The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Since 7 October 2023, Israel has redrawn the balance of power in the Middle East and indeed in the world.  Here is a summary of its triumphant war against savage theocratic terrorists:

• Hamas has been gutted as a fighting force.  As of September, it has killed at least 17,000 Hamas fighters and “dismantled” 22 of its 24 battalions, while losing fewer than 1,000 of its soldiers.  As David French comments, “Hamas is a shell of its former self.
• It has killed Yahya Sinwar, the brutal Hamas terrorist and leader who engineered the 7 October slaughter in Israel.
• On 17 September Israel orchestrated an attack in which thousands of pagers detonated in the hands and pockets of Hezbollah operatives.  The next day it detonated hand-held radios that Hezbollah used.
• It then killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and several other senior Hezbollah officials.
• It is currently conducting operations in southern Lebanon and bombing key parts of Lebanon destroying thousands of Hezbollah rockets and missiles.
• Concerning Iran, Israel bombed the Iranian Embassy compound in Damascus, killing three senior Iranian commanders.
• In July, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the chairman of the Hamas political bureau by smuggling a bomb into an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps guesthouse in Tehran, “a shocking penetration of Iranian security.”

Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal poignantly concludes that “We can say two things . . . First, the strategic, tactical, intelligence and technological genius Israel has demonstrated over the past year might have done so much damage to Iran’s proxy armies and their military and political leaders that they will be ill-prepared and equipped for the bigger struggle to come, and Israel—and let’s hope, reliable allies—better placed to defeat its enemies.  Second, having observed this Israeli superiority over that time and eagerness to bring the destruction on itself a wider war would surely bring, perhaps Iran will be deterred.”

Israel’s’ success must also reshape the West’s perception of Iran.  Walter Russell Mead captures the brutal reality about Iran:  “In the real world, Iran is a malign and restless power whose fanatical ambitions can only be resisted by force . . . The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, whatever else it does, enables and nourishes terrorism.  The international laws of war, like it or not, have limited relevance in a region in which the UN Charter itself is largely a dead letter.  Real peace . . . is not on the table for Israel or indeed for any state in the Middle East any time soon.  All of these things are true, but respectable Western opinion refuses to accept any of them.  In the West’s view, peace with Iran is just a couple of diplomatic meetings away.  A few simple Israeli concessions will usher in a stable two-state solution.  That conflict resolved, a rules-based, democratic regional order is just around the corner. . . .”

As Bret Stephens correctly observes, “Since it came to power in 1979, Iran’s Islamist regime has declared itself at war with two Satans: the little one, Israel; the big one, [the US].  This has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran; the diplomats and Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALS who persisted in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping . . . We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies.  Today’s dictatorships also know how to smell weakness.  We would be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.”

Editorially, the Wall Street Journal concluded that “Israel’s experience in the last year is a reminder to the West about the cost of failed deterrence and what is required to restore it.  Israel let down its guard against Hamas a year ago and paid a terrible price.”

In a word, Israel has embraced the policy of deterrence as the key to its survival.  What does that mean and what is its origin?  Historically, Patrick Kingsley of the New York Times argues, “A quarter-century before Israel was founded, the Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky articulated an idea that has come to define the way Israelis protect their country. A Jewish state, he wrote in 1923, would succeed only by projecting enough strength to force its enemies to accept it as a permanent reality.  Israel’s killing of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is the newest manifestation of that century-old premise . . . It reflects Israel’s decades-old policy of killing enemies in order to exact revenge, undermine its foes or establish deterrence—aims that became ever more urgent after Hamas’s devastating attack last October dented Israel’s image of strength . . . It is a view that helps to explain why, over the years, Israel has retaliated for attacks with overwhelming force, attempting to show that it is more costly to fight Israel than to accept its existence.”

• “As an act of revenge, it summoned memories of efforts by pre-state Zionists in 1945 to assassinate hundreds of Nazis involved in the Holocaust. It also was a reminder of Israel’s decades-long effort to kill the perpetrators of a massacre in Munich in 1972, when terrorists killed 11 Israelis participating in the Olympic Games that year. One senior Palestinian official linked to the attack, Atef Bseiso, was shot outside a hotel in Paris nearly 20 years later, though Israel never claimed responsibility for his assassination.”
• “As a disruption of Hamas’s hierarchy, the killing of Mr. Sinwar and other leaders echoed Israel’s effort to assassinate the scientists leading Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, a strategic attempt to undermine Iranian capabilities.”
• “And as an act of deterrence, it evoked Israel’s recent assassinations of Hezbollah leaders.”
• “But Mr. Sinwar’s killing was about more than sending a message to enemies opposed to Israel’s existence, Israeli thinkers said. It was also a way of proving to Israelis themselves that the central assumption of Zionism—that Jews would be safer in a Jewish state than in the diaspora—was still valid. ‘The dare against Jewish history—that we could somehow take the weakest and most defenseless people with no military experience for 2,000 years and turn this people into an effective combat force—

collapsed on Oct. 7,’ said Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research organization.  This last year has been a slow and painful and essential attempt to reclaim the Zionist promise of Jewish self-defense,’ Mr. Halevi added. ‘For me, the death of Sinwar is a culminating moment in that process.’”

• “According to Tom Segev, a biographer of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, it is a mentality with roots in the ideas of both Mr. Ben-Gurion and Mr. Jabotinsky, whose 1923 essay, ‘The Iron Wall,’ encapsulated the Zionist quest for deterrence. Mr. Jabotinsky and Mr. Ben-Gurion were rivals, but both agreed that the Arab world would accept the Jewish state only if it was too strong to be destroyed, Mr. Segev said.  ‘Everything is rooted in ‘The Iron Wall’ idea, Mr. Segev said. The Iron Wall is the security policy of Israel.’”

I have argued many times on Issues, that the Jewish people are in an unconditional, unilateral covenant relationship with Almighty God called the Abrahamic Covenant.  And, as a fulfillment of that Covenant, Ezekiel 36:16-38 envisages the restoration of the Jewish people to their land.  As this event is accomplished, Ezekiel exclaimed, the nations will be silent in their amazement of what God has done (vv. 33-36).  I believe quite strongly that in the 21st century we are witnessing that restoration.  But the other dimension of Ezekiel’s prophetic claim is the spiritual restoration of the Jews.  That is detailed in Ezekiel 36:22-32 and 37:15-28.   God will put His Spirit in them; they will obey Him; and they will walk with Him forever.  The fulfillment of God’s covenantal promises to Abraham (land, seed and blessing), to David (an eternal throne, kingdom and dynasty) and the New Covenant of spiritual renewal are foretold in 37:24-28.  The Jewish people will be united as one people, secure in the land God promised them, renewed spiritually, with their Davidic King ruling in their midst.  We await that fulfillment.

See David French in the New York Times (30 September 2024); Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal (1 October 2024); Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal (1 October 2024); Bret Stephens in the New York Times (9 October 2024); editorial in the Wall Street Journal (30 September 2024); Patrick Kingsley, “Sinwar’s Death Highlights Israel’s Long Quest for Deterrence” in the New York Times (18 October 2024).