My Word: The difference between offensive and defensive - opinion

It was a particularly poignant image even for these troubled times of war. The staff of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa this week sent home hundreds of patients and moved the remainder to their specially prepared missile-protected underground facilities. 

A similar scene was repeated in Emek Medical Center in Afula and other hospitals in northern Israel, although not all have the same high-level fortified wards and units.

The Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya has been operating underground for most of the past year, since Hezbollah in Lebanon started its rocket campaign on northern Israel the day after the Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity on October 7.

Hospitalization is never easy; imagine the added suffering if you’re deprived of natural daylight. Working in these conditions must be even more challenging for the staff.

Southern hospitals have had to deal with rocket attacks for nearly two decades – what began as a trickle of rockets became a periodic downpour after Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas took over in 2007.

Think of the hospitalized elderly and the dying deprived of the comfort of looking at blue skies; imagine mothers just after giving birth, the newborns, and the tiny preemies struggling for life. 

Every Israeli knows the feeling of nausea caused by the sound of a siren as flight-or-fight syndrome kicks into action in your stomach as rockets fly. Every terrorist rocket is a war crime. 

Sadly, since our lives underwent a collective upheaval on October 7, not a day passes without most Israelis thinking of the hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in terror tunnels in Gaza.

It has become de rigueur in certain diplomatic circles to declare that Israel has the right to defend itself – but to impose restraints on how. 

Sitting in shelters and building bomb-proof hospitals is not defense. Israel must be able to attack its attackers, and preempt its enemies before they strike. 

This is what is now happening in Lebanon, as much of the Western world wrings its hands – or worse, points an accusing finger at Israel rather than Hezbollah and Hamas and the Iranian regime that sponsors them.

A growing list of countries – including the US, UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands – have imposed some arms sales restraints on Israel. 

The Jewish state is guilty of hitting back. Instead of standing up for ourselves, we’re meant to take whatever is thrown at us sitting down.

While Israelis from North to South were making sure their shelters, safe rooms, and safe spaces were ready and the entire country was put on an emergency footing, the IDF was warning residents of southern Lebanon to leave their homes if Hezbollah was hiding weapons there or nearby to enable Israeli action with the least possible collateral damage.

Using human shields 

Hezbollah in Lebanon, like Hamas in Gaza, deliberately operates from residential areas, using its own people as human shields. 

In Gaza, the IDF uncovered terrorist command centers in and under hospitals, schools, mosques, and homes. UNRWA facilities, instead of providing for the safety and well-being of Palestinians, are weaponized against Israelis.

Hezbollah adopted the same strategy. If Israeli forces hit terrorist targets hiding amid civilians, Israel gets the blame, and the dead “martyrs” become another means of delegitimizing the Jewish state.

It is hard to understand when you’re sitting thousands of miles from where rockets are falling. Americans can’t imagine Canadians building terror tunnels and firing hundreds of rockets across the border; when the Nobel Peace Prize is given out in Oslo, no one fears that Sweden is on the verge of launching a mega-attack. 

Germany is not constantly readying for an invasion, although the fact that it has purchased Israeli-made Arrow 3 anti-missile defense systems indicates that it is aware of the threats of the terrorists’ allies, which include Russia along with Iran, and China, against the German Republic and NATO.

Looking at the massive warrens of terror tunnels and huge arms stockpiles – some 150,000 Hezbollah rockets before this week’s IDF action – ordinary Iranians, Lebanese, and Gazans can easily tell where their money is being spent. And the money of the UN and donor states.

Israel has spent billions on defense – from anti-rocket systems to shelters; its enemies have spent billions on building rocket supplies and terror tunnels.

It’s time for the pressure to be put on Hamas to stop its attacks and release all the hostages and for Hezbollah to halt its rocket fire, give up on its invasion plans, and allow the 60,000 displaced Israelis to return to their homes after nearly a year.

It helped restore Israeli self-confidence and deterrence in a tough neighborhood.

It was reminiscent of a scene from the movie Kingsman. Jaws around the world dropped at the sight of the precise targeting of Hezbollah terrorists – in supermarkets, on motorbikes, and at home. 

When the jaws were able to open and close again, out came the words of condemnation – against Israel. Hezbollah remains nameless and blameless.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued his standard call on “all concerned actors to exercise maximum restraint to avert any further escalation.” Hezbollah, for Guterres, is not a recognized terrorist organization, but an actor in the Middle East drama. 

Not for the first time I wondered what UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, was doing while all the tunnel digging and buildup of arms was going on for years under its nose, or right under its military boots.

EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell tweeted, “Even if the attacks seem to have been targeted, they had heavy, indiscriminate collateral damages among civilians, including children among the victims,” without bothering to provide figures or evidence.

I’m not sure he understands the meaning of the word “indiscriminate.” Here’s a reminder: Look at the faces of the 12 children killed by a Hezbollah rocket as they played soccer in the Druze town of Majdal Shams in July.

Because the town is so close to Israel’s border with Lebanon, there was not enough time for the children to reach the bomb shelter between the sirens sounding and the rocket exploding on the pitch.

Imagine the Israeli reality of needing a bomb shelter next to children’s playgrounds. More Druze, Muslim, and Christian communities, including the English and Scottish Hospital in Nazareth, came under indiscriminate fire in the North this week along with their Jewish neighbors.

To compound the travesty, the UN General Assembly last week passed one of its regular resolutions – by 124-14, with 43 abstentions – demanding that Israel withdraw to indefensible pre-1948 borders within 12 months. This would include the Old City of Jerusalem (including Judaism’s holiest sites, the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall); Judea and Samaria; and any “territorial changes” in Gaza (from which Israel already withdrew with disastrous effect).

Last November, within weeks of the Hamas invasion and Hezbollah rocket attacks, the UN passed another regular resolution saying Israel should withdraw “from all the occupied Syrian Golan to the line of June 4, 1967.” Apparently, handing the Golan over to Syria’s President Bashar Assad would help world peace.

Hezbollah’s vision for the end of Israel is no less apocalyptic than that of Hamas’s. The brutal first stage was perpetrated on October 7 with the ISIS-style murder and mutilation, rapes, beheading, and burning that left 1,200 dead and the abduction of 250 hostages.

When pro-Palestinian supporters yell “Globalize the intifada” it is not only a call to battle Israel, it is a shout-out of support for jihadists everywhere: ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Houthis, and Hezbollah. Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic of Iran has no incentive to stop funding its terrorist proxies or put an end to its plans to develop nuclear weapons, just a touch away.

As columnist Melanie Phillips summed up so succinctly in a Jewish News Service opinion piece last week, “This is a seismic battle of civilization against barbarism, victim against oppressor, truth against lies. Lonely Israel is leading the great fight of good against evil, while the so-called civilized world no longer knows what side it’s on.”

The West needs to understand that you can’t defeat enemies by hiding from them. Security and peace require hitting and destroying the enemy. Turning the other cheek, or looking the other way, will not prevent the next terrorist blow.