Tom on the Middle East

 I fell asleep for a nap last evening to a normal world, well, as normal as the world ever seems these days), and awakened a couple of hours later to a conflagration in the always fraught Middle East.  It seems that the forces affiliated with the militant group, Hamas, have initiated hostilities against the State of Israel.  While this is far from the first time that the two entities have crossed swords, the scope and effrontery of the current Hamas offensive is reminiscent of past conflicts like the so-called "6 Day War", in 1967, or the "Yom Kippur War", in 1973.  The current conflict has a couple of things in common with the Yom Kippur war, notably the fact that Israel seems to have been caught by surprise, and the fact that today'a assault is taking place on the last day of Sukkot and will certainly continue into Simchat Torah.  There will be no dancing in Israel tonight, although I suspect that the dancing among the diaspora will take on a defiant tone.

There will be condemnation from those who believe that Israel has no right to defend herself, unlike the case for any other nation on earth.  Nations always have the right to resist hostilities from outside their borders, but there are some who would deny Israel, alone among nations, the same right to self-defense that every other nation enjoys.  

Some have pointed to recent tensions between the Government of Binyamin Netenyahu and his Haredi supporters, and the secular Israelis who make up a large proportion of the Israeli population as providing cover for today's events.  All families squabble, but when faced with an existential threat they come together and exclaim "Never Again '', their differences forgotten.  Were our own United States similarly threatened today, I'm certain the Republicans and Democrats would stand together against our common foe, points of contention forgotten for the moment, resolute in our determination to repel our common foe.

The elephant in the room in this matter is the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Hamas is incapable of mounting such a sophisticated offensive by themselves.  It's often been said of the Palestinians that they have an almost preternatural ability to "...snatch defeat from the jaws of victory...".  The discipline evident among today's assailants is not commonly associated with the Palestinians, as is the training so clearly a part of today's offensive. 

The fear among observers is that Hezbollah will invade Israel  from their strongholds in South Lebanon.  The possibility that this is the opening salvo between Israel and its would be allies in the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia on the one hand, and Iran and its many proxies on the otherr One can never really know these things will evolve....

The thing that troubles me is that the fingerprints of Russia and Iran are all over today's events, and while these links will be important roles in the intermediate term, Israel must gather it's courage and proclaim, as Cato the Elder proclaimed at the onset of the Third Punic War, (149-146 BCE): "Carthago delenda est", or: ' Carthage must be destroyed'.  Hamas must be destroyed, and destroyed in such a way that Israel's enemies take notice.  This fire needs to be damped before it turns into a wider regional conflagration and the only way to do that is to make the price of moving against Israel prohibitive.