Tag Archives: Politics

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

Whenever Israelis sense that the world is unsympathetic to our case, we habitually lament our failure of hasbara – i.e., public relations, diplomacy, even propaganda in the most innocuous sense. If only we had the right people or the right message, the complaint goes, then we would be the darlings of the diplomatic set, the world would eagerly embrace our narrative, learn the facts, and support the justice of our cause. They would not be swallowing the “Gaza starvation blood libel” propagated by Hamas nor be quick to reward our murderers, rapists, and kidnappers with their own state.

What we fail to realize is that our futility is not due to the incompetence of our spokesmen, who do a credible job, but to the deafness of the intended audience. When talking to the deaf, with the speaker ignorant of sign language and the deaf person inept at lip-reading, it is simply impossible to be understood, no matter how persuasive or cogent. The bottom line is that much of the world is deaf to Israel, the Jewish state, the Jewish national idea, and even to a great extent, our moral aspirations. It is not at all a matter of what we say or how we say it; it is almost exclusively a question of who is doing the listening, and who we are trying to convince.

Forget our haters. If people are on the fence, unable to choose between the genocidal death cult of Hamas and its allies, and the Jews who bring so much good to the world, it is unclear that they can be convinced or that they are really fence sitters who await our explanation.

Nevertheless, there is one feature of our hasbara that we should abandon, and better yesterday. Israel is the only country in the world in which its officials and friends constantly preface their defense by saying “Israel is not perfect.” Search the archives and look for any official or patriot of the following countries beginning a sentence “well, Russia is not perfect,” “China is not perfect,” “France is not perfect,” “Greece is not perfect,” “Turkey is not perfect,” “The Emirates are not perfect,” the United Kingdom is not perfect,” etc. 

It is preposterous. Israel is the only country in the world where admission to imperfection is supposed to be part of its brief. We might add the United States during the apology tour of Barack Obama but even he only admitted to the past sins of others, not his own, and certainly no current sins.

To begin a jury summation with “my client is not perfect” is used usually when your client is guilty as sin – unless the concession is in an unrelated area. (For example, your client is on trial for homicide and you concede that he routinely parks in a handicapped spot.) But to concede “my client is not perfect. He has a terrible temper and is prone to violence, but in this case, it was self-defense,” well, that is a losing argument. Get ready for a conviction.

We should ask ourselves: which nation is perfect such that Israel has to use that preface? None, and so it is a mistake. Instead of explaining repeatedly when enemy civilians are killed during a battle that “Israel doesn’t intentionally attack civilians but a mistake was made,” we should be responding: “This is the nature of war, a war forced upon us. Who does attack civilians? Hamas on October 7 attacked civilians. Hamas is still brutalizing our civilians they hold hostage. If they care about the fate of their civilians, they will surrender. Until then, this is war, and we intend to end it with the complete vanquishing of our enemy.”

Instead of boasting how much aid we are giving to the enemy, we should be saying “there is real starvation – not in Gaza (except for our hostages) but in Sudan, in Syria, in Haiti. Five times as many people have died there in the last year than in all of Gaza in the last two years. Yes, we are not perfect. We are so imperfect that we are foolishly providing food, water, and fuel to the enemy and prolonging the war in the hope that a hypocritical world will recognize our goodness. But you won’t, ever – and therefore we intend to force a surrender by halting all aid. That is war.”

These are powerful assertions of our rights and should replace the groveling, begging the nations to appreciate and extol our morality. It should be obvious to all of us that they know it already. They just can’t admit it. They know that they have never conducted their wars as they expect us to conduct ours – not the United States, not Britain, not Germany, not France, not Spain, not Russia, not Belgium, not Australia, not China, not any Arab country, etc. Wars conducted on those terms can never be won.

So why play their game? Why give in to their farce? Rather than constantly note our imperfections, simply ask: which of you, nations, has ever fought a war in which you supplied food and aid to the enemy population before surrender? Correct answer: none. 

Even after World War II, millions (!) of Europeans died of starvation after the war, primarily but not exclusively in Eastern Europe. President Truman dispatched Herbert Hoover to deal with the famine problem (as Hoover had done so successfully after World War I). And when did Hoover go to Europe to investigate the problem and fashion a solution? It was not until the spring of 1946, almost a year after the war ended. By then millions of civilians were already dead. Food aid did not begin on a consistent basis until May 1946.

Please check carefully: the victorious Allies never prefaced any statement with “well, the Allies are not perfect…”

There is a reason for this and a profound lesson to be taught, even to enemy civilians. You don’t want to suffer? Don’t aggress, don’t maraud, don’t murder, don’t kidnap, and don’t start a war you can’t win hoping that a duplicitous world will save you.

