100 Things We've Learned After Nine Months of War
The Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war has taught us a ton about Zionism, the Palestinians, Jewish friends and enemies, and the Jewish world as a whole.
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1. Germany is a true friend to Israel.
In addition to remarks and actions in defense of Israel after the Jewish state was brutally attacked by Palestinian terrorists on October 7th, Germany recently leaped to the aid of Israel at the International Court of Justice, rejecting South Africa’s preposterous accusation of Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
“Accusing Israel of genocide is a complete distortion of victims and perpetrators,” said German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck.
2. U.S. support continues to waver.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has incessantly used the words “antisemitism” and Islamophobia in the same sentence, and superfluously preached morality to Israel, not because American standards are higher, but because Israel is itself — a Jewish state that must adhere to guidelines no other country would even think about entertaining, given the circumstances.
Despite Israel’s extraordinary efforts to avoid causing civilian casualties, U.S. administration officials have been complaining that Israelis are not doing enough.
“Far too many Palestinians have been killed,” declared Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that Israel has failed to abide by international humanitarian law. Biden, himself, complained to American Jewish donors that Israel was losing international support due to its “indiscriminate bombing.”
These signals are part of a greater trend of woeful incompetence in the Democratic Party, since Obama’s presidencies when Biden was Vice President, with regard to Middle East. In 2021, for example, the Biden Administration cut off its support for Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, and Washington later removed the Houthis from its list of terrorist organizations.
“American policy-makers, for many years now, have refused to understand that ignoring aggression and broadcasting fear in the Middle East is the surest way to encourage aggression and realize that fear,” wrote Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.2
On Thursday, Kamala Harris insisted that she would not be “silent” on suffering in Gaza, in comments made shortly after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — as if Israel is to blame for the situation in Gaza. As one of our guest writers wrote:
“Only a monster could look at the devastation in Gaza and not be moved to tears. And only a fool could look at it and blame Israel.”
3. Europe is fractured.
The sentiments coming out of European countries have been mixed since the Palestinian massacre in Israel on October 7th.
Most recently, a joint statement was issued by an international coalition supportive of military intervention to disable Houthi capabilities of endangering global shipping lanes, including attacks led by the U.S. and UK.
Just five of the 27 countries in the European Union attached themselves to the statement — Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands — even though the Houthis’ attacks on commercial vessels have the potential to mostly affect European economies.
4. The Saudis are rooting for an Israeli victory.
At the end of October 2023, one of the missiles fired towards Israel by Houthi rebels in Yemen was intercepted by Saudi Arabia.
Then, on November 11th, the Saudis hosted an Arab-Islamic summit against the backdrop of the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war. When it came time to deliver a “unified collective position” at the summit’s end, the proposal was to sever all diplomatic and economic relations with Israel, deny Arab airspace to Israeli flights, and for oil-producing Muslim countries to “threaten to use oil as a means of leverage” — all in order to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.1 Saudi Arabia was reportedly among the countries that blocked this proposal.
More recently, Saudi Arabia likely opened its airspace so that Israel could attack the Houthis in Yemen.
5. The United Nations and Red Cross have grossly failed their missions.
My only question is: Who is paying them to be Hamas’ mouthpieces, servants, and even co-conspirators?
6. The Islamic Republic of Iran is desperate not to lose Hamas.
After all, why would Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iranian-backed militias in the West Bank, Syria, and Iraq be attacking Israel? Because if Hamas goes down, Iran knows that its baby, Hezbollah, will be next.
7. Antisemitism knows no bounds.
After months of genetic tests and group discussions, a gay Jewish sperm donor was suddenly told by a lesbian couple that they could not proceed with the process due to the war in Gaza. True story.2
A festival in Virginia canceled a menorah lighting because they were concerned that a Chanukah celebration — which has nothing to do with Israel — would send the message that the festival was “supporting the killing/bombing of thousands of men, women, and children.”
8. The #MeToo movement includes all women, unless they are Jewish.
The lack of condemnation regarding the horrific crimes against women during the Palestinian massacre in Israel on October 7th is not only unbelievable; it is a sign of significantly deeper biases that must be addressed.
“It is not that condemnations of gender-based violence by Hamas have been weak or insufficient,” wrote Michal Herzog, Israel’s First Lady. “There have been none at all. Statement after statement by organizations like UN Women, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women have failed to condemn these crimes. They failed us, and all women, at this critical moment.”3
9. South Africa does not know what ‘genocide’ means.
Hamas leaders say they would do what they did on October 7th many times over to teach Israel a lesson. Thousands of people are marching in cities spanning the globe to implicitly and explicitly encourage the killing of more Jews, wherever they are in the world.
“From the river to the sea” chants have gained great steam as the new “Heil Hitler” — only the former waxes more poetically. “Pro-Palestinian” activists aren’t just calling for a ceasefire to protect Hamas; they’re advocating to “globalize the intifada.”
Yet the South African government somehow thinks the Jews — Israel, more specifically — is waging genocide in Gaza against the Palestinians.
10. Or South Africa is on someone’s payroll.
After all, Hamas has an office building in Cape Town.
11. Journalists are the new ‘innocent children and women.’
A Hamas deputy squad commander and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist, who called themselves “journalists,” operated a drone in a war zone and, as such, were killed by an Israeli strike. But the media tells us that “Israel is killing journalists.”
12. Having one of the world’s strongest armies does not guarantee victory in war.
As we have seen since the 1990s, and especially today, Israel also has to fight an information war and a diplomatic war, which in some ways are more important than the actual battles on the ground.
There is no doubt that Israel is giving Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad a good whooping in Gaza, but we Israelis are tremendously struggling in the information war and the diplomatic war. Ultimately, this might prohibit Israel from achieving proper victory in Gaza and perhaps in future conflicts.
Additionally, we must understand that the wars which Israel previously won — such as the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War — are much different in nature than this current one. Those wars were country-versus-country conflicts, but today’s war is “country versus terror group deeply embedded within a civilian population” — a deliberate and admittedly creative strategy by Israel’s enemies (chiefly, Iran).
This gives the appearance, especially in the media and on social media, of a country-versus-people war, which does not bode well in successfully fighting the information war and diplomatic war.
13. Arab ‘brotherhood’ with the Palestinians (still) does not exist.
With their vast fortunes, Arab countries who claim “brotherhood” with the Palestinians could have temporarily sheltered Palestinians from Gaza, either in their own countries or in Egypt’s vast Sinai desert, while Israel alone attempts to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
But, going back to the 1940s, Arab leaders never recognized Palestinians as an ethnic group with self-determination rights, but rather as a part of the larger Arab goal to create Greater Syria, covering today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel, a vision outlined in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915 and 1916.
Since Egypt and its Arab partners haven’t ensured the safety of Palestinian civilians from Gaza by temporarily giving them shelter and other basic needs, many of these Palestinian civilians — including children — will die. And make no mistake: This is Egypt and the Arab world’s fault.
14. The Arab world has never really been Israel’s partner.
Some Israelis will blame Egypt and its Arab partners for not helping Israel eradicate Hamas with minimal damage to Palestinian civilians, but many Israelis (including myself) will not blame them. The Arab world has never really been our partners, even against the worst horrors of terrorism, and to expect them to change now is naive.
