Four thoughts on Day One of Operation Roaring Lion |
Some thoughts after a day spent running to and from a bomb shelter.
1. I’ve written before about the need for nuance when assessing President Trump – especially as a liberal Israeli.
Trump’s norm-busting, bullying style meant he could pressure both Hamas and Bibi to end the war and get the hostages out, and Israelis will be eternally grateful to him for that. But were I living in the United States, I’d see that same tendency as potentially disastrous for American democracy and for US’s alliances with the West.
Suffice to say, if Trump is the President who brings down the Iranian regime, history absolutely should laud him for it, whatever else can be said about him. And let that be no mistake, it is Trump far more than Netanyahu who is the key factor here. Whatever Bibi and his cheerleaders will tell you – especially come election time – he would not have been able to do this under Biden or (certainly) under a President Kamala Harris.
2. It is sobering and really quite disturbing reading some of the reaction on social media. Apropos the need for nuance – you shouldn’t need to be fans of either Trump or Netanyahu to understand that when the guy on the other side of the battlefield is Ayatollah Khamenei, they are the good guys in this conflict. It’s quite extraordinary to see how many Western liberals cannot bring themselves to unequivocally support a military campaign which could actually free the Iranian people from tyranny, and rid the world of a regime that is up there with the most evil there has ever been.
3. On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched what they hoped would be a full-scale war on Israel from the ‘resistance axis’, headed by Iran. We now know that Iran was not ready to commit itself or Hezbollah to the kind of all-out attack Yahya Sinwar envisaged, but Khamenei tweeted (in Hebrew) his support for the mass slaughter, torture and rape committed that day.
What has transpired since has been an utter catastrophe for him – the decimation of Hamas and Hezbollah, the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria. And now – it seems – it has ended in his death at the hands of the “Zionist entity’.
4. Finally, on a more personal note –
Watching my children deal with this situation, I’m reminded that they see this as normal. It doesn’t cross their mind that their relatives in London, Paris and New York have never had to think about what it means to have ballistic missiles being fired at you; have never heard a siren warning them of such an attack; don’t know what the inside of a bomb shelter looks like – indeed, don’t live anywhere that requires bomb shelters.
I think of all the armchair pundits who’ve long-criticised Israel for its unwillingness to make concessions; its reluctance (especially post-Oct 7) to contemplate withdrawing from territory; its refusal to buy into European and (some) American ideas of compromise with the likes of Iran and Hamas.
I am someone who longs for Israeli-Arab peace, and who believes that a Palestinian state alongside Israel is likely the only way this conflict can finally end. But I insist that we cannot contemplate this until my children can live with the same security and peace of mind as their cousins abroad. And for that reason, everyone who claims to want peace in the Middle East should be cheering on Israel and the US in the days ahead.