Opinion by Bret Stephens on July 30, 2024.

The world will soon know the shape and scale of Israel’s response to Hezbollah for Saturday’s rocket attack on a Druze town in the Golan Heights, which killed 12 children. But it’s not too soon to ask what purpose the expected retaliation will serve in the context of Israel’s five wars.

Five wars? Yes. And they are more about ideas than they are about geography.

The first war — the war Israel is now waging against Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Iran itself — is about security. Israelis want to be able to live safely in their homes without fearing they could be rocketed, pillaged, killed or kidnapped with barely a moment’s warning. The threat of a major escalation on Israel’s northern border has turned entire cities into ghost towns and displaced more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

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That’s the proportional equivalent of roughly 2 million Americans forced out of their homes by the threat of terrorism. Those who condemn Israel now for its allegedly disproportionate response to the attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah would be a little more intellectually honest if they asked themselves what they would demand of their own governments if they were in the same situation.

The second war fuels and explains the first. It’s about existence. Israel’s most strident critics insist that the current conflict is about Palestinian existence, about Israel’s alleged refusal to grant a Palestinian homeland. But that’s a historically ignorant claim — and a dishonest one. Israel agreed to a Palestinian Authority in 1993, offered a Palestinian state in 2000 and vacated the Gaza Strip in 2005. When campus protesters at Princeton chanted, “We don’t want no two states; we want ’48,” they weren’t asking for Israel to accept a Palestinian state. They’re demanding Israel’s abolition.

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They are also adopting the views of Hamas’ Yahya Sinwar, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s Ali Khamenei — leaders of the so-called Axis of Resistance, which believes that the only solution in the Middle East is a final one: Israel’s annihilation. The pundits who incessantly fault Israel’s means of defense might at least pause to ask what Hamas would have done to Israeli civilians Oct. 8, 9 or 10 had Israel’s armed forces not been able to finally stop its slaughter.

The third war is metaphorical. It’s also dangerous and corrosive. It’s Israel’s war for the legitimacy of its actions, a war against the “yes but” thinking that now describes the middle ground of Western opinion on the conflict. That’s not a demand that people turn off their brains when it comes to judging Israel’s behavior. On the contrary, it’s a request that they turn their brains on.

To wit: How exactly do the people who say Israel has “the right to defend itself” propose that it do so against an enemy that entrenches itself beneath civilians in hundreds of miles of tunnels? What’s their strategy for lawful urban warfare against an enemy that fights unlawfully from hospitals and mosques and homes? Despite their notional acceptance of Israel’s right of self-defense, are they really calling for anything more than a unilateral cease-fire? The least the yes-but critics can do is recognize the fact that these questions have no easy answers.

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The fourth war is global, ideological — and fundamental. It’s the war against antisemitism. Among the many toxic and defamatory charges leveled against Israel since Oct. 7 is that the war in Gaza has caused a surge in antisemitism, a sly way of charging the Jewish state with being the agent of anti-Jewish hate.

The truth is precisely the opposite: Antisemitism is the cause of Oct. 7, not the consequence of it. Mountains of documentation attest to this and predate the creation of the state of Israel: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, met Adolf Hitler in 1941 to avow their shared struggle against “the English, the Jews and the Communists.” Today, it’s no surprise to see those who cheer Hamas’ aims are assaulting synagogues in Berlin or Los Angeles. Hatred of Jews will always find a convenient explanation or excuse; Israel is the latest, but hardly the first.

Finally, there’s the war within the state of Israel and among the Jewish people worldwide. It’s a war that has been one of the most enduring, and often fatal, features of Jewish history. Its contours were visible during the fight over Israeli judicial reform before Oct. 7 and now in the lawlessness of right-wing Israeli mobs charging into Israeli army bases. It’s also a war between diaspora Jews who recognize that the assault on Israel is ultimately an assault on them, and the “As a Jew” Jews who provide moral cover and comfort to Israel’s enemies. Addressing these divisions is as central to Israel’s long-term security as confronting any other threat.

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Israel struck Beirut on Tuesday, targeting the official it blamed for Saturday’s attack. Whatever Israel does next, it should be calculated to advance the national interests on all these fronts. If that means postponing a fuller response to explain its rationale, necessity and goal, so much the better.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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