‘A Liberal Always Takes the Other Fellow’s Side in a Quarrel’

Robert Frost once said that “a liberal always takes the other fellow’s side in a quarrel.” Maoz Inon has gone far beyond Frost’s “liberal”; he’s determined to fatally undermine the case for his own country’s war of self-defense.

Maoz Inon is a far-left Israeli whose parents were murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and has just appeared at a UN Security Council meeting to denounce, not Hamas, but his own country, Israel, for what he claims is its exploiting the grief over the October 7 attacks as an “excuse” for making war in Gaza. More on this moral topsy-turveydom can be found here.

Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon, whose parents Bilha and Yaakov Inon were killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack, criticized the Israeli government’s policies in an unusual address to the United Nations Security Council on Monday, saying that “our grief cannot be an excuse for war.”

Inon claimed that the government had “used these atrocities to wage a devastating war of revenge” and called for efforts to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Why does Inon attack Israel? It is now engaged in a war it did not expect, and did not want, a war that was thrust upon it, and it is conducting that war in a way that, far from being “devastating,” makes it the most moral war in history.

The IDF does everything it can to minimize civilian casualties. It has dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of text messages, made millions of robo-calls, and employed the “knock-on-the-roof” technique, all in order to warn civilians (and unavoidably, Hamas fighters as well) away from sites about to be targeted.

The civilian-to-combatant ratio of deaths in Gaza is roughly 1:1. Consider that the U.N. has said that in all the wars fought since 1945, the civilian-to-combatant ratio was 9:1; in Afghanistan, the Americans brought that ratio down to 4:1, and in Iraq, to 3:1. But in Gaza, in a war that Moaz Inon wrongly calls “devastating,” the IDF has brought that ratio down to 1:1. No wonder West Point Professor John Spencer has written that in Gaza “Israel is applying more measures to minimize civilian casualties than any military in history.”

The meeting at the UNSC focused on the periodic report on the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 from 2016, which calls for an end to settlement construction.

The report, presented by Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN’s acting coordinator for the Middle East peace process, included sharp accusations against Israel over settlement expansion, demolitions, and the displacement of Palestinians, alongside claims of harm to the humanitarian space in Gaza.

UNSC Resolution 2334 — which the Obama administration shamefully did not veto but chose instead to abstain — calls for Israel to stop building settlements in Judea and Samaria. No matter how many UN votes denounce Israeli “settlements” as “illegal,” the truth is that in 1921, the League of Nations created the Mandate for Palestine, that was intended to eventually result in a Jewish state, and that included in its territory all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

When the UN replaced the moribund League of Nations, it committed itself in Article 20 of the UN Charter to fulfill the terms of the mandates still remaining. The sole mandate remaining was that of “Palestine.” Such a commitment to bring about the creation of a Jewish state extending from the river to the sea could not be undone by a vote in the UNGA or the UNSC.

Representatives from the UK, France, China, Russia, and other countries criticized settlement expansion and the E1 plan, arguing that they jeopardize the possibility of a two-state solution….

Endless repetition of the phrase “two-state solution” attempts to convince the world that there really is such a “solution,” for otherwise why would that phrase have become a mantra? In practice, that “solution” would require Israel to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines (they were never recognized borders), with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea. An invading force from the east could slice Israel in two in a matter of hours, before the IDF’s reservists could be called up.

On the morning of October 7, my world collapsed,” Inon told the Security Council. “My beloved parents, Bilha and Yaakov, were among the first victims of the Hamas attack in Netiv Ha’asara.”

Two days later, he said, his family decided to reject revenge.

Maoz Inon has mischaracterized the war in Gaza. Israel is not engaged in “revenge,” but in self-defense, just as the U.S. was when it went to war against Imperial Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Israelis, with a handful of exceptions such as the delusional far-leftist Moaz Inon, know that Hamas is dedicated — see its Charter — to destroying the people and state of Israel. Israel has no other choice but to fight back until Hamas is no longer able to harm it. If the IDF does not succeed, there will be many more atrocities in the future like the one carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023.