Tag Archives: Israel

The Real World

Posted on October 15, 2024 | 3 comments

(First published in the Jerusalem Report, October 21)

Rabbi Dr. Ron Kronish makes a compelling case (Jerusalem Report, October 7) that the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael must learn to live together. He touts our shared ancestry and shared values and attributes continued strife to “deeply ingrained negative stereotypes” that need to be “overcome today through education and dialogue.” If only it were true. My heart is with the writer, though not my head.

All Jews want peace, prosperity, and freedom for all peoples. In the real world in which we reside, Islam is dominated by a relative minority of radicals for whom the existence of Israel is repugnant and unacceptable. Indeed, that fraction of Muslims might number 10% of all Muslims, which computes to one hundred million people of the roughly billion Muslims across the globe. That is not a small number and they wage war not only against Israel but also against the West. They have perpetrated terrorists acts in dozens of cities across the world, and of course delight in murdering Jews wherever we might be found.

We can wish this were not so – Dr. Kronish completely elides this very recent history – but we would be saps to base our diplomacy and statecraft upon wishful thinking. Such wishful thinking underwrote the Oslo Accords and their “sacrifices for peace,” the creation of the Palestinian Authority, the expulsion of Jews from Gaza, the tolerance of the Hamas terror infrastructure, and directly led to the atrocities of October 7 and the multifront wars Israel is now waging. We indulge the saccharine rhetoric about the “moderates” and “coexistence” at our peril; it was the exact same language that lulled Israel into the catastrophic diplomacy of the last three decades.

Certainly, there are moderates in the Arab world. The Abraham Accords spearheaded by President Trump demonstrates that. Israeli visitors to the United Arab Emirates are treated quite hospitably. And yet, all the peace treaties have not changed hearts and minds in the Muslim world. Few Israelis now venture into Egypt or Jordan, and Jordanians and Egyptians have wantonly murdered Jews. Even in Dubai, Jewish public prayer has ended. Worse, after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, hundreds of the “innocent civilians” of Gaza rampaged, raped, marauded, and murdered even Jews who had befriended them, hired them, transported them to Israeli hospitals. Peace and co-existence are unnecessary with the moderates and impossible with the radicals.

Of all the Arab states that have made peace with Israel – a welcome development per se– it is hard to think of even one that would mourn Israel’s disappearance. Consequently, even these nations that are ostensible peace partners with Israel routinely vote against Israel in the United Nations. Yes, a cold peace is better than a hot war – but there is something much deeper that unfortunately precludes full co-existence.

That impediment is an Islamic doctrine that dictates that any land that was once Muslim remains Muslim in perpetuity, and if lost, must be recaptured, the Dar al-Islām. That Jews have returned as sovereigns in the land of Israel is especially galling. We can wish that away as well but wishing it away does not make it less true. And if 10% of Muslims subscribe to that doctrine, then “education and dialogue” is asking them to repudiate their religion, a fools’ errand indeed.

Many Israelis still delude themselves into thinking that this conflict is all about real estate and finding the right division of territory to satisfy both sides. This is an egregious error born of a secular mindset that cannot admit there are people who take religion seriously. It was baked into Israeli diplomacy, which is one reason Israel’s strategic position has so deteriorated since Oslo. We would be prudent – as befitting a “wise and discerning people” (Devarim 4:6) – not to repeat the same mistakes but to look to our traditions and Torah for our claims to the land of Israel.

It is disconcerting that, in the entire article, Dr. Kronish uses the word “violent” only in relation to what he terms “extremist settler Judaism,” apparently willing to deny the settlers of the Jewish heartland the right to defend themselves and our land. Note the irony that the way Israelis on the left regard the settlers is the same way the world regards Israelis – violent, extreme, genocidal, and other lies. But the settlers are the ones who counter the Muslim narrative with a proudly Jewish one – that this is the land that G-d granted us, from which we were exiled, and to which the Jewish prophets declared we would (and did) return. That is the grand drama of Jewish history.

