Reflections on Israel’s New Existential War

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

There have been plenty of terrorist attacks on Israel. A dozen or so conventional wars of various magnitude have been waged against the Jewish state. And more often there have been mixtures of both.

Yet never have hundreds of gangs of black-clad murderers carefully planned to swarm Israel, with an agenda to pull random Jews out of their homes and off the street, murder them, and toss their bodies in the street.

In fact, the closest parallel to the sort of methods Hamas is now embracing is something close to the Rwanda 1994 mass killing, when swarms of Hutu militia killers launched a preplanned murder spree against thousands of Tutsi civilians.

Note one common theme of these horrific videos of the murdering of young women: the bloodthirst of the Gaza crowd. There appears a natural desire of everyday Gazans to video the mutilations, an embrace of the spitting on the doomed, a frenzied effort to mutilate the dead—and the absence of a single Gazan objecting to the group murder of a civilian.

Hamas did not act out of the ordinary, but in sync with its people. In truth, there is something so terribly wrong in Gaza that the United States should keep as far away as it can from such barbarity—and hope that it too feels the same about America and keeps to itself.

So again why did Hamas mount such a long-planned and multifaceted assault on Israeli towns, public buildings, soldiers, and civilians?

The invasion was not so much a surprise attack, in the conventional Pearl Harbor sense, as a carefully calibrated land, sea, and ground effort at mass killing and hostage taking. It was designed to execute noncombatants, grab Jews for bargaining leverage, and to shock Israelis through their pre-civilizational desecration of the bodies of the dead.

It targeted first a youth concert near the border, on the theory the cowardly killers could gain maximum media traction and Arab solidarity by sensationally butchering and kidnapping helpless adolescents. Will the murderers in the weeks ahead transfer their killing zeal to attacks on the IDF? They will soon have their long desired and ample opportunity to showcase to the world their bravado as they face real soldiers and not unarmed elderly and youth.

Apparently, the Palestinians in their now ISIS role also thought their descent into even greater barbarity, rarely witnessed in even the most savage parts of the world, would shock Israelis into assuming some sort of collective fetal position, with hands over their ears screaming, “make all these demons just go away.”

If so, Hamas sorely miscalculated.

The sheer horror of their methods, and the cowardice shown by focusing on teen-aged girls and children rather than the IDF, will have the exact opposite effect, both in Israel and worldwide.

Israel now knows there is no living with a precivilizational Hamas. It must destroy it, permanently block off Gaza from itself, and adopt a strategy of chronic disproportionate response from now on out.

In such a change of strategy, Israel will have the backing of most of the civilized world and its own people, since there is no other choice once Hamas has adopted its campaign of death. We will likely see things in the next month that no one has anticipated, and yet the Israeli response will be in the eyes of most of the world long overdue.

In other words, few will pay any more attention to the Squads of the world, or the radical Jew-haters of the Western Left, or the Democratic-Socialists of America who cheered on the killing. They are now revealed on the side of death for death’s sake and cannot be reasoned with.

We are not yet 80 years out from the Holocaust. Yet here again we witness black-clad cadres of special killer units trying to round up Jews and execute them on the spot. There is one strange difference though between the current Hamas SS cadres and their spiritual forefathers in Nazi Germany.

Between 1941-45 America fought to destroy the SS and its hired local death squads. But in 2023, the Biden administration has restored hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority and to Gaza under Hamas, despite the commitments of both to the destruction of Israel and the mass killing of Jews—and regardless of the warnings of its own State Department.

That too will change, as there will soon be zero American support for giving one more cent to any Palestinian “organization.”

Why the attacks now? Other than the usual reasons the Palestinians slaughter Jews—envy, the easy preference to destroy others than to create a successful modern state of their own, ethnic and religious hatred—the timing and methods of this particular killing spread were predicated on some particular catalysts.

Palestinians wanted to stop any rumored rapprochement between the Gulf monarchies—their traditional purse strings—and Israel, by forcing the issue of Arab solidarity in times of “war,” especially through waging a gruesome attack aimed at civilians and encompassing executions and hostage taking. They wished to force, for example, the Saudis to endorse their mutilation of corpses or else be to seen as sell-outs to the “Jews.”

Iran is the likely driving force in prompting the war. Its greatest fear is a Sunni Arab-Israel deal that would finally transcend the anti-Semitic and ethnic hatred that now resides most prominently in Palestine and Iran.

