Recently, the American investigative journalist program 60 Minutes featured a report on Israel’s impressive pager operation that decimated the ranks of Hezbollah’s officers.
In response to this operation, British broadcaster Piers Morgan – host of the YouTube show Piers Morgan Uncensored – posted on X/Twitter, “Mind-bogglingly, extraordinary... though it does beg the question: If the Mossad could do this to decapitate Hezbollah, why could they not have done something similar with Hamas?”
Morgan isn’t the first to assume that our intelligence agencies and special forces are so talented that they can defeat our enemies in targeted strikes without the use of the broader army.
They imagine that the Mossad has the ability to plant pagers in every enemy’s pocket as it did with Hezbollah’s leaders, or isolate each one in an empty apartment and eliminate him, as it did with Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.
The assumption-turned-accusation assumes Israel could conduct its entire self-defense without harming any non-combatants. It ignores Palestinian terrorists’ use of non-combatants that leads to so many of their deaths and injuries – and vilifies the Jewish state for involuntarily causing collateral damage.
There is a form of racism that is known as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” This racism occurs when people think so low of a group that they don’t expect them to do anything worthwhile.
An example of this form of racism is when people don’t demand that Palestinians stop their terrorism and the violent culture that surrounds it because they consider the Palestinians so pathetic that they can’t be anything but violent.
There is another type of racism that Piers Morgan plays with in his observation of the pager operation. Different than the soft bigotry of low expectations, this form of racism is the soft bigotry of impossibly high expectations.
The soft bigotry of impossibly high expectations
This form of racism is where people hate a group so much that they place impossibly high standards on the group and criticize them when they don’t reach that level of impossible behavior.
An example of this form of racism is demanding Israel defeat its enemies in a supernatural way that is beyond realistic and blaming Israel when they can’t meet the unrealistic standard set for them by antisemites.
Special Envoy for Trade and Innovation Fleur Hassan-Nahoum pointed to human rights activist Natan Sharansky’s definition of antisemitism to explain the soft bigotry of impossibly high expectations. Sharansky coined the “Three D’s” that qualify a statement as antisemitic: delegitimization, demonization, and double standards. Setting aside the important question of whether or not a person who makes an antisemitic comment is antisemitic themselves, Sharansky’s point is that when one of these “Three D’s” is employed, the statement can be qualified as antisemitic. When Morgan and others use the soft bigotry of impossibly high expectations in their analyses of Israel and its conduct during the war by assuming the country can ensure its safety without utilizing the IDF, they are engaging in antisemitism.
They are holding Israel to a double standard because they allow all other countries to go to war, and only Israel must use special forces and not the military to defend itself.
These accusers also demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state with their analysis of Israel’s conduct during the war. By saying it can defend itself but limiting that defense to special operations and not full military operations, the country is left open to charges of overstepping and even war crimes and genocide when it wages war as every other nation wages war when defending itself.
Israel’s detractors charge that its method of war delegitimizes it as a country. These accusations are false and qualify as antisemitism based on Sharansky’s definition.
The Mossad and special forces are incredible forces of power, cunning, and strength. They have achieved successes in this war that were previously unheard of in battle. Their stunning success in wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership in one fell swoop demonstrates a level of skill not seen heretofore in any other intelligence agency in the world. Their assassination of Ismail Haniyeh while in Iran and of Yahya Sinwar in Gaza degraded Hamas’s ability to strike Israel.
These intelligence feats were matched by the Israel Air Force’s pinpoint destruction of the entire Syrian Air Force and Navy in the midst of an internal Syrian rebellion.
However, these awesome feats shouldn’t lead to the erroneous idea that warfare has changed in the modern era to the point that defeating an enemy can be accomplished without an army and tremendous destruction. When an enemy uses its entire geographic space to wage war against its neighbor, it turns all of its space into a legitimate target.
Victory can only be achieved by destroying the enemy and its assets. If a nation leaves its enemy or its resources, the foe will reconstruct itself and attack at a later date. The Allies weren’t content to simply defeat the Nazis. They had to destroy most of Germany and totally control it for this very reason.
People without military experience and expertise, like Morgan and his colleagues, imagine that war only requires the elimination of “the bad guys.” They picture a world where special forces operators and intelligence field agents can defeat entire armies and opponents.
Their opinions are unrealistic, and they live in a world of fantasy. They accuse Israel’s army of acting heavy-handedly in ways that are immoral, uncalled for, and illegal. They employ a double standard toward Israel based on the soft bigotry of impossibly high expectations. Their opinions must be rejected, and Israel must be allowed to defend itself in the manner it sees fit.
The writer is a Zionist educator at institutions around the world. He recently published his book, Zionism Today.