Want to beat Hamas and Hezbollah? Show moral and military superiority
There is a way to beat the terrorists from Hamas and Hezbollah, and it may provide the only hope for Israel and the West, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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The year before the October 7 attacks I went to Israel as a guest on a study tour organised by the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.
It was of course heavily curated but I believe a genuine effort was made to present both sides of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, including a session with the nominal Palestinian Prime Minister in the West Bank. The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip was even then considered too dangerous for an attempted visit.
That is not the point of this column, that is just its disclaimer.
What I really wanted to say at the outset is I have seen the Hezbollah outposts from the northern border of Israel and stood in children’s playgrounds that double as bomb shelters in the south.
I have thought about that time in Israel every day since I returned and all but constantly since the new horrors that erupted a year ago and even then I don’t think I ever fully understood what the place was trying to tell me.
But I think that maybe I am finally starting to now.
The information and argument that flowed among the various journos likewise assembled and the fascinating key figures we were given access to was voluminous and covered everything from the historical claims to the land to the innumerable provocations of innumerable provocateurs, from the grievances of Palestinians over power and water supply to the strategic objectives of illegal Israeli settlers, from the tactics of Palestinian suicide-bombers to the heavy-handedness of the IDF at Palestinian funerals.
At the centre of it all was the constant throbbing question that demanded an answer: Who was in the right? Who had the greater argument, the more legitimate claim? Who was the victim and who was the aggressor?
It is a debate that is raging even more hotly now in newspaper pages and the sewers of social media and an argument being waged with bombs and guns and lives in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon.
And yet despite all the enormous power of weaponry and rhetoric on all sides I have finally come to realise that it is an argument that can never be won.
That may make me a bit slow to the party or perhaps just a bit slow. But some of the most intelligent and politically powerful people I know are firmly entrenched on either side of this so-called debate. For all their intelligence and political power they can’t both be right. But perhaps they can both be wrong.
Because for all its political pitfalls and deadly political trappings, at its core the conflict between Israel and Palestine isn’t really a political or intellectual conflict at all. It’s a personal one.
It is personal for those killed and kidnapped and the families that mourn them or linger in a hellish limbo. It is personal for the Palestinians dispossessed and the Israelis who are told by Palestinian propaganda that they do not have a right to exist.
It is only for everybody else that this is a political lightning rod to be dealt with by UN resolutions, empty slogans or ugly scrawl on electorate offices. For those actually affected it is not a parlour room debate but a deadly family feud in which bodies are strewn in kitchens and playgrounds.
The rightness or wrongness of either side doesn’t matter. The side you are on isn’t determined by politics or history or rationality. It is determined by blood and culture and nationality.
If you are an Israeli whose toddler plays in a park furnished by multi-coloured concrete tubes to make hiding from Hamas rockets child-friendly no amount of academic discourse will convince you they have a point.
Likewise no parent who has had a child die in their arms after an Israeli rocket attack is likely to be persuaded they were just acting in self-defence.
And this makes the efforts by activists to turn such personal trauma into political fodder all the more grotesque.
It also makes the efforts to separate the terrorists of Hamas from the people of Gaza and the terrorists of Hezbollah from the people of southern Lebanon excruciatingly difficult. Perhaps even impossible.
Those living under these terrorist regimes have been conditioned for years to regard their masters not as ruthless oppressors but fearless freedom fighters. So what does wiping out Hamas or Hezbollah actually end up meaning? The death of all of those who voted for them?
The only hope for Israel and the West is to show a better way. To understand that this is not a political war but a personal one. A war in which primacy is placed on innocent human life.
We beat the terrorists not just by killing them but by proving we are better than them.
God willing, I hope we do both.
Listen to The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand wherever you get your podcasts
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