That’s the deal Hamas’ MFWIC Yayha Sinwar is demanding before he’ll agree to a cease fire with Israel. Never mind that all the players but Hamas—Sinwar—have agreed to the latest set of ceasefire terms.

Sinwar emphasizes that the security of his life and well-being must be ensured, according to Egyptian officials.

Sinwar’s life matters; the lives of Palestinians, for whom he pretends to be fighting, don’t in the slightest. Sinwar and the terrorists he leads will go on killing Palestinians or arranging their deaths by using them as shields, using their schools, residences, hospitals, mosques and churches as weapons caches, weapon launch sites, control centers.

This is what Israel is fighting; this is what the Biden-Harris administration is so desperate to protect with its incessant demands for cease fires, withholding weapons from Israel, anti-Israel rhetoric.

Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, has a piece in The Free Press in which he asks that question regarding Israel’s current situation against the backdrop of Israel’s decision to preempt at the outset of Israel’s 1967 defensive war vs Israel’s 1973 war for survival when it decided to let its enemies strike first.

I suggest the question has a broader historical scope than that. The question of preemption goes at least as far back as St Augustine’s early 5^th century assertion that preemption was ipso facto immoral and so unjustified and unjustifiable. The pace of combat and the level of technology of those days gave practical support to the claim: an attacked nation could absorb the first blow and still have the wherewithal to respond and successfully defend itself.

Today is nothing like those days. Combat pacing and the technology in arms, mobility, and cyber make it very nearly suicidal for a nation under irrefutable threat of imminent attack to sit quietly and accept the enemy’s opening set of blows before responding. That opening set may well be fatal, with the attacked nation unable to respond at all. This is especially the case with nuclear weapons, which for instance, Iran is on the verge of achieving.

That makes sitting by today and accepting the enemy’s first strike, whether conventional, possibly coupled with cyber attacks, or nuclear the immoral move, as suicidal as sitting by may well prove to be.

Preemptive war does require strong evidence that the enemy intends to attack and that the enemy is about to do so. In Israel’s case, Hamas leadership has openly announced he intends to continue Hamas’ war of extermination—already underway. Iran’s leadership has announced that it intends to strike massive blows against Israel in response to the killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran. Hezbollah’s leadership is prosecuting its own lower-key war of extermination from the north.

In 1967, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol agonized for three weeks before deciding to preempt, and when he did, Israel settled that war in six days with far fewer casualties—friendly and enemy—than would have been the case had he decided Israel should absorb that first blow. This is demonstrated by Prime Minister Golda Meier’s decision to do exactly that in 1973’s war and that war’s costs.

Certainly preemption is more difficult when striking an amorphous network entity like the terrorist entities of Hamas and Hezbollah than it is against formal nation states like Iran. It’s no less important to be done for that, and “more difficult” means “possible.”

Preemption has become the moral imperative for the nation about to be attacked. That applies today for Israel, especially in the case of Iran, where preemption is not only necessary, it may well limit Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s abilities to continue.