Here’s why Israel is winning

“The attempted hijacking of the Flydubai aircraft en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv brings to mind many other attacks,” recalls Douglas Murray in the Free Press. “The courage of the crew and passengers who overpowered the terrorist pilot evokes the heroism of the American passengers on United Flight 93. The fact that the target was a plane full of Israeli passengers brings to mind the series of aircraft hijackings that plagued the 1970s. But above all, the attack – and the successful thwarting of what could have been a mass terrorist event – serves as a reminder of something greater: that Israel and the West remain at war with Islamic radicals, and that it is a war we are winning. To some people, this observation may seem counterintuitive. Every day, the news is full of declarations of defeat. The online world is rife with strident proclamations that Israel has lost this war. But as we approach the third anniversary of the 7 October attacks, I stand by what I wrote here a year ago: Israel and its allies are winning the war on the ground, even if they have lost the propaganda war in the wider world. The propaganda war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. It is better to win the war on the ground and lose the propaganda war than the other way round. Three years on from the attack unleashed by Yahya Sinwar, it is worth reiterating the successes of the nation he sought to defeat – and the utter devastation suffered by those who started this war.

For decades, the Iranian revolutionary government has sought to encircle the State of Israel in a ring of fire. Its proxies – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and other forces in Syria, Iraq and Yemen – were positioned as a trap. The long- and short-range rockets stockpiled particularly in Lebanon had one main purpose: to act as a deterrent should Israel ever take military action against Iran’s nuclear programme. That nuclear programme was meant to be the crown jewel of the Iranian regime. It was what the regime’s apologists in the West had spent years pretending did not exist. But it did. And the regime’s spokespeople in the West were simply covering it up until the day the Iranians might declare a nuclear breakout. Once the mullahs had deployable nuclear weapons, they would have believed themselves to be invincible – capable, in fact, of continuing to oppress the Iranian people for the indefinite future and of holding not only the Middle East, but also the rest of the world, by the throat. That was, in fact, what their spokespeople in the Western media wanted. A single major miscalculation prevented them from achieving this: Sinwar’s launch of the attacks on 7 October.

With the benefit of hindsight after three years of war, we can now see more clearly just how thoroughly Iran’s plans have been shattered. Piece by piece, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has dismantled the Iranian axis. First, they dismantled Hamas in Gaza. They did so despite constant attempts to make them stop, coming not only from minor ‘allies’ in Europe, but also from President Joe Biden’s White House. During the years in which the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were attempting to carry out their mission in Gaza, the Biden Administration constantly sought to pull them back. But the Israeli government refused. Even as Kamala Harris claimed to have ‘studied the maps’ and the hashtag ‘All eyes on Rafah’ went viral online, the IDF entered Hamas’s last stronghold. There, they surrounded Sinwar and killed the mastermind behind the attacks. There was no ‘massacre’ in Rafah, as the online world had predicted. There was simply another Israeli victory.

Other leaders of the Iranian axis were killed one after the other. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a bomb hidden in the compound where he was staying in Tehran in July 2024. With Hamas dismantled, the Israelis turned their attention to Hezbollah and Lebanon. There was significant disagreement within the Israeli war cabinet over when to confront Hezbollah, which had joined the war against Israel on 8 October 2023. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant wanted to strike immediately, on the grounds that Hezbollah was the greater enemy and Hamas the lesser, and that it was wiser to follow the rules of war which recommend tackling the stronger enemy first. But Netanyahu was reluctant – though not opposed – to fight on two fronts. The Prime Minister’s plan worked. A year after the attacks of 7 October, Israel had carried out the brilliant pager- and walkie-talkie-coordinated strikes, killing or maiming thousands of Hezbollah operatives whilst minimising civilian casualties. Then, whilst Netanyahu was in New York addressing the United Nations, Israel bombed the compound where Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and almost all of his remaining top colleagues were located.

Having taken down Hamas and Hezbollah in turn, it was time to take the war directly to the Iranian regime. To do this, Israel needed the help of the new administration in Washington – and it received it. The Israeli Air Force took out most of the Iranian regime’s surface-to-air missile defences. It left the skies over Iran defenceless and then returned. Two years after the start of the war unleashed by Sinwar, Israel had struck thousands of the regime’s targets and paved the way for American B-2 bombers to attack Iran’s key nuclear sites.

President Donald Trump declared a total victory over Iran’s nuclear programme, but once it emerged that the Iranians retained their capabilities and were still refusing to cooperate, the Americans and Israelis returned. This time – earlier this year – not only did they once again target Iran’s nuclear programme, but they also killed the Supreme Leader. At present, the Iranian regime is weak; its leaders are reluctant to appear in public; its economy is in ruins thanks to the sanctions imposed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; and the entire ‘axis of terror’ that Iran has built since 1979 is on its knees. Perhaps the final blow will come from outside Iran, or perhaps from within. But the regime has never been in a weaker position.

Sinwar was a psychopath, and so he would probably have launched his war anyway. But by any measure, what he started on 7 October was one of the greatest military blunders in history. Everyone who stood beside him and above him in the chain of command is now dead. Neither Hamas, nor Hezbollah, nor the Iranian regime has a noose ready to tighten around Israel’s neck any longer. Three years ago, this series of victories would have seemed unthinkable. Today, it is just another day’s news. That a significant proportion of the Israeli hostages claimed by Hamas on 7 October were ultimately returned alive is a further victory worthy of the Scriptures.

Only one aspect of the war has been lost, and that is the battle for public opinion – particularly amongst young people. This is both worrying and unsurprising. The terrorism-linked regime in Qatar, amongst others, has been exceptionally adept at using its spokespersons on Al Jazeera and other, more covert propaganda channels to influence global opinion. These outlets began making false claims that Israel was committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza as early as October 2023. Unfortunately, large parts of the world believed this lie, and weak governments such as that of the United Kingdom chose to pander to a section of their domestic political base by repeating and fuelling it. In the years to come, that will be their problem. But for now, what happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning stands as a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands and charted their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether to follow the Israeli model or let their future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of society as a whole.”