Dead Israelis will never assuage woke consciences

Morally, Israel has the right to be wrong. Hamas is simply evil all the time. No number of dead Jews will assuage the conscience of those who embrace the fiction of a Palestinian state.

There’s no way to hit this topic by sticking a toe in the water, so dive in we must. I want to apologize in advance as most of the articles I link here are behind subscription paywalls. This is the reality of our Substack and webbified news culture. At least you’ve got The Racket News™️, still free to read. And by that, I mean thank you for reading. So let’s dive in.

At Yalta, in February 1945, Winston Churchill showed his disdain for holding Nazi war crime trials after the war, favoring summary executions for Nazis over a certain rank. Josef Stalin was no shrinking violet at the concept of using bullets in the back of heads, but the Soviet dictator sided with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarding trials. However, there was a strong desire among U.S. troops who witnessed the scale and trauma of the death camps to go with Churchill’s solution.

No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Wilson, M H (Lt), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Notwithstanding libelously wrong history presented by podcasting idiots like Tucker Carlson or guests of the Joe Rogan Experience, Germany lost between 6.6 and 8 million citizens in WWII, from combat, displacement and bombings. Their military losses were around five and a half million. Six million Jews were systematically exterminated, most with zero chance of fighting back, either by a bullet in the head after digging their own graves, a machine gun, and later, the gas chambers and ovens. It would have been a just solution to go out and find six million Germans who survived the war they started, piled them high, soaked them in gasoline, and lit the mountain of death to burn into the sky.

But we would not have learned anything at all from it. Instead, General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered his troops to document everything, and preserve as much evidence as possible for later war crime trials.

I spent a lot of time thinking whether I wanted to go down another rabbit hole regarding war crime trials, and decided to at least mention it—about Japan. My brother Jay and I discussed this a little bit yesterday, how General Douglas McArthur flew into Tokyo completely unarmed. When asked if he was concerned for his safety, he reportedly answered that he could not have been safer, for Emperor Hirohito guaranteed he would not be harmed. Japanese culture viewed their emperor as a god on earth, which is why, after the atomic attacks, his voice alone was enough to prevent a bloodbath by invasion, ordering his people to surrender—and they did. It was critical to McArthur to ensure Japan was governable after the war, and deposing Hirohito is the one thing that would ensure the opposite. The price of this stability (though life was difficult for the Japanese) is that the allies did not get to have war trials, and the atrocities committed against China, Burma, India, New Zealand, Australia, and even the U.S. went largely unpunished and out of the public mind.

Getting into today’s topic, let’s talk about Israel and Gaza. The Israeli security cabinet approved a plan for the IDF to take military control of Gaza City. I can’t tell you if this is the right decision, but I can tell you that in the context of war, when there is an enemy who refuses to surrender, and still keeps civilian hostages, maintains a large propaganda ministry, arms its terrorist fighters, who don’t wear uniforms when fighting (only for ceremonies), and continues to plan to attack and further its war aims, it is entirely appropriate for the stronger military to pursue victory until it obtains acceptable terms.

Hamas started this war. It prepared for years, used ruses and subterfuge, funded itself lavishly using Qatar’s great wealth, and money from various friendly nations. It heavily armed itself, and to dispute the notion that Gaza was some kind of “open air prison,” read Jonah Goldberg’s excellent piece comparing Hamas to a “death cult prison gang.” It does in fact operate exactly like that, and maintains a robust prison gang in Israeli prisons also, which has been the source of many of their leaders, including the eliminated Yahya Sinwar and his brother. These men were arrested as youngsters, spent time in Israeli prisons, learning Hebrew, observing their enemy at close range, and in previous deals to free hostages taken by other terrorists, were freed to go back and plan to kill more Jews. There are thousands like them in Israeli prisons today.