Must this war end one day, as Dr. Kronish declares? We can hope for that as well, as long as hope does not transmute into naiveté. But Hamas has already infiltrated Jerusalem and dominates the Arab educational, commercial, cultural, and political institutions there. Hamas is more powerful today in Judea and Samaria than is the Palestinian Authority, itself rampant with Jew hatred. Iran shows no signs of abating its Jew hatred and prepares to develop nuclear weaponry, winked at (if not subsidized) by the current American government. And I am unaware of the pedagogical tools that will persuade those who delight in burning children alive and stealing corpses for ransom, and those who support them, of the error of their ways. Sadly, the current battles will end but the war will go on, as it has since the first Jewish casualty of Arab violence in the land of Israel 140 years ago.

When will it end? Jewish tradition in many places (see, e.g., Zohar, Parshat Vaera, end of chapter 7) states that the final war at the end of days will be between the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael. Our long and bloody history with our brother Esav is essentially behind us and the climactic battle with Ishmael will be waged over the land of Israel.

This war – all wars – will end when redemption comes and all mankind recognizes the sovereignty of the Creator of the universe. Until then, we should befriend all moral people who believe in the Bible and respect the Jewish narrative. And we can hasten that day of peace not by renouncing our heritage in the futile quest of winning over moderates without power or influence anywhere, but by deepening our connection to Torah, mitzvot, and the land of Israel.

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Don’t Be Manipulated

Posted on July 29, 2024 | 1 comment

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

Are good and decent people so easily manipulated?

Even as President Joe Biden’s advancing senescence was so obvious to impartial observers that his aides and handlers kept him under wraps for years, allowing him only rare and heavily scripted encounters with the media and public, Americans were being reassured by those closest to him as well as the media types who masquerade as objective journalists that Biden was sharp as a tack and nimble as a gymnast. Almost all Democrat politicians and foreign diplomats played along even as they privately voiced concerns about his mental acuity.

This is no laughing matter. Global crises abound, America’s leadership is vital, and whoever has been running the country for the last 3 ½ years has made a mess of it – domestically and internationally. And the American people are still being played for fools. The same people who for years said that Biden is perfectly well abruptly decided that he is perfectly unwell and have now decided that Kamala Harris is a perfect successor. It is even within reason that whoever talked Biden into engaging in an unprecedented pre-convention debate with Donald Trump knew that Biden would crash and burn and, as such, easier to disgorge from the campaign.

To add to the contempt the administration must have for American citizens, Biden’s decision to drop out has been attributed to no specific cause except a desire to “pass the torch to a new generation.” But what changed from July 12, 2024, when Biden was committed to his candidacy, and July 14, 2024, when he announced his withdrawal from the race? The glaring problem, necessitating the lies and obfuscation, is that if Biden admits to a physical and mental condition that makes his candidacy untenable, it should be his remaining president for the next six months untenable as well.

It is worth noting that as Joe Biden began his presidential aspirations with a flagrant act of plagiarism, he ends it with another act of plagiarism. His 1987 campaign foundered when it was revealed that he, oddly, had filched then British Labor Party leader’s Neil Kinnock’s personal biography almost verbatim. Similarly, his campaign ends with Biden’s desire, repeated endlessly by every Democrat who received the memo, to “pass the torch to a new generation.” Anyone with even slight historical memory recalls that line from President John F. Kennedy’s eloquent inaugural speech, where he intoned “Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans…” Really?

Perhaps if Biden had cited Kennedy, he might have brought redemption to the world, in line with Masechet Megilah 15a. Another missed opportunity.

It is indeed strange that there is little outcry from Americans about being duped for so long, maybe because so many who were duped for so long were duped wittingly, with a vested interest in being duped for as long as possible.

Nevertheless, the Biden deceptions have not spared Israelis either.

In Biden’s withdrawal address, he stated that in the last six months of his presidency, he would like, among other things, to “end cancer as we know it” and “bring peace and security to the Middle East.” At least he is thinking big, if not a bit fancifully.

But he also stated that he is “going to call for Supreme Court reform because this is critical to our democracy.” Biden wants to reform the US Supreme Court, in some unspecified ways, because he disagrees with their rulings. Perhaps he would like to pack the Court with additional justices more to his liking. Perhaps he would like to change their method of selection, the extent of their jurisdiction, or place the current justices under greater Congressional scrutiny, notwithstanding that these three proposals would require a constitutional amendment that will never happen.