Hence why the idea of true peace with the Arabs is an illusion, an imaginary assumption that has no basis in reality. Partial peace is possible, meaning peace mixed with terrorism, which will exist provided Israel has sufficient deterrent power. On October 7th, this deterrent power either collapsed or was on an unexplainable hiatus.
15. ‘Pro-Palestinian’ activists are who we thought they were.
The timeline has become hazy for many, but let’s get one thing straight: “Pro-Palestinian” demonstrations around the world started calling for violent Palestinian uprisings and gassing the Jews after Hamas’ massacre of Jews on October 7th, and before Israel’s response in Gaza. They were not showing solidarity with Palestinians; they were celebrating dead Jews.
16. Many Western democracies have overindulged on individual liberties.
“It is always interesting to note that only western liberal democracies tolerate and give succour to the most heinous arguments and positions in public protests,” wrote Gareth Cliff, a South African radio personality and television host who says he is not Jewish and has no ties to Israel.
“You couldn’t picket on the side of quite laudable things like education for girls in Taliban Afghanistan, gay rights in Syria, or against the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The Ayatollahs of Iran wouldn’t allow women to protest the hijab there under threats of violence,” added Cliff. “But London, New York, Sydney and even Johannesburg will embrace marches where people actively call for genocide.”
17. Israel (still) cannot win the ‘war of information.’
If Israel bombs Hamas, it’s purposefully endangering Palestinian civilian life. If Israel gives civilians advance warnings to relocate from certain areas, it’s engaging in ethnic cleansing. If Israel fires missiles into civilian infrastructure where Palestinian terrorists purposely house their forces and equipment, Israel is committing war crimes. If Israel attacks northern Gaza, it’s genocide. But if Israel pleads with the people of northern Gaza to relocate first, that’s “forced transfer,” which is genocide.
Don’t you wish people would just say it, without beating around the bush: “Let yourselves be massacred, Jews. Don’t fight back. Don’t do anything at all.”
18. Many people have still not woken up to Left-wing antisemitism.
Blaming one group (Israel) for another group’s refusals and failures (Egypt, the Arab world, the United Nations, and others) is called antisemitism, also known as Jew-hatred.
Yet it is not the blatant antisemitism that so many of us think of when we hear this word. It is covert antisemitism, subliminal antisemitism, disguised as “anti-Israel” or “pro-Palestine.” And this is what makes it hard to detect.
19. Many people still believe the State of Israel was created specifically because of the Holocaust.
The years of circa 1850 to 1930 are equally critical to the creation of Israel in 1948 — far before the rise of antisemitic Nazi Germany and the subsequent start of the Holocaust in 1939. Full context here.
20. Blood libels (antisemitic rumors) still exist.
Like when Palestinian authorities reported early in the war that Israel attacked a hospital, killing some 500 people. The joke was not that Palestinian terrorists kill their own people and then manipulate these tragedies into an anti-Israel blood libel, but that somehow the Palestinians are the only people on Earth who can count 500 dead bodies in just a few minutes.
Still, virtually the entire world including many Arab countries, organizations like the antisemitic United Nations and others, politicians, political puppets, thought leaders, influencers, and wannabe influencers immediately took this Palestinian narrative and ran with it to the moon and back.
Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President (a largely ceremonious position, not to be confused with the prime minister) called accusations that Israel struck the hospital in Gaza what they were: “a blood libel.”
21. ‘Progressives’ are not who you think they are.
Prior to this Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, I used to say that I have a few “progressive” beliefs. But it took this war for me realize just how warped and demented “progressive” ideology really is.
Many progressives think it is okay for Palestinian terrorists to do what they did on October 7th, because of the past Israeli-Palestinian saga, which might make them “pro-Palestinian” — but it also makes them pro-rape, pro-massacres, pro-kidnapping, pro-beheading of babies.
Many “progressives” have called for a ceasefire, yet have not stood loud and clear for the release of all the hostages before anything else happens. In other words, they think Israelis should allow themselves to be massacred, burned to death, beheaded, raped, mutilated, and kidnapped — and then patiently wait for the return of the hostages without doing anything else, just going about our day-to-day life. Business as usual. As if nothing happened.
Many “progressives” stand up for the Palestinians because they are a “humanitarians” and subscribe to “shared humanity” and “all humans are equal” — but they are not and haven’t been standing up for every other group of humans in the world that is presently facing harsh conditions — meaning they are picky and choosy about their humanitarianism and shared humanity.
It is time to start calling “progressives” what they really are — hypocrites — and it is time to realize that extremists are extremists, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they are on. Let’s next give those on one end of this spectrum a benefit of the doubt while we scold those on the other end.
22. ‘Progressives’ are not as open-minded as they claim to be.
When you aim to have a conversation with them about the incredibly intricate topics of Israel, Zionism, Palestinian history, and Jews, they reflexively become some of the most biased, close-minded, ignorant, and uneducated people on the planet.
For example, many so-called “progressives” are indeed highly educated, meaning they have university degrees. “Thirsty for knowledge,” they proclaim. Yet when you present them with certified facts about Israel and Jews, they reflexively refuse to be fact-checked. Mind you, these are the same people who furiously demand that news channels fact-check Donald Trump and others.
If your interpretation and manifestation of liberalism is inherently hypocritical, then you are not liberal. You are a fake, and a fraud.
23. The Internet is making people more illiterate.
Those who claim Israel is engaging in “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “war crimes” have no idea what these terms actually mean. I thought Google was supposed to make us smarter.
24. ‘Proportionality’ doesn’t mean what many people think it means.
Proportionality in regular life and in war are two different things. As the joke in Israel goes: Us Israelis considered a proportional response, but none of our soldiers want to go into Gaza and rape women, kidnap the elderly, cut off babies’ heads, and burn children to death.
Under International Humanitarian Law, proportionality requires that any degree of damage (up to and including death) to civilians not be excessive in relation to the military advantage anticipated from a strike against a military target.
Simply, and unfortunately, international rules of law recognize that civilians are often killed during war; and, most of the time, these deaths are actually not indicative of a war crime. Instead, the legal test for “proportionality” requires that each individual strike be looked at with a particular balancing analysis: The strike must be intended to achieve a military objective.
25. It is okay to take sides sometimes.
In the words of Elie Wiesel: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
26. Palestinian history does not reflect so positively on the Palestinian cause.
These days, so many people are chiming in about the Palestinians, but very few actually know about their history, which can help all of us better understand the current Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, as well as its geopolitical implications on the Middle East and North Africa.
To claim that there is no such thing as the Palestinians is plainly ignorant and inflammatory. They exist now and they have existed in different iterations for quite some time. Yet, it is their history that shows just how much Palestinians, and their supporters, are responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including but certainly not limited to the present situation.
