Judith Bergman
The Israel Defense Forces recently revealed that a new Hezbollah terror cell has been seeking to establish itself in the border region across from Israel’s northern Golan Heights, in Syria between the abandoned city of Quneitra and the village of Arnah.
According to the IDF, much of its infrastructure has been set up around the Druze village of Khader. This is significant information, as Hezbollah—an Iranian proxy terrorist organization—has been seeking to establish itself in that area since 2013, as part of Iran’s ongoing efforts to encircle Israel on all fronts, including through Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The world community continues, deliberately, to ignore Iran’s stated ambition to eradicate Israel and its fundamental role in driving jihad against Israel along Israel’s borders, as the farce at the U.N. Human Rights Council last week amply demonstrated.
Iran’s crucial role in stoking conflict with Israel through its terrorist proxy Hamas was on full display of late when Hamas fired a missile on central Israel and hit the town of Mishmeret, just north of Tel Aviv, which destroyed a home, left seven family members injured, including two infants and a neighboring child. That missile attack, apparently, was directly ordered by Iran, according to the claim of a senior Hamas official, speaking anonymously to Israel Hayom.
According to the source, Iran “went over the heads” of Hamas leadership and ordered an Islamic Jihad cell operating out of the Gaza Strip to carry out the attack. Whether it really was Islamic Jihad or Hamas is not of much consequence.
In May, senior Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar admitted in an interview with Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen TV channel that Iran funnels “a lot of money, equipment and expertise” to Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist organizations. “We have excellent relations with our brothers in Hezbollah. Our relations with them are extremely developed. We work together and coordinate and are in touch on an almost daily basis. The relations are at the best stage ever. Similarly, our ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, with brother Qasem Soleimani and the other brothers in the IRGC leadership are very strong, powerful, and warm. Our relations with the Islamic Republic are excellent.”
They are all terrorists, and they all work for Iran.
For Israel, the recent revelations offer still more proof, if any were needed, that Iran seeks the Jewish state’s destruction on a multitude of fronts, and that Israel cannot afford to continue a strategy of seeking tactical, but inconclusive victories with Iran’s various terrorist proxy organizations to placate the histrionics of the so-called international community.
Israel needs to focus strategically on achieving victory on all fronts, which will finally bring a lasting peace to Israel and its neighbors. The strategy until now of “seeking peaceful compromise” has only served the purpose of Israel’s enemies, which is to enable the continuation of their relentless jihad, completely undeterred, on Israel’s very existence, through whatever means necessary.
It is important to note that those means do not only include military attacks on Israel with rockets and missiles, or terrorist attacks with incendiary devices, suicide-bombers, stabbings and other means of high- or low-scale terrorism. They include an array of other kinds of warfare, such as lawfare, cultural warfare and economic warfare, all of which are underpinned and made possible by the ongoing falsification of history, primarily the false claim of a “Palestinian people”.
It is crucial for Israel’s political and diplomatic echelons to acknowledge the overwhelming necessity for military victory over Israel’s enemies, but also to recognize the need to effectively put an end to the other kinds of warfare aimed at delegitimizing and undermining the existence of Israel.
The IDF’s revelations about the Hezbollah cell incidentally came around the same time, as the United Kingdom proscribed Hezbollah in its entirety—the first European country to do so since the Netherlands proscribed the terrorist organization in 2004.
This decision stands in stark contrast to the rest of the European Union, which insists on upholding the fiction that Hezbollah can be divided into a “military” and a “political” wing—a fiction that Hezbollah itself obviously does not promote. The rest of the E.U. countries, apparently, have no problem with Hezbollah. Niels Annen, deputy minister at the Foreign Ministry of Germany, even told Der Spiegel that Germany will not declare Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement a terrorist organization because Germany views it as “a relevant factor in Lebanese society and part of the complex political landscape in the country … ”
The political establishments of Germany and other E.U. countries are not the only ones who view the terrorist Hezbollah organization as ‘relevant’ and legitimate.
According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a delegation of European fascist and neo-Nazi Parliament members, European Parliament members, activists and politicians from countries including Britain, Italy, Belgium, Germany and Croatia—all members of the Alliance for Freedom and Peace (AFP), a European political party—visited Hezbollah’s foreign-affairs chief Ammar Al-Moussawi. Members of the delegation included the self-described fascist APF president and former Italian MP and MEP Roberto Fiore, neo-Nazi German MEP and NDP MP Udo Voigt, and Belgian political activist Hervé Van Laetham, who all expressed support for Hezbollah and its fight against Israel. In February 2018, Voigt said, “Where are the sanctions against other states that violate human rights and commit war crimes: the United States of America, Saudi Arabia, Israel? It is time to lift all sanctions against Tehran and give Iran another chance!”
It is extremely telling that European establishment leaders and European neo-Nazis harbor the same hopes and dreams about keeping Hezbollah politically legitimate and lifting the re-instated U.S. sanctions on Iran.
When it comes to hostility towards the Jewish state, there is an increased convergence between fascists and neo-Nazis, self-appointed mainstream liberals and Islamists.
Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst, and a fellow with the Gatestone Institute. You can find more in-depth articles on Israel and the Middle East @en.mida.org.il.
