They say Israel's war strategy is failing. They are dead wrong.
Based on much evidence, Israel is clobbering Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Islamic Iran of Republic — for the betterment of the Western world. One day, more of the West will thank us.
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The year 2024 might be the days remembered for global absurdity reaching unprecedented heights.
The Israelis are biting their nails, buying water and canned goods, while members of the evil coalition, led by the Islamic Republic of Iran, relish threats of a harsh response to Israel’s assassinations of top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders in recent weeks — as a “side dish” to their years of declarations to exterminate the Jewish state.
Yet the foreign ministers at a recent meeting of G7, the powerful Western countries, issued a conciliatory statement this week “to the parties concerned.” The word Iran did not even appear once. And this happened after recently assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s last meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, where the latter again mentioned the complete elimination of Israel.
When the powerful Western countries do not say a word about the threats of this axis of evil, they encourage it. Israel has never threatened Iran with destruction, nor the Palestinian people. But the powerful Western countries are afraid of their own shadow. They are on the fence. And neutrality at this time is a gift to this axis of evil.
These events are precisely a microcosm for how the last 300-plus days of the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war has gone: victim-blaming Israel and finding every excuse to overlook the actions of Jihadist Iran and its terror-group proxies across the Middle East, one of which (Hamas) started this war on October 7th and another of which (Hezbollah) joined the fray exactly one day later — or a few weeks before Israel started its ground incursion into Gaza.
Many semi-educated (and I am being generous) pundits have continued to make comparisons between Israel’s response to the October 7th Hamas-led massacres and kidnappings, and the United States’ ultimately unsuccessful responses to the 9/11 attacks. The implication is that Israel’s strategy in this war is doomed to fail.
Making comparisons (or reasoning by analogy) is a normal part of how the human brain works, but it also produces profound errors in judgment. But if we were to dissect 9/11 and America’s subsequent wars in the Middle East, and then October 7th and the subsequent Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, we would rather quickly realize that the two episodes are about as different as Indonesia and Hawaii (even though both are islands).
The second argument I have heard people make against Israel’s war strategy is that Israel has “leveled” Gaza and thus alienated practically the entire world. I and many other Israelis are far less concerned that we have “alienated practically the entire world” because it is based on a premise — that Israel has “leveled” Gaza — which is completely false. At best, this premise is based on superficial media reports that are, in turn, based on information coming out of Gaza.
From the Palestinian side, the vast majority of information broadcast from Gaza first and foremost runs through Hamas which, of course, creates an ardent anti-Israel spin, meaning reports are grossly exaggerated or outright lies nine times out of 10. And many Gazans who are so-called “journalists” actually work for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, meaning they are terrorists who moonlight as “journalists.”
A ridiculous amount of mainstream media outlets — including so-called prestigious ones like The New York Times and the BBC — know all this to be true, yet they still report what these “journalists” feed them without doing much independent verification or just waiting for Israel to provide its side of a given story.
This is because many mainstream media outfits are not all that interested in telling audiences the truth; they are chiefly in the business of doing business (i.e. making money) which means fabricating, telling half-truths, and running stories for the lucrative sake of attracting eyeballs (i.e. advertising dollars and subscriptions) — even if it means broadcasting information that is primarily sourced from death-cult terrorist organizations named Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
For example, an Israeli airstrike hit a school-turned-shelter in Gaza last Saturday — because Hamas terrorists hijacked the school and turned it into their headquarters. The Associated Press reported that the strike killed “at least 80 people” and wounded “nearly 50 others, Palestinian health authorities said.” For those who have not been paying as close of attention, Hamas is “the Palestinian health authorities” in Gaza.
Israel later announced, within a few hours, that at least 30 of the people killed in this strike were Hamas terrorists, and it published the names and photos of every single one of these terrorists as proof. It also said that the number of deaths purported by “the Palestinian health authorities” was ridiculously inflated, a tactic that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have all but perfected.
Yet so much of the mainstream media do not wait to tell you any of this. They run with stories in “real-time” because they have little appetite for accuracy, truth, credibility, and ethics. This is the type of “yellow journalism” that my college professors warned me about during my journalism studies.
