The Liberty Papers

So, the latest Arab-Israeli War has begun. Israel is under attack on two fronts and Israel is responding with artillery fire and air raids, many of the air raids though are killing civilians. The world is asking itself, what can it do to end this crisis? Before we can decide on a solution, we need to analyze the situation. Furthermore, as classical liberals, we need to look at this through classical liberal principles as well. First, let’s break this down.

Hamas and Hezbollah intiated combat against Israel by abducting Israeli soldiers. The Israelis have every right to respond to these provocations against Hamas and Hizbullah and the governments that harbor and support and encourage them including the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Israel and the Arabs have an obligation to minimize civilian casualties and refrain from directly targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Obviously, neither side is living up to that obligation. So the question is where to go from here?

Israel needs to, instead of turning possible Lebanese allies into enemies by bombing Lebanese civilian infrastructure and start actually conducting a war against Hezbollah and its state sponsors such as Syria and Iran. The Israelis need better intelligence against Hezbollah and start launching strikes against selected Hezbollah targets. The Lebanese government needs to be emboldened to move against Hezbollah, bombing them won’t help the situation. Finally, Israel needs to take the war to Syria and Iran. Syrian policy on Israel is to fight Israel to the last Palestinian and Lebanese and Iranian policy is to fight Israel to the last Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian. Maybe if Iranians and Syrians, especially those connected to the leadership, began dying they would rethink their proxy war against Israel.