by Victor Rosenthal November 24, 2023
Look for a moment at the Israel-Gaza war in a different way, a Middle Eastern way. Look at it in terms of honor and shame. Despite the fact that these ideas are almost gone from the West – replaced in some places by “woke” concepts that are almost unintelligible here – they are tremendously important. The tribes of the Middle East still operate in a zero-sum world, where the weak are prey, deterrence is paramount, and honor is deterrence. And Israel’s future, if she has one, will be dependent on her relations with her Middle Eastern neighbors and not with post-Christian Europe and North America.
Everything about the terrible attack on southern Israel on 7 October was designed and choreographed as an attack on her honor. The rapes and torture, and (especially) the video documentation thereof, the emphasis on the degradation of women, the inclusion of Israeli Arabs and foreign workers in the massacre (to show that we couldn’t protect them), the killing of men and the capture of women and children (to become slaves) were more important than the transient military advantage resulting from the invasion.
The crowning glory of the attack was the hostage-taking, because, as the Hamas leaders understood, it enabled the subjugation of the Jews to the will of Hamas. Suddenly all our tanks and F-35s are rendered useless, and we are required to jump to the commands of Hamas, to beg for the lives of the women and children in their cruel hands, as they strut around and preen themselves, to worldwide applause.
This, as they see it, is enabled by the essential weakness of Israeli society, the society that Hamas leaders learned about as they served prison sentences (in the case of Yahya Sinwar, a sentence that was cut short as part of the obscenely excessive ransom for one Israeli soldier).
From 7 October to today, everything has gone according to the Hamas plan. The deal that was made will enable its military capability and political control to survive. They have precisely calibrated it according to their understanding of our society, the political situation in the US, and the expected behavior of the international community. The message to the most important audience, the tribes of the Middle East, has been received. Israel has no honor; anyone can hurt us, even a group like Hamas that is little more than an ISIS-like militia. The Iranian axis is the “strong horse.”
It needn’t be this way. Even now, it isn’t too late to recover our honor and our deterrence. The war should be resumed, with a strong offensive to finish off Hamas’ military capability in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. We should demand that all hostages be released within a specified time period (a few days). If this does not occur to our satisfaction, not only will the Hamas leadership all be targeted and killed, but their families as well. In effect, they will be our hostages. In either case, the war will continue until the military capability and political control of Hamas over Gaza is ended.
I can only imagine the objections. It will endanger the captives. It is barbaric. It is collective punishment. Let me answer the last two first: call it what you will, it is the way a tribe must behave in the Middle East to survive. This is especially important for a small country without strategic depth like Israel, which can’t afford mistakes. Israel’s attempts to act according to the moral precepts of large Western nations (which, of course, the hypocritical Westerners violate with impunity whenever it is to their advantage) places her at a great disadvantage in asymmetric warfare with typical Middle-Eastern tribal societies like Hamas, possibly an existential one.
The first objection is more serious. It is true that anything other than complete surrender to all of Hamas’ demands will endanger the captives to some extent. But allowing Hamas to survive, giving it military advantages, and releasing terrorist prisoners will also have its price. We can’t put up posters of future victims of Hamas, but they are certain to exist. As Caroline Glick has said, the only difference is that we know the names of today’s captives. The others areas yet unknown, but they are no less real. And if we do not regain our deterrence, we can expect that there will be many more of them.
@Tanna Actually, nobody is advocating what the Torah says to do. Liberals just quote the first sentence of the relevant passage in Deuteronomy 20.
Madline is correct. Israel does not have the leadership nor will to follow the Torah. Hamas will keep killing Jews and maybe after enough dead Jews pile up, Israel will do what needs to be done.
dreuveni-
I agree on the Kfir, it was an excellent plane. (the US made them a “deal they just couldn’t refuse) But Israel still makes a few domestic planes, so the industry is not closed down but just sleeping.
Or it was a few years ago when I read about it.