Israel declared war against Hamas, which doesn’t recognize the rules of war. It is only Israel that is being held to those rules. Hamas is free to violate them at will, and still earn rewards of having recognition by the U.K., Canada, and France. Don’t claim that these western nations somehow are only recognizing Palestinian statehood without endorsing Hamas. That’s total nonsense. As Kevin D. Williamson patiently explained (once again), there is no Palestinian state, and there is unlikely to be one anytime soon. When Israel was recognized de facto as a state by the United States government, followed by the Soviet Union, in the land of Mandatory Palestine, which was up to May 15, 1948 controlled by Great Britain, it was because on that day, the various military sects operated by Jews in the land became the Israeli Defense Forces, and the State of Israel was established as its government.

The countries wishing to recognize a Palestinian State have no de facto government to recognize. It is a de jure genie wish, a conjuring of a state where none exists, and none has ever existed with its own government since Judea was a Roman province and renamed Syria Palaestina by the emperor Hadrian. This was done in retribution for the Bar Kokhba revolts, which caused no end of headaches for various Roman legions in the first century A.D. All Jewish culture was to be wiped from the face of the earth—meaning the Roman Empire within its borders. But the Jews didn’t go away, they just kept moving in a permanent diaspora. Then in the late 19th century, the Zionist movement began gathering Jew back to the Holy Land. In 1917, during WWII, the Balfour Declaration in London proposed that the Jews be given their ancestral homeland in the Holy Land. In May, 1948, the vision for a Jewish state culminated in the State of Israel. It has been fighting for its existence ever since.

To recognize a Palestinian state, whatever government chooses to engage in this conjuring must deal with Hamas, and Hamas is not a government. It is a terrorist organization built for one purpose—the elimination of Israel and the Jews worldwide. That’s not the basis for statecraft, so the fiction of declaring a state without endorsing a government has to be maintained.

In its war with Hamas, Israel has likely killed some 60,000 Palestinians. It is a fiction and propaganda that they are all innocents, hospital patients, humanitarian workers, and children. The majority of those killed are themselves stone-cold killers, terrorists who were trying to kill Israelis, including many of the October 7, 2023 killers who put on IDF uniforms, lured Israeli citizens to them, and shot them in sight of their children, then killed the children. They put a baby into a hot oven. They raped, tortured, and filmed their exploits. The terrible video evidence of their acts exists, just as surely as the evidence of the Nazi camps in WWII exists.

It would be just to kill them all, as Winston Churchill proposed regarding Nazis after WWII. Many IDF soldiers who witnessed the evil on October 7 have to suppress their own urge for vengeance, because they operate in a professional military that, more than practically any other in the world, obeys the laws of war. Israel leaflets areas where military action is planned in advance of its operations. It “knocks” on buildings where civilians are known to be inside before an airstrike. It uses existing (now severely damaged) communications infrastructure to mass text people in target areas. It does all this to preserve innocent life. But Hamas doesn’t want to preserve innocent life. Hamas wants a large death count, whether by bomb, bullet, or starvation, in order to claim Israel is the war criminal, and win friends in the west.

Israel’s taking of Gaza City may be the wrong thing to do, tactically and strategically. I believe it’s a fair argument to suggest it’s not a good path to end the war. I even agree that there have been opportunities for offramp that the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have avoided in order to continue to pursue a military solution. I think Israel will pay for their poor decisions. But that doesn’t mean Israel is committing war crimes, or it is in the wrong at all in pursuing an enemy who refuses to surrender after starting a war and losing it. Tactics and strategy can be discussed at length by historians, like the U.S. decision during WWII to use atomic weapons against civilians in Japanese cities. But nobody should suggest that America find an equal number of innocent U.S. citizens to die in a nuclear blast in exchange for the conscience of killing 80,000 or so Japanese to win the war.

There is no moral argument you can make that 60,000 Israelis deserve to die because the IDF killed 60,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were in the act of trying to kill IDF soldiers or innocent Israelis by firing rockets into Israeli cities. No sane, rational person would take that position, and I dismiss anyone who suggests it. The only real agenda of such a person is raw antisemitism. Jew hatred.

