Let Israel Win the War Iran Started

Yesterday evening, 180 ballistic missiles rained down on Israel, sending the country’s citizens into bunkers, killing one Palestinian man—and failing to damage military sites. Israel has promised to retaliate. The White House has threatened unspecified consequences. How this ends is anyone’s guess. 

The question now is how we came to the precipice of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran. The answer is not found in Tehran or Jerusalem, but in Washington.  

Since October 7, we’ve seen a consistent story: The Biden administration views its support for Israel in purely defensive terms, and feels a duty to restrain Israel’s offense. The American hug comes with handcuffs. 

And the handcuffs often come with stern admonitions. So Biden arms the Jewish state and professes his support for Israel’s right to defend itself, but there is always a “but.” Israel has a right to self-defense, but it must do more to protect the Palestinian civilians Hamas uses as human shields. Israel has a right to self-defense, but it should not escalate its war against Hezbollah—even as the terror group fires rockets and missiles over Lebanon’s southern border. Israel has a right to self-defense, but it must participate in ceasefire talks that Hamas has boycotted. Israel has a right to self-defense, but there is no way it can enter its enemy’s last stronghold in Gaza without unacceptable casualties. Put another way, Israel has a right to fight its enemies to a tie.

The pattern began shortly after October 7, when Biden’s support for the Jewish state was at its strongest. According to the Financial Times, in the days after Hamas crossed Israel’s southern border in a savage rape-murder spree, “Israeli warplanes took off with instructions to bomb a location where [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah had been located by Israel’s intelligence directorate Aman.” But that raid was called off after the White House demanded Prime Minister Netanyahu order the warplanes to turn around. 

A few months into Israel’s war in Gaza, the Biden administration began to get cold feet. In December, a little over a week into Israel’s ground offensive into Gaza, Secretary of State Antony Blinken began to warn that Israel was not doing enough to protect civilians who were deliberately placed in between Israeli forces and the Hamas fighters hiding in the tunnels below. 

The pressure was ramped up ahead of Biden’s last State of the Union address, in which he used casualty statistics from the Hamas-run health ministry, only a few months after he said he didn’t trust those statistics. In May, Biden publicly threatened to withhold delivery of heavy bombs to Israel if it went ahead with an operation to clear Hamas from its remaining stronghold in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. In March, Harris told ABC News that she had studied maps of Rafah, and there was nowhere for civilians to escape if Israel went in. 

The last time Iran launched a barrage of missiles and slow-moving drones at Israel, in April, Israel and her regional allies also defeated the attack. But Israel limited its retaliation to a radar system near Iran’s nuclear sites, after Biden publicly urged America’s ally to “take the win.” As Iran’s escalation Tuesday showed, April’s “win” was more of an invitation. 

After much hemming and hawing over Rafah, Israel proved Harris wrong. In May it helped evacuate nearly 1 million people from the small city and began to deal the final blow to Hamas as a military organization. Last month, Israel’s defense minister announced that Hamas no longer existed as a military force. So much for that talking point. 

The Rafah incursion marks Netanyahu’s defiance of his ally’s restraints. Israel has had a new approach to its war for survival ever since. Last month, it launched a series of operations that eliminated the entire senior leadership of Hezbollah—the Iran-sponsored terror army that was pointing more than 100,000 missiles at Israel. This series of strikes and attacks has already destroyed half of Hezbollah’s missile stockpiles, according to Israeli officials. 

And yet, despite the success of Israel’s military operations against Hezbollah, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris still warned against further escalation of a war that has been regional since Iran’s proxies started it on October 7 and 8. 

And this brings things back to the American policy of restraining Israel. One can never get into the minds of the madmen who run Iran, but it’s quite possible the mullahs believed that America would continue to restrain Israel to deescalate the regional conflict that Iran—through its proxies—initiated nearly a year ago. 

But what does it tell us about what comes next? Thus far, the Biden administration is playing its cards close to the vest. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that he and the president were consulting with Israel on how to respond to the Iranian attack. He gave no specifics, but said one of the factors would be to “promote stability to the maximum extent possible as we go forward.” 

If Sullivan means that the U.S. will continue its policy of hoping to deter Iran by restraining Israel, then he is inviting further Iranian escalation. With two of Iran’s proxies—Hamas and Hezbollah—reeling, now is not the time to return the Middle East to an inherently unstable status quo. Real stability demands the ending of Iran’s nuclear blackmail of the region. 

In other words, if Sullivan and Biden are serious, now would be the time to take off the handcuffs. Israel has vast capabilities—as it has shown in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and Iran over the last year. But it’s even more capable when its chief ally supports its mission. 

So why not give Israel the green light and help it defang the chief cause of regional instability, the Iranian regime? Through pluck, daring, and ingenuity, Israel changed the dynamics of the war last month. Iran is wobbling. The win is there if the president takes it.  

Eli Lake is a columnist at The Free Press. You can follow him on X @EliLake and read his piece “The Killing of Nasrallah—and the Virtue of Escalation.”

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