Israel, ignore Democrats’ warped cease-fire calls after Hamas big’s death

Barely an hour after Israel confirmed it had killed Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader and the architect of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, the Very Smart People in Washington, DC jumped in with helpful advice.

“Israel,” former ambassador and Clinton confidante Dennis Ross opined on social media, “should say it will end the war.”

Vice President Kamala Harris agreed. A few hours later, she delivered a brief statement saying the exact same thing: “This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.”  

Others in the thicket of Democrat-friendly think tanks jumped in to amplify the same message: Now that the bad guy is dead, Israel should lay down its arms and engage in peaceful diplomatic negotiations.

It’s a talking point we’re likely to hear more and more these coming days — and it’s wrong, warped, stupid and dangerous.

It doesn’t really take a Churchill to understand why.

Just look at the instantly iconic picture of the slain Sinwar, laying lifeless in the rubble as three robust Israeli soldiers tower over his soot-covered corpse, and you’ll realize that Washington’s insistence on diplomacy at any cost is nonsense: Sometimes, war is precisely the answer.

And sometimes, especially when you’re fighting a genocidal terror group hell-bent on raping your women, beheading your children and eliminating every last civilian, you can’t and shouldn’t stop until you win.

Not that you’d get any of that if you listened to Team Biden-Harris.

“We have got to reach a cease-fire,” the vice president told reporters just last week.

“We’ve got to de-escalate.”

It wasn’t just talk: As Israelis were struggling with more deadly Hezbollah rockets and ongoing attacks from Hamas in Gaza, the Biden administration ramped up its threats of cutting off weapons shipments to Israel, increased pressure on Jerusalem to refrain from a major attack on Iran and repeated the mantra, best expressed earlier this year by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, that a cease-fire is “the only credible path forward.”

If you want to know how things turn out for those who take the administration’s sage advice, just ask any Afghan what life’s been like these last few years.

Israel could’ve succumbed to the same pressure, and let the Democrat dodos push it into premature surrender.

It could have caved when Harris threatened it with “consequences” should the Israeli army go into Rafah.

It could’ve agreed to cede control of the Philadelphi corridor, Gaza’s border with Egypt, giving Hamas a major pathway to smuggling fighters and munitions.

Had it done so, Sinwar — who was killed in Rafah, not far from the Philadelphi corridor, reportedly with wads of cash and a fake passport on his person and likely while attempting to flee into Egypt — would’ve been sipping sweet tea from the safety of some shelter and doubling down on planning the next murderous attack.

Thankfully, the Jewish state made a very different choice.

Withstanding immense pressure, not just from Washington but from its many domestic cronies in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to fight on.

Instead of agreeing to engage yet again in negotiations with two terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, that have been brazenly violating agreements and flouting internationally imposed restrictions for decades, Netanyahu had the IDF eliminate Hezbollah’s top leadership, take out its commander Hassan Nasrallah and make sure that Hamas’ Sinwar, too, died like a dog.

In doing so, Netanyahu and Israel taught America a lesson our spineless and rudderless elites desperately need to learn: Winning is possible.

Winning is desirable.

Winning is good.

True, war comes at a terrible price.

But refusing to fight and insisting that diplomacy is the only acceptable route only serves to embolden our worst enemies, prolong the misery of innocent people on all sides and ensure that the war we’ll eventually have to fight will be much deadlier.

In killing Sinwar, Israel gave the world another reminder about not politics or military strategy, but basic human nature.

When someone marches into your home, rapes your daughter and burns your baby alive, the normal human response isn’t to weep and then slouch towards the negotiations table.

It’s to pick up a gun and go seek justice.

It’s the sort of logic Americans inherently understand, and one more reason why so many are rejecting the defeatist and delusional policies of an administration committed to absurd abstractions rather than concrete victories.

America has very real foes taking very real steps to jeopardize our national security interests, Iran first and foremost among them.

Instead of kowtowing to our murderous enemies, here’s hoping we take a page out of Israel’s playbook and refuse to budge until they’re all lying dead in the dirt.

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.