By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post
There are a lot of foolish Jews in Canada and the United States. They have voted for, among other fair-weather friends, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris (all now thankfully out of office) and Justin Trudeau (hopefully also soon on the way out). They also despise Benjamin Netanyahu.
But October 7, 2023, the Hamas attack on Israel and the horrific and pervasive antisemitism we have seen across both countries, led to November 5, 2024, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. And change has already begun.
There will be fewer mealy-mouthed statements about how “Israel has the right to defend itself” while refusing the Jewish state genuine military support and, in the case of Canada, supporting the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for the Prime Minister of Israel, who along with Yoav Gallant, the former Minister of Defence, was charged with being genocidal war criminals, on a par with Milosevic, Putin, numerous other satraps, and perhaps even Hitler!
Trump’s victory has given Israel political breathing space, and without the American foreign policy establishment breathing down its neck, it has allowed Jerusalem to continue degrading Hamas’ terrorist base in Gaza and to neutralize Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Syria’s tyrant, Bashir al-Assad, was quickly overthrown – though we must be careful not to regard the victors, backed by Turkey, as “democrats” – and this means that the Iranian regime has lost its most important ally and its land route to Lebanon.
With Russia distracted by its war in Ukraine and Hezbollah weakened by Israel to the point where it lost its ability to defend Iranian interests, the Syrian rebels were able to turn the tide of a war that most of the world thought had ended years ago.
Tehran believed the assaults launched against the Jewish state by its terrorist proxies would fundamentally alter the balance of power in the region. It has indeed – but not in the way Iran hoped!
The ring of fire that Iran had planned to establish around Israel has been dismantled with the loss of the single most important link in the chain, Syria. Hezbollah is now locked in an isolated enclave in south and west Lebanon. Hamas is transformed from a well-equipped terrorist army based in tunnels into a scattered armed underground.
Assad’s downfall was made possible by a year of Israeli strikes on Iranian targets, military industries and air defence systems in Syria. Netanyahu warned during a meeting at the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces in Tel Aviv December 10 that if the new Syrian regime befriends Iran, Israel will take decisive action against it.
“If this regime allows Iran to regain its foothold in Syria, or allows the transfer of Iranian weapons or any other weapons to Hezbollah, or attacks us, we will respond forcefully and we will exact a heavy price from it,” he declared. “What happened to the previous regime will happen to this regime as well,” he warned. Israel has no intention of interfering in Syria’s internal affairs but would take action it deemed necessary for its security.
Indeed, Israel took advantage of the chaos in Syria to quickly damage and destroy much of that country’s air force and navy. Netanyahu authorized the Israeli Air Force to bomb “strategic military capabilities left by the Syrian army so that they would not fall into the hands of the jihadists.” The aerial assault targeted air force bases, including entire squadrons of fighter jets.
Israel is systematically dismantling Iran’s axis of evil, Netanyahu said, referring to the Islamic Republic’s attempt via its proxies to build a “path of terror from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea: from Iran to Iraq, from Iraq to Syria, and from Syria to Lebanon.”
As for Trump, unlike his Democratic presidential predecessors, he will not engage the region with a new round of appeasement of Iran or by pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians or any of its other enemies. This will be a non-starter in an administration packed with friends of the Jewish state.
Trump exercised a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran through heavy sanctions during his first term, which included the United States withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal in May 2018. His nominees for senior positions in his forthcoming administration suggest that he intends to remain tough on the Iranian regime.
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