You are a law-abiding citizen living a peaceful life with your family. Now, imagine a frightening scenario. Your house is attacked by heavily-armed goons from your neighbourhood who proceed to rape your wife, daughter and even old mother; kill the children and kidnap your brothers. Then, to rub salt into your wounds, they make the photos and videos of the outrage viral on social media. What could you possibly do? First, you may be so outraged by the sheer atrocity of the brutality committed upon you that you feel that unless you avenge it, your life as a man would be a shame. You might summon your friends, muster some weapons and proceed to punish the goons yourself. Second, you may lodge a FIR. However, by the time the police do anything, the goons could have fled the city and safely ensconced in some other part of the country, forcing you to live with the guilt all your life. Third, you may, like the coward many people might advise you to become, accept the loss as your fate and decide not to do anything for fear of incurring the wrath of goons.
A similar thing happened with Israel on October 7. Hundreds or thousands of heavily-armed terrorists of Hamas breached Israel’s border fence and attacked unarmed citizens. They killed some 1,200 people including kids; raped women; humiliated them by stripping them naked; trampled on their bodies while shouting Islamic religious slogans; and abducted 240 people. To humiliate Israel further, they uploaded videos and photos of the outrage on social media. The question is, if such a heinous crime does not deserve the most ruthless punishment, what else does?
How is Israel Supposed to Respond?
What are they supposed to do in the face of such an atrocity? For your information, there is no ‘World Police Station’ where they could lodge an FIR. Complaining to the UN is pointless because Hamas is not a nation on which the UN could impose sanctions. Then, Israel, though a small nation of just 93.6 lakhs, has a highly sophisticated army of 1.7 lakh active soldiers with 4.65 lakh reservists. Had India adopted those standards, our army would have been nearly 9 crore strong instead of 14.6 lakhs! Moreover, it is unofficially a nuclear power also. Now, given the fact that it is surrounded by hostile Muslim nations, Israel faces an existential crisis. If it is even mistakenly perceived as weak-willed, it would encourage the terrorists and hostile powers to deadlier attacks. Thus, Israel cannot afford to even think of ‘forgive and forget’ under any fits of pacifism. It would lose not only self-respect but also its very raison d’etre as a nation.
Thus, the only logical option open for Israel is to avenge the atrocity. How does a nation avenge? Historically, since times immemorial, the only way has been through a war. That is precisely what they are doing. How it can be criticized then? Can anybody in his right mind argue that Israel should have rather taken pity on the Palestinians as poor, stateless people and pardoned their terrorist act as an act of misdemeanour of a nasty kid?
Collateral Damage in Unavoidable in Any War
Realizing that it would be an insult to the human intellect to say that Israel did not have the right to launch a retaliatory war, liberal gangs of the world are criticising Israel for collateral damage, that is, the deaths of non-combatants in Gaza.
This is sheer illiteracy and malicious propaganda. Combatants and non-combatants used to be clearly separated only in a bygone era when opposing armies were ranged in a field to slug it out. Even in that era, however, victorious armies ritually indulged in murder, plunder, destruction, rape and rapine, of civilians. Once that era passed, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was blurred and wars, as a matter of rule, entered the so-called ‘civilian areas’.
In the Second World War, the number of civilians killed was about 50-55 million against 21-25 million soldiers. Closer in time, during the Afghanistan War (Operation Enduring Freedom), more than 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians are estimated to have died as a direct result of the war while 52,893 Taliban were killed. It is difficult to estimate the numbers of those civilians who might have perished as a consequence of poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, etc. ensuing from the war.
Thus, singling out Israel as if collateral damage is taking place for the first time in human history is malicious, ignorant or both. Social media is flooded with tear-jerker stories of children suffering for want of food and medicines as if children had never suffered in any previous war of the human race.
Liberals have not had the intellectual honesty to point out that no Palestinian civilian has denounced Hamas for its terrorist acts, neither in the past nor now. Hamas has always been an integral part of the Palestinian psyche. How can Hamas terrorists be separated from the ordinary man on the streets unless they fly a white flag and surrender?
Singling Out Terrorists Alone Is Technically Impossible
Can anybody explain how Israel can find out either from the air or on the ground who is a Hamas terrorist and who is not, or which building has only peace-loving people in it and which has terrorists mixed with them in it? Where does such a mythical technology exist? Do Hamas terrorists have red beacon lights on their heads? Irrefutable evidence has been produced by the Israeli military as to how Hamas has built tunnels right under hospitals and how they have stored weaponry in civilian houses.
Liberals lament that 45% of the over 40,000 tons of bombs dropped by Israel in Gaza are not smart or guided bombs but unguided “dumb bombs” that cause collateral damage. The ignorant do not know that smart or precision-guided bombs can be used profitably only if you have pin-pointed intelligence. Such intelligence, particularly when the Hamas terrorists are inextricably mixed with the civilian population, can exist only in films.
