Why bother?
That’s the message that much reporting on Israel sends to the Jewish state.
For example, the following sentence appeared near the top of the New York Times’s report on Israel’s elimination of Iranian leader Ali Larijani: “Mr. Larijani’s death raises questions about whether Israel is killing so many Iranian leaders because that appears the surest way to achieve its military objectives — or merely because it can.”
Come again? The question here, as I understand it, is whether Israel is killing its enemies … just for kicks?
If you want a strategic reason to take out leaders like Larijani and the Iranian intelligence chief who was eliminated a day later, it is that such moves completely paralyze the lower command. Israel’s threats are credible, and any junior security official considering calling Israel’s bluff will think again. The idea that Israel knows where everyone is and how to reach anyone who defies its threats is, again, paralyzing.
But do we need to prove such a strategic benefit? It should be enough that Larijani got what he deserved.
The Times piece then gives us a potted history of Israeli hunting missions:
“Israel has long experience eliminating its enemies.
“In 1972, after 12 of its Olympic athletes were slain in Munich, Israel launched a yearslong campaign of vengeance aimed at killing every person responsible. In the early 2000s, it gunned down or blew up many Palestinians it accused of terrorism during the Second Intifada. And in 2024, it killed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, in an airstrike on his headquarters in Beirut. (His successor was killed in an airstrike days later.)”
What this means in practice is that there is a price to be paid for killing Jews. It should not surprise anybody, then, that the price for October 7 is high, and that Israel will decide when it has been extracted. There is legitimacy enough in that alone.
After all, the regime responsible for the horrors of October 7 deserves destruction. So do the armies and proxies used to carry out those horrors: Hamas and Hezbollah top the list. The pursuit of that destruction is itself a noble cause, because it is the pursuit of justice.
There is a line in an Israeli spy movie, Walk on Water, that sums up this idea quite nicely. As the Mossad director gives his employee an important assassination assignment, he says to the younger man: “Get him before God does.”
The assignment is to eliminate an old Nazi war criminal. But the aging German will die of old age sooner than later, so why go through all the trouble now? The answer is that Nazi war criminals should stop feeling hunted only when they shuffle off this mortal coil. Eliminating the Nazi official means delivering justice to his victims and to those who will never be his victims now. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
Israel does so much that benefits the rest of the world that sometimes people seem to forget that it is its own country with its own interests. Hence the increasing absurdity of the discourse around Israel’s objectively-successful military campaigns. Will killing Ali Larijani solve global warming? Will taking out Hassan Nasrallah end world poverty? Will any one action by the IDF end all wars forever? If not, the media doesn’t see a reason to do it.
But Israel is defending its citizens and dispensing justice, and that is reason enough. “Someone else will just replace Larijani” entirely misses the point. Because by this logic, putting a mob boss in prison will only cause someone else to take over the family, continuing a cycle of crime and retribution without eliminating the existence of organized crime itself.
As a matter of course, we punish criminals for the crimes they commit. Only when it comes to Israel do we suddenly agonize over the point of it all.
But Israel doesn’t agonize over the point of it all. Israel was reconstituted as a modern state during an era when Jews were being killed in the most horrible ways imaginable with no recourse. Those days are over.
Truth is, that section of the Times story about the history of Israel’s retaliatory missions is a fair guide to the near future as well. A lot of bad people and groups were involved in starting this war. The fact that Israel’s retaliatory campaign is so protracted should not be a criticism of Israel but a reminder of just how destructive and shattering October 7 was, and how widely the culpability for it is spread. The victims of that terrible day are no less deserving of justice just because there are so many of them.