In addition, Arab forces only achieve success against Israel in surprise assaults during an Israel holiday. So the current attack was timed 50-years after the October 6, 1973 beginning of the Yom Kippur War. They struck during Simchat Torah, coming at the end of a weeklong Jewish celebration of Sukkot. And yet despite the iconic date, Hamas caught both the sophisticated intelligence networks of Israel, the United States, and the West in general completely unaware.

Did Hamas think Hezbollah and Iran would join in? Will they? If one believes their rhetoric they will; if one believes that they do not wish to experience what will likely follow in Gaza, they will not.

For the time being, after all, there are now zero restraints on Israel for the first occasion perhaps in its history. Few other than the international relations major AOC or a bigot in the American State Department will call for proportionality, an immediate ceasefire, or an Israeli stand down.

Hamas may also have reckoned that recent Israeli turmoil and mass street protests over proposed reforms of the Israeli Supreme Court had led to permanent internal divisions and thus a climate of domestic distraction if not an erosion of deterrence.

True, there was something eerie about the Israeli left’s opposition that extended to the politicization of IDF recruits. This propensity to commit collective civilizational suicide is now toxic in Western society, from Sweden to America. But in a frontline state like Israel it could prove fatal–as Hamas apparently also reasoned.

Let us also be candid, the Biden administration has contributed to the notion that Hamas was a legitimate Middle-East player. It fueled the perception that the U.S. was backing away from its traditional support for Israel—to the delight of Hamas—based on inexplicable policies.

Remember there is an iron law in the Middle East: anytime the U.S. distances itself from Israel, and gravitates to Iran, its violent enemies see that as a de facto greenlight to ratchet up their aggression. It is now a tenet of the base of the new woke Democratic Party, whether on campuses, among its Squad, in the media, or as championed by its identify politics caucuses, that Israel is an illegitimate state, while radical Palestinians are freedom fighters.

Do we remember that in February the ridiculous Secretary of State Blinken bragged that not only had the Biden administration resumed massive aid to the corrupt PLA, canceled by Trump, but also cumulatively had transferred $1 billion—even as Palestinian authorities and Abbas bragged that they would continue to pay bounties to the families of “martyrs” (i.e., those killed while conducting terrorists attacks against Israel)?

All such funds are fungible. So the more Biden’s people brag that the money goes to humanitarian purposes or has not yet arrived in Iranian accounts, the more these terrorist entities preemptively free up cash to mobilize for war.

So millions of American dollars went into Gaza, run by Hamas—despite the Biden administration’s efforts to keep mostly quiet the resumption of such inexplicable support.

In this regard, note the shameful State-Department (“U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs”) website news release that was posted instantly after attack (since mysteriously taken down). It had ended with this quite embarrassing, morally equivalent admonition:

“We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.” “All sides?” “Refrain from retaliatory attacks?”

So Israel is to be the moral equivalent of terrorists executing civilians and brutalizing their corpses? And all this from the U.S. government? And what exactly is the “U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs,” a megaphone for “normalizing” Hamas?

The IDF then is not to retaliate against these killers?

Does the Biden administration now also call upon Ukraine, “to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks?” Does it believe that Ukraine’s “violence” in response to Putin’s “terror” will “solve nothing?”

Remember also the Biden administration had recently released some $6 billion to Iran through a prison swap deal that saw South Korea had over embargoed Iranian money to Qatar—despite Tehran’s increased anti-Israeli rhetoric and its loud brag about the escalation.

In fungible fashion and in anticipation of the arrival of this cash windfall, Iran no doubt accelerated its shipments of arms to Gaza. We should assume Iranian money for rockets (Hamas claims they have launched 5,000, and have received 100,000 of them via the Damascus airport) and weapons in general for Hamas were supplied by Iran, a terrorist state that the Biden administration apparently sees as a strategic partner.

Almost immediately, after his inauguration an eager Biden mobilized to resume the bankrupt Iran deal. In unhinged fashion, he appointed the anti-Israeli bigot, pro-Iranian zealot journalist Robert Malley as America’s chief Iranian negotiator. Remember, Malley was the special ISIS advisor of Barack Obama (who kept mum during the 2009 mass uprising against the Iranian theocracy), when ISIS overran Iraq.

Our envoy Malley apparently advertises himself, to quote his Wikipedia bio, as “an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has written extensively on this subject advocating rapprochement with Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood.”

We are now witnessing the reification of our Iranian envoy’s idea of “rapprochement” in the streets of Israel.

