Israel is not cut out for peace

Maybe we don’t deserve peace as we are still stuck in the wilderness. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be reading articles with the following titles, “Cabinet torn over appropriate Israeli response to murder of teens.” Or this one, “Israel wants to go after Hamas, but doesn’t want all-out war with Gaza.”

You can’t kill a snake by cutting off its tail.  If you “want to go after Hamas,” you cut off the head. And that means Gaza.

The formula for peace is deterrence through strength and not through restraint.

But Israel is not prepared to show deterrence. It would be, in this case premature, as Israel is not cut out for peace. It lacks the proper state of mind, as it possesses a mentality that never quite made it out of the desert.

On the heels of the children of Israel’s freedom from Egyptian bondage God decreed that the generation of the Exodus would live out their lives in the desert and not merit to conquer the land of Israel as death would be met in the wilderness.

If one would attempt to study God’s actions from a purely psychological perspective, one may conclude that He understood that the slave generation was not fit to conquer a land and rule over themselves as a strong and confident nation. Their mentality was simply not cut out for it.

The slave lives for the moment. Incapable of planning the future, much less envisioning one, he sees his role as simply to survive the present. The slave adjusts his mindset to one that is conquered, dominated and subjugated, simultaneously disowning any responsibility for his future and settles in to the culture of victimhood. In the outside world, in the free world, the slave lacks the confidence to pursue and secure independence.

The forty years in the desert is about a transformation of a nation. The children of Israel severed their dependence on Pharaoh at the Red Sea and embarked on learning a whole new system of faith and reliance. They underwent an educational process where God guided them into the realization that Torah is their food and water.

Those lessons learned throughout the forty years were lessons passed on to the next generation born as free people, the generation that did not view themselves as victims, the generation that became the nation of Israel and went on to conquer the Canaanites and establish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

But after 2000 years of persecution, having been spit out from one country after another, having been the scapegoat of the world and ultimately exterminated as if we were vermin, we, the Jewish nation who has risen from the depths of hell to labor, sweat and fight for our right to reestablish our sovereignty over our God given land, are today still wandering in a virtual wilderness, in a culture of victimhood we can’t seem to shake.

And because of that, we find ourselves in the absence of a strong leadership. We find ourselves with leaders that are all too willing to disown responsibility for the nation’s security and hence, all too unwilling to provide deterrents to our enemies.

We find ourselves with leaders that bask in being victimized by the world at large, and acquiesce to pressure politics by world leaders that salivate over our deaths. We find ourselves with leaders that place our very lives and the lives of our children in the hands of the likes of Obama and the leaders of Europe, a continent that is nothing more than a massive Jewish graveyard.

We find ourselves with leaders who have yet to find their way out of the wilderness, who time and again are reluctant to pursue a definitive course of action and take it to the limit. Instead, they cringe at the immoral objections that gush from the US and the EU in a burgeoning deluge of septic pus, decrying our right to defend ourselves and consequently stop just short enough for our enemies to regroup and start murdering us all over again.

In the absence of a strong leadership the nation of Israel is left with men and women at the helm who are steeped in uncertainty and hesitation along with the usual background din from a chorus of clowns that continue to chant in a self-induced stupor to give peace a chance. And thus, more among us will be abducted and murdered.

Look around you everyone. Who will be next?

Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, zichronam l’vracha, may God avenge your blood. Because no one else here will.