No, Israel Isn’t Losing a War It’s Winning

One of the oddest tropes of the past week has been too-clever-by-half theorizing that Israel is losing its war against Hamas even if, from all accounts, it is winning the war against Hamas—by knocking out Hamas’s missiles from the air, destroying its tunnels on land, killing its terrorists, and going after its weapons depots. The only way it can be deemed to be losing is if you think the war is primarily a public-relations battle for the hearts and minds of people who already have a fixed opinion of who the good guys and bad guys are in this struggle. It’s not.

If reports are true, over the past week Israel managed to uncover and disrupt a plot for the mass killing of Jews inside Israel on Rosh Hashanah. Forget the missiles; for that reason alone, the war has already been won.

So how is Israel losing? Oh, it seems Israel is getting bad press.

What else is new? What else is new about any of it?

Is Israel isolated in Europe? That isolation has been deepening for a decade. Has Barack Obama turned unfriendly? Well, his unfriendliness is far from new, as this piece of mine from July 2009 would suggest. Has the incursion led to an increase in overt anti-Semitism? Well, if so, any effort to excuse away such monstrousness by citing this war is nothing less than an act of blaming-the-victim. If Israel were to restrain itself from countering a mortal threat because it feared the promulgation of documents like this, it would be betraying its own reason for existence: a homeland for the Jewish people that needed and needs to exist precisely because of sentiments that help create documents like these—sentiments that are then turned into action, and into Kristallnacht, and into gas chambers.

The one deeply troubling fact that has emerged over the past week, in a Gallup poll, is that Americans under the age of 30 believe Israel’s action in Gaza is unjustified by a margin of 51-25 (24 percent have no opinion). Every friend of the Jewish state should be troubled; every enemy should rejoice. But then, why should it be otherwise, exactly? There is a man in the Oval Office who has spent five and a half years effectively preaching that extrication from conflict is a noble act. Is it any wonder that the age cohort most supportive of Obama—the cohort, by the way, that knows and cares the least about the world outside the borders of the United States—would be discomfited by a country that makes unapologetic use of its military in its own defense?

UPDATE: A new Pew poll suggests the views of Americans 18-30 are more favorably disposed toward Israel than Gallup–38 percent say Israel’s response has either been appropriate or hasn’t gone far enough, compared to 29 percent who say it’s gone too far.