Reject terrorism or expect to die

10 November 2024

Al-Quds Brigades weapons exhibition/parade, Gaza Strip, 7 January 2022

What would the United States do if Cuba was like Gaza and the Cubans kidnapped 8,600 Americans (comparable to 250 Israelis) and hid them throughout Cuba in residential areas, churches, schools, medical facilities and in a 300 mile tunnel network? In addition, suppose Cuba fired over 20,000 missiles toward the United States in the past year and refused to stop, due to their long standing grievances against the United States. How would the United States respond?

Does anyone doubt that the United States would bomb and invade Cuba and go house by house, building by building to find the hostages and stop the missiles, even though it would mean killing tens of thousands of Cubans? If the Cubans booby trapped their country, our response would be more severe. Would the airing of videos of the attacked Cubans pleading for their lives justify stopping our efforts? I think our response would be almost unanimous - we will stop when you release the hostages, stop the missile attacks and reveal the location of your weapons and terrorists, which the civilian population must know given that it is a small country.

Those who commit acts of terror or who kidnap hostages know that there will be severe retaliation. This is true in Gaza, southern Lebanon, the West Bank or anywhere else. As a practical matter, the attacked country must try to kill the terrorists since capturing them for legal proceedings is not practical. In addition, if a society allows terrorists to infiltrate their civilian population, then members of that society should expect to die in the retaliatory attacks because soldiers tasked with stopping the missile attacks or retrieving hostages cannot conduct long investigations to determine the precise role of those who are shielding the terrorists. In addition, even “smart bombs” cannot make subtle determinations of how responsible individuals are for nearby terrorist or hostage taking activities.

Currently, terrorists in Gaza and Southern Lebanon fire missiles at Israel almost every day. I suggest you download the Red Alert app, which provides real time alerts every time a terrorist fires rockets, mortars or missiles into Israel - you will quickly learn that these attacks occur almost daily.

The legal maxim, “he who seeks equity must do equity” means that those asking for others to help them must have “clean hands” and not be doing bad things themselves. Thus, those who commit acts of terrorism or tolerate terrorists within their society cannot legitimately complain that they don’t like the response to the terrorist attacks or that they are disproportionate. They should be aggressively doing whatever they can to eliminate the terrorists from their midst.

Former Israeli Golda Meier may have said (1973), “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” Fifty years later, this still seems true for those in Gaza and Lebanon. I suggest that those who actually care about the lives of the people in Gaza or Lebanon should be working hard to remove the terrorists there, even if it means restraining their hatred enough to do so. The failure of most Gazans and Lebanese, as well as their so called friends to even attempt to do so suggests that their hatred of Israel is more important to them than the lives of the people in Gaza and Lebanon.

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