The Home Front

Sitting in Tel Ha Shomer Hospital in Israel is even more stressful and absorbing than reading about national and international geopolitics. While we sit here in the hospital, a “hostile deal” has been hammered out between Israel and Hamas.

Now give this some thought. A criminal gang from Mexico comes into the United States murdering, raping, and killing 1,200 or 1,500 Americans in the southwest.  The gang takes back to Mexico hundreds of Americans including children, women, and a host of other innocents. The only way the Mexican gang will release the American hostages is if we agree to open up our prisons and let out some of the worst criminals, including 250 to 300 people who have murdered others. What would we do as Americans?

Israel is in the unenviable position of having to free 1,900 criminals in return for 33 hostages. Hamas, and Islamic Jihad generally, takes hostages precisely for this reason; they use the hostages as instruments of war to free criminals in Israeli prisons.

Perhaps it is time for Israel to consider the death penalty for those convicted of murder. That suggestion has been made in the Jewish state, but only one person in this country’s history has ever been given the death penalty and that was Adolf Eichmann. He was Hitler’s lieutenant, who helped to dream up and implement the Final Solution, the murder of 6 million European Jews.

So we sit here in the hospital, worried about a friend we came to see, on the eve of a Shabbat. This promises to be yet another emotional Sabbath. As we entered the hospital, enormous white drop cloths were in front of the hospital, covering large metal stanchions. The purpose of these is to provide privacy to those hostages arriving at the hospital.

The fact that Hamas is even in business, and has to be negotiated with, promotes a feeling of nausea. The world should have demanded complete eradication of Hamas, and no one should be negotiating with them. Hamas does not distinguish between Israelis and others. The hostages are comprised of people from Thailand, Russia, the United States, and a host of other places. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken pointed out in his interview with The New York Times, the world is not talking about the hostages or the repercussion of war being waged by the taking of hostages in return for military advantage.

Even more disgusting is the fact that many in the Arab world, and certainly in Gaza, consider the murderers to be let out of Israeli prisons to be freedom fighters. We live on a planet where the killing of innocents is extolled as a heroic act by freedom fighters. How insane is that?

Israelis, of course, want their hostages home but realize that the victory over Hamas has been incomplete. Hamas and Iran claim that they have “won.” In a way, they have. They still exist. The fact that Hamas is still on the face of this planet, along with the leadership of Iran, is a twisted kind of victory. The bad guys, the worst of the bad guys, have survived and western democracies are forced to “negotiate” with them.

It is interesting that the Israelis, much hated by their enemies, run hospitals which employ a significant number of Muslim Arabs. The nurse in attendance to the family proudly wore her head covering, as every Arab has the right to do in this country.  The halls and the rooms in this hospital are filled with a mixture of all kinds of people, skin colors, and religions. How many Jewish nurses do you think are working in any Arab hospitals, anywhere in the world? The answer is none!

On one floor I saw an Arab woman with her ill child. The child could barely walk.  Nevertheless, they are being cared for here by Jewish, Christian, and Arab Muslim doctors. Thank goodness that people of all races, religions, and colors have freedom in the Holy Land. It is and should be an example to the rest of the world. Instead, however, the Jihadist Muslims who make up so much of the Middle East hate Israel and the Jews precisely because they embrace freedom, democracy, and equality.  Those are philosophies that are foreign, completely alien, to those who hate Israel and the Jewish people.

Unfortunately, the Jihadist mentality has raised its ugly head in the United States, on college campuses, and sometimes even in the workplace. There is a reason why the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran always target Tel Aviv, the most western, modern, diverse city in all of the Middle East. Tel Aviv is the template, in the minds of the haters, of everything that is wrong with Israel and the Jewish people. The same mentality that seeks to rocket attack and bomb Tel Aviv flew airplanes into the World Trade Center murdering thousands of American citizens.

My immediate concern is the friend that I came to see. Within these walls there is safety and an attempt to provide good health, the Israeli population is getting ready to receive its hostages. The stain of October 7^th, the taking and abuse of hostages by Fundamentalist Islam will never abate completely. It will be a blemish on the character of the world that more effort was not made to free the hostages and to destroy organizations like Hamas. In the fight for the continued existence of the Jewish people in Israel, there is significant help from the United States. In the back of my mind, and the minds of many others, is whether President Trump will demand “peace” at any cost, or will he deliver on his promises to secure a Middle East where Jew, Christian, and Arab can live together by eliminating the threat to their very existence?

Unfortunately, no one is talking about the real reason why thousands of citizens of Gaza were killed and injured. They died and suffered by virtue of their own chosen government’s policy. Hamas is a government that the people of Gaza embraced and refused to get rid of. It is a government that used hospitals, mosques, and schools as launching pads for missiles. The people of Gaza not only knew what was going on, but they overwhelmingly supported the war against Israel. Hamas, meanwhile, gladly used their own people as tools to whip up sympathy for the cause.  Interception of numerous emails by Hamas leadership shows that the leadership celebrated the death of their own people and the popularity which it brought the Hamas “cause” in the so-called free world.

Right now, the hospitalized come first, but the reality of Jewish hostages being held ransom so that Hamas can trade them for murderers and criminals is a reality not to be forgotten.