Are we, too, so easily manipulated? Isn’t this the same Joe Biden (or his mouthpieces) who lectured and hectored Israel last year that our proposed judicial reforms were a threat to democracy in Israel? Didn’t Biden declare his opposition to judicial reform in Israel – including the selection of judges and limiting their jurisdiction – and state “the need for the broadest possible consensus” or the reforms should not take place?

Didn’t Biden proclaim “that shared democratic values have always been and must remain a hallmark of the U.S.-Israel relationship,” implying – as tendentious leftist Israeli “journalists” opined – that judicial reform in Israel will imperil the US-Israel alliance, as the US will invariably conclude that Israel is no longer a democracy (if Supreme Court justices do not have unlimited jurisdiction on every issue in Israeli society and insist on choosing their successors as well)?

Didn’t Biden term “unfortunate” the Knesset passage of the repeal of the “reasonableness clause” that allowed Israel’s High Court to base its decisions on personal whims and predilections and not at all on laws or legislation passed by majority vote in Israel’s Parliament?

That minor modification, since annulled by Israel’s undemocratic Supreme Court, was nonetheless called by one Congressman, Jerry Nadler, a “dark day for Israeli democracy.” Has Nadler deplored Biden’s attempt at judicial reform in the US? Of course not, and don’t hold your breath that he ever will.

Didn’t Israelis, even some good and decent people who supported judicial reform, allow themselves to be bamboozled into thinking that our ties with America would fray forever if true reforms were passed, that the country would veer into chaos and dictatorship, so now was not the time for reform? We must not lose sight of the fact that the Supreme Court’s heavy-handedness (dictating IDF tactics and responses along the Gaza border) was also partly responsible for the calamity of October 7 – and that such will never be properly investigated because the Court also controls any commission of inquiry?

In essence, Biden has reserved a right for himself that he denies Israel’s public. He will champion judicial reform in the United States, even though as currently constituted the US Supreme Court is subject to democratic controls that Israel’s Supreme Court is not. And he will denounce Israel’s valid efforts at making Israel’s Court more democratic, more responsive to the people, and more subject to checks and balances like the other branches of government.

We should not expect Biden to remember what he said last year nor demand consistency of expression from any politician. But there should be limits even to hypocrisy (but, of course, there are none). We should, though, expose the palpable manipulations from last year, and this year, and not let up.

When Israel passed our minor reform (that was soon after nullified by the Supreme Court it attempted to constrain), Biden said: “The genius of American democracy and Israeli democracy is that they are both built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary.” Hmmm. What changed? Why does the genius of American democracy need reform now but not the genius of Israeli democracy, which actually needs it more?

One takeaway is that we should stop taking seriously every pronouncement from the United States government, which should have been denounced at the time for its gross interference in Israel’s domestic affairs. We might consider issuing a statement urging Biden to retain America’s “independent judiciary,” whose weakening will reflect poorly on our “shared democratic values.” Another takeaway is that we should pay even less attention to Israel’s leftist journalists, activists, protesters, and rioters, whose goal is not to protect the judiciary or democracy but – as it has been for almost a decade – to topple the Netanyahu government and then restructure Israel as a less Jewish state.

And we should scrutinize every pronouncement through one lens: who is trying to manipulate us, and why?

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The Missing Piece

Posted on March 18, 2024 | 1 comment

(First published today at Israelnationalnews.com)

The National Guard is patrolling New York City subways to keep the people safe and even that is not working. There are homeless encampments in every major city, cities which are already being overrun by the millions of illegal migrants that are crossing America’s porous borders. The United States is $34.5 trillion in debt. And Chuck Schumer thinks that Israel’s government needs to be changed.

Schumer’s obscene outburst – which he has since tried to partially retract – was revolting both in style and substance. Yes, who is he? This gross interference in Israel’s domestic affairs exposes the hypocrisy of the Democrats who whined (falsely) about Putin’s alleged interference in America’s elections; yet, they have no hesitation at all interfering in Israel internal affairs – again. Both Clinton (1999) and Obama (2015) sent staff and money to try to defeat Binyamin Netanyahu. Now Schumer is doing Biden’s bidding in this vile display of contempt and condescension towards Israel, our electorate, and our government.

