I got it wrong about Israel. I was American-thinking about how it could be that after 77 years of statehood, a nuclear power with a superlative military, a true democracy, and an educated population with an incomparable determination for national survival, Israel was being attacked over and over again by ignorant, backward brutes whose sole organizing principle is to murder Jews and destroy Israel? Why couldn’t the Jews deal with this?
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I thought about how Gazans came to enjoy permanent unearned sustenance, endless multi-generational wailing victimhood, and well compensated murderousness against Jews, and why the three steps nations must take in order to enjoy stable and peaceful sovereignty — claim, conquest, and ongoing military control — haven’t worked for Israel. I had a notion that Jewish conquest and pillaging skills were rusty.
Wrong. (Picture palm of hand banging forehead.) The Jews have never been conquerors because they are forbidden to murder. There is one reason, inseparable from Jewish psychology for all time and everywhere: God forbade the Jews to murder, and conquest involves murder. Because Jews are forbidden to murder, the only chance Israel has to survive is clear-eyed, vigorous, relentless war against lethal enemies. That war of survival must be prosecuted until the macro-economic forces make it obsolete, and/or Islamists get tired of losing.
At Sinai, God gave the rule to Jews that they are forbidden to murder. God gave the Jews knowledge of His omnipresent unity, which will not be represented or transmuted in the world into any material form, and unambiguous rules regarding righteous worship and self-control. God’s rules had to be succinct because they were not given to a literate, educated people. His rules brought about literacy and education in the Jews, not the other way around. They brought out the Jewish brilliance and reverence for life, not the other way around.
One could see this from a negative viewpoint: God threw down to the Israelites an enormous miracle and all they got were these stinkin’ rules. No enthralling God-Man who exemplified perfect love and glorious self-sacrifice, no role model of Truth, just rules. Judaism is not the first monotheistic religion, but it is the only permanent one organized around rules, whose miraculous origins define the faith and joy of Judaism. Rules so powerful they are the basis not only of moral self-control for Jews but the entirety of Western civilization. Zoroaster said, “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” But when a recruit goes to boot camp, the sergeant doesn’t say “Do good.” He gives simple, clear, no-nonsense rules.
The other side of the no murder rule is no human being may be murdered. This is currently called the right to life, the natural expression of the only God-given human right, which is not to be murdered. Duh! That’s why Jews don’t conquer, because in conquering land for power and national glory (e.g., Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine), it is impossible to avoid committing murder. Even when God fulfilled the promise of the Jewish state (amidst a vast territory of peoples whose religion ennobles murder of Jews), Israel purchased land, accepted treaties, and did everything possible to avoid violent conquest.
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There is no more stark contrast between the Jewish reverence for life and the Islamist compulsion to heroic murder than Victor Davis Hanson’s narrative of how Israelis saved the life of Yahya Sinwar. After complaining of dizziness while in an Israeli prison for murder and terrorism, his captors ended up removing a brain tumor in a difficult operation, before they let him go. And how did he repay Israel? With hideous torture and murder of Jewish children and adults.
Jews have only fought reactive, defensive wars in response to attack after attack from Islamist Arabs. Any honest person recognizes that Israeli control of Gaza is not conquest, but rather a war of survival. The world can keep blaming the Jews for wanting to survive. Israel must face there are no civilian Gazans. If there were peace-loving Gazans, they would have sought refuge from the true Nakba of endless terrorism, and the Judeo-Christian world would have helped them begin new lives in new lands.
Palestinism is a decrepit hoax. The term Hamas is transitory because those monsters just change their names. The terrorists are Arab Gazans who use preschool children in war zones. Such children should be rescued whenever possible. Let the war criminals come forward to reclaim them. The harm and death that befalls Gazans is their own choice, established year after year, violence upon violence, against Israel. On 10/7, many of the animalistic murderers had pretended to be friends of the Israelis, decades of foreplay awaiting the thrill of their climax of torture and death. Gazans are not clinging to a beloved homeland or a cherished identity, they are clinging to the sick glorification of murdering Jews and destroying Israel. Israel must prosecute righteous war unto victory over their blood enemies. They have no choice.
When God gives an order, He must provide the means for its fulfillment. God never gives an order that cannot be obeyed. It is for His own sake, for His Law, He shaped the resilience, power and gifts of the Jewish people. For God’s sake He forbade them to murder, forbade them to lie. For God’s sake he will grant them the means of survival.
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