If Israel’s plan for the “day after” the current war against Hamas ends is to secure a future of peace by pouring aid into the Gaza Strip, then JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin says Israel’s leaders are being delusional. That’s the same foolish mindset that led the entire Israeli military, intelligence and political establishment to believe that Hamas wouldn’t jeopardize the flow of cash and aid into the Strip by attacking as they did on Oct. 7, 2023.
He’s joined in the week’s episode of “Think Twice” by Hudson institute scholar and Tablet magazine editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz who says that Israel’s leadership, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political opponents lived in “dream palaces” in which they bought into the conceptzia that led them to think, “that all we have to do is find the correct amount of U.S. dollars to pay the Palestinians in Gaza and Hamas would basically transform itself into the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.”
According to Leibovitz, the lesson of Oct. 7 and the previous century of history is that the idea that Israel is, as its leadership emphasizes, not at war with the Palestinian people, is a delusion. It is, he says, “absolutely straightforwardly false. Israel’s war is 100% with the Palestinian people, and we know this from the records of every single hostage who has returned,” and who have spoken of how they were held and abused by ordinary Palestinian civilians, not terrorists.
“We are fighting a war against a population that is hellbent on destroying us for no apparent reason. They are not kind of under the spell as some of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters like to tell us.” Nor is it, he asserts, “because of some generational trauma or the ‘occupation’ or living in Gaza. They are pursuing a very distinct and easy-to-understand faith that tells them that in their midst, there is a usurper—the Zionist entity—and it must be destroyed.”
Leibovitz also believes that the emphasis in the pro-Israel community on winning the information war against Hamas propaganda with better hasbara is another delusion. He says that Israel should forget about hasbara because the Western media is not interested in facts or truth. The only thing to do is to win the war and defeat Hamas and not worry about the “day after.” He also points out that the arguments against defeating Hamas to save the remaining hostages simply aren’t rational because it will endanger more Israelis, and that these efforts to pressure the government to surrender to the terrorists make a deal less likely.
The writer also believes that the efforts by some Jewish groups, including UJA-Federation of New York, to aid Gazans financially are indicative of a delusional effort to demonstrate empathy for Palestinians that will accomplish nothing. The same is true, he says, of what the Anti-Defamation League is doing. Leibovitz thinks that the mainstream Jewish organizations’ failure to respond to the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism illustrates their moral bankruptcy and the need to replace them with groups that serve the community’s interests and defend the Jewish people.
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