Now What?

Today, Jews cannot walk down the street in North America, Europe, or even Australia without the possibility of being spat on, beaten, or even murdered. Country after country mulls punishing Israel and rewarding Hamas [!] by the absurd recognition of Palestine, a non-country without defined borders. Almost 700 days after Israel was invaded and more than 1200 Israelis viciously slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped – Hamas survives, receiving water, food, fuel and electricity from Israel. The war in Gaza is static, almost 900 Israeli soldiers have been killed and countless wounded, and 20 living hostages still remain in the tunnels under the Gaza strip.

How we got here is not the issue. International and domestic politics, manipulation of consciousness, covert financing of ‘popular’ movements, religious imperatives, power struggles, wars, terrorism, honor and shame, and of course, the oldest hatred all played a part. But the hour is too late for historical analysis and philosophical arguments. It’s time to act.

I can’t speak for diaspora Jews. I only have one piece of advice: take what’s happening seriously. The golden age for Jews in North America is over. Create a strategy to protect yourselves and implement it.

Israel, too, needs a whole new set of strategies. She needs a strategy for the kinetic war in Gaza and the closely related information war, both of which she is losing despite her clear military superiority.

Someone recently said that on 7 October 2023 we were the “good guys,” but Hamas propaganda quickly turned us into the “bad guys” in the story. That isn’t correct. It’s true that Hamas’ propaganda – crude as it is – has been remarkably effective, but that is because it falls on very fertile ground. We became the “bad guys” the moment the news of the obscenely vicious pogrom perpetrated by Hamas hit the professional and social media.

There are two reasons for this: one is the prior preparation of opinion leaders in the West by a decades-long takeover of the educational system and media by a red-green alliance financed by Arab petrodollars with ideological direction from the anti-Western Left. The other is a fundamental fact of human psychology: people, like turkeys, admire the strong, and peck the weak or injured ones to death. The horrors of 7/10, just like the gas chambers of Auschwitz, caused people to identify with the perpetrators, rather than the victims (incidentally, this is why so much “Holocaust education” has the opposite of its intended effect).

This is the paradox of the response to Hamas’ propaganda. Although they present the Gazans as victims, they proudly broadcast live video on 7/10. The open brutality of Hamas is contrasted with the weakness of Israel, which is forced to make concession after concession, including freeing hundreds of murderers of Jews (an act that incurs great dishonor), in order to get her tortured hostages back. Israel has even been forced to feed and supply its enemy with fuel and electricity, for which Hamas has given nothing in return.

This is why it doesn’t matter when the numbers of dead Gazans provided by Hamas are shown to be false, or when the emaciated children on the front pages of Western newspapers turn out to be suffering from various wasting diseases rather than starvation. Concern for the suffering of Gazans is an excuse, a rationalization for a deeper, less attractive emotion. Indeed, the less convincing the propaganda, the better. The important subtext is that despite its tanks and air force, Israel is a weak, wounded, loser. Hamas represents a courageous indigenous people who are winning, despite their suffering. Nobody likes a loser.

Practically speaking, the success of its information warfare has encouraged Hamas to hold on, believing that the world will come to its rescue and stop Israel before they are forced to give up control of Gaza.

There is little that can be done now to overcome the indoctrination of young people, including those who have begun to move into positions of power in Western media and politics. Reversing that damage will be a long and expensive process. But Israel can adopt a strategy to gain a psychological, as well as physical, victory over Hamas. And that will require her to change her behavior by 180 degrees.

Israel has responded to the false Palestinian claims of genocide, deliberate starvation, and so on by taking extra care to avoid civilian casualties. She has endangered her own soldiers to this end. She has allowed truckloads of food and fuel to be handed over directly to Hamas. She has even airdropped food to Palestinians in Gaza, something unprecedented in war. All of these actions send a message of weakness and submission. They in essence say, “yes, we’ve been bad, we’ll make ourselves better.” Israel has allowed herself to appear both evil and weak at the same time. No wonder the world holds her in contempt!

Rather, Israel must act like the stronger party, which in fact she is. She must use her firepower to defeat Hamas, in all parts of Gaza. No aid can be permitted to reach Hamas. Our government understands that Hamas will never release all the hostages in return for anything less than complete surrender, and it must make it clear, inside Israel and to the world, this is a price that we will not pay. If the UN, Europe, and the US want to ameliorate the condition of the Gazans, then they should force Egypt to allow refugees from the war to enter the Sinai where the UN can take care of them, and from where they can emigrate to other countries. Their welfare is not Israel’s responsibility.

Israel should make it clear that she does not accept the narrative of Palestinian peoplehood and ownership of our land, and emphasize this by annexing parts of Gaza and applying Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and Area C in Judea and Samaria. She should make it clear that after the Second Intifada and 7/10, the idea of a Palestinian state in the territories is permanently off the table. No terrorist murderer should ever again be freed from an Israeli prison in return for a hostage, and a death penalty for terrorist murder should be instituted.

We do not have unlimited time to do these things. Although they would provoke condemnation in Europe and other places, I think they would be acceptable to American president Trump, which would enable us to weather the storm. But he will not be president forever, and the demographic changes in the US and other Western countries are not favorable. If we don’t act soon, we may be prevented from acting at all.