The Unexpected Benefit of Post-Zionism

This idea of a high-tech, low-grunt army came from the "woke" universe, and this whole disaster goes to show how much damage can be done by bad ideas, and how hard it is to reverse their effect.

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Ehud Neor, a writer from Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Things are happening too fast to start with analysis of this the latest flare-up of Israel’s War of Independence.

Still, we cannot help ourselves and continually ask while being bombarded with events, literally and figuratively: “Is this good for the Jews?”

That’s what we do. Always.

This time, because of the severity and the extent of Israel’s security failure on October 7th and the resultant slaughter, that question, though still asked out of long habit, is only asked rhetorically because the only possible good is the absolute defeat of all Israel’s enemies — West, East, North and South.

The Israeli army, inexplicably held back by supposedly well-meaning allies, has not swerved from its goal of a complete defeat of Hamas. This is confounding the opposition parties in Israel because one of the core tenets of their post-Zionist world view is that the Arabs cannot be defeated in a war. They need this tenet to be proved again and this means that they need an extended battle of attrition so that the Jew-on-the-street turns against the war, and by extension, the government.

The fallacy of this approach is apparent to any with eyes to see. October 7th was the perfect storm that should have bolstered their claims and shot them into power, leaving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a bad nightmare of the past.

Why did it not?

Take your time. While you ponder — you will see it, and once you see it you will not be able to unsee it — consider this: It is true that Israel does not have a culture of top people taking responsibility for errors. We are not like the Japanese. Far from it.

We regrettably have a culture of blaming the guard at the gate, so that major calamities end up having independent panels of experts investigating events by calling in all the players to testify after the fact, accompanied by the best lawyers that they can afford. Which means that it becomes a spin-fest, a colossal fight between narratives that never ends.

Of the guards at the gates on October 7th were front-line female soldiers who were operating high-tech intrusion detection mechanisms. Most were killed or taken captive.

It is not toxic masculinity to bemoan their fate because of their femininity (male captives were raped and are being raped too). They volunteered, and not only were they excellent soldiers — second to none — they did their job on that fateful day and more importantly, they did their job during the period leading up to that day by passing on warnings to such an extent that they were threatened by their “woke”-infused commanding officers with jail time if they did not desist. You now can begin to see the difficulty in blaming the gate-keeper in this particular instance.

The eyes of the Jew-in-the-street travel upwards along the chain of command. Who the hell was in charge? What were they thinking? Among other things, they were thinking that Hamas was intimidated. This is how they perceived the conflict up until October 7th.

Sure, they thought, Hamas outwardly claimed that it wanted to eradicate the Jewish state, but that was just for show. What Hamas really wanted was to remain in power in Gaza, and to provide the inhabitants with a decent life. They definitely did not want war with Israel.

How wrong can you be? That wrong. Babies burnt in front of their mothers wrong. Young woman and girls gang-raped before their parents wrong. It was all wrong.

That is not a failure that anyone wants to own. Not because of the particular evils perpetrated by the terrorists — we have seen this before, though not on such a scale — but because the entire raison d’etre of an army is to protect the country’s civilians.

It gets worse. Not only did the Israeli army fail to protect Israeli citizens from the terrorist attack, it continued in failing to do so for about 10 hours by not showing up on the battlefield at all. The entire nation knew more or less what was happening, but, to take just one example, the vaunted Israeli Air Force released initial findings of its own internal investigation just a few days ago, and they claimed that they did not know what was happening, and so they could not enter the fight. For eight hours.

This is worse than a lie because the investigating officers who made this finding and the spokesman who mouthed it were spitting in the face of common sense and in the face of the common Israeli, and believed that they could get away with it. Talk about howlers.

The release of the belt that resulted in the Israeli army being caught with its pants down was predicated by a vocal meme (once known as a slogan) — “a small but smart army.” That meant fewer divisions and fewer tanks. This idea of a high-tech, low-grunt army came from the “woke” universe, and this whole disaster goes to show how much damage can be done by bad ideas, and how hard it is to reverse their effect, even while babies are being burnt.

There are vested interests in promoting these ideas, monied interests and powerful interests to the tune of sovereign countries. Filthy lucre. So instead of battling the terrorists, the “woke” high command of the Israeli army entered spin mode. When the command came, a hundred attorneys were in the high-command bunker in less than an hour. The Israeli army had become good at law-fare instead of warfare.

The general premise behind the “woke” worldview that led to this latest slaughter of Jews was that the Jews, a peace loving people who more than anything want to live and let live, could not stand up to a continued war of attrition with occasional murderous outbreaks. This is perfectly aligned with the worldview of Israel’s enemies.

Now-assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said it after a few thousand of his terrorists were injured by faulty pagers. What led these terrorist leaders to think that they will defeat the Jews in a war of attrition? And why? Just about everything the Jews have said and done over the past 30 years. In particular, everything they have heard from Israeli mainstream media.

But that in itself was not enough. Israel’s enemies are not stupid. It was only when they detected that the post-Zionist rot had infiltrated the upper echelons of the Israeli army did they begin to build their strategy of violent mass incursions into Israeli population centers. The original sin was that of then Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who unilaterally withdrew from the security zone in southern Lebanon that had been established in order to put an end to the endless attacks on the communities of northern Israel that which been launched from there.

