Speaking at a recent event honoring the late Shimon Peres, the Israeli prime minister declared that “the weak crumble, are slaughtered, and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive.” These comments quickly met with scorn, derision, and even outrage on social media—some of which came from respected journalists, professors, and retired statesmen. Seth Frantzman notes that the events of the past 100 years strongly support Netanyahu’s claim:

For all of those who are outraged about the prime minister’s statement, I have a question. Where were they in August 2014 when Islamic State (IS) launched its attack on the weak, peaceful, defenseless, and vulnerable Yazidis in northern Iraq? When IS overran their villages and separated men and women, and then systematically machine-gunned the men into mass graves as the Einsatzgruppen did in 1941, where were they? . . .

[The Yazidis] are the weak. Who helped them? Well, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) helped them in 2014. Who was it that formed a human wall against IS in 2014 at the gates of Erbil and Baghdad? It was Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militias aided by U.S. air power. . . .

So let’s read again what Netanyahu said. “The weak crumble, are slaughtered, and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.” People [have commented] that this [sentiment] reminds them of fascism and Hitler. But let me tell you a story about the people who stopped Hitler. Was it the weak? Did protesters in New York stop Hitler? Whose troops liberated Auschwitz? The Soviet Red Army. It was the strong who stopped Hitler. It was [military might paired with] the strength of conviction of such leaders as Winston Churchill.

If you care about the weak, you need to be strong to defend them. A bully isn’t defeated by virtue signaling. A bully is defeated by someone who is willing to stand up and be strong.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.