It is also what’s known as “the Israel story” — the news media’s editorial line that the conflict is predominantly Israel’s fault, and the Palestinians and the Arab world are blameless. The uglier characteristics of Palestinian politics and society are mostly untouched by the international press because that would disrupt “the Israel story” which makes a lot more money for the media, even if this narrative — a narrative of Jewish moral failure — is largely or even completely untrue.
You do realize that so much of what you read about Gaza comes to your eyes and ears from the lips of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists, don’t you?
Yet, because it is wrapped in nicely packaged media brands like The New York Times and the BBC, an uncomfortable amount of people assume it to be true. That says just as much about these media outlets as it does about their audiences who take what the media says verbatim and draw half-baked conclusions.
And do not even get me started about social media, where 15 seconds of scrolling or a 30-second TikTok video makes people feel like they are subject-matter experts on, for example, the Middle East.
In this war, it is difficult to know what is actually happening in real-time. The “humanitarian crisis” and “death and destruction” in Gaza might be accurate to an extent, but it might also not be. And it is psychologically stunted to form an opinion about a half-baked premise, no less one that is heavily influenced by Jihadist terrorist organizations.
One of the reasons why it is difficult to know what is actually happening in real-time in Gaza is because Israel does not let most international media into the Strip. Why? Because Israel knows that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad will purposely target these journalists and then blame Israel for their deaths.
The IDF does not need yet another thing to worry about in Gaza, such as protecting international media members from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s war crimes, especially international media members who are looking for “evidence” to support its predetermined, ill-informed narrative of Jewish moral failure.
Thus, if people feel that Israel has “alienated practically the entire world” because practically the entire world swallows Palestinian propaganda — even though there is a huge poison warning on the label — that is less of a reflection on Israel, and more a reflection on practically the entire world.
Another argument I have heard people make against Israel’s war strategy is that the Jewish state should have taken a more limited, “precise” approach, and that by not taking such an approach, Israel has radicalized more Palestinians. Oh, the victim-blaming is pungent!
Most Palestinians have already been radicalized, not by Israeli actions past or present, but by their own leadership, dating back at least 100 years when, for example, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, became a militant opponent of Zionism.
He very quickly adopted the Nazis modern form of antisemitism and skillfully wove it into a Muslim religious narrative to appeal to the masses, while being notorious for visiting Berlin during the Second World War, where he was made very welcome by the Nazis. al-Husseini was also the voice of Nazi propaganda in Arabic.
Since then, Palestinian leaders — always backed by the world’s most atrocious regimes, such as the Soviets and more recently Qatar and Iran — have continued to brainwash their people through media, education, and populist politics not to fight for a Palestinian state among the nations, but to oppose the Jewish one at all costs, including their own lives.
This is what most people get wrong about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It is not about land; it is about antisemitism. The Palestinians have been offered more land in many negotiations dating back to 1937. If they simply wanted land, they would have taken it by now and called it a day (which means them recognizing a neighboring Jewish state).
Instead, they have refused these deals time and again because the Palestinians’ incessant refusal of recognizing a neighboring Jewish state is a far greater priority than building something of their own. That’s how you know just how silly, stupid, unreasonable, immature, self-defeating, backwards, and brainwashed so many Palestinians are.
Yet the world coddles the “poor Palestinians” who are “uninvolved” and mostly made up of “women and children” instead of realizing that many of these people are the exact opposite of those with whom you would want to share a neighborhood.
Essentially, much of the world has a fairy-tale, Disney-movie version in their head of who “the Palestinians” are — because, again, much of the world has swallowed Palestinian propaganda (even though, again, there is a huge poison warning on the label). And, again, this is less of a reflection on Israel, and more a reflection on much of the world.
It is not that Palestinians are “bad” people. I do not believe in “good” or “bad” as objective tags. But I can assure you, having lived in Israel since 2013, that many Palestinians (the majority for sure) do not share the same democratic and societal values that you and I share, even ones we take for granted. Palestinian society has always been obscenely undemocratic, misogynistic, Islamist (anti-non-Muslims), anti-minorities, anti-LGBTQ+ and brutally violent (both among themselves and externally).
There is a reason why even the Palestinians’ Arab “friends” across the Middle East and North Africa refuse to shelter Palestinians in this war: These Arabs know deep down that the Palestinians, on the whole, are dangerous. It is one of the worst-kept secrets in the region.