We will never win by being defensive, apologetic, or by loving our enemies and expecting them to love us. And feelings that are based on false information can never be assuaged. Far better to let the enemy and their supporters and even people across the world ponder this: “you attack Jews and the Jewish homeland? You murder, rape, maraud, and kidnap? This is the price you will pay until you surrender: death, destruction, devastation, suffering, and exile. And our response to your invasion is perfect – and perfectly Jewish.”

 And they will say to themselves – never aloud, except for a few good people – “hey, the Jews are right. This is how a government of murderers, rapists, beheaders, and kidnappers – and their voters and supporters – should be treated. Until they surrender.”

Is this Jewish morality? Absolutely. Unsophisticated Jews frequently hear the rabbinic maxim of the angels wanting to praise G-d after the elimination of the Egyptian enemy at the Red Sea, and G-d’s demurral: “My handiwork is drowning, and you want to sing before Me” (Sanhedrin 39b)? Indeed, let the angels lament the death of the enemy. But while the angels were being admonished for their attempt at praising G-d, the Jews were singing: “Let me sing to G-d for He has triumphed gloriously; a horse and his rider He has hurled into the sea…G-d is my strength and my song; He was for me a salvation. G-d is a warrior. G-d is His name” (Shemot 15:1-3). And we still sing that song every day. 

Unfortunately, most of our government does not yet operate with a Jewish head. Nor do most Jews. Thus, they will keep saying, “we are not perfect,” hoping that a partial admission will purchase us some good will. The nations, cynically but well aware of our confession, will just assume the worst about us, however false and fabricated. And we will continue to wonder why we cannot convince the world how moral we are. 

It says something good about our character that we like to boast about having the most moral army in the world but such is inapposite to the task at hand. It is nice and speaks well of us, but a greater boast would be having the most victorious army in the world. War is an immoral endeavor, and morality in war is on the margins, mostly in the exercise of self-restraint by soldiers who by definition are given a license to kill. The world’s attempt to civilize war beginning in the 19^th century – i.e., the attempt to refine and regulate the process by which people try to kill each other – helped to forge the bloodiest century in all of history, the 20^th century, in terms of raw numbers of combatants and civilians killed. And it still goes on and on. The attempt itself was good-hearted but ultimately counterproductive, encouraging the bad actors to wage war knowing the good guys will hamstring themselves. Rules of war that are not based on reciprocity are bound to fail and embolden the evildoers. 

And one way the evildoers are emboldened is by playing on the sympathies of liberal Jews, and Westerners who buy into the Hamas propaganda, or at least echo it as a possibility in an attempt to demonstrate their broadmindedness. This is the Hamas strategy. Note that Amalek in gematria equals 240, or safek, doubt. One of Amalek’s hoary tactics is to sow doubt among the Jews as to the justice of our cause, the morality of Torah, and our claims to the land of Israel. This is not new.

The truth is that if we win the war, utterly defeat Hamas, evacuate large numbers of Gazans to places in the world where they can rehabilitate themselves and live good, productive lives, all the enmity they feel will be channeled elsewhere. People move on. And those who hate Jews will still hate Jews. That’s not going away. 

But we should stop apologizing for not being perfect. No country on the planet has ever been given greater incentive or possessed a greater right to utterly extirpate a ruthless enemy than we have been given – and yet we have never acted on that impulse. Maybe that is as close to moral perfection as any nation has ever come.

The ideal should be awakening people to the reality of the utter devastation of war so that wars become too deadly to make any sense, and even evildoers stop waging war. We are closer to that than people think, as long as the good guys are allowed to win. And then we will realize the prophetic vision of the end of war when the nations see the light of divine morality and embrace a different, holier reality.

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

After more than twenty months of on-off warfare, Hamas is a pale image of its revolting self but still calls the shots, holds our hostages, manipulates Israel and world society, and is an evil player on the world stage. The war goals seem to have transmogrified to freeing the hostages at (almost) any price and providing humanitarian aid to the enemy population whose representatives invaded our communities, raped our women, butchered our elderly, set fire to our homes, and took hundreds of innocent people hostage. The conclusion is inescapable that the government of Israel is devoid of fresh ideas, trapped in the rut of failed approaches to the strategic challenges before us.

The two original errors still remain. First, declaring the joint war objectives of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages, both worthy goals but incompatible without a miracle; second, precipitously distinguishing between Hamas and Gazans, as if the latter bear no responsibility for the former, as absurd as in 1944 distinguishing between the Nazis and the German people.

