Category Archives: Contemporary Life

There is no escaping the troubling fact that President Obama’s policy on the Gaza conflict is intended to save Hamas from the natural consequences of its evil, in effect, to allow Hamas to survive to fight another day and murder more Jews. However Jewish Democrats seek to spin this, it is an overt and stunning betrayal of Israel. It would be fair these days to ask Obama the question made famous by President George W. Bush: “Are you with us, or are you with the terrorists?”

But Israel would be foolhardy to listen to a word that Obama says, even if he again shuts down American air traffic to Israel in an attempt to intimidate and weaken Israel. And if Israel embraces a cease-fire along the terms that Obama suggests (essentially, Israel ceases firing, while the enemy is allowed the launch of an occasional missile or rocket as well as the resumption of its tunnel-building) all the casualties would have been lost in vain.

The obvious reason is that halting Operation Protective Edge now would kick the can down the road for a few years, until the enemy re-arms and is even more powerful, with even deadlier weapons. Today’s Hamas is largely equipped with unguided rockets and missiles such that most fall in uninhabited areas. That necessitates a more limited use of the Iron Dome, which, for all its astonishing success and technological genius, is an expensive system to operate. Shooting down a $500 rocket with a $50,000 missile is imperative but not very cost-effective. The next war – if there is a next war – could involve Hamas missiles that feature guidance systems that could target specific areas and overwhelm even Iron Dome. Leaders must anticipate the future, not just see the past or present.

But there is a more compelling reason for seeing this mission to its natural conclusion – a death blow to Hamas – notwithstanding the Obama/Kerry perfidy. There is a convergence of factors here that might not recur for the foreseeable future. Egypt is allied with Israel (as are the Jordanians and the Saudis) against Hamas. Egypt has been extremely aggressive in recent weeks in closing off the southern border to Gaza, depriving Hamas of one avenue for importation of its weapons, and has killed numerous terrorists without, naturally, incurring the wrath of the international community or having to deal with the canard of “civilians.” (In Gaza, apparently, only civilians are killed, or so we are led to believe. Either there are no terrorists there, or somehow all bullets either bounce off them or are miraculously drawn to “civilians” as if by magnetic pull.) Both Israel and Egypt have an interest in eradicating the Hamas threat, a situation that could easily change in the coming months or years.

Additionally, the Israeli public has achieved a remarkable level of unity in support of the current operation. Upwards of 85% of the public support the mission. But if the past is any indication of the future, that will not endure. Already the insane left (given disproportionate attention by the dominant leftist media in Israel) is protesting the war, not fully grasping that the enemy means to kill them as well or perhaps, in their delusional state, preferring death to the moral quandaries that arise in any act of self-defense. This unity itself is a product of several phenomena.

From one perspective, sad to say, rockets on Sderot and environs for years did not properly trouble every Israeli. But now that missiles have targeted Yerushalayim, Tel Aviv and even as far as Haifa (not to mention Hezbollah’s missiles from Lebanon) it is clear that all of Israel could become Sderot, unless the dynamic is changed. Additionally, perhaps people are tired of having to fight the same battle every 2-4 years, against the same enemy but with increasingly-advanced weaponry. The sense that it can get worse – much worse – tends to focus the mind on real, not ersatz, solutions.

The soldiers of the IDF are anxious for battle, while mindful of the potential costs; morale is very high, and the sense of mission, of esprit de corps, is epic (which is why a premature conclusion will be deflating, and is also politically imprudent for Netanyahu).  And the ever-increasing number of religious soldiers in the IDF – especially among the officer corps, where they are today probably a majority – adds a different dimension to the struggle. While secular Israelis limit the scope of the conflict and see it as eminently solvable, religious Jews tend to see Jewish history from a broader perspective. We realize that the enemies of Israel weren’t created in 2005, 1967, 1948 or 1897 – but from the moment we received the Torah at Sinai (Masechet Shabbat 89a). Today’s wars are just the ancient wars in a slightly different guise, and in some sense, they are indistinguishable. All these add up to a nation that is primed for victory – for the defeat of one of its arch enemies – victory for itself and victory for the free world over the forces of Muslim terror.

The question is: what does victory look like? How can victory be assured?

