Marching Backwards

Blood flows and flows and flows. Bodies ripped apart on purpose. Babies, children, parents and the elderly beaten, raped, broken, decimated and still taken as hostages.

It is a mind numbing cruelty and yet it speaks to the Mission of Hamas: to end the state of Israel and silence the voice of Jews the World over. The means is actually simple. Do something so unspeakable that the government of Israel has no choice but to come for Hamas. And the coming creates its own narrative.

There are a million bystanders in Gaza running from the bombs and living as conditions go from bad to worse to sheer darkness, in which thousands are sacrificed in the pursuit of evil. And the pursuit is the real goal of Hamas, hiding in tunnels under hospitals and more than a thousand miles away in bedazzled homes in Qatar, talking to allies in Lebanon and Iran and quietly plotting the end of Israel.

The World watches and there is a drumbeat not for the reckoning, but for a cease fire. Thousands of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists invaded Southern Israel and exterminated everything in site. Butchering babies and their parents, and anyone in their way as they unleashed a massacre that can only be compared to the Holocaust itself. Some 1400 deaths in one depraved sweep across the border. Two hundred and fifty brutalized citizens from age 9 months to over 85 years ruthlessly taken hostage.

It is a sin against anything that anyone holds holy and yet the larger sin was/is lying in wait just ahead as people on seven continents look on and one nation after another calls for a cease fire. This is all before the start of the real War, when Israel launches a ground offensive against Hamas.

It seems Israel does not have the same rights as other nations. The rules of conflict are different in part because millions of Arabs have collaborated in a conspiracy against the Jews. The United Nations itself is not an objective judge. Its record is full of so much partisan history that the Secretary General could not help himself from saying the attacks by Hamas “did not happen in a vacuum.”

As every hour passes and another slew of rockets are fired from Gaza and bombs dropped by Israel, friends of Hamas double down with Hezbollah firing just enough missiles to make damn sure everyone knows. A thousand miles South the Houthis fire missiles because they are yet another proxy of Iran.

Hamas has perfected the use of poor Palestinian refugees who make up the majority of the population of Gaza with a majority of that majority being children as pawns to be sacrificed in the daily response by Israel as it readies it’s invasion. The clock ticks on because the World wants it’s hostages returned through a diplomatic masterstroke that I’m afraid may not be available. All the good people who don’t want to see poor refugees killed in the Israeli onslaught call their Representatives and cry for a cease fire.

The American Jewish left is divided, but it’s far left is better at calling Israel names than Antonio Guterres. Some thousand members of Jewish Voice for Peace showed up at Grand Central Station in NYC to stop traffic with a demonstration calling for Cease Fire Now and Not in Our Name and hoisted a banner that proudly announced the insipid words: “Never Again For Anyone.”

As the Anti-Defamation League monitors the stunning rise in anti-Semitism, America is only one example of the blossoming of hatred for Israel and all Jews that seems to accompany this increasingly autocratic age.

What comes next is anyone’s guess. But it’s pretty clear that Israel’s response to Hamas will function to destroy calls for a ‘New Middle East,’ with Joe Biden and the Americans caught putting out fires even as Iran and its proxies light an inferno,
and the military reply to Hamas by Israel inspires a thousand points of darkness around the Globe all in answer to the Jewish Question.