Gadi Taub and necessary wars

On 29 July 2024, historian Dr Gadi Taub gave what was arguable one of the most important interviews ever given by an Israeli, for it represented the clearest articulation yet, in English anyway, of Israelis waking up to what has been done to them and what has to be done. Be honest about who the enemy is; be honest about what the enemy wants; be honest about what must be done to defeat that enemy. On all three counts, Jews, both in the Diaspora and in Israel, have consistently failed for more than a hundred years.

Horrible, horrible as the Simchat Torah massacre was, it is history, and it cannot be undone. It was extortion that dispensed with the preliminaries. Israelis have paid in blood for an item they never purchased. It is time for Israel and the Jews to claim what they have so unwillingly paid for. What benefits can Israel and the Jews extract from the horrors of 7 October 2023? In short, since they were never a party to the bargain, anything they want—absolutely anything they want.

The first, and most important, good to have come out of the events of 7 October is the shattering of the illusion of attaining peace with the Palestinians. It is important here to distinguish between those Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, who are ideologically committed to peace with the Palestinians, and those who are morally committed to it. The former are, to borrow an Israeli friend’s words, “self-hating, extreme woke Leftist useful idiots,” while the latter are Jews who will never permit reality to interfere with their sense of themselves as “the moral people, the good people,” extremely narrowly-defined, or, as Gadi Taub put it, they are “too clever for their own good.” In other words, they are capable of defeating themselves with their own sophistry, and readily do. On 7 October 2023, Hamas broke that spell. According to Taub:

Five years from now, we will think of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as that moderate government that we once had. Israelis are massively moving to the Right. The more they internalise the danger, the more they will move to the Right.

Here we are, of course, talking about the Jews morally committed to peace, basically good people, not the ideological head-bangers who, if they could not get the country to capitulate to the Palestinians through the ballot box, tried through the Supreme Court, and since that did not seem to work either, urged foreign powers to impose capitulation on Israel on their behalf. At least the morally-committed are capable of learning that they are wrong. It is just a shame that the price needed to be so high.

Who is the enemy? Several times throughout the interview, Gadi Taub identifies the enemy, Palestinians, as Muslims, adherents of Islam, proven by both their words and their deeds. Such clarity about who the enemy is, is the second good to come out of the massacre of 7 October, or more accurately, the interrupted genocide. The good that is such clarity of who the enemy is, is not yet widely and openly claimed, but the prerequisites for doing so: acknowledging that Jews can be wrong; and that peace with the Palestinians is a fantasy, are now in place.

Accepting that the Palestinians are the enemy because they are Muslims is particularly hard to accept, because the implications are so profound. They draw into question the integrity of our very lives up to this point: if I have been so sincere about what I believe in for decades, proved it by my actions, and felt myself righteous for doing so, and now find that I have been wrong all along, then what has my life been? It might be less traumatic to acknowledge what the enemy does. Here is Gadi Taub again:

We already showed we want to [have a state for Jews and a state for Palestinians]. We went for the Oslo agreement. From the first moment, they never for one moment intended a two-state solution for two peoples—Saeb Erekat, who ran the negotiations for a while, instructed his team never to say “two states for two peoples”, but only “two states living side by side in peace”. What is the difference? The difference is that the Palestinians demand one nation state for the Palestinians, ethnically cleansed of any Jewish settlers, and another non-national state into which the Palestinian diaspora will return. That is what they call the ‘right of return’. There was never a Palestinian leader who was willing to even give an inch on the so-called right of return, which is not a right and also not a return, because these people are not refugees. They’ve been resettled. These are the sons and daughters and grandchildren of refugees of the [19]48 War.

Basically, they want two Muslim majority states. That’s what they’re talking about and we don’t listen to them. When Arafat came here, he said to his people, remember this is the agreement that the prophet Muhammad did with a tribe that he signed a peace accord with, and then the moment he was strong enough, he broke the accord, attacked them and killed them. From the first minute, Arafat has been saying to his people, don’t worry, we’re not actually going for it. Israel refused to acknowledge that and the press [controlled by the Left, AP] had a massive disinformation campaign.

Though this is not a national liberation struggle, not a matter of colonised or stolen land, and not a matter of land for peace, it is, nonetheless, an explicitly territorial question. For Israelis to understand the subtleties here, they must first acknowledge what drives the Palestinians to want what they want. Without understanding the central role of Islam in the Palestinian question, they will never be understand that “the Palestinian mission is jihad against the Jews.” The Palestinians have no reasons for existence, other than ending the existence of the Jews. The creation of a Palestinian state does not interest them; the destruction of the Jewish state does. 7 October helped a great many Israelis see this.

[In America] you cannot say that Islam is not a religion of peace, but the theology of the Muslim Brotherhood, who keep saying we love death more than life, take it seriously. So when you listen to a young terrorist calling his father on the phone and bragging that he just killed ten Jews with his own hands and asking to bring his mother on the phone and his mother saying I wish I was there with you, this is not our mentality. We cannot understand this based on our values.

