The Greatest War®
In a battle of civilizations, Israel is fighting to show that a free and decent society can defend itself against barbarians who have virtually all the cards stacked in their favor.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
World War One was called “The Great War” for its hitherto unmatched scale and horror.
Israel’s war against Hamas might not be as big, but when it comes to civilizational importance and complexity, Israel is fighting “The Greatest War.”
Never has a state, let alone one as tiny as Israel, faced such a vast and disparate range of adversaries, bent not just on victory, but on the annihilation of the Jewish nation and the civilization it spawned — the West.
At stake is the nothing less than the moral question of whether a free and decent society can defend itself against savages. If the answer is a negative, then civilization, as we have come to know it, is defenseless and will crumble.
Beyond the civilizational stakes, Israel is fighting the most heavily fortified enemy in history. The so-called Palestinians have built military, human, political, cultural, religious, and economic palisades in service of a wicked Islamist ideology.
To win “The Greatest War,” Israel will need to breach the following ramparts:
1) Military Fortifications
Hamas built a 580-kilometer (360-mile) tunnel network in Gaza, huge in itself, and extraordinary given that Gaza’s total area is only 225 square kilometers (140 square miles). It is one-and-a-half times bigger than the London Underground and about a third bigger than Israel estimated before the war. The tunnels extend into parts of Israel and Egypt, and connect every aspect of Hamas’ military operation.
It is a multilayered labyrinth of boobytraps that makes for technically difficult fighting. Hamas terrorists can pop up out of a tunnel anywhere, open fire, and disappear back into the sewer where such rats dwell. Israel must find and map the tunnels and undertake complex engineering operations to destroy them.
When the conflict began, the media wrote about how Israel would suffer heavy casualties in these tunnels. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) exceeded all expectations with regards to this, but it is also why a quick military victory, which would have been politically more expedient, has not been possible.
2) Human Shields
Hamas’ use of human shields is grotesque. It has layered civilians on top of the tunnels to serve as an outer fortress wall. It means Israel cannot destroy Hamas positions without killing civilians. This is definitionally evil.
The IDF achieving one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratios in history, even when using Hamas’ inflated casualty data, in such conditions is an achievement to match anything in the IDF’s storied history.
Israel has worked to minimize civilian casualties not in response to misguided and shrill international pressure, but because it is morally right. This speaks to this war being a fundamental conflict between right and wrong.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “For us, every uninvolved civilian who is hurt is a tragedy. For Hamas it’s a strategy. That’s the whole difference.”
The international community and mainstream media’s inability or refusal to grasp this is acutely troubling. Their blaming of Israel for civilian deaths that Hamas caused by using women and children and human shields shows that many of them are as morally impinged as Hamas, or outright supporters of the terror group.
3) Demographic Fortress of Young People
Hamas imbued its human shields with an extra dollop of potency by engineering an unusually young society. About 70 percent of Gazans are under 30 years old.
It is so young because Hamas has encouraged families to have many children to produce more fighters and martyrs to murder Jews. It has tied men’s incomes to how many children they have; the more they have, the more they earn.
Kindergarten children in Gaza play games where they pretend to be Islamist fighters killing Jews and practice burying martyrs. Hamas’ concept of martyrdom extends to including children who Hamas sacrifices so that the international community will pressure Israel into not defending itself and losing the war.
Hamas ideology is so rebarbative that it revels in dying children.
4) The United Nations (UN)
To say that the UN is corrupt and feckless is merely to acknowledge the English language’s paucity. It is truly rotten.
Here is a recent example: UN Secretary-General António Guterres just condemned Israel’s killing of 18 people in an attack on a Hamas terrorist position in Gaza. He said the attack was “totally unacceptable” and that “these dramatic violations of international humanitarian law need to stop now.”
In other words, the UN believes that Israel defending itself and defeating terrorists are wrong. Presumably, Guterres finds it acceptable that three of the terrorists killed were United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA) staff on his payroll.
Guterres and others like the UN’s Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, have stains upon their souls. Unlike Lady Macbeth, they see no need to try to remove them.
