Here in Israel, there’s been deep relief and celebration over the killing of the Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, along with some 20 senior Hezbollah and Iranian operatives who were meeting with him in an underground bunker in Beirut.
It’s not just the removal of an arch-terrorist and key strategist of mass murder across the region and the world. It’s not just the blow this has inflicted on the genocidal Iranian regime in which Nasrallah was a vital cog.
No less important to the beleaguered Israelis has been the demonstration of jaw-dropping intelligence and military genius in a series of brilliant manoeuvres — the rapid degradation of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal, the exploding pagers and two-way radios and the elimination of the entire Radwan high command through one missile strike, leaving Hezbollah already in chaos and on the ropes when Nasrallah and his fellow mass murderers were killed by mighty bunker-buster bombs.
To a country still deeply traumatised by the astounding failure of its intelligence and military establishment to prevent the barbaric pogrom on October 7, thus shattering the sacred promise that Israel embodied for the Jewish remnant of the Holocaust that this was the one country that would guarantee their safety, the super-smart and perfectly executed decimation of the enemy — in just two weeks, after almost a year of traumatic horror, grief and loss — has been a national shot in the arm.
Of course, the morally bankrupt and, frankly, increasingly out-to-lunch west doesn’t see it in that way at all. Once again, it’s blaming Israel for attempting to defeat its mortal enemies rather than surrendering to them, and is siding with those intent upon genocide rather than supporting their intended victims.
Having almost universally failed to acknowledge Hezbollah’s 8,000-plus rockets and missiles with which it has depopulated northern Israel by creating around 80,000 refugees inside their own country in a daily onslaught that started on October 8, the west has accused Israel of escalation!
In a fit of the vapours, the French president Emanuel Macron called on the United States to pressure Israel to accept a plan for a 21-day ceasefire with Hezbollah. He foamed:
Israel cannot invade Lebanon today. War is not possible in Lebanon today; it would be a huge mistake, a huge risk of escalation.
About the threat posed by Hezbollah and Iran not just to Israel but to the civilised world, the distinctly uncivilised Macron was silent. In a speech a few years ago, Nasrallah said:
Lebanon was a Christian country, but we took it and now it’s ours. After we kill all the Jews in Palestine, we will just have begun. We won’t stop until every country on Earth is ruled by the law of Allah and the people of Islam, like our prophet promised.
In a continuation of the bizarre moral inversion it uses to demonise Israel and sanitise those who aim to destroy it, the western media have nevertheless presented Nasrallah as a cross between Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Mother Theresa.
The New York Times described him as
a towering figure…A powerful orator, he was beloved among many Shiite Muslims, a historically marginalised group in the Arab world, and created a state within a state in Lebanon that provided social services.
The Washington Post eulogised him as a “moral compass” and “father figure”. The Guardian described him as a “qualified Islamic scholar, effective public speaker, and competent organiser”.
You would never know from this nauseating media fandom that Nasrallah was responsible for dozens of terrorist attacks and the murder of countless hundreds of people. These included the 1983 truck bombing of the US embassy in Beirut and the bombing of US and French marine barracks in Beirut in which 380 people were murdered; the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in which 85 were murdered; the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al Hariri when 21 were murdered, and numerous other bombings, kidnappings, hijackings and attempted atrocities — not to mention the rocket and missile attacks on Israel just in the past year.
Those governing the US, UK and EU have been no less despicable.
The EU's vice-president Josep Borrell told reporters:
What we do is to put all diplomatic pressure to a ceasefire, but nobody seems to be able to stop Netanyahu, neither in Gaza nor in the West Bank.
The idea that the urgent task was actually to stop Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran clearly never occurred to him. He wanted instead to stop Israel from stopping them. What kind of debauched imbecility is this?
US president Joe Biden said grudgingly that the killing of Nasrallah was a “measure of justice” for the victims of Hezbollah terrorism — but he then went on to call yet again for a ceasefire, as did Britain’s Starmer government. A ceasefire, of course, would allow Hezbollah to regroup and continue to pose a mortal threat to Israeli lives.
In unattributable briefings, the Biden administration was mulish and resentful about Israel’s sensational seizing of the military advantage. White House officials effectively accused Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of pulling the wool over their eyes by appearing to go along with a ceasefire plan while all the time planning to kill the enemy. Oh dear!
The Biden administration is simply furious that Israel defied the Americans’ instructions and carried out these strikes without telling them. For the past year, the Bidenites have been behaving like the most arrogant and amoral of colonial administrators, bullying and blackmailing Israel into surrender by presuming to instruct the sovereign Jewish state how not to defend itself.
Given how the Americans have been undermining and sabotaging Israel’s defence for the past year, it is fervently to be hoped that Israel is telling the Iran-genuflecting Bidenites precisely zero about what it’s doing.
