They’ll like us when we win

History will remember September 17th and 18th, 2024, as the days the laws of warfare were rewritten.

At around 3:30 PM on the 17th, thousands of pagers belonging to members of the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah exploded in unison. At least 50 terrorists were killed and thousands were hospitalized, many of them maimed. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon lost an eye. Others lost limbs. Lebanese hospitals and health systems were immediately overwhelmed. As of this writing, hundreds remain in critical condition.

Twenty-four hours later, dozens of walkie talkies belonging to Hezbollah members suddenly detonated, killing at least 12 and injuring hundreds more. One of the devices exploded at a Hezbollah funeral, blowing off the hands of its owner.

Hezbollah began using dated devices like beepers and handheld radios after its chief, Hassan Nasrallah, warned in February that Israel was tracking their phones.

As it turns out, Israel was waiting to pull the trigger on an attack so unprecedented that even Hollywood hadn’t thought of it.

What was equally shocking was that Israel’s detractors were largely silent. 

Sure, the taxpayer-funded BBC referred to the professional terrorists as an “armed group,” but the usual foaming hatred for Israel was absent from its reports. The same was true of CNN, The Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets.

And yes, Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of violating international law by “indiscriminate” killing — even though this was perhaps the most surgical mass offensive in military history. And yes, The Guardian is painting Hezbollah fighters as tame family men simply trying to terrorize in peace.

But that’s just a regular Thursday.

Absent are the mass protests, the angry social media mobs, and the wealthy college students demanding sushi as they camp out on lawns.

For the first time in Israel’s 11 months of war, there is relative silence.

Here’s why.

‘They’ll like us when we win’

Before he contracted a debilitating case of TDS, Aaron Sorkin wrote a hit political drama in the nineties called “The West Wing.” In one of the episodes, White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler (played by Richard Schiff) launches into a rant about the West’s soft approach to Islam and fear of offending Arabs:

I don't remember having to explain to Italians that our problem wasn't with them, but with Mussolini! Why does the U.S. have to take every Arab country out for an ice cream cone? They'll like us when we win!

Ziegler repeats the line later in his monologue, maintaining that the Arab world only respects its enemies when they are victorious: “They’ll like us when we win.”

‍

Israel: Once a winner

The fictitious Ziegler is correct. Israel used to enjoy a fair amount of support because it used to win.

The first time was when Israel was attacked in 1948 by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan (now Jordan) immediately after declaring independence. So sure were the Arabs of victory that they issued a proclamation to Muslims living in Israel: vacate your homes while we wipe out the Jews; you can have as many homes as you want after we win.

It is by now military lore how Israel beat back the armies in less than a year, with many Arabs having left their homes in vain. The UN later declared these Arabs “Palestinian refugees,” and their grandchildren are considered refugees to this day.

Perhaps Israel’s most famous victory was in 1967, when the infant country launched a preemptive attack on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The Muslim countries had mobilized their forces and were boasting over the radio waves how they were going to destroy the Zionist enemy.

Israel defeated them in six days. Ninety percent of Egypt’s air force was wiped out before it left the tarmac. The IDF drove out Arab forces from parts of historic Israel originally conquered by King David, including the Temple Mount and the Gaza Strip.

These victories, awesome and unprecedented, left international observers in shock.

Media coverage at the time was reverent. Even British media were cheering Israel on and hoping its victories would bring peace to the region.

But then Israel stopped winning.

Israel: A powerful loser

Within days of the Six-Day War, Israel’s leaders voted to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and the Golan Heights to Syria. To this day, no one knows why; the stated reason was “land for peace,” but Israel had already achieved peace. It had conquered its enemies decisively. Victory brings peace, and Israel’s victory was consummate.

Nevertheless, these concessions began to erode the awe and respect the small country had won on the world stage. Almost immediately, the Muslim world regained its bravado and began to once again rattle its sabers against the “Zionist satan.” 

In less than two years, a man named Yassir Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Arafat had launched the Marxist revolutionary group four years earlier, prior to the '67 victory and Israel's conquest of the Temple Mount and West Bank. The PLO's aim was to wrest control of Tel Aviv and other Jewish cities. As Israeli leaders continued offering concessions that the populace considered too risky, Arafat's emboldened PLO began to attack Israel from within through horrific terror campaigns.

By the time the Arab countries charged Israel again in 1973, Israel was no longer the fierce, agile force it had been; it had become sluggish and, some would argue, drunk with fame. Its globalist-minded leaders agreed to the demands of then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a card-carrying globalist himself. Under Kissinger's pressure, Israel refused to act preemptively to fend off the attacks that became known as the Yom Kippur War — when the nation was nearly extinguished.

Israel continued down this road of self-destruction. In 1993, it signed away much of its sovereignty in the Oslo Accords and made unprecedented concessions to the PLO, which responded with bloody intifadas and pogroms. 

