First things first: Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all can go to hell. The first two are outright Jew-haters. Not all Nazis in Germany shoved Jews into gas chambers and ovens. Some simply lined the streets and cheered the Hitlers on. The third may be a Jew-hater or just so leftist that her anti-Israel venom cannot be distinguished without a scorecard. The fourth is an apostate, one in a long line of history’s born Jews who would watch other Jews incinerated as long as he and his warped ideology benefits. Jews encountered it with Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. We encounter it with George Soros and the ilk whom he funds. It is the curse Jews uniquely endure when the Torah is abandoned for G-dless utopias that are dystopic. And now to the war in Israel:
The fools who are to blame for the catastrophes now emerging from Hamas and Gaza mostly are dead. They are the left-progressive Israeli Labor Party fools who had the power in June 1967 to grasp a moment of Divine miracle and launch Israel on a new destiny of fulfillment. “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” we heard when Israel liberated Jerusalem’s Old City and took back the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. But the cowards of Israel’s Labor party could not fathom the moment. It would take the 1973 Yom Kippur War to fully reveal that Moshe Dayan, whatever courage he may have manifested in battle, cowered in fear when not on the battlefield. The coward had been terrified to take East Jerusalem in 1967, and he suffered a meltdown as defense minister in 1973. Likewise, it took 1973 to see that Golda Meir may have been qualified to be a grandmother cooking chicken soup but was no leader of a nation on the cusp of historic greatness but simultaneously facing annihilation. Her refusal to act on intelligence she had before Anwar Sadat struck cost the lives of thousands of Israel’s boys, sacrificial lambs to her politics of fear and her obsessive need to be loved by American and European liberals.
Even the heroes of Labor like Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon came to be exposed more over time. It had been years since Rabin had played his evil role during the perfidious criminal murdering of Irgun heroes on the Altalena, patriots who had risked their lives to bring weapons to take Jerusalem in 1948, but Rabin returned with perfidy to push through the “Oslo Accords” disaster that laid the foundation for Yasser Arafat to control whole swaths of Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), to gain political autonomy and control over his own mass media, and to educate two new generations of Arab children to hate and murder Jews, all while he was given by Rabin his own internal security and police apparatus. Yigal Allon, meanwhile, had helped form the even-more-extreme-left Mapam party that idealized Josef Stalin and later mourned the death of Stalin, may his bones rot.
Ariel Sharon, too, now is dead, but his legacy lives on in the thousand Hamas rockets fired indiscriminately at Jewish civilians throughout Israel. Sharon unilaterally withdrew Israel out of Gaza without a plan for The Day After, expelled 8,600 pioneering, brave Jews from their homes in Gush Katif, handed over to the Arabs of Gaza thriving industries and gorgeous synagogues and yeshiva academies, and watched them all burn as he turned his attention next to wreak the same havoc for Judea and Samaria. Only a significant ischemic stroke, and then yet a more massive hemorrhagic stroke a fortnight later, stopped him permanently from bulldozing more Jews out of their homes. Was his termination the hand of G-d or a stroke of luck? You be the judge.
But that is what aggregated to cause today’s catastrophic latest Hamas War against the Jews. That — plus Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decade-long hesitancy to fight to a complete and outright crushing victory.
Professor Daniel Pipes has been advocating “Victory” these past several years, the idea that nothing short of an actual bruising, crushing, unequivocal Israeli victory over Hamas terror will achieve long-term results. By contrast, Netanyahu has followed a “lawn-mowing” philosophy: every few years, as new Hamas weeds grow, Israel confronts the comparatively reduced challenge to “mow the lawn.” The two competing perspectives each carry their respective pros and cons. A “Victory” campaign will entail the risk of more casualties up front and even worse international condemnation. By contrast, “mowing the lawn” reduces deaths in battle for the short term and limits ICC “war crimes” investigations initially but ensures more deaths and more world condemnations later, as future wars erupt. And these indeed are brutal wars. Responding to 1,000 rockets fired from an enemy border into civilian centers in Paris and Marseille, London and Manchester, Berlin and Hamburg, Rome and Milan, Shanghai and Beijing, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Los Angeles and New York — that is war, not an “operation.” It took much less for all of Europe to bury each other into a Great War in 1914 and another even more catastrophic from 1939–45.
