Messing with Israel is bad business

The enemies of Israel continue to pay a heavy price in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre. If Iran and its proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, believed that the Jewish state's time had come, they could not have been more wrong.

Hamas and Hezbollah lost their most important leaders, thousands of terrorists and much of their infrastructure; and Iran, focused on its proxy war against Israel, left Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad exposed, and he recently lost power to jihadist groups. Now, the Iranians will no longer be able to send weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas through Syria, further weakening Tehran and its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.

Of course, the jihadists who today control most of Syrian territory, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), would also murder all the Jews in the world with pleasure, especially those in Israel, but they will surely not try to upset the Israelis, at least not in the short term. They have seen the ability of the Jewish state to not only deal with seven simultaneous fronts, but also to humiliate them in a forceful manner. If they want to stay in power, they know it is a bad idea to mess with Israel.

Israel is right to reinforce its border with Syria and seize the demilitarized zone of 50 years ago and bomb weapons depots abandoned by al-Assad's forces so that they do not get into the hands of Syrian jihadists and cannot be sent to Lebanon.

These jihadists are not to be trusted and surely intend to rule like the Taliban in Afghanistan, oppressing the population with Shariah law.

The Kurds should also be careful, of course. Although they maintained an indirect alliance against the al-Assad regime, their common enemy, the truth is that the jihadists detest them and another genocide like the one perpetrated by ISIS in 2014 against the Yazidis in Iraq, which included kidnappings, rapes and murders.

The Middle East is a complex neighborhood, plagued by criminal dictators, as al-Assad was, and radical Islamist groups. Assassinations, political prisoners, rapes, kidnappings, etc., have now been normalized, unfortunately. Except in Israel, one cannot expect the most basic human rights to be respected in these countries. No cure can be expected, whoever governs, since they only understand one language: force. The Jewish state speaks it perfectly, which is why it is able to defend itself and continue to exist.

Progressives 'woke up'

Many media, misnamed "human rights" organizations and the usual Western progressives with Palestinian flags, who only serve to demonize Israel, suddenly realized that there are other little things going on in the Middle East. They seem confused, not knowing which side to be on, since they must have abandoned the "no Jews, no news" narrative temporarily. Clearly, they do not care about the Palestinians, or the rights of minorities, or even about ending the wars; they only want to demonize the Jews and the West.

Now, however, reality is hitting them by surprise again. They left aside millions of people who have been suffering murder and the worst atrocities for years in order not to deviate from their dark agenda.

Israel's enemies must accept that the Jewish state will not disappear

Israel knows that the Western political left will not change, and it knows that its enemies will not change either, but most of all it knows that it is in this world to stay and how it must act in order to continue to exist. The enemies of the Jewish state have two choices: accept it or accept it. And they know it: Messing with Israel is bad business.

The fall of al-Assad is another demonstration that the enemies of the Jewish state should think a hundred times before attacking it.