This is quite the historic week. Here we are on the eve of a peaceful transition of power in our decaying democracy, preparing for another orange turd shit show, while Israelis, Palestinians and diaspora Jews like myself search for meaning in what one analyst described the cease-fire as a “miserable draw”.
My feelings on the proposed ceasefire (just ratified by a vote of the Knesset) were captured eloquently in this poem by a fellow Substacker:
We shook hands with you monsters
Not because
It will bring about peace
But only because
It will bring our people home
Our people that you stole
Leaving behind a gaping hole
In an entire nation.You knew
What it means to be a Jew
What wouldn’t we do
To return our family
The lengths we’d go
To choose humanity
One soul, one world
And in an act so perverse
You stole a universe.We will never forget
We will never forgive.
While I am thrilled with a deal that puts the killing on pause and returns our people, including babies and elderly (who kidnaps babies?!) there are hundreds of other innocent victims that no deal will ever return. The list of the 800 civilians murdered by Hamas on Oct 7th can be found here. The youngest murder victim was a 14-hour-old newborn, delivered in an emergency procedure after his or her 9-months-pregnant mother was shot and killed. The mother remains unnamed; she was a Bedouin from a village near the City of Dimona.
All the children and thier teacher depicted in the image below were murdered on October 7.
The oldest murder victim was 88-year-old Chana Kritzman of Kibbutz Be’eri. What kind of animals do this shit? We will never forget, we will never forgive.
In my humble opinion, it was always about the hostages. Still is. The butchering of innocents was just a sideshow to the real Hamas objective: bring back hostages so we have leverage and can negotiate with the Jews. Hit’em where it hurts. And hurt it did. It tore a hole in Israelis soul and helped divide the nation. While the rest of the Arab world did not join Hamas in its intended genocide, Israel is now paying a dear price to bring our hostages home. Not only will Hamas live another day, and potentially regroup and control Gaza and it’s people once again, but hundreds of Jew killers will be released from Israeli prisons, and who knows if another Sinwar is among those freed murderers.
There will be a lot of analysis in mainstream and social media about “who won” this war, and what was the meaning of all this loss of blood and treasure. The simple answer is that it was, and always has been, and probably always will be, about killing Jews. And until the Arab world de-radicalizes the jihadists and loonies that defile the broader, peace-loving Muslim community, there is no relief in sight. It’s lather, rinse, repeat. Isreal, a tiny enclave of liberal democracy surrounded by hostile Arab neighbors, has survived yet another attempt at a real genocide. But, how long before Hamas, or some other jihadist group goes over the wall again and butchers more innocent Jews? As Daniel Clarke-Serret writes in his Guerre and Shalom Substack:
The international community called for armistice now and so it had to come. They prioritised the temporary end of human misery for the price for its assured recurrence. The Americans and Europeans could have demanded an immediate Hamas surrender; an immediate return of the hostages; but they refused to do so. The war could have ended on October 8th, but the equivocators equivocated. Throughout the entire war, the whole global commentary has been centered on casualty numbers (real or imagined) over grand strategy. The powers that be wanted death to end, so they called for war to end. Ceasefire over surrender. Humanitarianism over real peace. The needs of the moment over the slaughter to come. A huge, inevitable error. Yet without the surrender of Hamas put at front and centre of global demands, they were always always going to live to fight another day, however gingery, however diminished. In this context, Israel had no choice but to agree to this hostage deal and take stock knowing that their “Second World War” is a decade or more around the corner.
And if you think Hamas is bowed, or vanquished, think again. As many predicted, there is now a new generation of Jew killers who will bide their time, and play the long game. See the video below, a scene repeated throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Scary.
Israelis may brush off this kind of celebrating as “this is how Arabs celebrate losing”, but the celebrating is not just in the West Bank and Gaza. Progressive morons in our own US of A are also celebrating in the streets. I will spare you the images. And if you think Israel’s image around the world can’t get much worse, think again. The images that will emerge from Palestinians returning to their destroyed homes and cities will be tough to watch, and the Israeli haters and “anti-Zionists” will continue to fuel the media with those images and propaganda.
By not allowing Israel to win the war, lives of innocent Palestinians and Israeli soldiers will be saved. Some of the hostages will be returned to their families and to their wounded nation. But I fear this is not the end. As Clarke-Serret writes in his latest post:
Today, Hamas stand vanquished : their forces mowed down, their leadership in an early grave, their allies diminished beyond measure. Destruction has been wrought on an enormous scale and innocents have been sacrificed on the pyre of their leaders’ fanaticism. Yet from the depths of hell they still claim victory. They claim to be undefeated. They claim to have been stabbed in the back by the Saudis and Emiratis and their Arab brothers. Like Ludendorff before them, they will sell falsehoods to their people and continued militancy, murder and jihad will be the result. In their attempt to ensure that ‘never again’, the international community have unwittingly created Versailles 2.0: The forces of darkness will surely return for one last unthinkable fight to the death.
I pray he is wrong, but this seems like ground hog day to me.
I also pray that our hostages make it back safely, hopefully alive and not in a body bag, although we know the Hamas a-holes have been using dead hostages as part of their negotiations. So, the next few weeks are going to be difficult as we look to square the joy of the return of those hostages with the knowledge of what we gave up to get them home.
So, how do I really feel about this deal?
I will never forget, and I will never forgive.
Be careful out there.
Jew News Review 