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.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”