Undoubtedly, if the war is left to its natural conclusion, Hamas can be vanquished as a military and a political force within weeks. It has lost tremendous support in the Arab world, and few outside the world of radical Shi’a will mourn their demise. Of course, to the extent that Hamas represents an ideology of terror, hatred and violence it will continue to exist, as ideologies can only be destroyed if the entire infrastructure that sustains it is destroyed and its propagators eliminated (e.g., Nazism). But as a fighting force, military threat or political power, Hamas is on the verge of being devastated. Its leaders are in hiding, letting their electorate bear the brunt of the fighting, and their people know it – and know also that the Hamas leadership has embezzled that Western money that they have not squandered on their evil quest to destroy Israel. Most Hamas leaders – apart from Meshaal who lives in Qatar – have not lifted their heads from their bunkers or been heard from for weeks. They are ripe for defeat, a takeover of their territory followed by being ferreted out from their bunkers and tunnels. Victory means a Hamas surrender.

And then what?

Israel’s government has embraced the notion of demilitarization of Gaza, which is great if it could be implemented, but it can’t, so it is a pipedream. Under the Oslo Accords, none of the weaponry currently in possession of the Arabs in Judea, Samaria or Gaza is legal. They were all acquired in violation of standing agreements, so an additional agreement concerning demilitarization is futile. And as is now apparent, the main preoccupation of the Gazans is smuggling, and weaponry is just another entity that is smuggled. Another approach, even worse, sees the ultimate objective as destruction of the tunnels – as if the tunnels are the problem rather than the terrorists who use the tunnels and the killers who dispatch them.

One view gaining currency in Israel is that Gaza should be re-conquered by Israel (it would be for the fourth time since 1948) and its civilian administration assumed by responsible international organizations. That assumes, of course, that there is such a thing as a “responsible international organization,” a dubious proposition especially in light of UNRWA’s treachery and Jew-hatred that has now stretched over six decades. There are too many diplomats dressed in suits whose hatred for Israel and wishes for its demise rivals that of anyone in a kaffiyeh.

Consequently, I don’t believe that would succeed. The seeds would just be sown for the next conflict, under the same or worse leadership. There is only one solution that could work, change the entire dynamic in the Middle East and usher in an era of peace and prosperity (all right, perhaps the latter not right away). That is why it won’t happen.

In short, Gaza has to be depopulated.

The reality is that, despite Israel’s best and sometimes foolish efforts, the Middle East conflict is a zero-sum game. There are not enough Muslims who openly support the existence of a Jewish state in Israel, and there are too many Muslims who actively work, conspire and plan for its demise. “Land for peace,” which never made sense except within the echo chamber of the left, has run its course. Similarly, the “two-state solution” is anything but. It is clear to all but the willfully blind that any concession made to Arabs is simply the starting point of the next war and the next round of negotiations. The Arab world is divided between those who favor negotiating Israel into non-existence and those who favor destroying it into non-existence. That is the reality, sad as it is.

Nothing will change that. The Arabs of Judea and Samaria – and too many Israeli Arabs – harbor fantasies of Israel’s destruction, even when their own lives would suffer as a result (!). That is not changing. But start with Gaza. When Three Mile Island was contaminated by radioactivity in 1979, hundreds of thousands of people had to be evacuated for their own safety and well-being. One year earlier, several thousand people had to be resettled when the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls was discovered to be sitting on chemical wastes.

Gaza today (for decades, actually) is Five Mile Island, a toxic waste dump saturated in violence, depravity and Jew hatred. It cannot and should not be rebuilt. Arabs who dwell there will always retain animosity towards Israel and yearn to destroy it. They will sacrifice their children and grandchildren to that evil and quixotic quest. How they should be resettled is a different question than whether or to where they should be resettled (although western Iraq seems ideal – vacant desert land.)

The reality is that it is easier to change a human being’s location that it is to change his heart. So the world has a choice: it can continue to pour billions of dollars into Gazan “infrastructure,” knowing full well that the money will be used for terror. It can continue to waste the time of diplomats and politicians drafting arcane and detailed agreements that will be signed and never followed. It can continue to cajole the Arabs into verbally recognizing Israel’s right to exist, knowing full well they are not sincere and are just awaiting the most opportune time to attack Israel.