How bewildered is our government?

• We have no answer to the outrageous quandary of Israelis held hostage. Hamas knows our weaknesses, aided and abetted by anti-government mobs and media who demand “bring them home now,” oblivious to the reality that even if every hostage would be returned alive today, Hamas would simply take new hostages tomorrow. And why not? The tactic works, mostly because we have allowed it to work.
• We have become even more desperate than Hamas for a deal, any deal. We are negotiating with a genocidal, suicidal death cult sworn to our destruction, and perplexed why it is not responding favorably to our generous offers. It is because we have allowed them to think that they hold all the cards. Granted Hamas does not care about our people or even their people; but knowing that, why would keep strengthening them and their supporters?
• We have no answer to the issue of humanitarian aid. For the first time in world history, an invaded nation is being forced by the “global community” to provide food, water, and fuel to an enemy population. This is obviously not required even by the charade known as international law and it is foolish to boot. People who complain that the war has dragged on too long must know that the war is being prolonged because of this aid. We are prolonging this war; yet we keep falling into the same trap.
• We have no answer to the Hamas strategy of hiding among civilians. We have taken so many measures to avoid incidental harm to enemy civilians that our own soldiers’ lives have been lost. That is a moral obscenity, not surprisingly endorsed without legitimacy by our legal establishment – military, civilian and judicial – whom this government for too long has allowed to usurp power from the lawfully elected officials.
• We have no answer to the Hamas strategy of prioritizing its own survival while enabling them to kill more Jews. Every seizure of territory in Gaza comes with a price in our soldiers’ blood. Every withdrawal from that captured territory allows Hamas to plant bombs and mines. Every week, several of our soldiers are killed in this war of attrition, blown up in booby-trapped buildings or by mines planted on roads. This is all to achieve dubious objectives. If the intention is to find the hostages, that tactic is not working. If the intention is to destroy terrorist infrastructure, then that endeavor is pointless if the IDF plans to retreat from those locations in the event of a hostage deal. Each hostage deal has freed some hostages – but also invariably resulted in the deaths of as many soldiers blown up by the explosives that the deal enabled Hamas to plant. That is not a sensible or winning strategy, and yet we are begging to do it again.
• We have no answer to the relentless anti-Israel propaganda, but for that I cannot fault the government. Facts and truth are forlorn concepts in the Western world and the exponential increase in media outlets ensures that lies will always have greater currency than truth. The media’s interest is not in reporting news but in advancing a narrative, an agenda, and it is certainly harmful that the tendentious media readily find Israeli spokesmen – usually military has-beens who despise PM Netanyahu – who eagerly besmirch Israel at every opportunity. Where the government can be faulted is in not articulating a clear, Jewish approach to these issues, which has left us meandering in the muddle of Western moral vanities, adopting Western values (many of them fabricated just recently and some just for the purpose of this war) rather than present the Torah morality as would befit a Jewish people preserved by G-d to be a “light unto the nations.”

Our approach has become a macabre and bloody failure. We keep repeating the same mistakes hoping something different will happen. We keep negotiating hostage deals because that is what we do, unthinkingly, reflexively, knowing they jeopardize our soldiers today and our very existence tomorrow. We keep blowing things up, assuming that Hamas will rebuild but hoping it takes them just a little longer. We are not doing what it takes to win this war and deter the next. Why is Hamas recalcitrant in the most recent negotiations? Perhaps it is following Napoleon’s advice: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

It must be underscored that even with this government’s failures, spanning the spectrum of the Israeli political scene reveals that any other conceivable government would be far worse and its strategic posture even more distant from reality and our current needs. What must change?