5) Compromised Israel Allies
The Palestinians have built a political wall around their “cause” — if one can call murdering Jews a cause — by infiltrating Western political systems. They have achieved this through Arab and Muslim immigration, which has created a significant voter base that is hostile to Israel and Jews. In particular, they have managed to co-opt Western Left-wing parties into supporting “the Palestinians” and their thuggery.
They have also managed to make Palestinian issues central to many Western countries’ politics, even though what happens there is irrelevant to the lives of North Americans, Britons, Europeans, Australians, South Africans, Latin Americans, and so forth. Fear of losing votes to this ill-lettered demographic means many countries are adopting less Israel-friendly foreign policies.
This is terrifying because what many in the West still fail to understand is that the Islamists are not just against Israel, but against the West, too — and that will ultimately include those on the Western Left.
6) International Human Rights Law
The Palestinians have used so-called “international human rights law” to make Israel look criminal for protecting itself and its citizens.
The Palestinians have for decades cloaked their genocidal war against Jews as a fight for “human rights” and “liberation.” This has fooled many into believing that supporting the Palestinians is a just cause. These useful idiots are servants of evil, if not evil themselves.
Even the idea of international human right law is nebulous. It sounds wonderful. Who could object to human rights? However, the entire human rights establishment is a weapon in the battle between the political philosophies of nationalism and internationalism (universalism).
Internationalists hate the fact that we live in a system of competing nation states and want to impose supranatural structures in the name of causes that sound good, such as human rights.
It is an inherently totalitarian, top-down approach that presumes all people and cultures are equivalent and seeks to bind them through international treaties, conventions, and laws. Unelected international bodies imposing laws on a sovereign state is profoundly undemocratic. It is a philosophy for those who like living as serfs.
Nationalism, by contrast, is a bottom-up process that produces a state, government, and laws that reflect the people’s (the nation’s) will and values. At its worst it, can veer into ugly racism, but internationalism offers no protection against this either. The cadre of human rights lawyers that have helped the Palestinians erect this legal fortress cannot stand nationalism, and there is no healthier expression of nationalism than Zionism.
The only thing these gravy-train lawyers hate more than people governing themselves as a nation is Jews doing so. Allegations and rulings from international institutions such as the International Criminal Court and various racist and corrupt UN human rights bodies are about depriving Jews of national sovereignty. It is antisemitic to its core.
The legalists running these fake human rights bodies are not interested in the Palestinians’ or anyone else’s welfare. They do not get upset when people suffer, only when Israel stands up and defends itself — or, heaven forbid, fights for its own survival.
These moral cretins did not care about human rights in Gaza when Hamas was imposing its Islamist gender apartheid, shooting gay people, and throwing political opponents off buildings. They simply hate Jews.
This antisemitism is symptomatic of their bigger affliction, which is that they are evil. Jihadism and the Marxist international human rights establishment share a common feature: Both are internationalist ideologies.
7) The Islamic Republic of Iran
The Iranian clerical regime wants to destroy Israel because it is a Jewish state. Its ultimate aim is to defeat the United States — which it has dubbed “the Great Satan” — and bring down the West.
Iran has funded and trained militia and terror groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, and Syria. This has created a “ring of fire” around the Jewish state. Rarely does the media portray the fact that Israel is fighting a war on six fronts.
I sometimes wonder if the dotards in the world’s foreign affairs departments and mainstream media have Tourette Syndrome — the way they involuntarily bang on about a two-state solution as if the conflict was not a war between good and evil that is so stark, it is almost biblical.
8) Heavily Biased Media
Most mainstream media is wildly anti-Israel. Titles such as The New York Times and The Guardian are facsimiles of the newspapers they once were. Sometimes the anti-Israel sentiment is overt, such as at the BBC, which violated its own impartiality and accuracy guidelines a whopping 1,553 times in its overage of war’s first four months.1
Other times, the bias takes the form of poor reporting. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial position has generally been pro-Israel, yet the reporting in its news pages is often unbalanced and biased against the Israel.
This systemic bias makes it hard for Israel’s voice to be heard over the cacophony of lies and smears that the media peddles. There are many reasons — economic, technological, cultural, political — that so much news media is so anti-Israel. Mostly, it is pure antisemitism, even though few people have the courage to say it aloud.