Schumer has always fancied himself Israel’s shomer, a play on his name, but he has more consistently been, throughout his career, a schemer, a partisan Democrat hack. Schumer, who has the distinction of achieving the highest elected office of any American Jew now has the dishonor of being the highest elected American Jewish official ever to betray Israel. Let us not forget that it was Chuck Schumer who in 2015 pushed through Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran that will (barring some intervention) enable them to produce nuclear weapons and provided them up front with billions of dollars in cash that was and is being used to murder Jews. Having ensured there were enough votes not to override the dirty deal in the Senate, the oleaginous Schumer voted against it (to save face in the Jewish community, which bought it).

Besides calling for elections in Israel and the defeat and removal of Netanyahu, whom he deemed “an obstacle to peace,” Schumer emitted this gem: “The world has changed, radically, since [October 7], and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” By this he meant that the path to “peace” lies through indulging the two-state delusion. Well…talk about being stuck in the past.

The “two-state delusion” is not October 6 thinking. It is November 1947 thinking. It is an archaic, discredited, wholly deranged idea that rewards terror and will only encourage the enemy to plot more, to attack more, and to bomb more because there is literally no downside to it. The Knesset made this quite clear just a few weeks ago. An unprecedented 99 MK’s voted against an imposed “Palestinian state,” and close to 80% of Israelis oppose it as well. It’s not Netanyahu or Smotrich or Ben Gvir – it’s us, it’s the people, it’s common sense, it’s elementary morality.

Sure, “the world has changed radically” since October 7. Evil is ascendant across the globe. Rather than fight and destroy it, Schumer, Biden, Blinken and many in the Democratic Party want to appease it in the finest tradition of Neville Chamberlain. But Israel is not South Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Taiwan, all abandoned by the US in one way or another. They can either aid Israel in this struggle or not. But if US military aid is only granted not with strings but with chains, Israel does have the capability and the obligation to protect our interests.

Israel cannot prevail with this type of US support, the kind that demands – as Antony Blinken unctuously intoned, words then read verbatim by his water-carrier Schumer – that Israel’s “priority number one” must be the protection of Gaza’s civilians. No, no, no. That is depraved, preposterous, and defeatist. The fate of Gazan civilians should not be in the top ten of Israel’s concerns – or as much as the fate of enemy civilians was America’s concern in Germany, Japan, or Vietnam. In truth, but for Israel’s excessive concern about enemy civilians, we would have fewer dead soldiers and the war would be over by now. The stated war objectives are destroying Hamas’ terror capability, liberating our hostages, and ensuring that Gaza is never again a center of terror. Gazan civilians – the ones whose homes all had tunnels and were used as weapons depots – are not our problem. Months ago, they should have been resettled elsewhere – perhaps in the US, which annually admits millions of people who have identical problematic pasts.

Despite Blinken’s blathering, our concern should prioritize our civilians – those who were murdered, those who were kidnapped, and those who remain homeless because of the predations of our enemies. Blinken never mentions displaced Jews – only displaced Gazans. His priorities are skewed and should never be ours. We must never intentionally target civilians – and we never do – but that is wholly different than prioritizing their safety at the cost of victory.

What are we missing? Why is Schumer, like a lapdog with a bone, suddenly obsessed with a Palestinian state? What do the Democrats – and the Israeli left – not understand? Why do even genuine supporters continue to speak of coexistence as if, with just a little more goodwill, it is right over the horizon?

There is a missing piece to this puzzle.

In a private conversation some thirty years ago as the Oslo debacle unfolded, I spoke with a former State Department official, a former ambassador, and someone gung-ho about the prospects for peace in the Middle East (always just a few more Israeli concessions away). I asked him one simple question: “what if this is all a ruse? What if the real objective of the Arab countries is to destroy Israel, and all the peace process does is incrementally weaken Israel until it is ripe for conquest?”