And so the world can be witness to more Arab deaths, grinding poverty, miserable lives, dysfunctional families, child suicide bombers, etc. – generation after generation sacrificed on the altar of jihadist genocidal ambitions aimed first and foremost at Israel (but then the rest of the West, of course). Or the world – led by Israel – can analyze the situation and say that something must change dramatically. It is not enough to disarm them or demilitarize them but to resettle them. As it stands now and for the foreseeable future, no combination of words, inducements, bribes, carrots or even sticks will reverse the genocidal trends that animate an entire group. The same billions that Hamas and allies will divert to terror uses can be employed in resettlement, and the entire region and world would benefit. Of course, those Gazans who want to live as civilized people and accept Israel’s sovereignty can certainly stay, with blessings, and the application of the “one strike, you’re out” rule. And they would benefit from the return of Jewish settlers who had made that desert bloom before they were summarily expelled by short-sighted Israeli leaders, some of whom still lurk in positions of power.

As long as the enemy remains on land from which it can threaten Israel, nothing will ever change.

Which route is more moral – nurturing the Arabs’ false hopes of statehood and Israel’s ultimate disappearance in a land in which they have resided less than 100 years, or resettling them in a place where they can build the society of their dreams free of the necessity of raising their children on hatred, envy and violence? It is a choice between endless death and new life.

It strikes me that the latter is more moral and even more feasible, once the shock has worn off and the blinders have been taken off. Nothing else is going to change. Jews have no other place to go and fulfill a divine commandment living in Israel; Arabs have an abundance of choices although, given the proclivity to violence, admittedly not all are savory.

Undoubtedly, normal Gazans would accept this offer of resettlement – with compensation paid, of course – but many will be intimidated by the forces of evil which they wittingly voted into power. Their hatred of Jews is that irrational and that passionate, and Hamas does love the death of its own citizens almost as much as it loves the death of Jews. That is why it must be defeated. But a concerted effort on the part of the international community, and great resolve by Israel, will demonstrate that this is the only way. As long as there is a glimmer of hope that a “Palestinian” national home is a possibility in the land of Israel, the macabre dance of death will continue.

If it succeeds, there is hope for Judea and Samaria as well.

Of course, none of this will happen in the next week, month or year, and will require a generation of new thinkers able to break away from the tired and painful paradigms of the past.

In the meantime, Hamas has to be vanquished into unconditional surrender, and not rescued by the meddlesome team of Obama/Kerry. Israel then has to resist the temptation to make new concessions to some other group of Arabs which will also just prolong the war. Due to the bravery and sacrifice of Israelis, the first objective is within reach. May their resolve remain strong, and may G-d bless their efforts!

Our Sages taught: “Who is wise? He who sees what is foreseeable” (Masechet Tamid 32a).

To be able to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions, both short-term and long-term, would seem at first glance to be an obvious function of any thinking being and not at all a definition of wisdom or the wise person. In fact, such thinking is rare and therefore precious, and the hallmark of the bright and usually the successful. It is desperately needed now. While wartime is an inopportune occasion for retrospectives, Israel’s decisions – especially those made under the gun and to facilitate past cease-fires – have often engendered the problems that made subsequent conflicts more intractable and subsequent tragedies unavoidable. The examples are numerous.

As a result of the last cease-fire with the murderous Arab terrorist group Hamas, Israel relaxed its embargo on Gaza’s importation of steel and cement. Israel had rightly banned those imports after previous engagements knowing full well that Hamas would use that material to strengthen its military capacity rather than build housing complexes for its “refugees.” But under pressure from Hillary Clinton’s State Department in December 2012, Israel’s government succumbed and allowed Gaza to be flooded with steel and cement. Of course, rather than build even one hut to house even one of its decrepit civilians (and the flood of crocodile tears these days shows how much Hamas cares about those civilians), Hamas used its bounty to build sophisticated underground tunnels and bunkers from which it now seeks to terrorize Israeli citizens and from which it has been able to extract such a heavy toll in IDF casualties.

A little forethought – and a little more steadfastness – against an unsympathetic American government would have been wise and would have saved lives.