• We must rule out hostage deals in exchange for anything other than unconditional surrender. They are literally killing us – our soldiers, now, every week – and our citizens in the future. Hamas will never make any deal that leads to its disintegration and so we are foolish to expect it. Releasing their murderers cheapens our lives, emboldens them, and ensures that terror will continue and increase. We must stop validating their tactic of hostage-taking. Otherwise, we will wake up one day after all these hostages are freed to learn that G-d forbid a busload of children has been taken captive or a summer camp was overrun. At present, we are inviting that eventuality.
• Additionally, we must begin executing convicted terrorists – those who murdered and those who attempt to murder. Now. And within weeks of their attack, not decades. That too will disincentivize hostage-taking. The security services have long argued against the death penalty on the grounds that it will lead the terrorists to mistreat our captives. In retrospect, does any argument sound more farcical today?
• We must articulate for the world a Jewish morality of war. Sieges are moral, as they encourage surrender. We have no obligation to nourish the enemy in wartime. If the world really cares about innocent Gaza civilians, such as they might exist, they should be evacuating them from this war zone to their own countries. Again, by providing nourishment and fuel to our enemies in wartime (and not even insisting on third-party verification that our hostages are being fed!), we are prolonging the war, killing our soldiers, and further endangering our hostages.
• We need our own DOGE in Israel – a Department of Gaza Evacuation. To the extent that it does not already exist is an abject failure on the part of this government. A government that continues to surrender territory – that forces its soldiers to fight and die again and again for the same turf – is too cavalier with its soldiers’ lives. Yes, we should announce that Gaza will be evacuated, that Israel is claiming this territory (our ancient biblical patrimony, in any event), and will soon resettle it. This cannot hurt our public relations, which is already largely moribund and irrelevant to anyone outside our echo chamber. We should have already – literally – moved our border fences two kilometers inside Gaza and announced to the world that the invader has lost this land permanently. Let the nations of the world – all of them founded on conquest – object. And let those nations so concerned with the fate of Gaza civilians – I mean you, France, Turkey, and Spain – take them.
• We must not allow our fate to be decided by unelected judges and functionaries, like the Government’s Legal Advisor, herself morally compromised. She does not like the government’s new head of the GSS? She now wants the appointment delayed for another sixty days? Who is she? And why does any self-respecting government honor her wishes? The will of the people is reflected in their elected representatives, not a self-appointed legal oligarchy that deigns to rule its “inferiors.” Yes, General David Zini should be sworn in tomorrow and assume the position, and if the Legal Advisor objects, inform her that her objections are duly noted, but when the Government wants her advice, it will ask for it. Only a hapless government continues to abide her and the rogue court that underwrites her.
• We must make our goal of “absolute victory” not a political slogan or a rhetorical device but a reality. It is no secret that generals weaned on Oslo, the Gaza Expulsion, and the need to make peace with our enemies whatever the cost – and not entirely convinced of the  justice of our cause or possession of our land – will not be able to devise a plan for victory but only for negotiations, cease fires, and kicking the can down the road. With such generals, we will not prevail.
• We must cease listening to our enemies – and even some of our friends – as to how best to win the war. As the Prussian military thinker Karl von Clausewitz put it, “Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.” 

We are bereft of answers because we are making the mistake of fighting a war with too much kindness – the antithesis of the Torah’s ethic of war. It is not a sign of moral sensitivity that we worry ourselves with the fate of the enemy civilians but a clear indication of moral confusion. Our ongoing national surrender to hostage-taking must stop. If we continue along the current path, we will neither win the war nor free the hostages. And that will be more devastating than the matter of who the prime minister is and for how long.

To be sure, there is a clear but not a smooth path to victory. Much of the world simply does not want us to win and they couch their hatred in the moral bromides they direct our way. In the short term, we will pay a diplomatic and likely an economic price for victory. Worse, all of our hostages may not be returned alive. We should prepare for it – or at least willfully choose the path of false promises, magical illusions, and wishful thinking that were hallmarks of the Oslo Accords and the Gaza Expulsion, fatal errors from which many in our midst still do not recoil in shame. But victory is its own reward, much of the world will slowly awaken to the improved strategic posture of this defeat of radical Islam, and any discomfort should be short-lived. And always remember that Donald Trump loves winners, no matter how the victory is achieved, and has contempt for non-winners, the stalemate crowd.

What Thomas Jefferson said about slavery in 1820 is true about Hamas today: “We havethe wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.” If Hamas remains in Gaza, it will rebuild its terror infrastructure on the global dime, and quickly, and even more deadly – having bloodied Israel and survived. But even a Hamas defeated in Gaza will not disappear. It will continue its genocidal ambitions elsewhere and probably make foreign Jews its primary target in the short term. That is the price we pay for Jew hatred and we must always be vigilant.

What a victory will accomplish is deterrence. Our enemies will recalibrate the high cost of murdering Jews, and most will desist. Others will realize that they have nothing to gain as our foe and much to gain as our friend, and the region will be transformed. A victory will enable us to rebuild our society from within and heal the fractures that now beset our people, redefine our national purpose, and strengthen our national will. This government should not squander this opportunity.

Our government desires victory but has no plan for victory. It is now spinning its wheels, endangering our soldiers, and focused on feeding our enemies. Those mistakes can be rectified with an announcement and implementation of a dramatic change in policy – a policy centered on Israeli interests, the wellbeing of our citizens and soldiers, and faith in our destiny.