Two Years On

Has twenty-four months ever felt so long?  Has a (relatively) small scale conflict ever transformed the globe in such immediate, obvious, and irreversible ways?  The fact that there are living Israeli hostages still in captivity, as of this writing, is unbearable.  As is the fact that so many Western liberals—elected officials and citizens alike—continue to support or make excuses for some variation of the “Free Palestine!” movement as if it were a liberation or revolutionary movement, whose ultimate goal is freedom and equality, and not a violent, genocidal “death cult,” as Douglas Murray calls it, bent on regional and global dominance.  Is this conflict really so difficult to understand?  Has social media degraded our critical faculties and collective sense of world history, and our place in it, so completely?  Don’t answer that.

All historical periods come to an end.  For us, October 7 marked the end of one period and the beginning of another.  We may understand the period that just ended (with, let us not forget, the massacre of innocents and the celebration of that massacre) as something like late-postmodernism.  I asked AI what comes after postmodernism and its information-rich, morally-stupid answer was: Post-post- or hyper- or meta-modernism.  None of which suggestions I find in the least bit satisfying.  But whatever period we’re now in, it marks, among other things, a decisive geo-political shift (which is to say nothing of the spiritual, religious, moral and ethical shifts now taking place as well).  In short, liberalism is no longer so liberal and conservatism is not so conservative.  How else to explain the popularity of, say, a Zohran Mamdani who has steadfastly refused to condemn such self-evidently vile slogans as “Globalize the Intifada,” while a twice-elected, seemingly anti-democratic Donald Trump somehow impresses with his ability to rally Arab and Israeli support for an end to this awful conflict?  How else to explain the still-twisting-in-the-wind political fate of one Benjamin Netanyahu, who, while bearing undeniable responsibility for allowing October 7 to happen at all (a stain on his legacy that will never be erased), he undoubtedly deserves credit for maximizing Israel’s response to this catastrophe, specifically, for the way he’s reshaped the Middle East: the crippling of Hezbollah, the humbling of the Ayatollah and the Revolutionary Republic’s nuclear program, and the decimation of Hamas—all of which has made the world safer for things like religious tolerance, political moderation, and individual freedom.  No small feat—one that all democratic, freedom-loving individuals should be grateful for.

Could Netanyahu and the IDF been more social media-friendly throughout it all?  Sure.  But I’m still not convinced that appearing to do the right thing is better than doing the right thing.  Imagine if we judged our mitzvot on how our deeds looked to others rather than the inherent meaning of them?  Part of Hamas’s undeniable success in this conflict is that they have made themselves appear to the world, via social media, to be courageous, anti-colonial freedom fighters when, in reality, they are anti-liberal, theocratic murderers, kidnappers, rapists and thugs.  Talk about an empty victory.  Do you think this is the Middle East Yahyah Sinwar envisioned when he gave the orders that morning?  A Middle East in which the Arab world is now largely aligned against Hamas?  A world in which Hezbollah has been humiliated?  A world in which Israeli fighter jets fly unimpeded over the skies of Iran, and the Abraham Accords are not only set to continue but to expand?  Israel may have lost the PR war but one would be hard pressed to make the case that it is losing reality.  One takeaway from this conflict therefore may be that appearances are not what they seem, an old bit of wisdom that much of the world appears in need of reminding in this woefully illiterate digital age.

I have a prediction: Just as the so-called woke, progressive left has gone silent in the face of the current Trump 20-point peace plan, the moment this conflict ends, anti-Israel sentiment among educated, upper middle class American students and their milieu will taper off.  That’s what fads do.  They come and go.  There will be another cause to excite the emotions of the affluent directionless.  But Israel is not a fad.  Judaism is famously fad-proof.  And what seems like an interminable conflict one day becomes yesterday’s news the next.  It is only a matter of time before Hamas learns this unhappy lesson.  May the hostages soon be returned to their families.  May the suffering of innocents in Gaza soon cease.  And may we say in unison: “Be strong, be strong, and may we be strengthened!”  Baruch Hashem.