Unfortunately, despite "Israelis massively moving to the Right," the attitude that: if it doesn't make sense to me, then it doesn't make sense at all, is still all to prevalent. The problem could not possibly with their own thinking. Even if the rapidly-changing Israeli population is able to finally understand the true nature of their enemy, Gadi Taub is cautious about whether Israelis will be able to bring themselves to implementing the only solution to the profound dilemma before them.

Once the war is over, and if we don’t win it decisively, then this would go down as [a victory for Hamas]. Al-Sisi in Egypt once said that Egyptians should be proud about the war of Yom Kippur, because they almost defeated a Mercedes with a Sussita. He said, we had nothing and this is the monster, this is the high-tech army, the IDF, and so imagine that little Hamas brought Israel to its knees. That is if this stays as it is, if the Americans get their way and prevent victory in this war. Our blood will be in the water for all the big sharks. Remember, Hamas is the smallest of our enemies. If we can’t defeat the smallest of our enemies, then you bet that in Iran right now, they’re planning the next round, and the next round is going to be better coordinated.

One shares the doubts Taub expresses below, and his fear for the future, if Israelis do not heed the warnings.

I’m not sure, at least, that Israel has the stamina to do it, and don’t forget that our government is also way too dependent on a military that has been raised in progressive universities and is more mindful of being moral than it is of victory. So we have a very serious problem. ...This is very urgent, but if we had the stamina that I think we need, we will probably gradually—I don’t know what will happen in the next election.

But he is crystal clear on what every Israeli needs to be equally clear about:

In the Muslim Brotherhood theology, there are two conditions where you get a waiver from the responsibility to fight jihad: when you are too weak and you can’t do it; and when the war would cost waqf, hallowed Muslim land. Israel should exact a price in land. I’m not sure that we can do it, because we, Israel, has not yet internalised the seriousness of the situation. I think there’s something comforting in the fact that we keep talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as if that was the issue.

The comforting notion of the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" casts the land question entirely at the wrong level. The "illegitimacy" of Israel, both as a Jewish state and as a formerly Muslim-ruled territory, is centred not on Hamas, or Palestinians, or Arabs, but on Muslims. Here, in support of Gadi Taub's fearless honesty in articulating this issue, I should like to offer my understanding of the question of "Muslim lands", based on having been Muslim in the early part of my life. It becomes a matter of whether most Israeli Jews are able to move to the Right fast enough and far enough to appreciate Gadi Taub's next point:

What we need to do is transfer the remaining population in the northern part of Gaza all the way up to the Gaza river which is south of Gaza City. The North Gaza, the upper third of the Gaza Strip, should be annexed to Israel. It’s not that controversial among Israelis. We’re not saying this, politicians are not saying this, because international public opinion is not letting us win the war, not to mention annex any territory. But I think Israel should be bold, as I think Ben Gurion would be and was. [The Gazans transferred from the north to the southern two-thirds are] resettled there for now. We should also encourage emigration. There’ll be a lot of people wanting to emigrate. We should do that and, in the long run, to the extent that we can think about it now, is some sort of local administration, with the security responsibility fully in Israel’s hands. We also, in the long run, need to dismantle the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, because the Palestinian Authority is a terror organisation.

There might well be cause for optimism in the notable rise to prominence of Israeli Jews demanding the restoration of close settlement of the land in Gaza, much denser than before. My own published contention is that the jihad against Israel will be kept in check by saturating Gaza and Judea and Samaria with Jewish communities, armed, trained and militarily protected. In Gaza this would have to be preceded, I would argue, by enforcing buffer zones, ever-widening towards the Egyptian border and the coast with each Palestinian violation of the border, based on a calculus of number of border violations, or on length of tunnels detected. Surgically taking out a terrorist leader asleep in his bed sets back the terrorists and works wonders for Israeli morale, but it is not going to stop rocket attacks while entire rocket squads are mass-produced in the schools each day. Muslims commit jihad not because the mastermind orders it, but because Allah commands it and Muhammad did it.

It is also not a question of comparative birth rates. Whether Muslims are the minority or the majority is irrelevant. As soon as they are able to engage in jihad, they do. Taub warns:

“We should stop trying to guess their intentions and assume that we will have to get ready according to their capabilities, and their capabilities are now an existential danger to Israel.”

and offers the following concluding remark:

My hope is that first we in Israel will realise that this is a war between civilisation and barbarism and that eventually the West will wake up, or at least read Samuel Huntington, and come to the realisation that this war between civilisation and barbarism is taking place all over the world, including on Harvard campuses, and that we need to start fighting this war, instead of navel-gazing, thinking about the purity of our conscience and engaging in moral grandstanding, because the danger is real. (Emphasis original)

My one divergence from Gadi Taub is the significance for these issues of Shari’a not only being practised in Israel, but protected under Israeli law. Those who object that Shari’a in Israel only pertains to Muslim marriages, and so cannot be compared to full-blown Shari’a, are either ignorant of, or are hiding the fact that, Shari’a itself stipulates that wherever in infidel lands the slightest bit of Shari’a is permitted, “even if just for marriages,” there Muslims must behave as if they are in an Islamic state.