Assuaging the conscience of liberal nations who want to pretend they’re not siding with terrorists against a liberal, professional, democratic state that punches well above its weight economically, academically, and in military defensive technology, by pretending there is some equal existing on the Palestinian side is nothing but a mental delusion. Javier Milei, Argentina’s president and the author of its present economic libertarian miracle, explains it to The Free Press’s Niall Ferguson this way:

NF: You have said the other key relationship for you is with Israel. That is partly a personal connection, related to your Jewish grandfather. But we find ourselves sitting here at the end of a week when the French government and the British government announce that they will recognize a Palestinian state. What is your reaction to that?

JM: That they’re wrong. That wokeism has infected their thinking so much that they fail to realize what a mistake that would be. Israel is being attacked from two sides. On the one hand, the attack is coming from regimes that advocate the disappearance of Israel. So it’s only legitimate for Israel to want to defend itself. These murderers who want to wipe out Israel have found an unexpected ally—the left wing. Basically, Israel is the very heart of capitalism because capitalism is based on the values of Judeo-Christian culture. So the left is not attacking Israel for the sake of attacking Israel itself. It attacks Israel in order to attack the foundations of capitalism. Therefore taking a stance against Israel is, at bottom, suicide.

There is a meta discussion, which is the discussion of either good or evil, between freedom and democracy as opposed to totalitarians and murderers. I have decided to take sides with good and against the woke crowd and their stupid interpretation of freedom, out of which comes the account of oppressors versus the oppressed, which is, at bottom, post-Marxism. They have taken the class struggle to other issues—women against men, black against white, the indigenous people’s agenda, the LGBT agenda, the climate agenda, man against nature. The most violent expression of this is the abortion agenda, which is disguised as goodness when in fact it’s a bloody agenda. Unless Europe breaks from that agenda, it will be doomed and disappear in the way that we know it. Its death certificate will start to be written the day they take a stand against Israel.

Israel will continue to survive. Always. History shows that Israel has endured all sorts of aberrations because it combines the material life with the spiritual life. So they won’t be able to destroy Israel. But for those who don’t have a spiritual basis, the post-Marxist agenda will contaminate all sections of society, finally leading to the demise of Europe as we know it.

I don’t know that I fully agree with Milei about the demise of Europe, but from his chair in Argentina, I agree that it’s a pretty safe thing for him to say. The rest of what Milei answered is exactly true in my mind. Israel is a capitalist society, and its government is stable enough for Intel, Microsoft, and a host of other tech companies to maintain large offices there, where they attract talent, not by bringing it from outside, but by recruiting inside Israel. Israel also has its own very healthy startup culture and technology sector. Israel feeds itself, irrigating desert land into farmland. It has one of the world’s largest desalinization plants, and is fifth in the world by capacity for producing potable water from seawater. Israel is 44th in the world out of 102 nations by natural gas reserves.

The fact that Palestinians don’t get access to Israel’s success is not something to be blamed on Israel. All the Palestinians have had to do at any time in the last 60 years is to renounce a commitment to Israel’s destruction and provide an honest partner in government. Anytime there has been even a crack through which this might be a possibility, it is the Palestinians, in the person of Yassir Arafat, then in the Nazi clothing of Islamic Brotherhood and its death cult Hamas, who have slammed the door on peace and a two-state solution. They do not want a two-state solution. They want a one state solution, “from the river to the sea,” meaning, no Israel at all.

By recognizing the state the Palestinians wants, the western nations who have engaged in this fiction are truly de-recognizing Israel, and empowering the terrorists to continue to hold out. Nobody should be surprised that Israel is now taking the next step to guarantee its security against another October 7th.

Morally, Israel has the right to be wrong. Hamas is simply evil all the time. No number of dead Jews will assuage the conscience of those who embrace the fiction of a Palestinian state. It will only happen when there is a government capable of running such a state, and to date, there has never been one.

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