27. Ideology is not for sale.
For years, Israeli leaders thought that Hamas and its hellbent, rampaging ideology could essentially be bribed to not inflict too much destruction on Israel and its citizens. More specifically, the Israeli government reportedly allowed Hamas to receive monthly installments of $30 million from Qatar, and Israeli officials also issued some 18,000 work permits for Gazan residents to work in Israel.
Everyday Israeli citizens are also guilty of thinking all or even most Palestinians want to abide by play-for-pay rules. You’ll often hear certain Israelis say things like, “Most Palestinians just want to put food on their table and take care of their families.”
As someone recently commented to me, “Yeah, most Palestinians want to put food on their table and take care of their families. Just probably not while living next to a Jewish state.”
This is because Hamas, and other heavily religious Palestinian factions such as Islamic Jihad, are immensely driven by ideology: a set of beliefs or philosophies held for reasons that are not purely epistemic (relating to knowledge), in which practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones.
28. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
An enduring solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a so-called “happy ending” — is a nice idea in theory, but not rooted in any semblance of reality. Many Israelis realized this long ago. It is time for the rest of the world to wake up to it.
29. Few people know anything about the ‘Israeli occupation.’
People now seem afraid that Gaza will be occupied by Israel. Those same people were already saying that Gaza was occupied by Israel. Which one is it, exactly?
30. ‘From the River to the Sea’ is the new ‘Heil Hitler.’
Only that the former waxes much more poetically.
31. Hamas has more supporters than we thought.
There are American hostages, British hostages, French hostages, Thai hostages, Russian hostages — and people are marching, not in support of the hostages, but in support of the hostage-takers.
A poll done by Bir Zeit University in Ramallah found that more than 75 percent of Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza support Hamas and what they perpetrated on October 7th. If an election was held today, Western-backed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the “Mayor of Ramallah” (since that’s all he really controls) would lose to Hamas.
32. The West is allowing non-Westerners to pervert its virtues.
Virtues like “freedom of speech” are being used to justify chants like “Gas the Jews!” and other blatantly antisemitic demonstrations. “Freedom of religion” is being used to overlook Islamic Jihad and its obvious intentions to kill as many Jews as possible.
And “democracy” is being used by politicians to tolerate grossly incendiary behavior and flagrant double-standards, in fear of defeating backlash during the next election cycle. So much for Western ideals.
33. The Jews cannot make anyone happy.
Amos Oz, the great Israeli novelist and author, famously wrote: “When my father was a boy in Poland, streets of Europe were covered with graffiti. ‘Jews, go back to Palestine.’ When my father revisited Europe 50 years later, the walls had new graffiti. ‘Jews, get out of Palestine.’”
34. Some Jews have completely lost it.
For Jews who are saying this war is “not in my name,” they are absolutely correct. This war has nothing to do with you. Imagine how self-centered you have to be to think that something which is happening thousands of kilometers away from you has anything to do with you.
35. People do not know how to do math.
It is always interesting how fundamentalist Islam encourages Muslims to kill Jews. And I get it, most Muslims are probably peaceful. But that’s not the point. If there are one billion Muslims in the world, and let’s say 90 percent of them are peaceful, that means 100 million Muslims want to unleash violence in the name of Islam. This isn’t an exaggeration, or paranoia. This is math.
36. The Jews really do not own the media.
For weeks, respectable media outlets have been retracting their libelous reporting about Israel, and people have been deleting their antisemitic-riddled social media posts. Don’t you wish we Jews were better at, as people have accused us of doing for decades, controlling the media?
37. The Palestinians are not who we want them to be.
Even Hamas’ recent decline in popularity could not fully substantiate U.S. President Joe Biden’s claim that “the vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas.” Perhaps he was referring to the fact that, of the more than two million Gazans, only an estimated 150,000 were actual Hamas members.
Then again, it is quite possible the president and the polls are all fumbling the point — like the West has been doing in the Middle East for decades. It’s not what Hamas is, but rather what it does. Palestinians may well be disillusioned with Hamas governance, but they remain overwhelmingly approving of terror.
In other words, there is a drastic disconnect between what so many people think the Palestinian cause is, and what Palestinians think the Palestinian cause is.
38. Hostages and kidnapped are not one in the same.
The difference between being taken hostage and being kidnapped is that, with kidnapping, the captives’ location is unknown.
In a “typical” hostage crisis, decision-makers calculate the risk that terrorists will harm the hostages, or that the rescue team will be hurt during the operation — as long as accurate intelligence, manpower, and an experienced rescue team exist.
But this is not just a military operation. This is war — the worst war that Israel has ever faced. As such, Israel is engaging in some of the harshest attacks on Gazan soil, which includes a synchronous onslaught of aerial, sea, intelligence, cyber, and ground forces.
“Those types of activities would not support a fast secure deal of exchanging our hostages for the convicted terrorists that they want to free from Israeli jails,” according to counterterrorism expert Boaz Ganor . “It’s still possible to conduct a full-scale military operation and use intelligence aiming to free hostages there, but the possibility of doing that simultaneously and freeing the hostages unharmed is close to zero.”4
39. Somehow it’s possible for some 250 people being kidnapped to become a subplot, an afterthought, and even forgotten.
Again, Jewish lives do not matter.
40. Iran’s proxies have been underrated.
It is been well-documented that the Iranian revolution culminated in an overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. The theocratic regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a religious cleric who headed one of the rebel factions, superseded the Pahlavi dynasty. Since then, Khomeini has been relentlessly investing in exporting Iran’s Islamic revolution, with the aim of maximizing regional hegemony.
As part of this masterplan, the Iranians identify other like-minded rebel groups across the Middle East and North Africa, and supply them with training, weaponry, and funds to carry out (or stand ready to carry out) “missions” that align with this masterplan. This is what the term “Iranian proxies” means.
41. Muslims are better than the Nazis at Jew-hating propaganda.
Across the Muslim world, antisemitism is different than in non-religious countries, such as Europe and North America. It is used as some crazed, abstract system for making sense of a “broken” world that doesn’t subscribe to their fundamentalist Muslim ideals.
Fundamentalist Muslims don’t just oppose Israel. They have called the Jewish state things like a “sinister, unclean rabid dog of the region” whose leaders “look like beasts and cannot be called human.”
In the Palestinian territories, such propaganda is indoctrinated in children from very young ages, as they are taught the supreme value and various methods of killing Jews. In United Nations schools, mosques, and other government-sanctioned venues, they learn to glorify hatred and nurture violence. In “summer camps,” they teach kids how to fire automatic weapons and kidnap Israelis.
“Here the facts speak in a language that is not ambiguous,” famed Israeli historian Benzion Netanyahu said. “But if the Jews choose to ignore the facts, to belittle them, there is no possibility of influencing them under any reasoning whatsoever.”5
42. Internalized antisemitism is real.
Internalized antisemitism is the concept that people can ingest and even accept stereotypes, discrimination, prejudices, and traumas experienced by Jews, their ethnicity, or their religion.
Consider when you hear about a Jewish person who commits some heinous crime, such as Bernie Madoff or Jeffrey Epstein. Rationally, there is no reason why the Jewishness of these criminals should make us feel ashamed by their actions, though I’ll bet that many of us felt that shame.
