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Photo: EPA
These animals will respond to strength. Hamas.
Photo: EPA

Better to be leopards than goats

Op-ed: A significant portion of our Middle East enemies are not interested in peaceful solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. They want us gone. If we want peace, we have to be strong enough to instill fear in them.

A few days ago, from his mouse-like layer in the ground, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah threatened us with an array of rockets that could cover all of Israel. What can we do to appease him? Nothing. Nothing but our deaths will please him and his ilk.

 

 

Sometimes people are like animals. There are animals that smell fear and weakness. A horse, for instance, immediately senses the attitude of its rider; a timid person won't last long on a fierce horse's back. Dogs sense this as well: In the military, dogs come towards those who fear them. Those who aren't afraid only experience their barks from afar.

 

Threats from a mouse's lair. Nasrallah. (Photo: EPA)
Threats from a mouse's lair. Nasrallah. (Photo: EPA)

 

In this aspect of identifying fear and weakness – individuals, tribes, and people are akin to animals. Smell fear, then attack. In our region of the world - which is still quite wild and tribal - honor and revenge are not just words describing abstract emotions. They are a squeezed trigger, a downward-pushed gas pedal. And one gang travels on to kill the other.

 

In this reality, even if the leopard will eventually lie down with the goat, it's better that we be the leopard just in case. Politeness, an eagerness for peace and acceptance, are seen here as weakness. In this neighborhood, those who want peace should prepare for war.

 

Our neighbors' peaceful ambitions will not prevent a war here. They prefer a war, at the end of which we will be gone, rather than a peace which involves us staying. That's why the temptations of peace will not be enough to convince them, but only their fear of defeat. We have no way of buying peace from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups – neither with territory nor any other kind of generous concession. They want our heads, and these are not for sale.

 

A lot of good people, who accept this analysis but have a hard time accepting its implications, tend to ask: So, will there never be peace, then?

 

Well, what kind of peace? A peace like the one shared between Italy and France? We won't have anything of that sort for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean we can't achieve a kind of quiet. That can be achieved. We'll be strong, successful, and good, and we'll respond forcefully to every blow. Not proportionally, but with such force that they'll think we've gone off the rails.

 

Hamas isn't interested in peace, it's interested in our heads. (Photo: EPA)
Hamas isn't interested in peace, it's interested in our heads. (Photo: EPA)

 

In conclusion, turning back to the animals. I've lived my whole life in the vicinity of flocks. There are shepherds who place lion feces around a farm. Lower-level predators smell the waste of an upper-level predator and walk away. A lion's waste is enough to chase away a pack of Jackals.

 

And what of the lion itself? Everyone knows well that even a lazy lion that desires nothing more than to spend its days sleeping in the shade can be deadly when awakened.

 

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 08.16.16, 16:18
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