A Moment of Clarity
Israel’s Enemies’ Aim is to Eliminate the Jewish State and its People
It’s been a harrowing weekend in which the mitzvah to be festive has been hard to fulfill. Family members in Israel have joined their reserve units and we are praying for their safe return.
On Sunday night my Facebook feed was filled with heartbreaking pictures of the victims of the criminal Hamas regime in Gaza. Young and old, men and women, babies and grandmothers appeared along with the testimonies of grief and anger by those who loved them.
Image: Prayer for the soldiers of Israel
We’ve travelled to New Orleans today and the catastrophic news from Israel keeps coming. We will remember this Simchat Torah for the rest of our lives. The full scope of what has been done to us is still sinking in and it seems likely that worse lies ahead. The one gain from all of this heartbreak is that much of the mythology around the Palestinian cause has been debunked.
Many of those who criticize Israel out of a sincere sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians are forced to consider anew the cause they have signed up to support. For some of these people supporting a movement which engages in mass murder of Jews is incongruous with the empathy that drives their engagement. For those who are unmoved, and simply repeating their anti Israel mantra without a word of criticism for Hamas, their hatred for Jews is revealed for all to see.
In an interview on Sky News a Hamas spokesman was asked how the massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians could be justified. He said the attacks were directed at soldiers and settlers. It seems that to Hamas anyone in Israel is a legitimate target and that is exactly what we saw them do.
The behaviour of the attackers was worse than that of Russian occupiers in Bucha, Ukraine. Wherever Hamas infiltrators reached in their invasion they massacred the population. They conducted themselves like units of the SS, entering Israeli communities and going from house to house, killing many and kidnapping the rest.
The incursions from Gaza were reportedly coordinated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leadership and Hezbollah is said to be awaiting the beginning of an Israeli incursion on the ground in Gaza to launch an attack from the North. The Biden Administration has confirmed that it sees the Iranian regime as complicit in the attacks conducted by Hamas.
Long time critics of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians are shifting their positions. Fred Maroun, a supporter of Israel who has been highly critical of the Israeli policy of settling the territory captured from Jordan in 1967, today wrote that his support for a Palestinian state has evaporated. “We were fools to support the Palestinian cause”, he writes. This is because he has concluded that the cause Palestinians support is not a state of their own. It is rather the murder of Jews and denying the Jews their own right to self-determination. In his view the best option for Palestinians who wish to avoid complicity in this genocidal project and the danger from the necessary Israeli response is to leave and look for another place to live.
In the days and weeks ahead, we will see much more clearly who is driven by compassion for the plight of the Palestinians and who is driven by animosity toward Jews. The hard core supporters of Hamas who are celebrating, as terrorists drag the bodies of murdered Israelis through the streets of Gaza will find that the useful idiots who believed Hamas was open to compromise have fallen away. This will make it easier to see who the remaining supporters really are and what they really stand for.
I’ve long thought that the behaviour of the Palestinian leadership is inconsistent with the belief that they want their own state, but highly consistent with the view that they want to deny the Jews a state. Individual Palestinians have different views and some are strong supporters of Israel. But the Palestinian population as a whole seems to be largely in sympathy with Hamas. Living next to such people is an existential threat to Israelis, as we have seen in the past three days.
Therefore Israel must eliminate the Hamas regime, although this will come at a horrific cost. The alternative is more atrocities such as we have seen this weekend. Protecting Jews from people who want to murder them was the motive which gave urgency to the Zionist movement from the middle of the 19th century until today. Hamas has proven that they can’t be dealt with. They must therefore be defeated and the threat they pose uprooted.
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How can we ever hope for peace.. we must, I know , but how. A dear friend wrote from Jerusalem that their grandson was murdered, a young soldier of 22 with a young wife. GD help them and we pray for the release of those kidnapped.
We will recover!
Israel Through 🙏❤️🇮🇱