by Justine Hemmestad
2-8-24
Israel is getting hotter by the moment, with no cool down in sight. As my friend Itamar Ben David says, Hamas seeks “mainly to terrorize, to make Israelis feel unsafe in their country and to psychologically force them to leave.” And Lebanon’s escalating aggression toward Israel is compounded by the lack of will on the part of countries who support Israel to become involved, which has led Israel to become jaded with the world around it. To understand this growing ambivalence, I turn to my friend Itamar Ben David, Captain in the Israeli Army. Ben David helps me see the world from his vantage point. He believes that both Obama and Biden have exacerbated the situation in the Middle East, to the point where Iran has been fed and emboldened. The US policy of limiting and antagonizing Israel’s allies but being “friendly with Iran in the name of ‘de-escalation’ is a strategy that has proved itself to be a disaster.” Ben David says he thinks that if America and other countries “want to leave Israel alone in this battle and put shackles on it, which is to condemn its limited action against Gaza and later Lebanon, day in and day out - it will simply lead to more bloodshed and humanitarian crisis as a result, on Israeli and Western soil.” He believes that if the West isn’t united in this, the jihadists will continue to move forward and destroy the economies of Israel and the West (he refers to Yemenite damage of global shipping), as well as our societies (he refers to Iran and Lebanon promoting drug cartels in America). Ben David hopes that America would realize that it is “actually the only power that can stop the barbarians,” otherwise there is likely to be another 9/11, or even a 10/7 on American soil. An American air strike on February 2 may have been a message of unbreakable
allegiance to Israel as much as it was a message of strength and deterrence to Iran. Israel also knows what is vital to its national security, and any attempt to impose something in the name of compromise, which contradicts Israel’s core national interests or national security, won’t be accepted. If Israel’s enemy is building an army, the goal is to destroy that army, otherwise Israel knows the devastation that can and will be inflicted upon them as a nation if they do not. As Captain Ben David says, “National security isn’t something a nation can compromise on.”
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