This seemingly endless war only ends if Hamas surrenders all Israeli hostages. What are the odds of that happening? Slim to none on most betting pages. That is a problem.
The political question: How do we responsibly and realistically manage the slim?
Let’s look at the tale of the tape. This war began on May 14, 1948, with the creation of the State of Israel. Jews were not a neighbors welcomed back. It was not a feel-good story of the people of all three holy books returning to their homeland after 1,876 years in exile, building upon a growing Yishuv that King Abdullah of Jordan credited with “making the desert bloom” again.
Why were the Jews scattered from their promised homeland? The Romans did not like these stiff-necked people. (Much like Palestinians are seen as stiff-necked to a fault by Israel and its neighbors). For their pride, the Jews were scattered at the point of a spear throughout the world. Of course, the Jews found Europe a more attractive political climate at the time. The New World had not yet been discovered. Manhattan was in Edenic, indigenous hands.
And what was their fate under a forced Diaspora? Everywhere they settled, they were cutouts for villains, only to be made victims of pogroms at the hands of their hosts. They were tortured and forced to convert during the Inquisition. (Got to love that Spanish rack and those thumb screws). The civilized world knows what Hitler did. Few in the civilized world know what the Soviets did. And it was not France’s finest hour either, then or now.
Truth be told, Europe—hell, the world—has never liked the Jews. This is the bellicose, deep wellspring of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Why are Jews not liked? With regards to Europe, it wasn’t because of their social pathology. Wherever these people went, their public and private behavior was and still is tight. Jews habitually succeed on unequal playing fields. Success despite the spite appears to be their God-given, second nature. In addition, they have historically proven to be unmeltable ethnics.
They do their best to retain the form given to them in the desert, and that prepared them to enter and create promised lands. They don’t need to be assimilated to be good, prosperous, law-abiding and creative citizens.
Paradoxically, this turns out to be a recipe for contempt in the hearts of their historical hosts. The root of antisemitism is envy. The 10th Commandment, “Thou Shall Not Covet,” is a global indulgence and explains why Jews can’t—because they are not allowed to by their hosts and neighbors—have nice things.
In contrast, Europe has shown greater toleration of broken people— people they see as less than them and in need of them for their care— rather than living with equals or betters and working with them to be better together.
And after Europe did its worst, the Allies showed the Jews some humanity and returned them to their ancestral home and declared the diaspora over. What Rome taketh away, the Allies giveth back. They built new lives on old, holy ground. Sadly, it just happened to be a shared territory, composed of warring ghettos of the last war’s victims (European Jews) and the defeated (Ottoman Empire).
The new neighborhood had an immediate, collective bloodlust to push the returning Jews from the river to the sea. They went from German Nazis burning them to their new neighbors wanting to drown them.
Since the creation of the modern-day State of Israel, its relations with its neighbors have never been cool. Always simmering, with the pot frequently boiling over into war, 11 times to date. This small tribe has never lost a fight against its united, bigger, bellicose neighbors. It has not been Israel’s practice to start wars but to win them. A classic David-versus-Goliath story.
Sadly, this is not how Israel is currently seen by the world. The world curses Israel for the human toll that Hamas is willing to let its people suffer. Israel, the historical plaything of colonial powers, has been effectively redrawn as a colonial apartheid state, courtesy of the American Ivy League and made possible by an earlier academic import from the Sorbonne in Paris with a set of ideas of a Soviet, Marxist, virulent pedigree. When the truth is a construct, all lies are permitted and held up as humanitarian gospel.
Israel has been deconstructed from what it is—a regional, stand-out good guy—and reconstructed as a regional and global bad guy. In contrast, Hamas goes from being the terrorist group that it is to indigenous freedom fighters against a racist, apartheid state. The reality that 20% of Israeli citizens are Israeli Arabs is a fact willfully ignored.
Humanitarians of the world, lend me your ears. This war can end quickly. Hamas just has to give back to Israel their people—alive and dead—and accept Israel’s right to exist. With that, a ceasefire and baby steps toward peace can be had.
According to our once colonial betters, England and France, Israel must be the better country, stop waging war, and let Hamas grow back. They seem to favor a wash-rinse-repeat permanent state of war surrounding Israel? Recently, Canada, which still bends its knee to a king, has joined the September chorus of imposed sovereignty.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, coming late to the preening party, wants Hamas to politically and militarily disband before elections in 2026. Will Canadians wearing blue helmets enforce these conditions? Good luck with that happening. What is being served up is just ugly, shameful and revealing political theater.
Mainstream American media have done their best to wash and promote this narrative. It is trending. We are told that France is home to the largest populations of Jews (500,000) and Muslims (6.8 million) in Europe. (With that spread, who do you think France is responsive to?) Taking care to remind the United States that France, too, is a nuclear power, which somehow adds to the importance of French President Emmanuel Macron’s shameful and toothless utterances against Israel.
News alert: This is just a sad data point. Europe has been conquered by an anti-colonial mindset virus of their own creation, which led them to open the gates of their countries to an Islamic invasion. London-stan, Paris-stan, Berlin-stan and Ottawa-stan, et al., have been captured. Europe has fallen. Canada has fallen. New York City is next.
Let’s summarize the status of forces on the ground. This is how wars are usually resolved: Who is with and without a hand?
Clarity is important. Hamas started this war, and it has lost it. That is being too generous. Hamas cannot currently defend itself. It has been knocked out. Hamas is on its ass and in hiding. (In contrast to Russia and Ukraine, which is a grinding draw). The future of Gaza is not in its hands. It is in Israel’s. Hamas is the loser.
