Israel Is Not Losing the War

Part Three 

By: Victor Davis Hanson

The Patriot Post

June 14, 2024

So, no wonder that about 80 percent of the American people support Israel’s efforts against Hamas, a margin that has stayed more or less constant since October 7, despite global elite and media condemnation of the Israeli entry into Gaza.

Biden keeps pandering to a quarter-million potential Arab American voters. Yet, it is not clear that Biden’s waffling between sending Israel aid and suspending it pleases the Democrats’ once solid Arab American base. Far more worrisome are the 4-6 million Jewish voters—traditionally 70 percent pro-Democrat—who may defect from the Democratic Party both as voters and donors given its pro-Gaza pandering.

Bottom line: Despite daily anti-Israel vitriol from the global media and undisguised hatred directed at conservative Prime Minister Netanyahu, public opinion here and in Israel supports the Israeli government’s effort to respond to October 7 by defeating and eradicating its enemies.

Note Hezbollah has displaced nearly 100,000 Israelis from their homes along the Lebanese border by launching a variety of missiles, rockets, and slow-moving drones. But here, too, Hezbollah is operating only opportunistically, given the war in Gaza. When that ends in an Israeli victory, and it will, Israel will have to turn its attention to Hezbollah which will not have a kindred deflective Hamas any longer on the opposite front. The Palestinian Authority will do nothing if Israel responds to Hezbollah. It likely hates the Shiites in Lebanon as much as their paymasters in Tehran. The two million Arab citizens of Israel will be more worried about ensuring their permanent residence in Israel than volunteering to fight for Hezbollah.

Iran ponders its recent exchange with Israel; 99% of its rocket and drone waves did not hit the target, while Israel’s symbolic response reminded the world it could hit anything in Iran with precision.

Moreover, there is a 55/45% chance that the most anti-Israeli administration in modern memory will be gone after January 20, 2025, replaced by one of the most pro-Israeli American governments in memory.

In short, Hezbollah will have to pull back and cease hammering the Israeli border, or Israel will replicate the 2006 destruction of Beirut—damage that only now, nearly two decades later, is being repaired. Beirut is broke, Iran’s proxies are targeted, and the next administration will reinstate an oil embargo on Iran.

In sum, the geostrategic outlook for Israelis is not nearly as bleak as predicted.

Hezbollah can do a lot of damage with 120,000 rockets and drones. But even such a nightmarish notion pales in comparison to what Israel can do to Hezbollah, its patron in Tehran, and its uneasy hosts in Beirut.

Public opinion remains solidly pro-Israel. The campus and street demonstrations on behalf of Hamas repelled, not enlisted, Americans to the cause.

Hamas is not just losing its war but its very existence. When Israel is done in Gaza, the population may hate Israel, but its wrath will turn on the idea of Hamas as well as it walks the rubble and cratered surface beneath which is a multibillion-dollar but now collapsed city

The so-called Arab moderate nations resent Shiite Persians using Arabs as proxy cannon fodder in their war against Israel and are waiting for the end of the Biden administration to reassert their hatred of Iran.

The slithering Joe Biden will likely inherit the worst of both worlds, turning off thousands of Michigan voters who may stay home while alienating even more Jewish voters by his disconnect from the reality that Israel was attacked at peace by medieval killers.

As far as the battlefield goes, Israel has a much better chance to destroy Hamas, neuter Hezbollah, and deter Iran than Ukraine does to survive the constant Russian aggression and escalation.

Yet, while Biden loudly boasts about his support of Kyiv, he grows quiet about Israel. 

Or is it worse yet? Biden demands from Israel—ceasefires, proportionality, notification of impending attacks, coalition governments, continuance of elections—what it would never demand of Ukraine.

And so, we end in Orwellian territory. Somehow, Israel is a renegade nation in the eyes of the American administration by responding to the greatest terrorist attack in its history and killing of some 30,000 terrorists, and without intent, their civilian shields—even as we are told Ukraine must press on in its war as it surpasses the casualties of Verdun on its way to outdo the butchery of the Somme.