Note that Malley is now under FBI investigation for security breaches, involving disclosing classified U.S. documents. He also is under further scrutiny for allegedly helping pro-Iranian activists and propagandists land influential billets inside the U.S. government.

Imagine that: Iran now cheers on mass death in Israel while its agents and provocateurs burrow into the U.S. government (which might explain the Biden State Department’s immediate call to cease Israeli retaliation).

The result of this madness is that there was a general Hamas and Iranian perception that the Biden administration had resumed the discredited Obama insanity of empowering Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. This discredited agenda aimed to “balance” the power of Israel and the moderate Arab Gulf governments to achieve “creative tension,” and was certainly exacerbated by Biden’s loathing of the government of Benjamín Netanyahu.

Note as well that the Biden administration has insidiously siphoned off key weapons and munitions from emergency stockpiles inside Israel apparently to transfer them to Ukraine. The so-called “War Reserve Ammunition—Israel” is reportedly all but depleted of just the sorts of weapons and shells that will be likely needed in the present crisis.

Who knows, we should soon expect that some of the multibillion-dollar arsenal abandoned to the Taliban—who have now voiced a willingness to help Gaza in the killing of Jews—will end up with Hamas. So we deplete strategic arsenals in Israel, but leave them to the Taliban.

In this regard is there a Carteresque pattern here?

Upon the ascension of Biden and his woke strategic agendas, we witnessed the following chain of events: 1) the 2021 complete humiliation of the U.S. miliary in Kabul in its greatest defeat in 50 years; 2) followed by Vladimir Putin’s 2022 opportunistic invasion of Ukraine; 3) followed by China’s new belligerence and escalating threats to Taiwan; 4) followed by Turkey’s new de facto alliance with Russia and recent drone encounter with the U.S. air force in Syria; 5) followed by the Hamas/Iranian inspired attack on Israel—6) with more to come unfortunately.

Will Biden finally get the message from the attacks on the Ukraine and Israeli borders, that borders matter? We too are being invaded, with the encouragement of the Mexican government and to the advantage of the cartels. Biden should carefully digest the ranting of President Obrador who seems to feel he has veto power over the White House, as he demands our own borders remain open to his citizens for whom he cannot provide, while he seeks to influence U.S. elections.

In a sane world, the Biden administration would immediately cancel all talks with Iran, renew sanctions, and stop any cash transferences. (Why were the Obama and Biden administrations so fond of sending so much money to theocratic Iran)? It would stop all aid to the West Bank and Gaza. It would put a travel ban on anyone from Iran or the West Bank and Gaza and pull visas of any currently from Palestine in the U.S. It would immediately ramp up defense spending, especially on missile defense, dismantle the woke commissariat in the Pentagon, and prepare for the unthinkable and existential abroad.

And there is likely zero chance that the handlers of Joe Biden will do any of that.

 

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34 thoughts on “Reflections on Israel’s New Existential War”

  1. If any World Wokists, and especially those actually in charge of Biden’s agenda read this, please pay particular attention to the fable of The Scorpion and the Frog.

    “A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: “I am sorry, but I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s my character.”

  2. The inhumanity of Hamas, Iran, and O’Biden are sickening in a world already sick. The free world, what remains of it, watches. The fit will hit the shan eventually.

  3. Excellant informative article summerizing recents events that seem to be the beginning of a very sinister future for the free world.
    It needs to be stopped ! We need strong leaders in the free world to come together! United States of America needs a strong leader who can stop this insanity before it gets worse!

  4. You have a Troubled spirit by your comments about “keep to itself”. Finding it odd that your brilliance does not bear witness of the loss of innocent life and that all all all arabs are exactly like the heathen acts of the war in Israel since 1948. It is blood lust in the worst sense of the word. Frankly, It is just a matter of time before the arab devil is manifested, in other dark corners of the world. Keep your academia baaldung away from those who love Israel.

      1. If you’re referring to the article, he’s writing about history and humanity, and making the point that it’s incorrect to say Israel is acting unjustly. In my opinion, it takes only a shred of humanity for a rational, informed reader to agree.

        A lamentable number of innocent civilians are always killed in urban warfare; does Israel have a choice? Not if they want to defend themselves and survive.

  5. As usual, Dr. Hanson has hit the mark. The world is now in greater peril now than it has been in years. With Biden in the White House, it is very likely the situation will continue to spiral out of control and Robert Gates comments on Biden will be sealed. God help us all.