And the main reason we feel it is because of the negative stereotypes that abound Jews, Judaism, Jewishness, and the Jewish People. We are triggered by the nasty beliefs that others hold about Jews and Jewishness, which have become so entrenched in the soil of civilization, that many of us have absorbed some of these beliefs ourselves.
43. Some people think they know more about Israel and the Middle East than people who’ve been living there for decades.
Arrogant, much?
44. The Israeli settlements are very much overemphasized.
Less than 10 percent of the Israeli population lives in the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank).
At the same time, it is critical for people to understand that Judea and Samaria have never truly been a defining issue in the saga that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel dismantled all the settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005, and the following year, Hamas was supposedly voted into power in democratic elections.
Five years earlier, the Israelis again were willing to sacrifice land as part of the Camp David offer (brokered by U.S. President Bill Clinton), and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was not willing to make a deal or even a counteroffer.
45. Qatar has become the largest foreign donor to American universities.
According to a study published in 2022 by the National Association of Academics in the United States, a study that did not attract much attention at the time, the Qataris donated $4.7 billion to U.S. universities starting in 2001, precisely after the September 11th attacks. The recipients, however, did not report part of the money received, as required by law.
In fact, Qatar (whose allies include Iran, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, North Korea, and China) has become the largest foreign donor to American academia in the two decades since 9/11. This includes Cornell (an “Ivy League” school), Georgetown, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon, all considered among the most prestigious U.S. universities.
In another report comprising four separate studies, at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian.6
What’s been transpiring on the campuses of these universities and others since the war’s outbreak is a multi-participant, multifaceted strategy that is now coming to fruition at the so-called “right moment” — immediately after the Palestinian massacre and abduction in Israel on October 7th.
46. Gaza, which has received several billions of dollars in humanitarian aid over the years, seems to be running out of everything, except for rockets.
How is that possible?
47. Israel has a much better combatant-to-civilian death ratio than the international average.
While Israel is routinely criticized for any of its actions that kill civilians, you may be surprised to know that Israel’s civilian-to-combatant ratio is routinely much lower than the nine-to-one international average. (Yes, you read that correctly. Worldwide, for every one combatant killed, an average of nine civilians die.)
In the very last operation carried out by the Israeli military prior to October 7th (in Jenin), 0.6 civilians were killed for every one combatant killed. In other words, the Israeli military managed to kill more combatants than civilians, which is extremely rare.
During this war, the civilian-to-combatant ratio in Gaza is projected to be two-to-one, meaning that for every one combatant killed, an average of two civilians die.
48. The West Bank is disputed territory, not occupied.
Jews live in less than 12-percent geographically of the West Bank. The Jews living in the West Bank are not an ongoing administrative presence or the government in the Palestinian West Bank, as evidenced by the fact that they don’t make rules or draft laws, even though they share the same roads. That’s not occupation.
49. The State of Israel is the greatest decolonization project on planet Earth.
Enough said.
50. American Jews are officially dying a fast death.
That’s right, the country home to the world’s second-largest Jewish population, and in some ways its most powerful, is rapidly approaching social extinction, for eight reasons:
Death by assimilation
Lack of knowledge and effective education
Growing arrogance and ignorance
Jewish disunification
Jewish leadership (or lack thereof)
How American Jews are raised (e.g. “safetyism”)
A fraught relationship with Israel and Zionism
The rise of progressive liberalism among American Jews
51. Palestinian violence and breeding children evidently go hand-in-hand.
Children make up nearly half of Gaza’s population, at around 47 percent, among the two million people who live in the strip. During the First Intifada (a violent Palestinian uprising against Israel), which began in 1987, research found a surge in marriage and fertility rates across Gaza.
“Palestinian women are not having lots of children because they don’t know about contraception, or can’t access contraception,” said Sara Randall, an anthropologist at University College London, who co-authored the research. “So one has to conclude that they actually want lots of children.”7
52. Palestinian women’s high fertility rate goes hand-in-hand with low percentages of women in the labor market.
One of the outcomes of Gaza’s incredibly high fertility rate is that the strip has one of the lowest percentages of women in the labor market, at less than 15 percent. It’s a place in the world where the least amount of women work outside the home, compared to Scandinavian countries which have a 70-to-80 percent female employment rate.
“In a situation where disempowerment, underemployment, and marginalization have left few opportunities for expression of identity, reproduction is one of the few liberties which remains, and also contributes to the larger goal of increasing the Palestinian people,” Randall’s study said.
53. Israelis are changing.
Many Israelis are growing forgetful because our Western world insulation in a corner of the Middle East has disillusioned us into disregarding that we still live in this largely fanatical, ideological, crazed, dangerous, and volatile anti-West region.
Many Israelis are growing irrational because we’ve literally tried every possible avenue, every possible tactic, to achieve peace with the Palestinians — including 10 different two-state solution proposals, starting in the 1930s and most recently in 2019 — yet nothing seems to have worked. What’s that saying about insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
Many Israelis are growing ignorant because we somehow convinced ourselves that our enemies are the social and political opposites of us (the Israeli right if you are a leftist, the Israeli Left if you are a right-winger, the Israeli secular if you’re religious, the Israeli religious if you’re secular, the Israeli settlers if you live in mainland Israel, the Israeli middle and upper classes if you live in the Israeli settlements, and so on).
And, finally, many Israelis are growing self-centered because career opportunities, consumerism, individualism, and celebrity culture have become the new tokens of social currency. These trends erode the values that have historically made Israel such an impressive society: family, community, togetherness, sacrifice, history, education, and tradition.
54. Israelis might be too cocky.
The prevailing assumption in Israel is that, since we managed to overcome several wars in the past, we believe that we will overcome them now and in the future as well — but there is no security in this hubris. If anything, it leads to complacency, which leads to decay and failure.
“That is why I sometimes give my opinion to the possibility of defeat,” Benzion Netanyahu said. “If, in situations of danger, a nation does not have enough recognition of its righteousness, enough willingness to sacrifice itself, and enough understanding of the importance of the struggle, it may lose its battle.”
55. Zionism asked people to be something they were previously unaccustomed to being.
The national enterprise of the “return of Zion” took an apolitical people and suddenly put them into the framework of political life. It took a people who were mostly immersed in the affairs of metropolitan citizens — study and professions — and effectively forced them to cultivate barren, malaria-infested lands with their own hands.
It took a people who were historically barred from owning landing by different regimes and governments across the world, and it effectively forced us to acquire land and be landowners for the proverbial very first time. And it took a people who were mostly non-combatants and engulfed them in the conditions of a prolonged war.
Israel has people who are inherently good people, who are suitable for doing good business and innovating, but who may not be suitable for the historical task and geopolitical situation the Jews are in.
56. Every nation must be prepared for war.
As long as there are possibilities of conflagration in the world, every nation must be prepared for war. Humanity is still far from solving the problem of war, and it is far from a norm where nations will beat their swords into plowshares.
Therefore, the fundamental structure of political existence as it is, requires every nation to keep its sword and be ready to use it. All the more so for the Jewish state, living in the region that we do. The only realistic solution in this situation is to be unshakably strong, not just in words, but in politics, socioeconomics, security, and defense — forever and always.
