Whether the current cease-fire holds or collapses, the facts are thus far incontrovertible: Hamas has lost a war it started, and Israel has won a war it didn’t want.
Obi-Wan Kenobi may have told Darth Vader, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” but this is not “Star Wars.”
This is the real world, circa 2014 — and in the real world, winners win when they win and losers lose when they lose. The Force doesn’t exist, and if it did, top Hamas terrorist Khaled Mashaal wouldn’t have it — not even the Dark Side.
Israel didn’t strike Hamas down, not yet anyway, but it has devastated and humiliated the dictatorial terrorist group running Gaza.
And as a result Hamas has become far weaker, far less able to wreak havoc on its enemy and far more vulnerable to overthrow by other Palestinian entities.
ITEM: Hamas fired 3,200 rockets at Israel. Many were more dangerous than any Israel had yet faced, because they can travel long distances.
Yet they caused almost no damage and Israel thinks it succeeded in destroying another 1,000 or so on the ground. At least half of Hamas’ offensive capability has been destroyed.
ITEM: Hamas’ long-term strategy for attacking Israel was to set the terrorist clock back by staging debilitating attacks on homes and kibbutzes via its extensive network of secret tunnels.
One such plot, to take place on the Jewish New Year at the end of September, would’ve been a bold assault on multiple locations killing and/or kidnapping hundreds of civilians. The plot was uncovered and is now dead.
ITEM: The means by which Hamas intended to change the game with Israel was its tunnel network and the underground city it was constructing. Israel has destroyed 32 of these tunnels. The tunnels were built at great cost over a period of years.
Israel took them out in two weeks.
Hamas wasn’t without its successes. It impressed and frightened Israel with the extent of its tunneling. It ambushed some soldiers.
It reawakened Israel to the unnerving, chilling reality that it isn’t just the Start-Up Nation with a rising per-capita income and inflationary housing prices, but a small country still very much under the shadow of evil.
And yet the country has also experienced a moment of national pride like the one at the end of the triumphant 1967 Six Day War.
That was when Israel and everyone else discovered that this tiny band of Jews had built a fierce first-class army vastly better than the militaries of the 22 enemy nations surrounding it.
Iron Dome is the cause of the current national pride.
For the first time in the annals of modern warfare, civilians living in cities under air attack felt secure in the knowledge they weren’t going to be hit by missiles and rockets.
Just as Israel proved itself militarily unmatched in 1967, it has proved itself technologically unmatched in 2014.
Now, to be sure, you’ll hear different over the next couple of days. You’ll hear that Hamas won. You’ll hear that Hamas wanted Israel to decimate Gaza so that it could use the images of destruction against it.
You’ll be told that Israel lost because international opinion has been inflamed against it.
You’ll hear that Israel will suffer from a new round of investigations of its conduct by human-rights groups and the United Nations that will do immense damage to its reputation.
You’ll be informed that Israel’s relationship with the Obama administration is now so devastated it will pay a very high price.
All that may happen. Indeed, much of it is sure to happen. But it has all happened before, and it will probably happen again, and it won’t change the facts.
President Obama and John Kerry may hate Bibi Netanyahu and curl their lips privately, but the American people continue to support Israel overwhelmingly — and Obama on Tuesday approved more support for Iron Dome, which is all that really matters.
Israel’s standing in the “international community” and among self-appointed “human rights organizations” could hardly be worse.
But we’re talking about a world of people who focus on Israel’s supposed war crimes and keep quiet or ignore the Muslim-on-Muslim slaughter nearby — many, many thousands dead this month in Syria; ISIS murdering 1,400 Iraqi soldiers in one day in June and destroying the Christian community of Mosul.
These people deem themselves moral arbiters, but Israel knows full well: Their “arbit” does not macht frei.
And by the way, the overt anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish rioting in Europe speaks not to Israel’s need to bend but rather the absolute necessity that it stand strong.
For if France, Britain other nations become inhospitable to Jews, where can they go?
Only one place: the Jewish homeland, which exists precisely because the world has made it clear, as Jews say every Passover, that “in every generation they rise up against us to slay us.”
As Hamas has. And as it, or some other foe, will again.