The Middle East is a Simple Place to Understand

The Middle East is a fairly simple place to understand as long as a liberal progressive Western mind does not complicate it. Despite numerous clear signs from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Muslim-Arab world, Israelis in the leadership of the government, the IDF, Shabak, academic institutions and the media are not capable of seeing what’s right in front of their faces. (See my former piece Understanding ‘The Conceptia’) I’ll give you some examples.

The Hostage Deal

If anyone actually thinks that Sinwar wants to make a deal, they are disconnected from reality. 

Here is the deal that Israel is offering Sinwar: You release a few sick old hostages, we’ll release several hundred terrorists with blood on their hands, we won’t end the war and we will come and kill you and all of your friends.

If you were Sinwar, why would you ever accept a deal that wasn’t the end of the war and that also left hostages in your hands?

Regarding the protesters demanding a deal since the beginning of the war, by not defining what the deal is, all they’re doing is making noise and disturbing a lot of people by destroying public property and blocking roads. 

It had to be very clear from the beginning that the only deal that Israel would accept is all of the hostages released at the same time on the same day and anything less than that would not be accepted.

Imagine how powerful and unifying the protests could have been had their message been “all or nothing”? 

A partial deal is not just because that means they are willing to abandon the other hostages in Gaza. There is no logical justification for Sinwar to release the hostages unless he feels that it will give him an advantage over Israel. 

From Sinwar’s point of view, the advantage of holding the hostages right now is that it’s splitting our society. Unless we can show Sinwar it is not, he will continue holding the hostages forever, as far as he’s concerned. 

Rebuilding Gaza

Another example is the idea of rebuilding Gaza. The thinking is that if Israel were to just give Gazans their own electric plant and their own water plant and beautiful malls and lots of material goods they will want to live the same dream that we want to live in the West. But the dream of the Gazans is not the dream of Israelis or Americans and it never will be. 

Their dream, simply put, is to kill every Jew and replace the state of Israel with the state of Palestine. Anyone who is not willing to see this reality is living in a fantasy world, which, in the end, will bring more bloodshed to Muslims and Jews. 

For there to ever be peace in Israel, Gaza has to be voluntarily depopulated. The way Israel does that is by offering financial incentives to emigrate to other countries that support the Palestinians, for example: Spain, South Africa, Ireland, and any of the 135 countries around the world that have recognized a state of Palestine that doesn’t actually exist. If those countries really care about the Palestinians, they’ll take them in and give them a better life than their own leadership would ever allow them to have in Gaza. 

If not, their words are simply hot air that make them feel good about themselves but will only once again lead to more bloodshed. 

The thought that we can re-educate the Palestinian population to want Western values (a modern day Marshall Plan) and to see the world as we Israelis and the Western world see it is foolhardy. It’s the same thinking that allowed October 7th to happen. Gazans are not post WWII Germans or Japanese.

October 7th = Nakba 2024

The only solution for Gaza is resettling it with a Jewish population without a single Arab or Muslim in all of Gaza. I understand that this might feel racist or unjust to some Western readers, but this is the only thing that our enemies will understand. Muslim land is holy and according to Islam any land that has been conquered by Muslims has to remain in Muslim hands.

Jews controlling a land that was once under the control of Islams will send a very deep and clear message to Israel’s enemies. October 7th = Nakba 2024. That is the only way to bring any kind of peace to this region. 

But, alas, it goes against the Western way of seeing the world, and so liberal progressive Westerners are revolted by ideas like these. However Hamas is not moved since what the  leadership in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran and Lebanon are trying to do right now is to take the land away from the Jews. And so when you take the land away from Hamas and their supporters they understand it because that’s exactly what they’re trying to do to you. 

When you try to Westernize terrorists, they laugh at your naïveté thinking that they will take your liberal, progressive Western view and use it against you to conquer you.

Different Thinking = Different Results

Therefore, we Israelis need to start seeing the Middle East as it actually is and not how we want it to be. The way you understand the Middle East is to take yourself back to elementary school. In my school, one kid would say something obnoxious about another kid’s mother. That kid would punch the other kid in the face. The first kid would kick the other kid in his private parts. The teacher would come and make them apologize to one another but under their breath they threatened to kill each other after school. 

This is exactly how the Middle East works and to make it sound more sophisticated is only fooling ourselves into thinking that it can be something else. Look at the Middle East as it is. Don’t look for deeper meaning because it’s not there. Take everything at face value. If someone says they’re coming to kill you, they are actually coming to kill you. And if somebody has a date for destroying the state of Israel, trust that their goal is to try to destroy the state of Israel by that date.

Once we change the way we see our adversaries and the region, we will change the results we get.