By 2005, Israel was only a shadow of its former self. That year, it gave away the Gaza Strip to the PLO, armed its members, and allowed them to murder dissident journalists and politicians. Israeli citizens received nothing in return and American citizens were never told why their tax dollars started flowing to the PLO. Israel’s government, of course, knew that Gaza would be governed by Hamas; Israel had created Hamas and funded the terror organization up until 2023. (When Qatar tried to stop funding Hamas in 2020, Israel's "Israel Last" leaders sent the head of the Mossad to Qatar to convince it to continue.)

Israel still had a formidable fighting force but had adopted rules of engagement that handicapped its own soldiers and prevented them from fighting effectively. These rules, advocated by globalists to ensure that anti-West revolutionaries are rarely defeated, stopped just short of tying IDF soldiers’ hands behind their backs. These were similar to the rules of engagement that led to America's first failures to obtain complete victory in the Korean peninsula and in Vietnam. 

The IDF began bragging that it was “the most moral army in the world” because of how it risked its soldiers’ lives to avoid harming civilians. Before an attack, the Israel Air Force would drop leaflets which let both civilians and terrorists know where and when the army was going to attack. Former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz once bragged that he was “proud” to sacrifice IDF soldiers to protect the human shields used by Palestinian terrorists.

Israel fought war after war in Gaza, winning none of them. Each war cost millions of tax dollars and many lives, and each time Israel signed a ceasefire when the timing and conditions favored the enemy. Hamas became so emboldened that it carried out terror attacks within Israel, such as abducting and murdering teens. The terror organization began to shoot rockets at Israeli civilians reguarly, and continues to do so today.

Is Israel ready to win?

During the last 11 months, Israel’s feared military force has failed to destroy Hamas. According to Knesset Member Amit Halevi, the IDF has failed to destroy even a single Hamas brigade. Israeli media recently reported that Hamas is rebuilding and has added over 3,000 new soldiers to its ranks, though these new recruits are hardly a replacement for the approximate 20,000 trained Hamas terrorists who have been killed or the thousands who were captured or critically injured, leaving less than half to hold onto control by killing Gaza's citizens who attempt to access the free food and supplies that Hamas commandeers and sells with a profit of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is, by definition, immoral. A moral war is one that is fought quickly, which President Trump has advised Israel's leaders to do.

Since Israel stopped winning, it has been the target of the UN, world governments, and international media. It is boycotted, vilified, and prosecuted.

This week, however, Israel showed a moment of true strength, opening the lid on the pot of its citizens' collective anger at the government's refusal to fight the war with total victory in mind. Its ingenious attack on Hezbollah was reminiscent of 1967 Israel — the one interested in winning.

What's ahead?

Globalist politicians and their supporters in the mainstream media and academia will continue showing (some) compassion for the Jewish nation in the wake of the October 7th attack (as was the case after the Holocaust). However, they will quickly turn on Jews, in or outside Israel, if the small country defends itself too well. Israel's LINO (Likud in Name Only) leaders will, for their part, keep the globalists happy by responding to the pressure to concede to the extent they can do so without precipitating a political revolution that would bring a "Make Israel Great Again" politician, like former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Moshe Feiglin, to power.

This war began with a seige of Gaza that immediately followed the October 7th invasion, mass murder, and rape. That was set to lead to riots against the totalitarian Hamas regime until LINO leaders began again supplying Hamas with free aid. Feiglin would have continued the seige till the internal overthrow of or surrender by Hamas.

A more moderate plan put foward by a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland, would push the Gazan population to the sandy region along the west coast of the Strip, where weapons and rocket launchers could not easily be hidden:

The "Generals’ Plan," a three-page document published last week by high-ranking Israel Defense Forces reserve officers, calls to evacuate up to 300,000 civilians from the northern 1/3 of Gaza and then block all supplies to the estimated 5,000 Hamas terrorists in the area. The goal is to bring Hamas to the brink of defeat and force the Palestinian terror group to return the remaining hostages in Gaza on terms favorable to Israel ...

"Officials of Hamas will have only two choices: Starve or surrender," Giora Eiland [explained]. "This is something that might create some real pressure, and if we do it in this area, we can later do it in other areas."

Once the food trucks begin delivering food exclusively to the humanitarian zone in the coastal area, under IDF control, Israel could expect mass surrenders in the rest of the Strip and then divide the humanitarian zone into several parts, checking each tent for hostages and terrorists within one section of the zone while preventing them their movement to others.

This could lead to the "quick" victory Trump advocates, freeing Israelis and Gazans alike from the terror of Hamas, allowing them to rebuild or to emigrate if they so choose, ending their unique status as the only refugees denied the right to move.

That, combined with cinema worthy clever moves like pagers and walkie talkies blowing up in thousands of terrorists hands simultaneously, wherever they happen to be, would restore "1967 Israel."

And as it turns out, that’s the only Israel the world's citizens, if not its professors, news anchors and Leftist politicians, respect.