Israel is now facing the reality that only a re-establishment of that same security zone will allow the tens of thousands of Israelis who have been displaced by incessant rocket fire to return to their homes and to begin rebuilding their lives.

The second-to-original sin was that of then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who unilaterally withdrew from Gaza by destroying a vibrant arc of Israeli settlements. On that front Israel is facing the same reality: some sort of military presence will be necessary in order to prevent incessant rocket fire from this area.

See the pattern?

A bad-leadership syndrome that plays fast and loose with the daily lives of Israeli citizens. Gambling for peace with Jewish lives. Precisely that. The Israeli voter did not give them the right to do that. The Israeli people expect their leadership to provide, first and foremost, security.

Of course we know that these decisions were disastrous after the fact. We are a nation of Monday morning quarterbacks. Yes, that is us, but still, we are not Japanese. Our leadership does not take responsibility. They do not admit mistakes, and will double-down on those mistakes until Jewish blood is running in the streets.

One would think that at some point an Israeli leader, Left or Right, would, even if only out of curiosity, say the forbidden words: “I was wrong.” Now that would definitely signal the coming of the Jewish Messiah.

Until now, Israel’s narrative has been: “Look at all we are doing to find favor in the world’s eyes. Look how hard we are trying to do the right thing. Can we play now?” That narrative is changing before our eyes.

A new generation has arisen in Israel that knows not Pharaoh. This young generation is not fearful of Israel’s enemies, and is not respectful of the Israeli military or political leadership when that respect is not due.

This is, finally, a no-nonsense generation that is presently preoccupied with cleaning out the human sewer pipes of Gaza, the terrorist strongholds in Lebanon, and with sending the whole Ayatollah enterprise back to their tents in the desert. It is made up of Israelis of all types, and this generation has learned in the trenches and tunnels how to get along with each other.

There will be a new Israel in the coming years, a powerful, self-confident Israel, an Israel made up of Jews with a wide variety of views, an Israel that will pick and choose its new allies, while releasing with well wishes previous allies who have proven to be disloyal during Israel’s time of need.

As is fitting to the reality of underground warfare, this generation is still under the radar, both local and foreign. Those of us belonging to the generation of the present Israeli leadership — a poor, lackluster generation and a poor, lackluster leadership — sit and listen in awe at the stories of bravery and sacrifice coming back from the battlefields. Such is the dissonance between generations that we parents may be excused for asking ourselves: “Whose children are these?” Simply put, they are a gift from heaven.

The bigger gift from heaven was the prevailing Israeli zeitgeist promoted by the last few generations of intellectuals, mainstream media, and center-Left politicians — proclaiming that victory over our enemies is not possible. It is truly the zeitgeist of defeat. As such it would seem to be the farthest thing from a heavenly gift to the Jewish People.

However, it is precisely this worldview, held and promoted tenaciously by fading elites — with a tenaciousness which grows as those same elites fade away — that provided Israel’s enemies with the raw material for planning their strategy. This entire “old guard” served as an involuntary false flag, an Eisenhower-like imaginary cardboard army before D-Day. In the battlefield indoctrinations of the terrorists, indeed, in the terrorist indoctrination of their Arab youth, Israeli soldiers and Israeli Jews in general were seen as weak, as sub-human, ready for the taking.

Then, the “New Jew” appeared. Piecemeal, basing themselves on partial text messages and urgent phone calls, armed with pitifully inadequate personal sidearms, they flew to the sound of the battle, saving some before being outgunned and shot down. Hundreds answered a call that had not come; no siren had been sounded.

Indeed, Israel’s most elite fighters were ordered to stand down by high officers who did not understand the reality on the ground. Fortunately, most ignored those orders. In addition, the Israeli police fought like lions in the streets of Sderot and Ofakim. All in all it was a reverse Dunkirk, a unprecedented manifestation of individual courage in the face of likely death, the full story of which has not yet been told.

Based on their wrong assumptions, Israel’s attackers from Gaza believed that they were the vanguard of a great victory. Had they exploited the total surprise on that morning and the 12-hour window of freedom of action as a result of that surprise, they would have easily overrun two major bases of the Israeli Air Force, destroying at least two wings of fighter jets and all the underlying infrastructure. This was prevented partially by the harrying fire of the brave citizen soldiers, but mostly, and most ironically, by the success of their own self-indoctrination.

Their twisted and demented souls insured that their conquest would be limited, again ironically, to the crescent of settlements bordering Gaza that were home to some of the most radical pro-Arab Jews in Israel. For when these terrorists found themselves in the living rooms of these Jewish peace activists, who were in the terrorists’ eyes sons and daughters of pigs and monkeys, they did the one thing that was programmed into their souls: They raped and pillaged, filmed it, and uploaded it to social media.

The jets remained untouched and though late to the battle, the Israeli Air Force used those same planes to smash the terrorist dens in Gaza and in Lebanon, as they will soon use them against Iran.

Hamas and Hezbollah are on the road to utter oblivion, thanks to the swan-song messaging of a wannabe “woke” Israeli intelligentsia that misled them into thinking that the weak Israeli soldier — that son of pigs and monkeys — would not dare to enter the maze of tunnels beneath Gaza, or that the weak and decadent Israeli populace in general would not have the staying power to see this conflict through to the end.

They were mistaken.

---