The Gamble

There has been an uptick in the ever-present screeching this week surrounding the news of Israel’s planned date to occupy Gaza City, its newest effort to bring about the hostages’ return and Hamas’ demise.

On the surface, one might be slightly confused at the panic, as we’ve literally been told for years by all of Pallywood that Israel has already been occupying Gaza for its entire existence. But digging deeper, the screams always become the shrillest when leverage is being lost and reality will be exposed.

Looking back, no one wanted Israel to enter Rafah either because of both the incriminating truths and lies that would be revealed. And no one wanted Israel to enter the UNRWA headquarters, to find the actual electronic brain of Hamas, both below and above ground, nor any of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, to find troves of terror tunnels, hostage cells, weapon arsenals, and terrorists themselves.

In the simplest terms possible, if it is being called for Israel to not enter an area…they absolutely, without a doubt, should be entering that area.

Anyone who has objections to this next move first must ask the question:

Why are we here, physically and existentially?

The answer to that is another date about which one won’t hear the Hamas harpies’ screeching: 8/15/05.

The date that Israel left Gaza. The date that nearly ten thousand Jews were expelled from the land in order to gift it turnkey to another population. The date that Israel made the gigantic gamble which has only paid in dividends of pain.

It is said that only hindsight is 20/20, but every future sign was already there. The slew of painful images of Jews being forced from their homes was truly a forewarning to what we would see broadcast eighteen years later.

In one of the greatest failed experiments of modern nations, the Israeli government wagered desperately and lost devastatingly on two key realities of external entities.

The first, of course, was the famous farce of “land for peace”: the hope that if one gives up land for a neighbor, the neighbor will give up their homicidal ideation in return…that uprooting all Jews would uproot any conflict. Stability for stability. A future for a future. But as we’ve seen since then, what a literal pipe dream that continues to be.

Naive trust was undeservedly extended to those who never earned nor could even understand such a concept. The misnomer of “disengagement” not only sanitized the agony of the operation but ironically forecast the deadly engagement that would soon be forced. About a month after the expulsion, security was stolen with the first of what would become the usual rocket attacks. Israelis themselves were stolen only one year later. And the grand finale of both tangible and intangible theft was what we all witnessed 22 months ago. Because what the government naively banked on was thinking that the root of the problem was even about land, when that was only a surface metaphor for much deeper and insidious beliefs.

When dark doctrine literally teaches to glorify and prioritize dying over living…when true paradise and fulfillment can only be found in death and not in life on earth…there will always be a fatally irreconcilable problem between two incompatible concepts of society. Combining such dogmas of death with historically habitual hatred, modernized with irresponsible funding and governmental directives, predictably leads in just one direction, which we have already seen and will only continue to see if not righted.

The writing was always on the wall. When a society values demise of others over prosperity for themselves, when one’s national identity is literally birthed from and based upon opposition to another, destruction for both is the only possible outcome of providing the former with the means to do so.

The second miscalculation was that this regional offering would finally buy Israel some humanity in the world’s eyes. Of course, the fatal flaw in that wishful thinking is that you can’t ever buy humanity from those whose default is to consider you less than human.

In the double standard reserved only for this region, no one would ever second guess any other country’s need to eliminate the threat of terrorism to its people. Every other nation would be granted the acknowledgment that their own well-being would depend on its eradication and well worth the effort involved. However, too much of the world doesn’t see Israel as worthy of well-being and doesn’t value the lives of its citizens as full humans, so it doesn’t value its necessary elimination of threats against them.

When it comes down to it, here we have the age-old timeless dichotomy of Islamic infantilism versus antipathy for Jews rearing its ugly head…no one believes Israel has the agency to ensure a secure future for itself, and no one believes that Gaza has the agency to support a terror driven regime and ideology.

Beyond that, it is a perfect example of the end result of infatuation with allowing appeasement and low expectations to reign over responsibility and accountability. And with such an inability or flat out refusal to address the core of this conflict, on some level, from explicitly obvious to unadmittedly unconscious, the world actually desires to keep in place this fatal status quo.

Hamas read the global room, calculated effectively, and hedged its bets on that poignant reality. They wagered on a predictable past with current co-conspirators to enshrine future success. But while many others may always be homicidal, Jews must not become suicidal.

Through necessary survival over millennia, Jews have learned a noble but bad habit of tempering our specific suffering to that of all others’, in order to prove our humanity against the antisemitism that insists we have none. This twenty-year disaster is directly the result of trying to get the whole world to like the Jewish state, to point and say, “see, we are human, too!”

Yet the depressing reality is that anything Israel does, short of complete capitulation, will be vilified around the globe, and therefore, the most important goal must become securing its own future survival. No longer can there be the luxury of clinging to past ideals over current issues, nor self-image over collective necessity. Israel simply cannot afford to make the same mistake of trying to appease the world at the expense of its people again.

In the end, it’s really no coincidence that both gambles of external fantasies ultimately failed…because Israel should instead be gambling on itself.

As we’ve since harshly discovered, what “never again” means in action is a hell of a lot different than what “never again” has meant in theory. Israel was rebuilt for many reasons, but especially to ensure that the vast slaughters of the past could never happen again. Now, it is sorely understood, even by the previously most ardent supporters of fairytale symbiosis, that the premature dispensing of land in this untenable state only ensures more of what was intended to be prevented.

Golda Meir once famously stated that “if we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.” This truth is as appropriate today as it was when first spoken, and while other parties may genuinely prefer the more convenient option of dead and pitied, Jews can no longer allow others to dictate our survival nor our state’s existence for the sake of some standing in the international eye.

While much going forward remains clouded in the unknown, one thing is crystal clear: insanity will always be trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Past techniques have run their course, and standing still will get nowhere in any goal. It is past time to move and take back some true control lost for too long…to stop doing what Hamas wants and start doing what needs to be done…and to stop playing into others’ hands and start playing our own.