But Hamas is not the only loser. How is Iran doing? Like Hamas, it too is presently incapable of defending itself. Remember, while the United States pulled off three mother of all bombs—three-point shots on Iran’s nuclear facilities and then some—Israel shut down Hamas’s home office with little effort. Iran turned out in reality to be a paper tiger.
Also, how is Hezbollah doing in Lebanon? We hear that they are not taking or making calls on Hamas’s and Iran’s behalf. Those who are not dead are uncommunicative presently, so please leave a message.
It appears that Syria, given a new lease on a Levant life by U.S. President Donald Trump, was recently shown that this new lease is conditional on Syria not having a bellicose intent towards Israel. That is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s doctrine on the march, and it appears to be cool with Trump. That message was sent directly by Israel to the Syrian Defense Ministry, which the Israel Defense Forces blew up.
As for the Gazans living hungrily and in constant mortal danger from Israeli bombing and Hamas’s ruthless hold on the population. This grinding two-year war has passed the point of their realistically returning to any semblance of safe homes and communities. The Strip has been razed. Some 70% of its infrastructure has been reduced to rubble. Gazan’s immediate-term future must sadly be found elsewhere.
Israel has demonstrated its on-demand capacity. Israel has shown its regional enemies to be Nazis in spirit, but without the concomitant military competence, and they will not be indulged going forward. A new power dynamic has been aptly demonstrated.
Here is the new reality that we need to wrap our civilized minds around. Israel has run the regional chessboard. On Oct. 7, the Iranian terrorist nexus attacked and awoke a Lion with an aptitude to fight all the jackals. Since then, Netanyahu has recognized and demonstrated the wisdom of the Florentine—Machiavelli—and his effectual advice that it is better to be feared than loved.
For those of us who are watching as concerned spectators and are horrified by the conditions on the ground in Gaza, I ask you to ponder a simple “What if?” What if Iran and its satanic terrorist network had Israel’s hand? What if Israel were the one militarily prostrate, unable to defend itself, and without its ally, the United States, in its corner? Easy to answer, no? “A river to the sea” pogrom would be the program.
In 1985, a then-recognized international rock star who went by the name of Sting wrote a global ballad, with an Over-the-Iron-Curtain communique of “I hope the Russians love their children, too.” My question to the world is this: Do the Gazans “love their children?”
Hamas certainly does not. The only card that Hamas has is the Israeli hostages. And it turns out that, unlike Hamas, Israelis have great love for their own, alive and dead. Hamas watches its people die and starve as tribute to their nihilistic genocidal cause and waits for the shamefully predictable manna from Europe.
Good humanitarians of the world, this suffering stops when Hamas surrenders all the hostages and its leadership leaves. I am sure Iran’s leadership would welcome Hamas into their country and find an ugly purpose for it to serve, with the goal of a bellicose comeback.
The Strip has been effectively leveled, and it will take decades to rebuild. Trump recognized this reality instantly. The required infrastructure to support the present population does not exist. These hungry people have effectively been displaced and need to go elsewhere.
What are 2 million Palestinians to the total population of the Middle East, Europe and Canada? A virulent drop in the bucket, whose solution is dilution into better. An easy humanitarian lift, if they actually cared.
What’s stopping the Gazans from living with their neighbors? Gazans share the same book with many Muslim neighbors. Egypt and Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iran are all within walking distance. They could absorb their fair share of the collective problem of their shared making.
Gazans are not political prisoners of Israel. Their neighbors don’t want them. Why isn’t this a topic on the nightly news? This war will end when Israel’s bellicose neighbors make peace with the reality of the Jewish state and absorb these war-weary people that they have used as cutouts for their own hatred of Israel, and feed, educate and heal them. They owe it to them.
Nothing is stopping the Europeans and Canada from opening up as “sanctuary countries” to these abused political exiles. During the Syrian Civil War, Europe opened itself up to 1.3 million Syrian Muslims, made homeless by war and fleeing for a better future.
What does it say that none of this is being offered by the Europeans, Canadians or Muslim world? A lot.
What is Netanyahu’s endgame? It appears that he is setting the conditions for a new flavor of Cold War relations toward Israel’s enduring, historical enemies. A cold, realpolitik iteration without mutually assured destruction.
When circumstances warrant, Israel will go from cold to hot and punish in the moment of its choosing. Syria is the most recent kinetic example. After which, it methodically withdraws, reassesses and if circumstances warrant it, it goes cold again.
And for those nations within the Abraham Accords, Israel offers both a new glasnost (thawing) and a new perestroika (restructuring) to those willing to give recognition, peace, regional stability and commerce among nations a try. This is the slim-chance play on which to build a lasting settlement to a problem that has yet to provide a solution.
In the coming days and weeks, expect the food to flood in. A win will be given to those who rightfully want more humanitarian aid. But the war only ends with the return of all the hostages. Full bellies and targeted bombings will become the new normal.
Come September, France, England and Canada will make declarations at the U.N. General Assembly. They will beat their breasts and engage in global moral preening. The United States will, in all likelihood, veto the pronouncements, with Trump and his administration shrugging it off just as he did with the U.N. resolution condemning Russia and its invasion of Ukraine.
Let’s stop this gross political theater: Get the Gazans fed and let their diaspora begin in earnest, with an opportunity to return when circumstances improve.
This essay represents the thinking of the author and does not necessarily reflect the positions of any organization, institution or individual with which the author is affiliated.