57. Both the State of Israel and Jews across the world have ignorantly and arrogantly weakened ourselves.
We know this to be true when, for example, the Israeli prime minister, earlier this year, reportedly received and ignored two stark warnings from the head of research at the Military Intelligence Directorate, that the societal divisions sparked by his government’s effort to radically overhaul the judiciary, were emboldening Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran to take actions against the Jewish state.
58. Historically, religious doctrines were more important than political considerations for terrorism.
Religious terrorism, also known as “sacred terror,” has been ongoing since ancient times.
“Sacred terrorists find their rationale in the past, either in divine instructions transmitted long ago or in interpretations of precedents from founding periods of the parent religions,” according to UCLA professor David Rapoport. “Our obliviousness to holy terror rests on a misconception that the distinction between it and the modern form is one of scale, not of nature or kind.”8
59. ‘Progressive’ Jews have perverted Judaism and Jewish history.
Sure, their “wokeness” has made us alert to systemic injustice, while also being an aggressive, performative take on progressive politics that only makes things worse. Every week, it seems like new non-negotiable “woke” demands surface.
What was treated as insignificant yesterday may suddenly cause outrage and ostracism tomorrow. The package of “progressive” ideas continues to grow like wildflowers, and the language morphs regularly.
And then there’s the new thinking about race and power, which singles out Israel as a despicable human-rights offender and distorts the complex history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
For many of these progressives, intersectionality means that other countries’ history of racial inequality is projected onto the standoff between Israelis and Palestinians, preposterously defining Israelis as white supremacists and Palestinians as non-White victims.
What’s more, the growing number of mandatory programs supposedly promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion pose their own set of challenges. Apparently, only certain minorities are worthy of protection, among them Jews are not. On the contrary, Jews are automatically defined as part of the “White oppressor class.”
60. Israel’s existence has little to do America.
There is no question that the State of Israel has benefitted tremendously from its relationship with the United States, which is still the world’s military and economic superpower.
But most people do not realize that, in the years leading up to and after the founding of the Jewish state, America was not a “staunch supporter” of Israel. Far from it.
Support for Zionism among Americans was minimal until after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, when the U.S. started seriously selling arms to the Israelis, who essentially proved their value as an ally by virtue of this victory.
“Israel did not grow strong because it had an American alliance. It acquired an American alliance because it had grown strong,” according to Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College.9
61. Israel’s political strength is also the source of its greatest weakness.
Israel, on the other hand, has a parliamentary democratic system made up of several parties — none of which have ever received enough votes on their own to secure a majority of seats in the Knesset (Israel’s legislature).
This means parties must team up to create a coalition and reach the 61-seat minimum needed to form a ruling government, which Israelis view as a positive because several parties in a coalition allow for a variety of voices to be heard and a wide range of socioeconomic needs to be addressed.
However, these coalitions can also be shaky, especially if they hover around the 61-seat minimum. If you lose one party’s support, or sometimes even one member of parliament, you’ve lost the majority, at which point the coalition disbands and a new election is called (if the coalition falls beneath the 61-seat minimum).
The other factor is Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s served as prime minister for longer than anyone else in Israeli history (nearly one-quarter of the country’s existence, since there aren’t any term limits for Israeli prime ministers). Netanyahu is in the midst of a corruption trial, and some top politicians on the center and center-right, who agree with him ideologically, refuse to work with him for personal or political reasons.
This made it difficult for Netanyahu to build lasting governing majorities, resulting in an unprecedented five elections from 2019 to 2022.
62. Palestinian victimhood is a money-making machine.
Since the 1960s, Palestinian leaders have used bribery, nepotism, and kleptocracy to generate billions in international aid and personal wealth.
63. Israel is completely misunderstood in the West.
Literally and figuratively, Israel sits in the very middle of “the West” and “the East” — often taking the best from both worlds, but not quite fitting in to either one.
In “the West,” Jews are not considered an oppressed group. Overwhelmingly, Jews are considered oppressors. On the Right, they think we control the world, and on the Left anti-Zionists claim we are lording over our Arab brethren via the so-called Israeli occupation.
64. Identity politics does not accommodate specifically Jewish concerns.
Even those in U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration cannot speak about antisemitism without mentioning “Islamophobia” in the same sentence.
Identity politics doesn’t welcome the “we” — as in the collective, the whole of society. It groups society into “us” and “them,” forcing people to “pick a team” they feel more inclined to cheer for. Individuals are defined uni-dimensionally: black, female, Japanese, et cetera. Politics becomes a stage for teams, where the participants are “team” representatives. The outcome is that issues which affect all teams are overlooked.
This societal fragmentation is the very antithesis of Judaism, and it increasingly challenges Jews who are immersed in environments of identity politics to be authentically Jewish, which I define as the understanding that we Jews are part of a historically rich lineage of people, formerly called the Israelites and Hebrews, and now known as the Jews, who are tasked with perfecting the world regardless of what team you and we are on.
65. Jews can be antisemitic.
Throughout Jewish history, and especially in modern Jewish history, Jew-on-Jew hostilities have reared their ugly heads, and there are many reasons for it, such as:
Internalized antisemitism
Desire for assimilation
Perceived “White privilege”
Negative feelings regarding ethnocentrism
Lack of knowledge and education
66. Zionism is the misfortune of success.
Zionism has been vilified for its very success in self-transforming victims into sovereigns. But isn’t the very goal of progress to move away from victim to self-determination?
67. Israel is among the countries bucking the trend of global fertility.
After the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war broke out on October 7th, many young Israelis (both secular and religious) suddenly decided they want to have more children.
Israel, in general, is among the countries bucking the trend of global fertility that’s on pace to drop below 1.7 by the end of this century. Across the OECD, a group mostly of rich countries, the average fertility rate has fallen from almost three in 1970 to 1.6, well below the rate of about 2.1 needed to keep a population from shrinking.
Whereas the average British and French woman has 1.6 and 1.8 children, respectively, their Israeli peers are currently having 2.9 children on average.
“If an Israeli woman has fewer than three children, she feels as if she owes everyone an explanation — or an apology,” an Israeli demographer sarcastically said.10
68. Greta Thunberg cancelled herself.
Throughout the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, the climate quasi-activist has tried to conflate “climate justice” with sympathy for the Palestinians and Gaza.
Apparently, though, whoever is behind you knows very well how this game is played: dumbing down convoluted, nuanced topics; ignoring historical context; and hysterical people screaming through megaphones: “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
If she really seeks to save the planet, it is time to grow up and think, like an adult, about realistic solutions rooted in history and context — instead of posting tweets and Instagram photos.
69. It is time for Israel to reconsider its allies.
America’s monopoly on Israeli defense is endangering the Jewish state and Jews across the world.
Ultimately, a more mutually beneficial relationship would enable the Jewish state to shop on the open market and make military deals with others, including the Europeans, who at least seem to understand the Islamic jihad threat far better than do the Americans. Plus, Israel is more geographically aligned with the Europeans and, in some ways, is the line of first defense against Islamic jihad increasingly spilling over into Europe.
