Gavin the Brave

Carthago delenda est,” Carthage must be destroyed – the motto of Cato the Elder and the Roman army during the Punic wars

National Review reports, “California Governor Gavin Newsom will conduct tonight’s Christmas tree–lighting at California’s state capitol virtually, amid threats from pro-Palestinian protesters… The Sacramento Regional Coalition for Palestinian Rights announced that it would protest at the state capitol on Tuesday night — the same night Newsom was set to direct the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. The group told KCRA Channel 3 that it wants to ‘out Governor Gavin Newsom for hiding from the public because he doesn’t want to face their anger at his shameful stance in regard to the genocide in Gaza.’”

Perhaps President of China Xi Jinping can show Newsom the way. The Governor of California need not scurry to a place of safety because he wishes to avoid a public headline-generating backlash as a result of a strenuous moral opposition against a genocidal Hamas, both the governing authority of Gaza and, more importantly, a terrorist organization in the pay of Iran. Xi has been committing his opposition to the Chinese Gulag for decades.

It is not altogether clear that Palestine Gazans support Hamas. Indeed, it is not altogether certain that Iran, part Persian and part Islamic, supports its own revolutionary Shia government. Neither Iran, nor Hamas, nor other of Iran’s terrorist proxies, favors democratic solutions to political, cultural, or religious problems. And, of course, Iran, the principal troublemaker in the Middle East, wishes to push the state of Israel into the sea.

Protestors on college campuses throughout the United States, some of them dripping with ivy, have expressed their solidarity with Iran, Hamas terrorists, Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, Yameni terrorists, and peace seeking members of the United Nations, whose objections to Israel’s declaration of war against Hamas terrorists infesting Gaza is more subtle than Iran’s.

Also subtle is U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ objection to Israel’s declaration of war on Hamas.

Sanders, a Jewish socialist Senator from Vermont born in 1941, was 4 years old when anti-Nazi allies bombed Dresden in Germany. The bombing of Dresden, necessary or not, helped to bring an end to World War II and established, in the aftermath of the war, what one might call the peace of the victors.

Sanders believes that Israel’s war on Hamas is both necessary and just, and certainly Gaza is no Dresden. Israel is determined to destroy Hamas, and it has established offensive strategies that will, as far as possible, allow Gazans some measure of security against military attack not present when Dresden was utterly destroyed. These measures were in place before Sanders and President Joe Biden loudly advised Israeli leaders against the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians, such as happened when Hamas ruthlessly attacked Israel civilians on October 7.

Israel’s non-negotiable demands are these: Israel must win the war against Hamas and its supporters, and “winning” means that Hamas, both the government of Gaza and a terrorist organization financed and sponsored by Iran, must be uprooted and destroyed. The terrorist infrastructure in Gaza – religious, cultural and political – must be supplanted. If there is to be in Israel a so called “two state solution,” Palestinian and Israeli, one of the states cannot be Hamas -- or any other Iranian supported terrorist proxy. No nation can long survive by housing in its bosom a foreign supported terrorist group that has taken active measures to militarily destroy the nation.

These are demands that will be enforced, according to Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, whether or not the friends and enemies of Israel agree that the extirpation of Hamas is necessary.

Cleverly, the anti-Zionists insist that Israel should pause in its efforts to destroy Hamas for humanitarian reasons, and they do not make sharp distinctions between a pause in military action – for instance, a momentary cessation of hostile military action to allow for an exchange of prisoners – and an undefined cessation of hostilities.

Every formal declaration of war is a crossing of the Rubicon.

If you are a nation that has declared war against a hostile state or nation, you will want to concentrate your firepower, material or rhetorical, on one overriding goal – winning the war.

Under certain conditions, diplomacy works. More usually, wars, not diplomacy, decide the future of a nation, but only for those who have won the war. The United States and its allies could and did negotiate terms of peace with Germany and Japan after both nations had surrendered to the allies in 1945 – not before.

Iran has been sponsoring terrorism in the Middle East for decades, some would say successfully. The havoc Iran has caused has not disturbed a single hair in the snowy white beard of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989.

Peace between Gazans and Israel is not possible while Iran sponsored terrorists continue to harass the civilian population of Israel. Hamas must be destroyed. And it would help a great deal if the policy of the United States with respect to Iran were less accommodating than it appears to be. The armada President Joe Biden has sent to the Middle East has been badly used because it has hardly been used, apart from blowing up a few empty buildings to the north of Israel.