When one side is fighting a religious war and the other is not, then the one fighting the religious war will never lose, and will continue fighting, or at least resume fighting later, and will not stop until finally victorious. This can go on for generations.
With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wartime leadership having gone into high gear, one can expect talk of a peace deal with Hezbollah to more likely be a ruse for running out the clock on the dreadful Biden administration. Such talk, it turns out, is also bringing into the open just how solidly the Israeli public stands behind Mr Netanyahu in his prosecution of the war. As things stand, the only mistake Netanyahu can make is to fall behind the Israeli public.
Well behind the Israeli public are journalists such as Yair Pinto of TBN Israel, according to whom:
There might even still be hope among some Hamas leaders that Hezbollah will be able to distract Israel enough for them to survive, but if there’s a ceasefire and an obvious Israeli victory in the North, these hopes will finally be put to rest. This is a critical step that can affect the stability of the entire region and bring closer a hostage deal with Hamas which is an important goal for Israel and its allies.
There is just so much wrong with this assessment. “If there’s a ceasefire… these hopes [of Hamas survival] will finally be put to rest.” Precisely the opposite is the case: a ceasefire will boost such hopes, and they will keep on fighting because by agreeing to stop fighting them, the IDF cancels itself, leaving Hamas the only one fighting until the IDF again, reluctantly, “violates the ceasefire” (and, of course, apologises to the world for doing so).
Pinto speaks of “an obvious Israeli victory.” Ask most Israelis exactly what this means, operationally, and the answers range from the cringeworthy, “They accept that we’re here to stay because we have nowhere else to go,” to some technocratic, textbook definition of a peace agreement, such as are offered by retired IDF strategists. Pinto draws out the implications of this obvious Israeli victory: “This is a critical step that can… bring closer a hostage deal with Hamas.” What kind of “obvious Israeli victory” over Hezbollah, on whose continuation of the war Hamas’s survival depends, leaves Israel in a position where she can only hope for “a possible hostage deal with Hamas”? What kind of victory leaves power over hostages in the hands of what is supposedly a defeated enemy?
It is exactly this kind of self-defeating twaddle that irritated Ze’ev Jabotinsky so much. In the context of pressuring the British Palestine Mandatory for a Jewish state, Jabotinsky lambasted his fellow Jews. If we simply substitute “obvious Israeli victory” for “iron wall,” and “Hamas/Hezbollah” for “Mandatory Government,” the absurdity of Pinto’s perspective becomes obvious:
We all demand that there should be an iron wall. Yet we keep spoiling our own case, by talking about “agreement” which means telling the Mandatory Government that the important thing is not the iron wall, but discussions. Empty rhetoric of this kind is dangerous. And that is why it is not only a pleasure but a duty to discredit it and to demonstrate that it is both fantastic and dishonest. (Ze’ev Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall, 1923. My emphasis)
The Israeli population at large has finally lost patience with negotiations, deconflicting, de-escalation, ceasefires, agreements and peace deals. They want victory for themselves and defeat for their enemies; clear-cut, unambiguous and no gray areas. Tzvika Mor, whose son, Eitan, a security guard at the Nova music festival next to Gaza, had saved hundreds by the time Hamas took him captive. Tzvika Mor insists:
As a father of a hostage and as a reservist fighter in the IDF… I demand the legal system let the IDF achieve decisive victory and free the hostages… We must be allowed to fight until the end. And we believe that fighting until the end will force Hamas to bring us back our hostages.” (quoted in Israel Today, 19 November 2024, https://www.israeltoday.co.il/read/let-the-idf-win-insists-father-of-israeli-hostage/)
Who was Tzvika Mor having this heated argument with? Not Antony Blinken, not Amos Hochstein (both Jews), not António Guterres, no, but Israeli Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara and State Attorney Amit Aisman! These are exactly the people whose wings the Judicial Reforms were meant to clip before they could do the kind of damage they are doing now. Yair Pinto, for all his talk of victory, is the mouthpiece of capitulation, a Jew incapable of imagining victory. There are still too many of those.
Noticeable, though not yet quite so prominent, has been the growing recognition amongst Israelis that they are embroiled in a religious war, jihad, rather than a nationalist one. This used to be dismissed out of hand. Israelis can listen. They just need a little encouragement from, er, events.
Recognising the nature of a war is a prerequisite for correctly conceptualising victory and defeat. Here theapitulation and halfway measures are not it. A consistent pattern of the war has been a demand on the Prime Minister to spell out “what victory looks like”. Netanyahu has been inconsistent in his answers, less because he was practising the dark art of ambiguity, and more because, in all likelihood, he himself did not know. people of Israel still have some way to go, but most of them now know that c
Perhaps he cannot be blamed for not knowing what victory looks like, since those who kept pressing him did not know either. Finding themselves unable to answer their own question unnerved them, and they piled onto their leader the responsibility of knowing for them. But this is not a new phenomenon. Israelis, right from the founding of their state, despite all the wars and wars-between-wars, have consistently failed to answer the question of what victory looks like, because they have consistently denied that the war is a religious war, as if the act of acknowledging that it is a religious war makes you, ipso facto, religious, or at least, amounts to making a concession to the religious, the hated ‘Messianics.’