9) Cultural Warfare
Jews in Israel is the only case where being anti-indigenous rights is the politically correct position.
UNESCO, the UN’s clumsily named Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has declared that the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron is a protected Islamic cultural site. This tomb is the world’s oldest Jewish site and on land that Abraham himself bought 3,700 years ago — more than two millennia before Islam was born.
Given that everyone with an IQ above that of a starfish knows the Cave of the Patriarchs is a Jewish holy site, the only explanation is that UNESCO has become a corrupt and compromised body led and staffed by incompetent and/or evil people who are trying to erase the site’s Jewish history.
10) A Funding Fortress
Hamas and the broader Palestinian industry enjoy enormous amounts of funding that they use to murder Jews and plot the West’s downfall in the name of Islamism.
The West has sent more than $4.5 billion to Gaza alone since Israel unilaterally pulled out in 2005, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It speaks to clinically low self-worth that the West funds a Jihadist enemy which wants to destroy it and calls such funding “humanitarian aid.”
Given the West is too weak even to look in the mirror, it is unclear how it can hope to withstand and defeat motivated Islamists.
11) Academia and the Intellectual Zeitgeist
Anti-Israel protests at Western universities show that these once-revered institutions are now lobotomy production lines.
The huge number of students at these demonstrations proves that we have a lost generation, probably several, and that our society has failed in the fundamental task of teaching children right from wrong.
Claims that these student protestors are well-intentioned and just misguided or ignorant may be true in some cases, but it is a charitable reading. The unwillingness to hold students accountable for their racism, hatred, and treasonous support of violence and terror illustrates a moral catastrophe.
If people are no longer responsible for their actions, then we are lost.
12) Economic Fortress (The ‘BDS Movement’)
I must confess that I like looking at the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s website. It looks like a dunce has written it and I get an immediate self-esteem boost.
Given that the Israeli and Palestinian Territories are so economically intertwined, boycotting Israeli companies takes jobs and prosperity away from Palestinians.
It is ironic that, while Palestinians in Gaza and Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) are begging for Israel to re-open its borders so they can work in Israel again, the morons behind the BDS movement are trying to isolate these economies.
BDS is a racist Western colonialist movement that thinks it knows what is best for the Palestinian people, while actively working against their interests.
13) Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
NGOs infest and infect the Israeli-Palestinian debate and are key spreaders of Islamist lies and propaganda. They often work closely with various discredited and corrupt UN rights and humanitarian bodies.
NGOs are unaccountable entities that set themselves up as judge and jury of whatever the latest fetish cause is, which of late has been smearing Israel. NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Oxfam routinely employ people who regularly post anti-Israel content on their personal social media accounts, making their bias clear.
What these NGOs say does not matter at all, but the world’s media pretends they do and quotes their lies as truth, giving them a credibility to which they have no right.
The Islamist Palestinians have built a vast citadel and gotten the harebrained West to think of them as victims and help them defend the fortress of evil.
Israel is fighting for all of Western civilization, with little support from most of the West.
Israel is truly fighting “The Greatest War.”
“The Asserson Report: The Israel-Hamas war and the BBC.” Campaign for Media Standards. 9 September 2024.
Just the most brilliant and truthful article! Israel, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your bravery, you are fighting this war for the west as well as yourselves. With no understanding or thanks. My heart is with you and all my prayers.
Behind Islamism is the biggest threat to The West: NAZISM. Nazism has infiltrated The State and now contaminates Western Society as well. Islamist groups including Hamas have a formal alliance with these Neo-Nazis who have penetrated MI6 here in The UK as they have the BND in Germany. These High-placed Nazis have Re-Formed The Nazi Party. This Infiltration from Within is very dangerous, but is now WHOLLY ON RECORD. Israel is one of the mighty Bulwarks against Nazism, and I am proud to offer our Anti-Fascist Service here in The UK to put Re-emergent Nazism back in the public eye, so it is seen for what Nazism is: The Ultimate threat to Western Freedoms and our Democracies which must live free from Nazism's malicious intimidation and The Nazis promise of Genocide and mass-murder if Nazism takes power once again. Am Israel Chai.