His answer was telling and frightening. He said: “We do not factor in that possibility at all. If we did, we could never have a peace process.” It emerges that the likeliest explanation for all the terror, the missiles, the invasions, the wars, the bombings, the stabbings, the ramming, and the incitement – that many Arabs reject Israel’s very existence and always will – is never a consideration in the halls of diplomacy. It is this missing piece, this willful blindness, that shapes international diplomacy and now has produced the wailing for the “two-state delusion.” Would it not endanger Israel’s existence? No, say the grand poohbahs of diplomacy, because they have categorically ruled out that Israel’s existence is in danger and that our enemies want us dead.

Think of how we could change the world as we know it if we just ignored inconvenient facts. Why, human beings could fly… if we ignore the effects of gravity. And perhaps with enough international goading, and the magical words uttered by the right people that produce the ostentatious signing ceremony, Israel can be convinced that it can really fly, far and high.

Two months ago, my wife sat on a plane next to an American Israeli woman from a leftist kibbutz in the south who was also returning to Israel. Asked if she supports the “two state delusion,” the woman demurred. Everyone else on her kibbutz did before the Hamas massacre, but she did not. Why not? She explained that she studied just a few years earlier for a graduate degree in London, and there befriended some classmates who were from Gaza. Talking about politics, she questioned them about the two-state delusion, and, as she described it, they laughed at her. “We don’t want two states. We will not rest until we destroy Israel. You have no right to live on any part of that land – our land. And we don’t care how long it takes.”

So many of Israel’s devoted defenders have publicly repudiated the accusation that Gaza was “occupied,” and that the “occupation” was the cause of the invasion, because, indeed, Israel (foolishly) abandoned Gaza in 2005. All true – but it misses the point.

To our enemies, Gaza is occupied, as are Ashkelon, Beer Sheva, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Yerushalayim, Tzfat, and Kiryat Shemonah. That is the sum and substance of the “river to the sea” chant. Why do we ignore what they are saying? Why do we act horrified when we point out “that means no Israel!” Duh – that is exactly what they mean. Why do we pretend otherwise? We do so because we are loathe to consider the implications, but that does make it any less true.

Freed from the illusion that peace will ever be possible with enemies who will never stop and never give up, our entire statecraft should change. Our strategies, our public presentation, and our narrative cannot be the same. We would not just be managing the conflict. Our settlement policies would be efficient and coherent, not protracted and reactions to terror. We would not worry about antagonizing our enemy because they cannot already be more antagonized.

We no longer have the luxury to fantasize that our enemies do not mean what they say. We must somehow get it through our skulls that too many Arabs – in Gaza, Judea, Samaria, Lebanon, Syria, and even among Israeli Arabs, not to mention the Iranians – want to smother us and strangle our reborn state. And there is not much we can do to change that. We can through strength, vigilance, and fierce determination convince them that in the short term, their dream is dead. They will not defeat us and we should prove that by re-claiming Gaza and dispossessing them. But we should not allow continued residence in the land of Israel to those who harbor these genocidal fantasies. No one should live here – from the river to the sea – who does not want to dwell in the Jewish state of Israel.

To be sure, the Abraham Accords demonstrated that there are Arabs and Muslims throughout the region who respect our existence and sovereignty. There have always been such voices in the Arab world, although many have been muted, silenced, and killed over the last century. Time will tell if this friendship is based on love of Mordechai (the Jew) or hatred of Haman (the Persian). But if we refuse to acknowledge this basic truth – that those who are our enemies will never be reconciled to our existence – that nothing will change, even if Hamas is destroyed in Gaza.

If we ignore this reality, painful as it is, we will wake up the day after to still more rockets, bombs, stabbings, and shootings. We will be lamenting how hard it is to be a Jew in Israel rather than lamenting how hard we make it on ourselves to be a Jew in Israel because we choose to ignore reality. Perhaps it will take new leaders untainted by conceptions, fantasies, and illusions, and willing to tell the truth to our citizenry, to recognize what has been obvious for most of the last century. There is a reason Arabs have rejected the two-state delusion consistently from 1937-2024. They do not want us here and they will never abandon that dream. The fact that we do not mind having some of them here – we welcome co-existence if they recognize our rights and our sovereignty – does not alter the reality that many of them do not want us here. And they prove that almost daily through acts of terror and violence, through the propaganda and incitement they feed their children in school and their worshippers in the mosques, and through their explicit statements.