  6. “Israel now knows there is no living with a precivilization Hamas.”
    I really hope so. I live in Israel and its not clear that people got this message. All talks about peace and a political solution are muted at the moment.
    One thing I can’t get is why are people surprised. Hamas has always been ISIS with better PR.

    1. Better PR and a ton more money supplied by the world. Cut all and I mean all aid to the Palestinians, when people SHOW you what they think of you BELIEVE them. I am heart sick that my hard earned money ( Taxes) go to SCUM that support and carry out these foul deeds. The world has no right to try and reign in Israel – The Arab states have lost many wars to Israel, but one Israeli lose would be the end of the state of Israel. With about 10% Palestinians in your population its time to expel them from your country.

  7. Human shields have been a successful defense strategy by Hamas for as long as it’s been in existence. Those days are over. Sadly, human shields should no longer be considered as an impediment in full scale war. There should be military objectives and nothing should stand in the way of achieving them.

  8. When will someone have the courage to stand up and identify the REAL problem…it is the DEATH CULT
    known as ISLAM!

  9. When are we in the US wake up to the fact these prehistoric hominids are planning to do the same to us? Is 911 forgotten?

  10. Is this article too long for X ? If not you should post it there as I believe you will reach a
    wider audience, and this article should be read by millions.

  11. The only Honest thing Barrack Hussein Obama said was
    never underestimate joe to f@ck things up , guess things could be worse under BO

  12. The hostages might be declared already lost casualties of war, so that any Hamas leverage of duress is removed. Then Israel should do what it has to, to neuter, finally.

    1. thebaron@enter.net

      No one cares if you read Hanson’s columns or not. You’re like the people who belong to a social media site who get mad and declare, “I’m leaving!”, more for attention than anything else.

      1. Couldn’t agree more as the comment made from “nobody” is par for those like-minded people. In fact, that users screen name pretty much sums up who they are: nobody.

  13. The Mossad? CIA & NSA – no clue? Remember the supposed intelligence failure of 9/11?

    “An Egyptian intelligence official said that Jerusalem had ignored repeated warnings that the Gaza-based terror group was planning “something big” — which included an apparent direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister to (Israel’s) prime minister.” 9 Oct 2023, Times of Israel

  14. I have just finished “Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam by Raymond Ibrahim” which was recommended by VDH. This latest attack is not new, just the latest vicious attack on the West.

    I heard this a while ago and I think it is true. If all Muslims put down their weapons, tomorrow there would be peace. If all Westerners (Israelis) put down their weapons, tomorrow they would be dead.

  15. Most of my Uncles fought in WWll. Dad was a flight engineer and gunner in a B-24.

    In reference to SS troopers versus Hamas and what’s required to deal with them is this. My Uncle Oran was trained and fought from the beginning of Normandy landing and on into Germany. He joined in 1942 and was with the 36th Armored Infantry Regiment within the 3rd Division under Patton and later he was under Bradley. He told me of many of his experiences fighting and said that if they were up against SS troops they had to kill everyone of them. Not so he said about general Wehrmacht infantry who would generally surrender if they knew the odds were against them. So I understand Israel’s plan to wipe out the whole lot of Hamas to the man. I say God be with them and kill them all.

  16. Joe Biden is a freaking child rapping, communist, rad8cal Islam loving POS. He wants what just happened to Israel, to happen here in the US. That’s why he is allowing everyone that wants us dead, into the country. It will start here soon. So folks, you best prepare to defend yourselves.

  17. Victor, I think that it will always take more than a ” hope that it [Hammas] too feels the same about America and keeps to itself.”

    We have no idea how many of these young thugs have crossed the border under Biden’s implicit invitation. If their numbers are large, it will take more than hope, they have already proclaimed we are its victim list. It is now just a matter of opportunity.

    Worse, we have an underclass that has been denied an education that would allow their numbers to work productively in a modern economy. And this has been amplified by the indoctrination of those who bothered to complete high school and now exhibit inculcated behaviors that make them unemployable. I had one such fool, a white male, attempting to work at a grocery store. He complained that he had been fired from a competing store where he had been paid $25/hr versus the $20/hr in his current job. In between his comments he finally looked at my items and uttered “Who eats that crap?” referring to the chicken livers. They are quite good if cooked properly with sufficient garlic in olive oil, but this batch was for our dog, no garlic. I think he was shown the door with a boot in the rump, as I haven’t seen him lately. I expect that he will join the ranks of the self-proclaimed victims, and with a bit more indoctrination, he’ll be primed for Hammas-like behavior under the right conditions … such as those that characterize downtown Seattle.

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