Precisely for this reason, for even a nation like the USA, nearly 90% of the bombs dropped on Iraq were dumb bombs. In Afghanistan, nearly two-thirds of the bombs dropped were dumb bombs. In fact, since Vietnam, they were obliged to use the 15,000 pounds heavy Daisy Cutter bomb, Fuel-Air Explosives and Cluster munitions on a much larger scale in Afghanistan.
Smart bombs are for televised propaganda, not for fighting war. As a scientist, I must inform you that smart bombs cannot be used just about everywhere. For example, fleeting targets don’t allow the process of obtaining coordinates for GPS-guided weapons. Similarly, there may be obstacles that prevent a laser-guided delivery.
Despite such handicaps, Israeli intelligence has been able to identify some 22,000 terrorist targets in Gaza and attack them specifically. US Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula (Retd) points out that Israelis take great care to avoid collateral damage and use dumb bombs only after they clear an area. A general evacuation warning was given as early as October 16.
Liberals had made much of the underground tunnel network of Hamas and had fervently hoped that the Israeli operation would be ground to a halt or lead to such heavy casualties amongst their ranks that they would lose heart after a few days. Yet, much to their dismay, Israel flooded those tunnels with seawater. Now Hamas terrorists, for whom it was claimed that their Islamic religious fervour would make them fight to the death, are surrendering in large numbers. Israelis have been releasing their photos in which, to rule out sneak attacks by concealed weapons, they can be seen stripped down to their underwear. This is important. The Israelis are fully exploiting the psychological impact of their operations through such imagery. America’s Operation Enduring Freedom was weak on this aspect.
Liberals Stand Exposed
The simple undisputed issue in this entire affair is that Israel must get justice. As we saw above, justice is to be had through war. Now, the world has no right to prescribe the course of war for Israel. It is not a matter of your local court or laws that so many years of jail are prescribed for a given crime. It is for them to decide the course of war and the degree of punishment. The world has neither any historical, moral or legal precedent in this regard nor has any authority to decide for them that such-and-such quantum of punishment (in terms of Palestinian casualties or tonnage of bombs dropped, etc.) would be adequate. The simple question would be what is the basis of deciding when adequate punishment has been meted out? Who worked it out and who accepted it? Why such arguments were not advanced in other wars of the 20th and 21st centuries?
Also Read: Hamas attack: reasons behind the Israeli intelligence lapses
Israel has no interest in killing innocent civilians. 18% of their population is Muslim. Hence, it is patently unfair to attribute any anti-Islamic flavour to their war. On the other hand, Muslims of the world are supporting Hamas and Palestinians in the name of Islam. The fact is that Palestinian civilians have never made any attempt to distance themselves from Hamas terrorists. Liberals are wailing because they sympathize with terrorists particularly if they happen to be Muslim terrorists. In our own country, the fact that a veritable battery of top-notch lawyers appears regularly for Muslim terrorists is proof of the terrorists’ support system amongst liberals.
A Bloodless or Humanitarian War Is a Self-Contradiction
In more than 5,000 years of human history, mankind has fought more than 14,500 wars in which nearly 1 billion people have been killed. No one can argue that they were fought when mankind was not ‘evolved’ enough. For their information, more than 108 million people have been killed in the wars of the 20th century alone. By its very nature, war is violent. There has never been any bloodless or humanitarian war ever nor can it be.
Then why single out Israel’s war for castigation? What is so special about it except the fact that in this war, only Muslims are getting killed? It is the misplaced sympathy discussed above that has led to the outcry. How can the world be swept by a wave of humanitarianism only for the Palestinians? Did the 1,200 brutally slain Israelis not deserve any humanitarian consideration? Do such considerations arise only for Muslims?
One Day, the World Will Be Grateful To Israel
By the time of writing this article, Israel had killed nearly 20,000 people in Gaza at the cost of just 120 of their soldiers killed. We are indeed fortunate that we are witnessing such poetic justice, such swift reprisal, and, from a purely military perspective, professionally such brilliant fighting. I hope they will break the back of Hamas even if it is not possible to identify and kill every single terrorist.
To criticize Israel is both unfair and unjust. A just war is any day better than an unjust peace. Anybody who sheds crocodile tears for the Palestinians without explaining how Hamas terrorists must be punished for their crimes must be condemned as a sympathizer of terrorists. Pacifist fools who condemn war per se as immoral do not realize that in that case every prize of victory, in which throughout history, all races have exulted and taken pride, would also become immoral. Would these peaceniks dare denounce our victory in 1971 and our war heroes as immoral?
The world must be proud of the Israelis that they have meted out such exemplary punishment to terrorists, which will be a lesson to terrorists elsewhere in the world. If the world ever gets rid of the scourge of terrorism, most of the credit will go to this war of Israel.