The west doesn’t realise how this abominable reaction demonstrates that it has now lost the geopolitical plot big time. For while western media and politicians were eulogising a genocidal tyrant and spitting on his designated Israeli victim for not agreeing to commit national suicide, the Arab and Muslim world was reacting very differently.
Although the Islamic death cultists had a meltdown over Nasrallah’s demise, there were scenes of wild jubilation among thousands of Arabs and Muslims.
In Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran Arabs and Muslims distributed celebratory sweets and cakes and danced in the streets to express their unbridled joy at Nasrallah’s removal from this earth and thanked Israel for “getting rid of our garbage”.
In Lebanon, people cheered and clapped, drivers honked their horns and fireworks exploded in the sky in the north-western region where Nasrallah was seen as a key ally of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and was thus responsible for assisting Assad’s brutal crackdown on opponents and helping turn the tide of the civil war in his favour.
A video went viral on Arab social media celebrating Israel's dominance over Hezbollah. Many users dubbed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a hero, referring to him as “the king of the Middle East”. Syrians celebrating in the streets held up a sign reading: “Thank you very much Netanyahu. By killing Nasrallah you light the path of peace”. In a striking reversal of the obscene anti-Jewish hate marches that have been taking place ever since the October 7 pogrom, Iranians gathered outside the Israeli embassy in London to thank the IDF for removing Nasrallah from the world.
Israel has been getting rid of the west’s garbage too, since Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is the military arm have been attacking western interests for decades through both terrorism and subversion. And of course, Iran is the west’s arch-enemy — and if Israel neutralises the Iranian regime, that will get rid of the most putrid garbage of all.
The Arab and Muslim reaction suggests that Israel’s spectacular military successes have the potential to be a geopolitical game-changer. For what Israel has achieved in Lebanon over the past couple of weeks has illuminated the utter bankruptcy of the approach pushed by America, Britain, France and the rest of the supine and in every sense de-moralised west: that all conflict must be dealt with through negotiation and compromise — and in the great battle between good and evil, you split the difference.
For Israel, this pressure for a negotiated ceasefire was tantamount to offering its throat to an enemy which never stops announcing its intention to remove Israel’s head from its shoulders.
Israel Hayom reported of the American displeasure at Israel’s military adventures:
The officials stressed that diplomacy remains the only viable long-term solution to the conflict, even if military action sets the stage for negotiations.
This attitude has been lethal for the world order and for peace in the Middle East. The Arab and Muslim world respects strength. It regards negotiation and compromise as signals of surrender which incentivise its fanatics to ramp up their aggression. Using diplomacy to deal with non-negotiable fanaticism is an unforgiveable category error.
America’s appeasement of Iran, first by the Obama-Biden administration and then by the Biden-Harris administration, has been catastrophic in signalling to the Iranian regime that it is aiming at an open goal.
That was why the October 7 pogrom happened. It's why the subsequent war has dragged on for a year; it could have been stopped on October 8 had America bombed the Iranian oil refineries, or told Qatar that unless the hostages were released unharmed within 24 hours all relations with Qatar would cease.
But it didn’t do that. Instead it put pressure on Israel to surrender — as Biden is doing even now — and punished it when it refused. As a result, Iran and its proxies believed they were winning.
It’s taken Israel — in extremis — to show the spineless west that sometimes you have to make war to prevent a worse war; that in a war, you only win if the enemy is totally defeated, otherwise the enemy wins; and that you can only win if you fight with that aim in mind.
Israel has achieved more in two weeks against America’s enemy Hezbollah — which has so much American blood on its hands — than the US has achieved in more than two decades.
More significant than that, Israel has now been seen to have faced down America. This will have a dramatic and very deep impact on the Arab world.
The Arabs think that America has abandoned them for Iran — which indeed it has. Accordingly, the Arabs have come to regard America as their enemy. Now they are looking upon Israel — for whom America has also become a lethally false friend — as their brave and valorous defender.
As a result it is Israel, not the United States of America, which is now emerging as the major player in the Middle East and the chief defender of civilised values in the world. That’s quite an achievement. And it’s happened because of the civilisational collapse of America and the west.
Israel’s current celebrations are necessarily muted. More than 100 hostages remain in the hellholes of Gaza. Yahya Sinwar is (presumably) still alive and is still using the hostages as blackmail. Hezbollah and Iran still have many lethal missiles in their arsenals. Israel is still under attack from Yemen, Iraq and and Syria — not to mention from within the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. The head of the snake is Iran. This evil will not be defeated until and unless Iran is neutralised.
Yet despite these manifold dangers, it’s impossible not to feel that something momentous is now unfolding. Rub your eyes. As things stand at present, the line-up is Israel and the Arab world versus America and Iran.
Here in Israel it feels as if this is a seismic moment for the Jewish people, a hinge of history which is opening up a new world order in which Israel will win — because it has no alternative — and the west that so disdains it will lose. Express.