Not long before that, another concession wrung out of Israel helped create the circumstances that greased the wheels for another recent tragedy. Several years ago, Israel was agreed as a good-will gesture to remove many of its checkpoints in Judea and Samaria so as to not impede Arab traffic and freedom of movement. Naturally this has sparked a dramatic increase in the number of stonings and shootings along those roads, but more pointedly: isn’t it likely that had there still been checkpoints between Gush Etzion and Hevron that the three Israeli teenagers, Hy”d, kidnapped and murdered in cold blood a little over a month ago, could not have been transported so easily and might not have been killed – that their vehicle would have been stopped en route to Halhoul? Is that at least possible? Did it make sense to facilitate the movements of an enemy population when it should have been obvious that too many of them would exploit that freedom in order to kill Jews? Was that not foreseeable?

Of course, the third return to Gaza in nine years recalls the great national crime of the 2005 expulsion of 9000 Jews from Gush Katif and the destruction of their homes and settlements. Many opponents of that catastrophe explicitly predicted the barrage of missiles and rockets that would yet emerge from that territory, and especially the difficulty Israel would have in re-entry. The greatest benefit of the Expulsion was the short-lived propaganda victory it gave Israel, but it was short-lived.  Rather than perceive the sacrifice, the hardship and the yearning for peace on the part of Israel, the “world” simply saw an occupier relinquishing its illegal conquest, and, to add insult to injury, still considers Israel an “occupier” anyway. As predicted, Gaza became nothing more than a terror entity – a proxy for Iran with its finger sticking into Israel like a dagger – whose only purpose in existence is to harass Israel out of existence. The expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif remains one of the greatest, most suicidal, strategic disasters ever inflicted by a nation on itself.

The murder of Baruch Mizrachi Hy”d on Pesach eve by one of the bloodthirsty terrorists released in exchange for Gilad Shalit again underscores the folly and short-sightedness of these swaps. Roughly 30-40% of freed Arab terrorists return to terror and the murder of Jews. They really can’t help themselves. It is not only what they were trained to do, and not only what they are ideologically driven to do, but the murder of Jews is also both a lucrative and honorable profession in Arab society. These exchanges ensure that it will remain so, and the price paid for killing Jews will laughably cheap. They also guarantee that more Jews will be kidnapped and killed but none of the should surprise anyone. These exchange incentivize terror and make government of Israel complicit in the death of Jews. Was this not also predicted?

This fact should especially be borne in mind with the reports that Hamas is holding (and rejoicing over it) the body of a dead Israeli soldier, which it will undoubtedly try to ransom for hundreds of live terrorists. How about a new approach? No cease-fire until the body is released, and no humanitarian Red Cross visits to Gaza until the Red Cross verifies the status of that Israeli soldier. That should be followed in due course by a complete cutoff of electricity, fuel, food and water to all of Gaza – section by section – until the soldier’s remains are returned. Starve them with a good old-fashioned siege. War is war, and an enemy is an enemy. No displays of compassion are warranted until the enemy begins to display – not compassion, that is too much to expect from barbarians – but simple humanity.

And need we recall the original sin of the Oslo Accords, which brought Arafat to Gaza, and who was then provided with weapons by the sophisticated strategists of the Israeli government 20 years ago? Hmm….bring your sworn enemy in to your heartland and give him offensive weapons, sign treaties with him that he will never honor, etc. How’s that worked out? It was all so bloody predictable that one wonders if anyone thought beyond the day after.

If we go back even further, one stain on Menachem Begin’s record was his acceptance for the 1978 Camp David Accords of the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.” Sure, he was opposed to it, and of course, consummate wordsmith that he was, he talked himself into believing that the words meant nothing , that they had “legitimate rights” to breathe air, drink water, etc. Nevertheless, what he did, in actuality, was commit Israel to accepting the false narrative of the Arab enemy. In effect, he created a Palestinian people when, in reality, history had never known such an entity. (Really. Name a “Palestinian Arab” from the 19th century or the 15th century. Suffice it to say that the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, the world was as yet unaware there was such a thing as a Palestinian Arab people. Every major sport is older than the “Palestinian people.” But Begin signed on to it.)