Honour-Shmonour-
Who cares…except ideologues…>.???
In this particular circumstance the GOAL is to get out hostages back, and destroy Hamas permanently-thus sending a clear message to Iran.
Honour can wait.
You can either “go down with your ship”( and play your ukulele) -or grab the last seat in the waiting lifeboat.
I know what I’d chose
ALl the same , Victor writes a nice article.
@Adam:
Israel should never have stopped the Kfir.
So I guess we will have to save face as they say in the far east.
Excellent article. He makes many fine points, to which I will add just a bit. So what if Israel went full bore on the attack – including threats to kill terrorist families – defying Biden? Would he really cut off arms and let Israel fail? I know it’s a risk, but it would not be in Biden’s major interests, IMO. Anyway, as Vic points out, there are lots of other ways to get the necessary arms.
The key element is having the right mind set. Israel is not in 19th century Europe where gentlemen were supposed to fight for their honor in duels at dawn. European thinking in many forms has been influencing Israeli “niceness” and we should get out of it.
Rather, as I have written in articles and comments, Jews can fight as we were told in the Biblical books of Deuteronomy and Joshua: Give them a chance to surrender and if they don’t, kill all of them. The point was twofold. Don’t let them regroup and don’t be influenced by their terrible, pagan values. Maybe HaShem understood the tactics of honor better than any of us today. Ya think?
I do not know to what degree Israel actually is dependent upon the US. But there are two types of dependencies: one is real, the other is perceived.
In a real dependency, e.g. an infant, MUST have a parent to survive. In a perceived dependency, e.g. a young adult who believes or perceives him or herself to still need their parent, if that parent dies, this young adult can, indeed, survive and develop the capabilities he thought he didn’t have.
If Israel cannot get arms from anywhere else in the world, and the only place in the whole world that can supply arms were the US, then Israel has a real dependency upon the US government and would have to abort the mission whenever the US said Israel had to stop the mission.
If the dependency is of the perceived variety, and Israel can purchase arms from elsewhere until such time as Israel develops domestic weapons manufacturing, then Israel has the option to man up and move forward, along the lines suggested by Victor Rosenthal above.
Not only is that a good idea from the standpoint of Israel’s standing in the Middle East, it is actually a good idea from the standpoint of the reality of what has been happening in the United States.
According to Colonel MacGregor, the US military is in shambles. Our equipment levels are low to non-existent, our manpower has decreased, our military leadership is focused on fighting climate change, Donald Trump supporters, and implementing DEI workshops at all levels of the command structure. He says the US doesn’t have the means to help Israel, despite what the US government says. He explains “A lot of people lie.” He thinks Netanyahu has bought a lie about what the US can provide to Israel.
But even if MacGregor is incorrect in his assessment of US military readiness, Israel needs to follow Rosenthal’s suggestions for the sake of the Israeli PEOPLE. This is what the people of Israel need in order to have any hope to survive in Israel.
If Netanyahu cannot see his way to this line of thinking, ultimately he will be forced to step down. The Israeli people, are, unlike the Jews living in the diaspora, living with the conviction that unlike their grandparents and great-grandparents, they have future lives that are safe and secure from genocide as long as Israel survives, because everyone: every Jew in Israel, pledges to provide for the safety and security of every other Jew in Israel, and so there is universal military service. Every Jew has to put his or her life on the line to save his and her brother, sister, mother, father, and children.
When 10/7 happened it tore a deep rent into the fabric of that security. In order to heal that wound, Israel must be made MORE secure than it was prior to 10/7. It cannot be made MORE secure than it was prior to 10/7 with the thinking that led to 10/7. That thinking was:
1.complacency
2. “the US will back us.”
3. “we have the technology in our fence to stop anything and everything that attempts to penetrate the fence.”
4. “Hamas is busy doing other things than planning a devastating attack on us.”
5. “How do we solve the internal crisis and division over judicial reform?”