But this is why Schumer can say what he says, and Biden and Blinken can carry on as they do, and Israel’s left can continue to foster the illusion that if only they were in power, we would be the darlings of the Middle East, eating hummus in Damascus because they would know how to make peace with our enemies who feel religiously compelled to destroy us. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the Oslo crowd is resuscitating itself before our eyes hoping we have short memories.

Perhaps it is time that our leaders spoke frankly to us, to the Americans, and to the world, about our intentions in the land of Israel. We are fools if we again relinquish Gaza having conquered it for the third time, fools if we indulge the diplomatic delusions of Americans and Europeans, fools if we worry about enemy civilians more than we do our own, and fools if we pay no attention to what our enemies say and mean.

Perhaps we would benefit if we, a “wise and understanding people” as the Torah describes us, started acting like it, with pride and confidence in our national mission.

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At Any Price

Posted on January 31, 2024 | Comments Off on At Any Price

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com on January 30, 2024)

No one should find fault with the activism of the hostage families. It is a classic application of “al tadin et chavercha ad she’tagi’a limkomo,” do not judge your friend until you can stand in his place (Avot 2:4). The initial horror of the brutal, inhuman Hamas invasion, compounded by ongoing horror of the captivity itself, the uncertainty, the fear, and the ill-treatment, breaks our hearts and strengthens our will to crush this vile enemy. Certainly, not all hostage families have reacted the same way and the response, as should be expected, is not uniform. Those who have prioritized the national interest over their personal pain also have our respect and admiration. But we cannot judge any of them, pray that we should never find ourselves in that situation, and empathize with their need to protest, demonstrate, and keep the fate of their loved ones and our citizens in the public eye. They should feel they are doing everything within their power to do. Their trauma is our trauma, and it is right and proper that visitors to Israel are greeted in the airport with pictures of the hostages, as are pedestrians who walk our streets.

The question then is not one of right or propriety – but of effectiveness. Do the campaigns or disruptions help or hurt? Hasten the release of the hostages or delay it? Do they have any influence on their captors at all? Clearly, our evil enemy Hamas – and all those who seek our destruction – utilizes kidnapping and other ruthless tactics as psychological torture, knowing how we value life and want nothing more than to be able to live meaningful, purposeful, and happy lives. Do we unwittingly embolden Hamas in their sadistic cruelty when we exhibit the desperation implicit in the calls for a hostage release “at any price”? Do the rallies and demands make their release less likely and future hostage-taking more likely?

If a tactic works, it is bound to be repeated until it ceases to work. Employing methods that are counterproductive hurts the cause and endangers our future, especially in this part of the world where the norms of civilization are perceived by our enemies as weakness. Hamas knows how to weaponize against us our decency and love of life. It is misguided to think that somehow and for some reason our government is unconcerned with the fate of the hostages and not doing all it can to secure their freedom. In that regard, there is nothing more unhelpful than strident calls for their release “NOW” or “at any price.” That is a cost we will all bear.

The plea “bring them home NOW” has the faint echo of similar appeals in the recent past for some admirable goal that proponents would like to achieve, NOW. “Peace Now” stands out as a particularly egregious example of throwing caution to the wind and imperiling our homeland and security because of a lack of prudence or patience. One can attribute to “Peace Now,” among other execrable results, the fact that Israel has no sovereignty over the Sinai Peninsula, which ultimately allowed that territory to become the conduit for the smuggling of heavy weapons into Gaza overland and through tunnels. Its ideological successors compelled Israel’s hasty withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, from which we are now, again, suffering from the predations of Hezbollah. Even the foolhardy and self-destructive surrender of Gush Katif resulted from the misplaced desire for results, even peace, now. We should always be wary of demands for something drastic that advocates want now without considering the long-term consequences of the price paid. (Indeed, Peace Now still persists in pursuing the two-state illusion.)