Above all, a more balanced allyship between the Israelis, Americans, and Europeans could urgently create a true, formidable Western front against nefarious actors like Putin, the Iranian regime, North Korea, and China. If the Russia-Ukraine war has proved anything, it’s that Western deterrence is barely hanging by a thread.
70. American institutions of higher education are not what they used to be.
Presidents of some of the world’s most “prestigious” academic institutions — including Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania — will tell us it “depends on the context” when testifying, under oath in front of the U.S. Congress, about students calling for the killing of Jews on their campuses.
71. Ignorance knows no bounds.
“Gays for Gaza” apparently haven’t heard the running joke that there aren’t enough tall buildings in the strip from which to throw them off.
Activists hold signs that affirm they “stand with Palestine” even though Palestine ceased to exist in 1948 when the British repealed their mandate of the area, and the Palestinians refused to accept the United Nations’ Partition Plan which recommended two states, a Jewish and an Arab one, for two peoples.
And a new fad called “influencers” who have several thousand “followers” effectively think they are the second coming of Christ, capable of lecturing us on everything moral, righteous, and praiseworthy.
A newish political faction called “progressives,” who have an obsessive preoccupation with their and other people’s pronouns, are so intoxicated by the “pro-Palestinian” hoopla, they’ve become blinded to the reality that, for the vast majority of them, their pronouns in the Palestinian territories would be “was” and “were.”
“There’s no shame in being ignorant,” Ron Hassner wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.”
72. Free speech has been perverted.
It really should not be that difficult to differentiate between free speech, the fundamental democratic right, and free speech, the amoral we-will-attack-whoever-we-want ideology.
A free speech vision that does not take seriously hate speech — and, by extension, micro-aggressions, bullying, fear-mongering, and gaslighting — is repugnantly reckless, no less harmful to society.
According to legal historian Laura Weinrib: “History can tell us that we’ve been too credulous in accepting the traditional narrative about the trajectory of free speech.”
73. Zionist legends told us things decades ago that are still incredibly truthful today.
Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister, said: “Israel is still the only country in the world against which there is a written document to the effect that it must disappear.”
Moshe Sharett, the country’s first foreign minister and second prime minister, said: “The state of Israel must, from time to time, prove clearly that it is strong, and able and willing to use force, in a devastating and highly effective way. If it does not prove this, it will be swallowed up, and perhaps wiped off the face of the earth.”
Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s fifth prime minister, said: “Israel has an important principle: It is only Israel that is responsible for our security.”
Golda Meir, Israel’s first and only female head of government, said that “we’re not the only people in the world who’ve had difficulties with neighbors; that has happened to many. We are the only country in the world whose neighbors do not say, ‘We are going to war because we want a certain piece of land from Israel,’ or waterways or anything of that kind. We’re the only people in the world where our neighbors openly announce they just won’t have us here. And they will not give up fighting and they will not give up war as long as we remain alive. Here.”
Yitzhak Shamir, the seventh prime minister of Israel, said: “Israel has had a very bad history with the United Nations, and whoever cares for himself in Israel distances himself from that organization.”
Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Defense Minister during the 1967 Six-Day War, said: “Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.”
74. The Jews suffered the worst atrocity since the Holocaust on October 7th, but it did not make any difference.
Look around you at the hate and vitriol. Even in an hour of enormous grief, streets in the West are abound with people perverting the rights of free speech and “peaceful” protest.
They have chosen, loud and clear, to support genocidal terrorists, while calling for globalizing the intifada. This is not about Gaza or the Palestinians anymore. It’s about cursing Jews and intimidating Jewish communities.
Media outlets, for their part, have feebly attempted to draw moral equivalents and question Israel’s intentions — simply for defending itself against genocidal terrorists — while using the terrorist-run “Gaza Health Ministry” as a remotely reliable source for the number of Palestinian casualties.
At the same time, celebrities and influencers (who said nothing as millions died elsewhere) suddenly obsess over Israel and regurgitate the words of Palestinian terror groups’ spokesmen.
Make no mistake: The out-of-whack global attention levied at Israel is the very nature of antisemitism, yet even our most “prestigious” universities are effectively complicit in this Jew hate.
75. A majority of societies simply cannot understand the Jews’ minority experience.
There is a term for this. It’s called “hermeneutical injustice.”
76. For now, the idea of a two-state solution is a fairy tale.
It only means, at least for now, sacrificing more Jewish lives on the altar of illusions and distortions. If one day the Palestinians want a true and lasting peace, let them come to us. You think the world will hate us if we draw these lines in the sand? Look around you, they hate us anyway.
77. Liberal immigration policies are a double-sided coin.
Many people think that liberal immigration policies have imperiled “the West” — but this is only one side of the coin. These policies wouldn’t have turned out to be such a disaster if organized, effective immigration infrastructure enabled Western countries to adequately absorb and assimilate newcomers.
Historian Niall Ferguson said the failure has been in not explaining to immigrants “what the deal is if you come to a new society. You have to accept the norms, the laws of that society. And if you don’t, if your allegiance remains to some other power, then you’re not fulfilling your side of the implicit contract.”
For some strange reason, though, Western countries refuse to tell new immigrants that if you don’t get with the program, you do not get to stay.
78. A ceasefire right now would be a disaster for the West.
It would embolden Iran and its aims to destabilize the Middle East, including all the business being done in Israel, Dubai, and other places, with the potential to hurt gas prices and all products and services that rely on fuel.
What’s more, a ceasefire now would set a precedent for more terrorist attacks across the world. Terrorists have repeatedly used attacks against Israel as prototypes for plans against other places in the West. In 1976, for example, terrorists hijacked an Air France flight en route to Israel, which many believe gave Osama bin Laden inspiration for the 9/11 blueprint.
A ceasefire now would also further demonstrate that the U.S. cannot be relied upon as a bonafide ally — not to Israel, not to Ukraine, not to South Korea, and not to Taiwan. The very notion that U.S. dominance in international affairs is tiring will only buttress the hegemonic ambitions of Iran, Russia, and China.
79. It is impossible to want for the Palestinians what they do not want for themselves.
I’m talking about an independent state alongside Israel as a Jewish one. They cannot be forced to turn Gaza or the West Bank into prosperous places if they prefer to keep them as launchpads for their “armed struggle.”
Hence why Left-leaning former Israeli politician Einat Wilf claims that “the Palestinians are not in danger and they do not need the world’s help. They just have to decide that it is more important for them to build for themselves than to destroy for others. Once those are their priorities, everything else will fall into place.”11
80. Academia is turning against the Jews, again.
As universities try to compete for more students and faculty, homogenous opinion is spreading on campus, and academia has metastasized from liberal to illiberal bias.
And college campuses are far from the only problem here. In America, during the first two months of the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, there were 905 rallies including antisemitic rhetoric, expressions of support for terrorism against the State of Israel, or so-called anti-Zionism.12
This equates to 15 rallies per day, made up of large crowds that call for the extermination of Jews, that cheer the campaign of sadistic violence and systematic rape by Hamas — and demand more of it.