6. How do we achieve success in negotiating with Saudi Arabia for the next Abraham Accords agreement?
Before anyone thinks I am blaming Israel for the attacks on 10/7 let me hasten to qualify what I meant. The primary responsibility for 10/7 goes to Hamas AND the Biden Administration. The Biden administration did everything they could to empower Iran and the Palestinians since day one of his presidency. But in addition to Biden and Hamas, there was some contribution from Israel too.
I never thought I would see the day when Netanyahu, who stood right up to President Obama, and fought him directly on his own turf, would allow Biden to lead him around like he had a ring in his nose. I still don’t know if this is the truth about Netanyahu today. But there is a way to tell, and that is in the prosecution of this war. If the war falls apart following these first hostages being released, because Hamas then says, “Oh we will release a few more if you will pause the war a few more days,” and then that happens again, and again, and the war is never renewed, we will all know that Netanyahu failed to deliver for the people of Israel.
The article above will be looked at afterwards and the Israeli people will realize what could have been done for them. Or, Netanyahu will deliver on his promise to finish this war, destroy Hamas, and recover remaining hostages, no matter what Biden or Blinken says.
Rosenthal may be very wrong. There’s nothing convincing (except on a superficial level) of seeing Iran as a tribal society. It is a developed CAPITALIST nation and filled with Koranic religion. The jihad is not now at any rate tribal it is national and international as well. I do not find Victor very educated, not really.
This bagman Zelensky came to the Jews and asked them to strip themselves of their arms for the glory of modern day Nazis and AMERICA BRITISH proxies
So Adam Dalgliesh look after your own history
Adam Dalgliesh seems to not realise the aims of the operation set by the leadership
* Eliminate Hamas
* Recover hostages
If he cannot support Israel in this then…
Vic is right. This is what Israel would have to do to survive. As for the arms needed to survive, Israel should massively increase its domestic arms production. It should also go on the international arms market, including the extensive black market, to acquire as many arms as possible. The U.S. has sold arms to many countries over the years that are compatible with Israeli platforms, including fighter jets. Israel could also acquire the plans for many of the American arms that it needs, and the spare parts for them, especially since many of America’s weapons systems were designed and even manufactured in
Israel.
When France refused to turn over to Israel the ships and planes the Israelis managed to “hijack their own planes and ships with the help of some French officials who defied President DeGaulle to “free” them from French ports. They didn’t have the spare parts or the plans for manufacturing the spare parts for these weapons. But they located a Swiss engineer who worked at a Swiss plant where many of the spare parts were produced. He developed an ingenious plan for delivering to Israeli agents the plans for making the spare parts. The Israelis were able to use these plans to manufacture the spares for their ships and planes The Israelis offered the Swiss gentleman transportation to Israel, and a a well paying jobthere working as an engineer once he arrived., They warned him that the Swiss authorities would soon uncover his role and put him in jail unless he accepted this offer. REgrettably. the Swiss enginerr refused this offer, saying that he did not think he would fit in in Israel because he was a Swiss Catholic, not a Jew. As a result of his foolish obstinacy, the Swiss government soon figured out that he was the “culprit” and sentenced him to a long term in prison.
I know that I have digressed pretty far from my point. My point is that Israel could fight and defeat Hamas, without agreeing to hostage exchanges or cease-fires, if it were willindg to take decisive action to end its dependence on the USG for weapons. However, the Israeli government is made up entirely of “pussies-wussies” who cannot even imagine disobeying orders from Uncle Sam. As a result, Hamas will remain inpower in Gaza and will continue its reign of terror against Isral
Wow,
That was powerful.
Maybe Victor Rosenthal is right.
However, we are dependent on the United States. If the US stops supplying us with spear parts for airplanes, we’ll soon have no air force. If they don’t supply us the munitions, we’ll not have enough to fight the war, and then Hezbollah will attack us, and all the other volters.
But his point that we are in the Middle East, and we need to be respected by our neighbors is valid.