In the pivotal October 28, 1980, presidential debate, Ronald Reagan asked the American people, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The electorate answered resoundingly in the negative the following Tuesday, sending President Carter back to Plains, Georgia, by a landslide. In a similar vein, after two years of intense conflict, Israel is indeed substantially better off than it was on October 7, 2023, when a genocidal attack was unleashed on the Jewish state.  

 Israel confounded its mortal enemies by inflicting defeat after defeat on the revolutionary, virulently antisemitic Iranian regime and its primary surrogates—Hezbollah and Hamas. As a result, the prospects for a new and better day in the Middle East have soared. 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 Hezbollah’s leadership; degrading its thousands of missiles that loomed like a Sword of Damocles over Israel’s northern border in Lebanon; 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, combined with the heavy losses Russia has incurred in Ukraine contributed mightily to the weakening of Assad’s bloody tyranny in Syria. 

The United States 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 put it best, expressing his gratitude for Israel’s attacks on Iran: “This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us. We are victims of the regime. This regime has brought death and destruction to the world.”   

No war is cost-free. That is especially true for an existential conflict against ferocious enemies seeking to annihilate the Jewish state. The 9/11 or Pearl Harbor metaphors understate Israel’s October 7 death toll by an order of magnitude. To that figure should be added the hostages that Hamas later murdered and the IDF combat deaths incurred during the two-year war. Although the IDF decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership, degraded its huge missile arsenal, and devastated Iran’s air defenses with remarkable precision and discrimination, a similar campaign of airstrikes and special operations was not feasible in Gaza due to an insidious combination of the intrinsic character of urban warfare and Hamas’s strategic choices. At least 40,000 Gazan civilians have perished because Hamas deliberately embedded itself amidst its civilian population in violation of the laws of war for the express purpose of increasing the death tolls of its own people; or as John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, put it: “Hamas fighters, who unlike the IDF, don’t wear uniforms, have taken the opportunity to blend into the civilian populations as they evacuate. The net effect is that Hamas succeeds in its strategy of creating Palestinian suffering and images of destruction to build international pressure on Israel to stop its operations, therefore ensuring Hamas’ survival.”  

Sympathetic and hostile observers alike also have noted the surge for antisemitism even in decent, democratic regimes long largely immune to it. Douglas Murray—perhaps Israel’s most indefatigable and formidable champion—makes the case that Israel has been winning the war in the Middle East while the West has been “losing the war for our civilization,” this despite the manifest moral necessity of the conflict (ius ad bellum) and despite the surgical proportionality Israel exercised (ius in bello) in defanging Hezbollah and Iran, despite the assessment of genuine experts such as retired Colonel Richard Kemp, who marvels at the ingenuity, bravery, and decency of the IDF, hailing it as the “world’s most moral army,” despite the assessment of West Point’s John Spencer that Israel went to great lengths, as usual, to minimize civilian casualties within the constraints of the type of war Hamas imposed and the imperative of no substitute for victory. Murray rightly attributes this perversity to the virulence of antisemitism for which Israel is the surrogate and this Gaza war pretext. 

Thus Israel did what I hope and pray the United States would have done had a genocidal enemy launched a proportionally equivalent attack on us—murdering forty thousand Americans; raping, torturing, and beheading victims; casting babies into ovens—without a shred of remorse. Surely we would and should have vanquished such 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. Ronald Reagan observed frequently and famously that every generation of Americans will have to fight for their freedom, relearning the lessons of the previous generation. It is rank hypocrisy—an invidious double standard—to begrudge the right of Israel to do what we and any other strategically and morally sane nation would have done in response to a comparable attack.

  Israel also deserves gratitude it won’t receive for affirming Winston Churchill’s timeless truth expressed in The Gathering Storm that too many pale facsimiles of democratic statesmen have forgotten: “If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” The same goes for Israel affirming the wisdom of the great scholar of war Geoffrey Blainey, who 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, especially now facing a new axis of tyranny led by China, striving to make the world safe for rogue regimes with the United States as the chief obstacle to their implacable ambitions.

A triumphant Israel may not be loved, but it is feared and begrudgingly respected. That is the most practicable strategic outcome for now, despite the cost, as we ride out the current wave of antisemitism. May those who have lost their way because of malice, naïveté, or ignorance come to their strategic and moral senses sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Israel, its enemies, and the Palestinians desperate to be liberated from Hamas’s bondage have the chance—if not the guarantee—to reach broader, more stable ground because Israel did not give up or give in.