Think about how might be perceived by an outsider: a society with global influence and permeation that is completely losing its mind.
81. The Left’s position has not changed about Israel.
No matter how much terror Palestinians engage in — hijacking airplanes, murdering eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics, blowing up Israelis in pizza parlors and at weddings, October 7th — the Left’s position has not changed since the late 1960s: Palestinians are good, Israelis are bad. Because the Palestinians are “weak.” And Israel is “strong.”
82. Israel seems to be the only country in the world never allowed to win a conflict.
“It is allowed to fight a conflict to a draw, but rarely to a win,” British writer Douglas Murray said. “Which is one reason why the wars keep occurring.”13
83. Hamas is fighting a three-faced war.
For audiences across the West, Hamas wants the narrative to revolve around the “poor” and “uninvolved” Palestinians who are “indiscriminately” being “bombarded” by the excessively mighty and oppressive Israeli military. Oh, and the destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure like schools, mosques, international organizations’ offices, and otherwise “regular” buildings. But nothing else.
For Arabic-speaking audiences across the Middle East, and Hebrew-speaking ones in Israel, Hamas is after an entirely different image, one that shows “successful” attacks on IDF soldiers and the plight of Israeli hostages, which it calls “prisoners of war.” For Arabic-speaking audiences, this strategy is meant to enhance Hamas’ regional standing.
Then there is the narrative that Hamas tries to craft among Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank. It has seen a major boost in popularity in the West Bank since October 7th at the rival Palestinian Authority’s expense. Hamas incessantly uses terminology like “our people” and “the Palestinian home” — even though the terror group has done next to nothing to protect civilians, uses them as human shields, and violently diverts trucks bringing humanitarian aid into wartime Gaza.
84. The kids aren’t alright.
Take, for example, a letter reportedly signed by what NBC News said were 40 White House interns, demanding U.S. President Joe Biden call for a ceasefire and end Israeli “apartheid.” Yes, interns. What happened to the days where the newest and youngest people in an organization kept their heads down and did their jobs until they worked their way up to decision-making positions?
According to a recent poll, the majority of young people ages 18-to-24 think Israel should be “ended and given to Hamas” — you know, the openly genocidal terror group.14
Social media trends perpetuated lately by young influencers have included the idea that Jesus Christ was “a Palestinian refugee,” and Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” has opened eyes to a history they never learned.
At The New York Times, “editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns,” according to one of the newspaper’s former editors, James Bennet.15
“There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors could strike terror in young reporters,” wrote Bennet. “The pendulum has swung so far in the other direction.”
85. The United Nations remains bizarrely obsessed with Israel.
Eight years ago, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gave words to what Israelis had been feeling for decades, as he criticized the UN for its “obsession with Israel.” True to form, the organization has issued 14 condemnations of the Jewish state this year — double the rest of the world, combined.
But why the UN’s obsession with Israel?
Actually, it is pretty simple: The UN is the one place where countries, particularly Arab and Muslim ones, can take swings at Israel without any real repercussions. Whereas Jewish state has won all its many wars since 1948, becoming a regional superpower and forcing Arab regimes to bow in humiliation, the UN has become the only arena where Israel can be embarrassed.
86. The New York Times has officially lost its way.
This past Christmas Eve, the New York Times went to a place I would never imagine: It published an essay by Gaza City’s mayor, an appointee of Hamas.
Still, the newspaper defends giving Hamas a platform as important to shed more light on the most extreme corners of the world. Influential Left-wing columnists and editors coax reporters into interviewing operatives from Hamas’ “political” wing, but you’d have to be an idiot to not tell the difference between “political” Hamas and “military” Hamas. Spoiler: There is none.
87. We are failing to understand Hamas and the Middle East.
Differences in culture, language, values, and outlook on life make it difficult for the West to decipher the conduct and vision of Hamas in particular and the region in general.
The West sees the problem as political and territorial in nature. To some Palestinians, this is the case, but for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, their supporters, and their chief sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is primarily religious, and at its heart is the annihilationist fantasy of ending the Jewish state by killing as many Jews as possible.
88. Israel’s Christian population is growing.
Around 187,900 Christians live in Israel, comprising 1.9 percent of the population and representing a 1.3-percent growth from the year before.
This contrasts with most countries in the Middle East, where Christian populations are declining and there is “horrifying growth” of Christian persecution, according to the organization Open Doors.
Israeli Christian women have some of the highest education rates in the country, and the vast majority of Israeli Christians say they are satisfied with life in the country.
89. Of course Hamas lies about Palestinian casualty numbers.
No one capable of committing the atrocities of October 7th should be deemed trustworthy in the slightest.
90. The Houthis are just a code name, along with Hezbollah and Hamas, for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Something the West seems allergic to calling out. In dealing with the ayatollahs, Western leaders have made the same mistake that Israel made with Hamas: hoping that jihadists could be paid off to abandon their hegemonic visions.
As professor Bernard Lewis said: “Mutually assured deterrence for the Iranian regime is not deterrence, but an incentive.”16 But the Biden administration has gone out of its way to reinstate the Iranian nuclear deal, effectively telling the Iranians that they no longer have anything to fear by flagrantly violating the previous deal’s terms.
91. Some of the world’s worst dictators suddenly understand ‘morality.’
Russia and Turkey have come out of the woodwork to preach morality, with the Turkish president saying the systematic slaughter of six million Jews in the Holocaust was not as bad as Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Mind you, this is the same guy who committed genocide against the Kurds, and who relentlessly imprisons journalists opposing his rule.
The goody two-shoes Vladimir Putin has also blasted Israel for employing “cruel methods” in its campaign against Hamas, while he wages an indiscriminate war in Ukraine, packed with war crimes upon war crimes, going on two years now.
Naturally, though, Russia and Turkey are among the few nefarious countries which support Hamas — alongside Iran, Qatar, and North Korea — but few people succeed in identifying the pattern here.
92. Israelis fight the most humane wars.
At the same time, no one in Israel is denying the ugly reality in Gaza. But it’s not the ugliest of realities.
It’s not the methodical use of human shields and civilian infrastructure to shelter terrorists and their weapons. It’s not the redirection of humanitarian aid to build hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels for the purpose of smuggling and protecting these terrorists.
It’s not beheading babies, raping and mutilating women, and disgracefully kidnapping dozens of children (including a nine-month-old baby) and elderly people. It’s not calling these behaviors mere acts of “resistance” and “liberation.”
It’s not bullying the United Nations and International Red Cross into being servants for Islamic jihadists. It’s not the genocidal, eliminationist ideology inspired by Islam. It’s not constructing an entire sociopolitical architecture of antisemitism that spans academia, religion, politics, and culture. It’s not the countless Muslim preachers who regularly encourage intolerance, hate, and terrorism.