Words matter. Actions matter. And what is even more significant is that the law of unintended consequences is one of the most fundamental aspects of politics, war, interpersonal relationships and life itself. But how painful is it when those consequences, while perhaps unintended, are readily foreseeable and should have been reasonably anticipated?

Finally, in the department of “words matter,” few writers can compete with the level of despicability of NY Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman, who I stopped reading years ago (this piece was sent to me) and who has won more Pulitzer Prizes than the number of times he has been right about something in the Middle East. His last Sunday column began thusly: “From Ukraine to the Middle East, some bad actors — Hamas, Vladimir Putin and Israeli settlers to name but a few — are trying to bury the future with the past and divide…” What followed was some forgettable piffle about globalization, an electric car company, or something. But note the odious comparison.

The dictator Putin aside, are Hamas and Israeli settlers really comparable? Only the twisted, distorted mind of a self-hating Jew could possibly compare Hamas – a radical Islamic terrorist group that has murdered thousands of its own people, whose charter calls for both the destruction of the State of Israel and the extermination of every Jew in the world, and part of a movement that is sowing mayhem across the globe – with Jews who want nothing more than to fulfill the Torah commandment of settling the land of Israel, whose lives are dedicated to holy works, and who – the real crime in Friedman’s eyes – refuse to disappear, i.e., refuse to commit suicide by adopting Friedman’s failed policy prescriptions. But, to borrow his approach, journalists like Julius Streicher and Thomas Friedman never miss an opportunity to castigate Jews for living, breathing, observing the Torah, building, contributing, and enjoying their lives while they are at it.

Friedman’s invective essentially calls for open season on Israeli settlers. As decent people across the world come to the realization that Gaza will remain a terror-infested swamp until Hamas is eradicated, Friedman is justifying the same type of treatment for Jews who live in Hevron and Efrat, in Bet El and Ofra. Indeed, “your despoilers and destroyers will emerge from you” (Yeshayahu 49:17). Note how the current conflict in Gaza has nothing to do with Israeli settlers, and note the irony that the safest place in Israel today is in Judea and Samaria, neither of which are targets of Hamas missiles.

Words matter and actions matter. We live in a world of cause and effect, and sometimes, effects are felt long after the causes have receded from memory. Friedman is a hater of Israel, but he is inconsequential. What matters more is to see the foreseeable, to look beyond what the great Thomas Sowell called “Stage One Thinking,” and to anticipate the natural consequences of our actions. Israel should refrain from holding its fire and abandoning its mission until it achieves its objectives. To leave Gaza with Hamas intact will ensure that when Israel has to return to Gaza again Hamas will be even more powerful, with rocketry that has guidance systems that will overwhelm even the genius of Iron Dome and tunnels that will penetrate even further into Israel.

So too, Israel should lose the temptation to balance its success against Hamas in Gaza with new concessions to Fatah. That has been an execrable pattern in the past, and sowed the seeds of future troubles. Israel should act like a normal country and pursue its interests rather than satisfy its “friends.” Among those friends are the United States, which shamefully halted flights to Israel yesterday on allegations of security concerns but which sound more like a shot across Israel’s bow in order to intimidate Israel into accepting a cease fire that will leave Hamas intact and ready to launch more missiles…the day after the cease fire goes into effect. All this while President Obama hustles dumb Jews out of their money on his interminable fund-raising excursions. But consider: if Ben-Gurion Airport is now being avoided by world airlines because of the mild threat currently posed by Hamas, it might as well close permanently if Arabs ever become sovereign in Judea and Samaria, where the threat will be real, permanent and just three miles away. (And how about closing the airport to Kerry’s plane until the FAA allows all US airlines to fly to Israel?)

Above all, Israel should act with wisdom – wisdom to deal with the present, but even greater wisdom to prepare for the future, without any illusions but with an abundance of foresight. It might then even succeed in reversing the effects of some of the misguided policies of the past. Otherwise, it will just continue the unfortunate dynamic of the last two decades of short-term advantages that yield longer-term disaster. The good news is that its leaders are very capable of this, but would benefit from the support (and a little nudging) of the courageous people of Israel who are tired of treading water and yearn for the victory over pure evil that is achievable.