The heart forces us to stand with our aggrieved families. The head tells us that the address for their valid complaints is not so much our government but Hamas, the international community, and all those who are more concerned about the fate of Gazan civilians than the fate of our hostages. Certainly, we should reject calls to provide humanitarian aid to the enemy civilians as long as our civilians are illegally incarcerated under dreadful conditions or as long as rockets keep being fired at our people. We should not normalize the seizure of hostages as part of war even if this ploy has been used repeatedly in Arab wars across the region. The truth is that our hostages are more innocent than their civilians and it is high time we broadcast that truth unflinchingly.

Even worse than the NOW ultimatum is the demand for their release “at any price,” recently bellowed by a former Speaker of the Knesset. This is rank populism of the worst kind, and inherently unserious. Any price? Would he be willing to trade himself for the hostages? That’s a price. Would he acquiesce to transferring the Kotel to Hamas, to permanently flying the Hamas flag over the Knesset, to the disestablishment of the State of Israel, in exchange for freedom for the hostages? Those are also prices. It is not only insincere; it is also profoundly foolish. A negotiator that offers to pay “any price” for his cherished objective only drives up that price, more and more and more, until the negotiator realizes the inanity of the offer or pays a self-destructive price. 

And no price has been proven more destructive to Jewish life in the land of Israel than the exchange of murderous terrorists for innocent Jews. That too is a price we are paying today, heavily and bitterly, for the folly of the past. The release of the accursed Sinwar, among more than a thousand other terrorists, in the Shalit deal should cause any sane nation to re-think that approach to hostage negotiations. These deals literally prompt more hostage-taking and the loss of more Jewish life. Defeating Hamas is incompatible with releasing Hamas terrorists back into society. It only strengthens Hamas, reinforces that crimes against Jews pay, and encourages the next round.

As we have seen, there is no simple and convenient to defeat Hamas and simultaneously liberate the hostages. Our government can be criticized for many things, but I do not believe that we can fault its current efforts to secure the release of the hostages. We are dealing with a diabolical enemy. What we should do, at least, is make the lives of Gazans as miserable as are the lives of our hostages. It is not enough that they – finally – protest against Hamas, if those protests are even sincere and not orchestrated by Hamas. I will be more convinced of their sincerity when they run en masse into the tunnels and bring out our hostages with them. Many of them surely know where Hamas is holding the hostages. The provision of aid to Gaza might be the biggest mistake since the war started; it should stop, now, and afflicted Gazans should storm Hamas strongholds and free the hostages.

If there is a price that we can and should pay in these perilous times, it is this it is a more pleasant and enriching one: call it the nuclear spiritual option. The Talmud (Shabbat 118b) states that Rabbi Yocḥanan said in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai: “If only the Jewish people would keep two Shabbatot in accordance with their halachot, they would be immediately redeemed.”

What a beautiful and ennobling price! Two Shabbatot, because while one is a special experience, two is a commitment. Imagine if every Jew in Israel committed to observing two Shabbot according to halacha. Yes, it would be revolutionary – no television or radio, no theaters and no beaches, no pubs or nightclubs, no telephones, no texting, no shopping, no cars, and no buses. Rather, two Shabbatot that begin with candle lighting at home, and include public prayer and Torah study, kiddush, meals with our families and friends, our children and grandchildren, discussing life, and values, and meaning, and G-d, and redemption, and holiness, and the uniqueness of the Jewish people. We could reflect on our history, on the gifts that G-d bestowed upon us, and the challenges that we have in every generation. We could understand our place in history, why our enemies persist in their hatred, and how we can overcome them as we always have. We can discuss what G-d wants from us, having restored us to His land after a long exile, as He promised.

If we can do it – and we can, and we should – than we are taught that we would “immediately be redeemed,” with everything that entails for our current predicament.” If only we put that declaration, which has tantalized Jews for almost two millennia, to the test! Two Shabbatot, fully observed by every Jew in Israel, the only exceptions being the security apparatus and other essential services (like medical) who also observe Shabbat but in a different way. What a unifying and uplifting experience that would be – and it requires the participation of every Jew.

Does “any price” include something that might actually work and that will transform our society for the better? Or does it only involve concessions that make us less safe? Or are we content to only engage in empty gestures?

The times are serious. Let the organizers get to work. We should try it – and I dare say, we should try it NOW.

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