The Arabs’ thinking goes like this: Better to keep them “locked up” in Gaza and the West Bank where we can smear Israel with baseless accusations of “occupation” and “apartheid” than to let them into our own countries and have them be a threat to our societies, like they have been in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait.
Another argument I have heard people make against Israel’s war strategy is that Israel has not achieved its goal of eliminating Hamas’ military and governing power in Gaza.
At face value, this is true, but it ignores all nuance, context, and depth. From the first few weeks of this war, Israel has been held to a standard that no other military has ever been held to in the modern world. And this has nothing to do with Israel’s Right-wing government, led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If you go back and read the history of Israel’s other defensive wars, the Israelis have almost always been expected to fight in ways that other countries would so obviously deem counterproductive and even idiotic. And these other wars were managed by many Left-wing Israeli governments.
Once you understand the absurd double standards that Israel as the Jewish state has faced from different parts of the “international community” essentially since its founding in 1948, you begin to realize that these double standards are not a critique of certain policies — but a more subliminal, subversive version of post-Holocaust antisemitism.
One of the main reasons why Israel has not eliminated Hamas’ military and governing power in Gaza is because world powers, led by the United States, are effectively forcing the Israelis to fight with two hands behind their back. You could write an encyclopedia with the amount of scrutiny that Israel has been under, since even before our ground incursion into Gaza a few weeks after October 7th.
And still, Israel has notched quite a few extraordinary achievements, including:
Losing less than two soldiers on average, per day, compared to the 20 per day that U.S. officials predicted
A roughly one-to-one ratio of civilian-to-combatant Palestinian casualties, compared to the 9-to-1 international average (according to the United Nations)
Hamas has already said that it is willing to relinquish civilian governance of the Gaza Strip.
Israel has assassinated so many Jihadist Hamas leaders that the International Criminal Court said it would halt the process for issuing arrest warrants against them — because they are dead.
The last point is particularly impressive. Last Friday’s operation in Khan Yunis, as well as the activity in the center of the Gaza Strip and Rafah, may advance the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel’s Security Agency) to their primary goal: the elimination of senior Hamas leadership. In fact, one security source estimates that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is running out of places to hide.
Sinwar is almost alone at the top of Hamas. His close friends in the senior ranks of the terrorist organization, as well as its senior officials, have been eliminated or have disappeared. According to Arab media, the man closest to Sinwar, a minister in the Hamas government and his right-hand man, Rawhi Mushtaha, was also killed.
The fact that Sinwar’s entire operational hub has disappeared makes it difficult for him to move to hiding places, especially above ground. According to an Israeli source, Sinwar’s movement area, like that of other senior officials in the terrorist organization, is getting smaller and smaller.
Recently, the IDF even detected 10 attempts by Hamas members to move through the Rafah beaches to the Egyptian side of the border. Israeli Navy ships managed to thwart all attempts, and each terrorist was eliminated.
Wars are seldom expeditious, especially when they are started with a surprise attack like we saw on October 7th. And there will be a time and place to dive into the questions about Israeli miscalculations, incompetence, and other mistakes that prevented the Jewish state from thwarting the October 7th massacres and kidnappings.
But that time and place is not right now, when Israel is literally fighting an existential war against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies, namely Hamas and Hezbollah among others.
It should go without being said that no country can fight a war perfectly, yet many people’s criticisms of Israel’s war strategies are benchmarked against perfection. Every other country would also go up in the flames of failure if it was judged accordingly.
Another way to look at it is: Wars are horrific, senseless, and tragic. Hence why it is unwise to start them. If we are truly to do this war justice, we ought to be leveling the vast majority of our criticisms against the Jihadist death cults that started this war — no less all of their supporters — not the side that was dragged into it.
In our significant history, Jews are all-too-accustomed to being victim-blamed, which is why one Jewish poem goes: “You’ve trained us to do what it takes to exist. Don’t be surprised when we do it.”1
Jewish Poems on Instagram
Apparently, I am the dumbest of shits on the planet, as I don’t understand why a nation that has to actually fight for its actual existence every several years gets criticized when fighting for its actual existence every several years.
Thank you for an overview that helps me counter the doubts I feel from an overload of’unbiased’ journalism about Israel that I consume daily. Hopefully this war will result in a destruction of Hamas’s leadership and ultimately the ‘death’ of this ideology.