With the anniversary of the Hamas atrocities of October 7 falling on Monday, Gaza reduced to rubble and graves, 101 Israelis still in captivity and the streets of Canada’s cities routinely erupting in the worst spasms of Jew hatred in living memory, cause for hope is sparse and meagre.
But some hope can be taken in the evidence that after a year of war, Israel appears to be winning. Although backed by the torture-state alliance of Iran, China and Russia, the heavily-armed Islamist forces arrayed against the Jewish state, from Lebanon to Yemen and beyond, have not prevailed.
Am Israel Chai. The people of Israel live.
It has been a bloody business. Fatality estimates from the United Nations Relief Works Agency, the World Health Organization and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry are sharply contested. Even so, it’s probably fair to say that the Gaza dead number roughly 40,000 people, including Hamas fighters.
The smoke will clear one day. But even now, a year after the worst single day in Jewish history since the time of the Nazi death camps, it’s contentious enough just to put a name to the foremost cause of this war and to focus attention on its principal belligerent.
The cause of it all is Judenstaatrein, the contemporary iteration of Judenrein. It’s anti-Zionism, the reconstructed sociopathology of antisemitism. And behind Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ansarullah Houthis of Yemen, is Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his wretched regime and his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
That’s it. Whatever the excesses of Israel’s unpopular and mercurial prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and whatever Israel’s trespasses on principled conduct in the semi-occupied West Bank, that’s it.
In recent weeks, the Israel Defense Forces and Mossad have accomplished the nearly unimaginable.
In July, the Hamas politburo chairman Ismail Haniyeh was killed in disputed circumstances in a top-security guesthouse in Tehran. It was either a remotely triggered bomb planted in the facility two months before he arrived, or it was an explosive projectile fired from outside the building.
Last week, Khamenei’s disciple Hassan Nasrallah, supreme leader of Lebanese Hezbollah, was eliminated by way of a bunker-buster bomb in Beirut, capping off several days of targeted attacks that carried off 19 of his most senior commanders. The operation followed the spy-fiction elimination of hundreds of Hezbollah operatives by means of remotely-detonated pagers and walkie-talkies.
In April and again last week, Tehran launched barrages of hundreds of rockets, drones and ballistic missiles at Israel in spectacular attacks that lit up the night sky, demolished buildings and cratered roads. Owing to Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling defence systems, and assistance from the Jordanians, Americans, the British and the French, not a single Jewish Israeli was killed in either attack.
In the April barrage, a Bedouin girl was injured. Last week, a Palestinian was killed by falling shrapnel in Jericho, in the West Bank. But roughly 1,700 Israelis have been killed in a variety of attacks since last October 7, and at least 60,000 people are still displaced from the steady stream of rockets — about 11,000 to date — that Hezbollah has fired across the border from Lebanon since last Oct. 8.
The “conflict,” as it has come to be called, is part of a wider war that has been cleaving the world in two since at least 2015, when former U.S. president Barack Obama imagined that Middle East peace could be secured by accommodating Iran’s “moderates” in a nuclear-arms bargain, and by inviting Vladimir Putin to police Baathist dictator Bashar Assad’s promises to stop using poison gas to kill his own people en masse. Assad never stopped.
As many as 500,000 Syrians have died in the chaos, mostly at the hands of Assad, with the help of Tehran’s IRGC Quds Force, Putin’s bombers and Hezbollah militiamen. Roughly a million Russians and Ukrainians have been killed or wounded since Putin invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, confident that Washington and the NATO capitals didn’t have the mettle to fight to win.
Iran supplies Russia with ballistic missiles to fire at civilian neighbourhoods in Ukrainian cities. Russia supplies Hezbollah with Yakhont missiles capable of hitting targets 300 kilometres away, and China supplies Hezbollah with Silkworm missiles capable of penetrating 100 kilometres inside Israel.
For the first time, in July, a Houthi drone made it as far as Tel Aviv. In September, the Houthis fired a projectile at Israel that they claimed was a “hypersonic” missile. It caused fires and set off a panic near Ben Gurion Airport.
The Houthis mostly target ships traversing the Red Sea, except where Russian or Chinese commercial interests are involved, purportedly in solidarity with the Palestinians. The’ve targeted more than 70 ships since last November. They’ve sunk two ships, seized one and killed four sailors. The chaos has severely disrupted the $1 trillion annual Red Sea commercial traffic, and U.S. Navy commanders say their interceptions and high-seas skirmishing with the Houthis amount to the most intense American sea battles since the Second World War.
Israel bombed Houthi targets in Yemen last week, killing four people and wounding 29 in the ports of Hodeidah and Ras Issa. Israeli warplanes hit Hodeidah back in July, as well.
Cooperation and collaboration among and between China, Russia, Iran and Iran’s proxies throughout the Middle East are intensifying. Almost all the money for the anti-Israel violence comes from Iran, and almost all of Iran’s foreign income — more than 90 per cent — comes from sales of sanctioned oil to China via a fleet of “ghost ships.”
Unburdened by quotas set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Iran’s current oil output is its highest in five years. The Americans are nervous about bothering the Iran-China oil trade for fear of sparking fuel price hikes. Israel’s Netanyahu says he’s considering hitting Iran’s oil production anyway, in response to last week’s Iranian missile barrage.
But that may depend on what U.S. President Joe Biden thinks of the idea. And that’s the predicament — Obama-style American restraint — that has so far prevented Israel from going after the key force behind its enemies: Khomeinist Iran, paymaster of Hamas, benefactor of the Houthis, and lodestar, banker and chief armourer of Hezbollah.
National Post