The United States and numerous other countries are calling for “a 21-day ceasefire along the Israel-Lebanon border.”
Ceasefire wishes are always understandable. Peaceful people desire peace both at home and abroad. We see the press coverage of flattened houses, shattered apartment buildings, and emergency responders treating crying families. Our hearts go out to them.
We long for a peaceful world.
But this is a political issue; we cannot give in to the temptation to think with our hearts. We must think with our heads.
And that means that before we make a decision, we must ask certain questions. For example:
Why Are They Calling For A Ceasefire This Week? Why Not A Month Ago? Or Six Months Ago? Or Nine Or Ten?
Hezbollah has been firing rockets into northern Israel for a year. As soon as Hamas poured in from Gaza to commit its unimaginable horrors on October 7, 2023, their allies in Lebanon announced that they would be “showing their support” by similar attacks from the north.
These attacks from Lebanon have continued unabated for a year. Israel evacuated some 60,000 people from the north, and postponed dealing with the Hezbollah threat while they concentrated on Gaza.
Israel has now spent nearly a full year methodically scouring the Gaza Strip for criminal militants. Hamas operatives have been found in apartments, nurseries, clinics, kitchens – in attics and basements, in offices and tunnels.
Israel has put its full focus on Gaza and has eradicated much of the threat posed by Hamas. Not all; probably never all. But much.
All this time, Hezbollah – based in Lebanon, a sovereign foreign country, remember – has continued its constant attacks on Israel. Israel has responded regularly, but not in full. Israel has instead focused on its police action in Gaza, hoping that the Hezbollah threat from Lebanon would dissipate or be stopped by others.
But no, Hezbollah has not let up. So finally, Israel has turned its full attention to this threat, and has spent a week concentrating directly on Hezbollah.
But we must ask: where was the world community all this time? Where were all these tender, tearful calls for peace when Hezbollah was the primary aggressor?
Where was the Biden-Harris regime, and the European Union, and the United Nations then? Why is it that all these alleged peacemakers were perfectly happy to remain silent during constant rocket fire from Lebanon into Israel for months, and they only started worrying about it when Israel started an aggressive self-defense and hit back last week?
One could make a strong case that if the alleged peacemakers of the West are only advocates for peace when Israel is on the ascendant, and they are perfectly happy to be quiet as long as Hezbollah has the upper hand, well then…
These alleged peacemakers aren’t really peacemakers at all; they’re just allies of Hezbollah.
Why Doesn’t Lebanon Control Hezbollah?
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, operating almost exclusively out of Lebanon for the past forty years.
In international law, if practically daily military attacks come in from a foreign country, there’s a limit to how long the victim can keep an open mind about the sympathies of that country’s government. Eventually, you simply have to take it as an act of war.
In fact, the Lebanese government is responsible for these attacks. The Lebanese government has tolerated or even supported Hezbollah in recent years; and Hezbollah reciprocates by being among the controlling interests in Lebanon’s mess of a government.
Once a well-respected, pluralistic society where Christians, Jews and muslims could all live in harmony, Lebanon has long been recognized as a failed state. Even if it wanted to control Hezbollah, it probably couldn’t. And there’s no reason to believe it wants to.
The simple fact is, by Lebanon’s tolerance of Hezbollah all these years, its welcoming of Hezbollah into both government and media, it has made Hezbollah’s actions – for all intents and purposes – official Lebanon policy.
Israel has therefore had the right to interpret Hezbollah’s attacks as an act of war, a full justification for all-out war against the entire country of Lebanon, for years now, let alone months.
These Western observers – the Biden-Harris Regime, the EU, and the UN – should be daily offering their gratitude to Israel for its restraint.
Israel has had both the right and the ability to absolutely pummel Lebanon for years, and yet, it hasn’t done so.
What Should Be Done About Hezbollah?
There are all sorts of organizations in the world. Some have a few main purposes; others have hundreds of purposes. And some have just one.
For example, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts famously provide dozens and dozens of merit badges; they teach all sorts of skills from fishing to camping, from first aid to mining, from auto mechanics to chemistry.
