At War With Evil

We are a nation at war. We are a nation in mourning. We are a nation divided by an evil enemy.

We innocently and naively allowed ourselves to believe that the force of a mother’s love and dedication could not fail to triumph over evil. We looked forward to the day of the joyful reunion, feeling that we would have a part in it, because Rachel and Jon put a human face on their suffering and invited us, as an extended family, to share in their intimate misery and their endless optimism. So we agonized with them, we marveled at their unrelenting efforts and tireless determination, we felt ennobled by their virtue and their generous spirits, and we experienced communal heartbreak and bereavement when their hopes were dashed.

To be sure, the awesome extent of the mother’s love was touching and compelling. But the depth and darkness of the evil opposing them was so far beyond our powers to imagine that we could not fully comprehend the reality that confronted us.

We cannot presume to know how the families of the murdered hostages feel. We only know that our world is diminished, our hearts are broken, and we are in despair.

Just as the evil bastards planned. And make no mistake. They are calculating and they are evil.

Knowing that they could not prevail by force of arms, they sought to destroy our will and our spirit. Depraved and inhumane, they forced us to choose between, on the one hand, conducting and winning the war that they thrust upon us or, on the other, capitulating to their demands, letting them survive and rearm, and releasing hundreds of their murderous colleagues, thus assuring that we would continue to be at risk and in danger.

Our reason told us that the latter was folly. But our hearts told us that we could not turn our backs on the cries of the families.

Pressure from our “friends” complicated our quandary. They asked us to negotiate with Hamas as equals, not as terrorists, as though there could ever be any equivalence between us. When we sought to achieve rapid and total victory, believing that unrelenting pressure was the only way to succeed in recovering the hostages, our “friends” threatened to withhold weapons, warned us against entering Rafah, and harshly criticized our measured military responses because they purported to accept verifiably erroneous information provided by perfidious and deceitful Hamas. The accursed and despicable United Nations, which through UNRWA, the HRC, and the General Assembly, is the wicked godfather of Hamas, loudly condemned our behavior through its loathsome Secretary-General and its abhorrent and anti-semitic Special Rapporteur. And the haters demonstrated on the streets and universities, mocking, slandering, and reviling us.

We will never know whether the tactics that freed the original 38 hostages would have worked to liberate the rest, because we were threatened with dire consequences if we persisted. Vacuous Kamala Harris declaimed that she had “studied the maps” and that we could not enter Rafah, thus further demonstrating that, as Senator Kennedy recently said, she is AOC without the bartending skills. Dithering, inconstant Joe Biden was so concerned about Muslim voters in Michigan that he abandoned his own principles and his solemn pledge to support Israel to the fullest extent possible; he denounced our conduct at every opportunity. Antony Blinken just embarrassed himself.

I hold no illusions with respect to our own failures. There is an enormous amount of blame to be apportioned among the policymakers in Israel, the military leadership, the security apparatus, the prime minister, the vile politicians who attempted to capitalize on the situation for personal gain, the feckless media, and a host of others.

But there is only one guilty party. The people who started the war, took the hostages, held them captive, and killed them. It was Hamas and its Palestinian cohorts who murdered and mutilated babies, brutally raped women and girls, took infants and octogenarians hostage, used their own people as human shields, callously operated out of mosques and schools, and ultimately murdered innocent captives in cold blood. They bear the guilt and the shame, together with their sponsor, Iran, their enablers in Qatar and Turkey, and the host of pusillanimous nations that are so timid in the face of their Muslim populations and so driven by anti-semitism that they have lost the power to distinguish between good and evil.

Now they will manipulate this horrific event to suggest that the Palestinians must be rewarded for their behavior with a state of their own. Israel will be blamed for the murders because it failed to surrender to the demands of the terrorists. The enlightened world will expect us to establish a nation for the terrorists on the ruin they themselves have brought to pass, and then to live side by side with them in harmony and peace. Until they start another war, as they have pledged to do, over and over.

This is indefensible. The very existence of Hamas and its supporters pollutes the environment. They kill babies with relish. They rape young women as a matter of policy. They kidnap octogenarians and keep them in dark tunnels until they die. They play on a mother’s love for political gain. They sacrifice and slaughter their own people. Peace is as alien to them as basic decency, compassion, and humanity.

And the world wonders–Why wouldn’t anyone want to reward them with a state of their own?

Unfortunately, Sinwar’s strategy has succeeded beyond his most optimistic dreams. In bitter retrospect, the day he took the hostages he won. Our community is riven. He wanted to divide us and we are divided. Our internal strife is his triumph.

There is one way to deny him victory, but only if we and the western world can muster the internal courage to do the right thing. If the free nations of the world would (i) coalesce and restore the sanctions on Iran, with dire consequences for further incitement, (ii) put pressure on Turkey and Qatar to withdraw their active support for Hamas, (iii) explain to Egypt and Lebanon that supplying continued economic and military assistance to Hamas will imperil aid from the US, and, most important, (iv) provide full support, materiel, and encouragement to Israel to finish the job, win the war against its enemies, and obliterate Hamas to the point that it no longer has any viability, then there is a chance for peace in the Middle East and the world. World War II could only end with the unconditional surrender of the Germans and the Japanese. Victory over the modern Nazis requires no less.

That result will not mean that the hostages did not die in vain, because their deaths were senseless, horrid, irreparable tragedies that should never have occurred and can never be justified or compensated. May the perpetrators be forever damned and reviled. But if we ever hope to end the seemingly interminable violence, Hamas and its supporters must be defeated and eliminated.

If only the world can marshal the will.