This is irrational, yet it functions as a powerful block on many a rational mind. Yet, when one side is fighting a religious war and the other is not, then the one fighting the religious war will never lose, and will continue fighting, or at least resume fighting later, and will not stop until finally victorious. This can go on for generations. In the meantime, the side fighting a secular war always thinks they have won every time the religious side is overcome, only to end up surprised over and over again that the religious side has yet again launched “another war.” How many times must Jews be put through this cruel, self-righteous mockery?
From the 1834 Safed Massacre through every massacre, pogrom, raid, skirmish and war up to the current war, it is all one war: jihad against the Jews. It continues because the Muslims never lost. The Muslims never lost because the Jews always stop before the Muslims lose, because the Jews imagine the Muslims are fighting a war that they are not fighting. Every time the Jews celebrate victory, they simply give Muslims the chance to gather their strength and prepare to continue the war. Preparing to continue the war does not mean peace; it means that the war continues by every other means that they can get away with.
When I say, “the Muslims never lost,” that is not quite true. They did lose in 1948. It is, however, a loss from which they were rescued and could return to the fight in some other way. In the Arab Muslim mind, the stronger dominates the weaker, else what would be the point of being the stronger? The side that prevails in war is, by definition, the stronger. Their dominance must be confirmed in no uncertain terms, not only so the weaker knows with absolute certainty that they have been defeated and so will submit, but so surrounding peoples (all enemies, if they believe not in Allah), submit before jihad comes to them. “I have been helped by terror (in the hearts of enemies),” Muhammad is reported to have said.
The stronger army failing to assert dominance by humiliation means that the weaker army has not been vanquished, regardless of what the stronger army might believe. In such failure to humiliate it, the weaker army will see the stronger as having humiliated itself, all the proof it needs that it is, indeed the stronger and will quite legitimately celebrate victory. It will only be a matter of time before it attacks again, this time to impose its dominance in no uncertain terms. Decades of “mowing the lawn” in Gaza made October 7 inevitable.
Islamic history is replete with the victor putting the vanquished to the sword, man, woman and child. Anything less is mercy: kill all the men and enslave all the women and children; or hold them all for ransom, or prisoner exchange. As a general rule, the more savagery, the better. But victory is cemented in humiliating the enemy, such as: raping women in front of their families; forcing a ruler’s head to the ground; publicly shaving a ruler’s beard; a woman, a slave or a dog standing guard over a captured ruler, and so forth.
But the greatest humiliation of all is the loss of “Muslim land” to non-Muslims. Not only had a seriously disadvantaged army prevailed over an advantaged one, a Jewish army had seized Muslim territory from an Arab army. The United Nations had assigned 14,700 sq Km of Muslim land to Jews! It was a humiliation that the ummah would not stand for. The Arabs assembled five armies, supplemented with Arab expeditionary forces, to prevent this loss of Muslim land. The Arabs expected to win, because Jews were the weaker army, but more importantly, the Muslims were entitled to win, because the opposing army were Jews.
In the event, by the time the armies stopped fighting in 1949, not only had the combined Arab armies not prevented the loss of the original 14,700 sq Km of Muslim land, the Jewish army had seized a further 5,800 sq Km, bringing the total Muslim loss to 20,500 sq km, an increase of 37% over what they were meant to secure. This humiliation was devastating enough, but it had been seriously compounded when the Arab leaders themselves forced the Arab non-combatant population to evacuate their homes and farms within the 14,000 sq Km, so they may be out of harm’s way and not hamper the Arab armies when they sweep through to massacre all the Jews. It was the Arab leaders, not the Jews, that had promised the Arab evacuees they could return to their homes within a few days.
Dr Einat Wilf had the powerful insight that the creation of UNWRA allowed the Arabs after 1948 to continue their war by every other means. UNWRA helped the Palestinian Arabs believe that they had not lost the war. For as long as they remain “refugees,” they remain evacuees waiting to return to their homes when the war is over. This leads me to conjecture that UNWRA might have been set up as the Arab leaders’ attempt to redeem that promise they made to the Arab evacuees in 1948.
Had the Jews understood it this way, they would have made sure that the humiliation of 1948 stuck, for it was, indeed, the only real victory the Jews had secured over jihad, apart from the Golan Heights and most of Jerusalem, both special cases. There would never have been any notion of “land for peace” and Yair Pinto would not today be making such predictions as:
The hope in many circles is that after the IDF withdraws from Lebanon and this war officially ends, Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon, and with it Iran’s influence, will be greatly diminished.
It is my sincere hope that the Jews will not wait for the next October 7 before they permanently seize from Muslim land the 365 sq Km of Gaza and the 1,988 sq Km of southern Lebanon from which the IDF is now expelling the remnants of Hezbollah. Doing this will secure a victory similar to 1948 in that Hezbollah and the IRGC will have lost Muslim territory to Jews. In other words, both Sunni and Shi’a jihad armies have failed to protect Muslim land from the Jews. What is more, they have both lost additional Muslim land after repeatedly declaring that they will recover previously lost Muslim land. The humiliation of Islam and the ummah will be complete. Thus will Israel have found a real possibility of securing her position in the Middle East as the saviour of the Arabs. Seen in this context, extending Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria shows itself as not warranting the decades of dithering.
Picture credits:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yasin_Rantisi_Hamas_Wahlkampf.jpg
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