Hezbollah is not that kind of organization. Hezbollah just has one purpose.
Hezbollah was founded to fight Israel. It was chartered with one goal: to wipe Israel off the map, to overpower Israel from border to border and turn it into a muslim territory.
This is Hezbollah’s purpose in life: the genocidal destruction of their neighbor, the nation of Israel. And they act on this purpose, in some way, big or small, every day, by constantly attacking, often just as a nuisance but often as more.
We can therefore ask, why does Lebanon tolerate such an organization within its borders, constantly trying to draw the country into a malevolent war of conquest with a neighbor?
Imagine if the United States discovered that some internal paramilitary organization was trying to take over or destroy Canada or Mexico, not just by words in newspaper articles, but by firing barrages of missiles into the neighboring country, for months and even years? The United States wouldn’t stand for it; our government would rightly remind the criminals that foreign policy and military attacks are the job of the armed forces, and civilians simply can’t be allowed to wage such operations on their own. Such an organization would be rounded up and jailed, immediately.
Why doesn’t that happen in Lebanon? Why doesn’t the government of Lebanon put its foot down, at least in the interest of preserving peace?
I think we know.
And What Should The World Community Be Doing?
In the final analysis, this is the key question for us.
Hezbollah is attacking Israel, so Israel will decide how to deal with those attacks; Israel has the right, the ability, and the obligation. Israel has shown restraint for a long time, but judging from the past ten days, Israel’s patience has worn thin.
But we are outside Israel, we of the Western Hemisphere. The United States is both a major world power and a key leader of the UN, a member of the UN Security Council, in fact. We have an obligation to decide what to do about groups like Hezbollah.
Hezbollah was founded to be a terrorist organization, single-mindedly focused on the goal of destroying the sovereign state of Israel, not just our political ally but our true cultural friend.
It is clear what we should be doing. We should be denouncing Hezbollah every single time it attacks Israel – every day, every hour. We should be supporting Israel in the UN and in other major summits. We should be standing up for the honorable victim and opposing Israel’s genocidal, bigoted enemy to the north. This is undeniable.
But there’s more – because the UN has already made its decision.
With the passage of the Geneva Convention in 1949, the United Nations clearly identified terrorist groups as being anathema to a peaceful, civilized world. The Geneva Convention declared that organizations that wear civilian clothes to blend in, locate themselves among civilian areas, then attack innocent civilians – as Hamas and Hezbollah regularly do – and generally violate the rules of war are not deserving of the protections that honorable combatants give each other.
As non-state actors (NSAs), both Hamas and Hezbollah have been flagrantly operating outside the laws of the international community for as long as they have existed, but especially since the attacks of October 7.
If the membership of the UN respected its charter as its members claim, there would be universal opposition to Hamas and Hezbollah, and for that matter, to all the other puppets that are managed, like marionettes with platinum cards, by the islamic state of Iran.
Iran is the true enemy here. It provides theocratic justification for the atrocities that its clients want to commit; it funds them and provides them with the necessary materiel, while keeping a safe distance to enable the appearance of clean hands.
But nothing about it is really clean. Iran is pulling the strings – with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with the Houthis, with the PMF, and likely countless more.
Can the West present a united front to involve itself in every foreign war, and to intervene militarily in every such conflict? Perhaps not.
But at least the West can dispose of the shameful hypocrisy of acting as if Israel and Hezbollah are two moral equals with an argument who just need to cool down. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If we believe in the rules of war – if we believe in the high moral platitudes that inspired the Geneva Conventions – then we simply must stand together and renounce all these Iranian terrorist groups. Even if we don’t join in the fighting, the UN can at least provide Israel the honest public support for its police actions, so that Israel can do what has to be done.
And stop pleading for a ceasefire as if it was a simple barfight over some meaningless disagreement. This is existential, and Israel deserves the support of the world in defending itself from these demonic enemies.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
His newest nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” was just released on July 1, and is also available, in both paperback and Kindle eBook, exclusively on Amazon.
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