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Source: https://providencemag.com/2025/10/in-war-resolution-israel-had-no-substitute-for-victory-1/
Israel Did What the U.S. Would Have Done Had a Genocidal Enemy Launched an Attack on Us
(Providence - Institute on Religion and Democracy) Robert G. Kaufman - After two years of intense conflict, Israel is substantially better off than it was on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel confounded its mortal enemies by inflicting defeat after defeat on the revolutionary, virulently antisemitic Iranian regime and its primary surrogates - Hizbullah and Hamas. Israel persevered heroically in defiance of the Biden administration's relentless pressure to restrain its response. The IDF waged a series of brilliant campaigns - decapitating, with surgical precision, Hizbullah's leadership; degrading its thousands of missiles; and devastating Iran's air defenses, thereby facilitating U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear sites that significantly set back its nuclear weapons program. Israel also secured the return of the remaining hostages without sacrificing its prerogative to crush the unreconciled remnants of Hamas should they resume violence. The shock and awe of the IDF's military victory has incentivized more moderate Arab regimes to cooperate with Israel and abandon Hamas. Israel's resounding victories against Iranian proxies contributed mightily to the weakening of Assad's bloody tyranny in Syria. The U.S. and its democratic allies are also substantially better off now that Israel has won its existential war against its genocidal adversaries. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz expressed his gratitude for Israel's attacks on Iran: "This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us....This regime has brought death and destruction to the world." Thus, Israel did what I hope and pray the U.S. would have done had a genocidal enemy launched a proportionally equivalent attack on us - murdering 40,000 Americans; raping, torturing, and beheading victims; casting babies into ovens - without a shred of remorse. Surely we would and should have vanquished such a perpetrator, settling for nothing less than complete and utter destruction of the regime that perpetrated the attack - just as Churchill and FDR rightly did with Nazi Germany and Japan. It is rank hypocrisy to begrudge the right of Israel to do what we and any other morally sane nation would have done in response to a comparable attack. The great scholar of war Geoffrey Blainey instructs us in The Causes of War that the longest and most durable periods of peace occur when the results of war are most decisive, eliminating the root cause of the conflict. We ignore these lessons at our peril. The writer is a Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.