If any country on Earth were to fire 1,000 rockets in three days indiscriminately into Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Omaha, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Boston, New York, Atlanta, and Houston civilian centers, this country — yes, even under Biden and Pelosi, Obama and Schumer — would be dropping nuclear bombs on the source. And England would be doing the same if their cities were enduring this. So would France and Germany. So would China and Russia. So would you if you had the button.
Amid such catastrophes, Israelis vote every so often — with emphasis these past two years on “often” — and, as happens in every democratic electorate, certain regions tend to vote in certain ways. For example, in America the Northeast tends towards the Democrats and the left while the Deep South goes Republican conservative. Similarly in Israel, the 800,000 Jews in Judea and Samaria, those in the northern border development towns, and those near and amid the Gaza “envelope” vote for the military security of a Likud-right bloc, those in Jerusalem veer towards religious parties and the political right, and those in the Gush Dan–Tel Aviv region where the “beautiful people” live tend to vote for Labor and Meretz on the left. Meanwhile, for decades Israel’s third-largest city has been known as “Red Haifa” for its more extreme leftist sympathies. Thus, the leftist Ron Huldai has been elected and reelected mayor of Tel Aviv forever — now at 23 consecutive years — but when he tried to form a national political party to contend for the premiership over all of Israel’s voters he was handed his head in a hand-basket unceremoniously.
Tel Aviv and Haifa voters always have felt they could vote gaily and merrily for the Left because it never was their necks on the line as rockets roared nightly from Gaza into southern Israeli cities like Sderot, Ashkelon, and Ashdod. Haifa leftists did not share the concerns of residents based in northern Israel’s development towns like Maalot and Kiryat Shmona who contend with Hezbollah on their border with Lebanon. But all things come to an end. Decades of Oslo-based Israeli governmental failures driven by myopic leftist Labor governments, and by Sharon’s additional blind blunders, now have synergized to bring onto Israel the catastrophe of a Hamas-dominated Gaza in the south whose terror rockets now do reach Tel Aviv, even as Hezbollah yet awaits demonstrating to Haifa’s Meretz leftists what lies in store there.
Moments like these change a nation. The fall of the Twin Towers in Manhattan showed liberal New Yorkers that they, too, can be hit. They ended up shocked into voting for mayors on the Republican line for more than another decade. America stuck with George W. Bush for the next eight years. The year 2002 was only the fourth time since the Civil War that the party controlling the White House gained seats during a midterm election.
If Israel’s political stalemate soon forces the country into its fifth round of national elections in 30 months, it may well be expected that the present catastrophic awakening — the awareness that Hamas now can, will, and does hit Tel Aviv with rockets aimed at women, children, and civilian men — will move more seats to the right. More than that, it will change a generation of Jewish thinking in Israel among the dwindling remnant of leftists who did not already wise up after two intifadas. Jewish Israelis now consistently vote 70 percent right-wing. That number will increase.
For Israel, there is no making peace with people who will not accept the right of Jews to live sovereign in the land. It is a hard pill to swallow, recognizing with exasperation that there is no possible formula for making peace with such other than utterly crushing. The reason that German Nazis under Hitler and Eichmann finally have stopped their effort to destroy Jews is that they are dead, crushed, annihilated, wiped out. Even their carcasses are gone. The reason that Japan, who destroyed Pearl Harbor, became friendly to and a great ally of America can be explained in eight syllables: Na-ga-sa-ki-Hi-ro-shi-ma.
As with Oslo and the intifadas, this latest Hamas War catastrophe, highlighted by the Hamas war crimes of embedding their entire terror apparatus amid civilian population centers — primarily at hospitals, residential apartment buildings, and school yards — will impact another cohort of leftist Israelis for years to come. The last remnants of “Beautiful People” liberalism and progressivism in Israel — the voting booths of Tel Aviv and Haifa — will become a bit less red, even less pink. And there may come a time when, beyond mowing the lawn, the weeds finally will be extirpated because they must be.
As Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders tweet their condemnations of Israel for doing what any sovereign country would do to defend itself against a terror regime that bases its rocket launchers in hospitals, elementary schools, residential apartment buildings, and in ambulances, fair people will respond in the only five words that seem logical: They can go to hell.