It’s not making outrageous claims, such as the historical distortion that Jesus Christ was a “Palestinian prophet,” in an effort to deny Jewish indigenousness to the Levant way before Arabs from Arabia migrated to and Arabicized it. It’s not leaders who don’t just oppose Israel, but call the Jewish state a “sinister, unclean rabid dog of the region” whose leaders “look like beasts and cannot be called human.”8
It’s not throwing people off the top of a building for having dissimilar political beliefs. It’s not carrying out public executions of LGBTQ+ people. It’s not inviting hundreds of spectators, including children, to watch firing squads kill “criminals.”
It’s not purging Gaza’s Christian community, part of a broader vanishing of Christians from the Middle East, and firebombing (twice) Gaza’s last Christian bookstore, while kidnapping, torturing, and murdering its Christian owner.
It’s not using an outpatient clinic at a hospital to interrogate, torture, and kill dissidents in an operation known as “Strangling Necks.
93. Palestinians and their supporters use gaslighting to win in a post-truth world.
From “Palestinian children” to “innocent journalists,” they attempt to psychologically manipulate people whereby a perpetrator commits atrocities and then uses the victim’s response to distort or reimagine the perpetrator’s actions. In other words: gaslighting. Or, as we’ve been facetiously saying since the start of this war: “gaza-lighting.”
The Palestinians’ “war on reality” turns factual truths into “social facts” which appeal to emotions and personal beliefs in much more powerful, persuasive ways than do appeals to objective facts.
94. Ego is the ultimate enemy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This pressing need to solve every problem on Earth is part of Western culture’s obsession with “happy endings” and “peace on Earth” — but neither microcosm of wishful thinking has any connection with reality, not today and not ever. It’s time we accept that some situations won’t end happily, and “peace on Earth” only makes for a cute mug or bumper sticker.
One American academic, Alan Richards, said it more aptly: The West is largely comprised of “Puritan Engineers” who believe all problems have solutions, the past and history don’t matter, and “our new technology, and our organizational prowess, will always find a solution.”17
Hence, the Israeli-Palestinian paradox: The more we try to devise a solution, the less likely we are to actually achieve one.
95. Islamophobia is legitimate.
Islamophobia is a fear of the religion of Islam or Muslims in general, especially when seen as a geopolitical force or a source of terrorism.
But there’s something really awkward about this definition: Many of us have totally rational reasons to be frightened by Islam and Muslims — because millions of Muslims are, as a matter of fact, a geopolitical force and a source of terrorism, in the name of Islam.
Some Muslims, though, are courageously speaking out against Islam’s problematic and potentially catastrophic ways. And it’s from them that we can truly understand Islam and Islamophobia.
“Dear Muslims,” wrote Luai Ahmed. “The world is scared of us. The world is laughing at us. The world is worried about us. And there are legitimate reasons for their worry that we cannot keep denying. It is time for us to flush the word ‘Islamophobia’ down the toilet and start looking in the mirror.”18
96. Selective outrage is real.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been slaughtered in the Yemeni civil war, and more than 10 million Yemeni children are starving right now, yet there are no pro-Yemeni protestors purposely stopping traffic at busy junctions in Western capitals.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal government body, recommended that India be put on the list of countries “of particular concern” (a suggestion ignored by the U.S. State Department) alongside China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. But you don’t see any demonstrations in the West demanding more theological liberties for Indians.
In 2016, a terrorist attacked a crowd in Nice, France and killed 84 people, prompting #PrayForNice to trend on Twitter. Yet after twin bombings at a crowded market in Baghdad left almost 300 dead, there was no real international reaction and not nearly enough #PrayforBaghdad tweets to make it trend.
Hayder Alasadi, an Iraqi and self-described “ex-Muslim,” had something to say about this:
“Don’t tell me you give a damn about ‘civilians,’ otherwise you all would have protested about every single soul being killed in all of our Arab countries.”
“What you are doing is simply Jew-hating and Israel-hating, using ‘innocent Palestinians’ as a card to demote Israel, to make Jews look ‘evil,’ to push for boycotts against this beautiful country, to have the ‘right’ to attack everything Jewish, from innocent students in universities, to Jewish-owned stores, to anybody who wears the Star of David or simply holds the Israeli flag.”19
97. Politics is an inevitable part of wartime calculations, decisions, and discourse.
And the more this war stretches out, the more politics will creep into what has essentially been a pretty steady front of Israeli national unity following the Palestinian massacre in Israel on October 7th. Truth be told, politics has always been a key component of Israeli wars, from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to the first and second Lebanon wars in 1982 and 2006, respectively.
98. The Jews do not control the world, after all.
Heck, the Jews cannot even defend themselves against radical Islamic terrorists without being charged for “genocide” at the United Nations’ International Court of Justice.
99. Israel does not seek to destroy the Palestinians.
What Israel seeks is not to destroy a people but to protect a people, its people, and to do so in accordance with international law — even as it faces an enemy hellbent on leveraging a storm of lies, distortions, misinformation, and gaslighting against it.
100. The State of Israel was founded so we can tell antisemites to go screw themselves.
The end.
“Why Saudi Arabia and the UAE want to keep links with Israel.” The Economist. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/10/22/are-the-abraham-accords-over.
“Lesbian couple dump gay Jewish sperm donor because of war in Gaza.” The Jerusalem Post.
“The Silence From International Bodies Over Hamas’ Mass Rapes Is a Betrayal of All Women | Opinion.” Newsweek.
“Why the Israeli Hostages Face Grim Prospects.” Foreign Policy.
“Ben-Zion Netanyahu in an interview in 1998.” Haaretz.
“THE CORRUPTION OF THE AMERICAN MIND: HOW CONCEALED FOREIGN FUNDING OF U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION PREDICTS EROSION OF DEMOCRATIC VALUES AND ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS ON CAMPUS.” NCRI.
“The reasons why Gaza’s population is so young.” NewScientist.
“Fear and Trembling: Terrorism in Three Religious Traditions.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Sep. 1984), 658-677.
Mead, Walter Russell. “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.” Knopf.
“In Israel, birth rates are converging between Jews and Muslims.” The Economist.
Einat Wilf on X
“ADL Reports Unprecedented Rise in Antisemitic Incidents Post-Oct. 7.” ADL.
“The Easy Politics of Criticizing Israel.” Sapir.
“Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’.” The Times of Israel.
“When the New York Times lost its way.” The Economist.
“The Iran Delusion.” The Free Press.
“American Thinking About Violence in the Middle East.” UC Santa Cruz: Center for Global, International and Regional Studies.
Luai Ahmed on X
Hayder Alasadi on X
Very difficult to comment as there are so many blatancies nobody wants to hear about. Now, we ALL know every point made here is something everyone needs to know, but, if any 1 of 100 stands out, it IS 100.
It’s not so much that Israel HAS the right to tell the world to piss off, it’s more like Israel has been FORCED to tell the world to FUCK OFF.
And, as I say, only slow learners think attacking Israel is ever going to end well for those dumb enough to try.
Joshua Hoffman, this was a tour de force — an omnibus collection of items, with some of which you have already articulated, and many that were revised and redacted for the better. It’s a powerful list that I intend to share and endorse with my small audience of friends around the world. I do hope that these truths, some of which conclude with action items, would enable a viable, effective and humane playbook that would make us all proud! Be well!