The average American may not have heard of Yahya Sinwar or even attached much significance to his death this week. But clarification was not long in coming: the primary military leader of Hamas, the godfather of the October 7 massacre that killed more Jews at one time since the Holocaust, and a stone-cold killer whose murderous rampages targeted both Jews and Palestinians who had opposed him. In short, the Hamas equivalent of Osama bin Laden and an eminently ignoble creature to be returned to his Maker.

One also has to be impressed by the gutsiness of the Israeli Defense Forces as well as the sheer chutzpah of Benjamin Netanyahu, absorbing the terrible shock of those initial attacks and then rallying his countrymen for an extended fight in the urban killing zones of Gaza. He deserves even greater credit for keeping the IDF hard at it, deploying and re-deploying them into the toughest combat there is.

Not for the first time, Mr Netanahu reminds me of Winston Churchill, summoning his country to battle against the Nazi blitzkrieg in northern France, through the heartbreak of Dunkirk and the hard-fought Battle of Britain. When Montgomery finally managed a desperate victory against Rommel’s Afrika Corps at El Alamein, Churchill kept his focus on rallying Britain for what still lay ahead. “The Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/famous-quotations-and-stories/

In much the same way, Israel understands far better than the strategically challenged Biden-Harris White House that, while new opportunities may emerge from their recent decapitation of the Hamas-Hezbollah leadership, the essential geo-politics of the Middle East remain unchanged. Iran is still intact: So are its client-countries surrounding Israel’s periphery, all armed with missiles, money and “technical advisors” from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp. So long as those facts remain unchanged, Iran also remains a potential nuclear power, a slow-motion Cuban Missile Crisis with every potential to create a second Holocaust against the very same people who fell victims during the first one.

That forbidding backdrop might provide the best way to appreciate Joe Biden’s characteristic missteps. Begin with the fact that Robert Gates, probably our best-ever secretary of defense, famously recalled in his memoirs that Mr. Biden had been disastrously wrong on every major defense issue over the previous four decades! https://www.yahoo.com/news/gates-slams-biden-memoir-reveals-194654938.html/

But more recently, there have been persistent indicators that either President Joe or maybe Candidate Joe was feeling heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party. Did they really have Israel’s back, despite their not-so-very subtle bows to the Democratic left? The strategic crossing point at Rafah, in southern Gaza has been a frequent object of presidential and vice-presidential ire, Ms. Harris frequently insisting the she could, after all, read a map. Which made it all the more embarrassing when Yahya Sinwar, was brought to divine justice from a building in Rafah attacked by an IDF infantry patrol, doing what infantrymen always do: Patrolling the ground and engaging the enemy with direct fire. Perhaps Ms. Harris could ask her running mate to explain such subtleties.

In an insightful article on US-Israeli tensions over recent days, Professor Charles Lipson reveals just how annoying White House knob-dickery has become: There is “also the unconscionable action of leaking highly-secret targeting information to the Washington Post, as soon as the Israelis shared it with the White House. That leak tells Iran where to concentrate their defensive efforts and where not to bother. The words that best describe that leak cannot be uttered in polite company.”  https://thespectator.com/topic/follows-yahya-sinwar-death-israel-war-gaza-beyond/

Small wonder that Lipson concludes by suggesting that the combination of American hi-tech weaponry mixed with bad strategic advice means that Israel will likely act in its own best interests. So where do those interests lie? I think both Winston Churchill and Benjamin Netanyahu would probably argue that Israel’s interests require a two-state solution, the two states being Israel and a New Iran – i.e., one no longer governed by the ayatollahs and the IRGC. If the Iranian leadership is deposed by any means necessary, then its empire also goes away, literally from Gulf to Sea. However, you can rest assured that such bold ideas are strictly off-limits in the Biden Pentagon, the elite foreign-policy salons of Georgetown and as well as the Ivy League’s DEI-infested warrens. But let us hope that Israel has not forgotten who fights on their side!

COL (Ret.) Ken Allard is a former West Point professor, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.