BRET STEPHENS: The world had better hope Israel wins its wars against Hamas

The world had better hope that Israel wins its wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and their masters in Tehran.

By “wins,” I mean that Israel inflicts such costs on its enemies’ capacity to wage war that they accept that their interests, irrespective of their desires, are no longer served by fighting.

Those who hope for an independent, free and peaceful Palestinian state had better hope Israel wins.

An Israel that allows Hamas to remain in power in the Gaza Strip is never going to give up the West Bank for the sake of Palestinian sovereignty, lest Hamas take over there, too, and replicate its strategy of rockets and tunnels on a grander scale. Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, or his heirs would continue their well-documented reign of Stasi-like surveillance over those they rule, not least by brutalizing Palestinians who dare to oppose them. And the feeble but authoritarian Palestinian Authority would remain unreformable if Hamas, rather than more moderate Palestinian groups, remains its principal political competition.

Those who hope for an independent, free and peaceful Lebanese state had better hope Israel wins.

Hezbollah likes to present itself as a Lebanese resistance force. In reality, it’s an Iranian occupation force. It has repeatedly, and often violently, imposed its will on the country’s elected leadership. It has been implicated in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. It has dragged the country into ruinous wars with Israel. It has turned Lebanese civilians into human shields by emplacing itself in dense Beirut neighbourhoods. It has taken advantage of the country’s weakness to establish lucrative sidelines in drug trafficking, weapons smuggling and money laundering.

Hezbollah is disliked, if not hated, by most Lebanese. But they will never be free of its tyranny if there is nobody to destroy its ability to violently dominate the political landscape. If a world that claims to care for Lebanon’s interests doesn’t want Israel to do it, perhaps someone else should volunteer. How about the French?

Those who want a more moderate Israeli government had better hope it wins.

Imagine if Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, were to agree tomorrow to a cease-fire, which Kamala Harris has said is her top priority when it comes to the conflict. Imagine (not that it’s remotely likely) that Netanyahu also announced that he was eager to hold talks leading to the creation of a Palestinian state, irrespective of whether Hamas remains a potent force in Palestinian politics. Just who among Israel’s political factions would be the chief political beneficiary of those decisions?

Answer: Not the accommodating Tel Aviv secularists, led by former foreign minister Yair Lapid. It would be figures like Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and their ultraright constituents, who would accuse the government of capitulating to Western leftists at just the moment when Israel had finally turned the tide of war. Nobody should then be surprised if the next Israeli government makes the current one look dovish by comparison.

American policymakers had better hope Israel wins.

A peace deal between Jerusalem and Riyadh — among the grand geopolitical ambitions of the Biden administration — is not going to happen if the Jewish state emerges from the war looking like a loser to Saudi Arabia’s cold-eyed rulers. Worse, the Mideast coalition of moderates and modernizers that was coalescing in the wake of the 2020 Abraham Accords — and which offered the best regional counterweight to the Axis of Aggression led from Tehran — will fall apart in the wake of an Israeli loss, as nervous Arab states recalibrate their approach toward an ascendant Iran.

The American people had better hope Israel wins.

Since it came to power in 1979, Iran’s Islamist regime has declared itself at war with two Satans: the little one, Israel; the big one, us. This has meant suffering for thousands of Americans: the hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran; the diplomats and Marines in Beirut; the troops around Baghdad and Basra, killed by munitions built in Iran and supplied to proxies in Iraq; the American citizens routinely taken as prisoners in Iran; the Navy SEALs who perished in January trying to stop Iran from supplying Houthis with weapons used against commercial shipping.

The war Israelis are fighting now — the one the news media often mislabels the “Gaza war” but is really between Israel and Iran — is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing; an enemy that has been attacking us for 45 years. Americans should consider ourselves fortunate that Israel is bearing the brunt of the fighting; the least we can do is root for it.

Those who care about the future of freedom had better hope Israel wins.

We are living in a world that increasingly resembles the 1930s, when cunning and aggressive dictatorships united against debilitated, inward-looking, risk-averse democracies. Today’s dictatorships also know how to smell weakness. We would all be safer if, in the Middle East, they finally learned the taste of defeat.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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