The constant Arab encroachments into Area-C are not about “creating a viable Palestinian state,” but about restoring “Muslim land.” Such behaviour follows inexorably from allowing Muslims to rule in Areas A and B. It should have come as no surprise to Israeli Jews at all that as soon as Hamas put out the call to Israeli Arab Muslims to kill the Jews, that large-scale pogroms should break out in Israel’s “mixed cities,” beacons of co-existence of which Left-wing Jews were immensely proud. The lessons were so obvious that comparisons were made to Kristallnacht. That was in May 2021, two years and five months before October 2023, when most Jews were caught by surprise again. By permitting any Shari’a at all, Israel had placed a time bomb into her own basement, a winning strategy that both Europe and the United States have been following. Gadi Taub observes:

Europe is basically committing suicide and the United States is denying (sic, in denial), but it may well be next. and I think that we have lost our immunity system and it is maybe up to Israel to try and wake it up.

In order for Israel to prohibit Shari'a, she will have to stop worrying about alienating people who were never on her side to begin with, no matter how well their standard of living compares to that of Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East. Counting how many Arab households have washing machines is yet more hasbara. The solution to a Muslim presence in any non-Muslim country lies within Shari’a itself. Are the Israeli, European or American security authorities even aware that as soon as it becomes impossible to practise Islam in a land, Shari’a stipulates that Muslims have to emigrate to where they can practise Islam? It is what some call low-hanging fruit, and others call a no-brainer: use Shari'a against Muslims!

Certainly, Muslims will have to loose land in Gaza, if not all of it at once, then step-by-step over time, and directly following jihad activity. The reality of the severe loss of "Muslim land," anywhere that Israel is physically able to annex such land as immediate punishment for attacking Israel or killing Jews anywhere in the world, will have the strongest deterrent impact on Muslims everywhere.

In Lebanon, Israel has the added justification of doing the neglected work of the United Nation of implementing SC Resolution 1701. And since Hezbollah has doubly violated that resolution, firstly, by not withdrawing to north of the Litani River, and secondly, by attacking Israel from the area it should have vacated, Israel is fully justified under international law to annex Lebanon south of the Litani in order to live behind a secure border in north, also as international law stipulates, thereby causing Muslims to loose even more territory.

The title of the Quillette video of the Gadi Taub interview, “Israel needs a war with Lebanon” is correct. She also needs a war with the Houthis (Muslims should loose Socotra for daring to attack Israel), the Palestinian Authority (and the assortment of terrorist outfits within PA jurisdiction), the Iranian proxies in Iraq, with Iran itself, and, of course, to finish off Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or she can just wait until the Americans have finished training the PA’s army, and Iran’s bomb is mounted atop a missile, counting down to launch.

Israel’s war against Iran is as necessary as the Allies’ war against Nazi Germany and Kokka-Shinto Japan to expunge from those nations their barbaric ideologies. Anyone other than Jews defeating Islam in Iran, while Islam is in crisis, will not have the effect of unravelling the OIC, the Arab League, the Muslim World League, the Muslim Brotherhood and all other international Muslim organisations, mass apostasy from Islam, far-sighted Arab rulers seizing the opportunity to rid their societies of the strictures of Islam (including their clergies), scattering the Western pro-Palestinian woke brigades and the catastrophic disintegration of the ummah. This is a task only Israel, the nemesis of jihad, can accomplish.

Finally, Ze'ev Jabotinsky might reinforce Taub thus:

The Talmud quotes a very instructive legal action – which has a direct bearing on this matter. Two people walking along the road find a piece of cloth. One of them says: " I found it. It is mine:" But the other says: " No: that is not true: I found the cloth, and it is mine: " The judge to whom they appeal cuts the cloth in two, and each of these obstinate folk gets half. But there is another version of this action. It is only one of the two claimants who is obstinate: the other, on the contrary, has determined to make the world wonder at this magnanimity. So he says: "We both found the cloth, and therefore I ask only a half of it, because the second belongs to B. But B. insists that he found it, and that he alone is entitled to it. In this case, the Talmud recommends a wise Judgment, that is, how very disappointing to our magnanimous gentleman. The judge says: "There is agreement about one half of the cloth. A. admits that it belongs to B. So it is only the second half that is in dispute. We shall, therefore divide this into two halves: And the obstinate claimant gets three-quarters of the cloth, while the ”gentleman" has only one quarter, and serve him right. It is a very fine thing to be a gentleman, but it is no reason for being an idiot. Our ancestors knew that. But we have forgotten it.

and

Each man who passes my window in the street has a right to live only in so far as he recognises my right to live; but if he is determined to kill me, I cannot admit that he has any right to live. (Ze'ev Jabotinsky, The Ethics of the Iron Wall, Essay, 11 November 1923)

To compromise on this is to invite death by a thousand cuts. But I should leave the last word to Gadi Taub:

We live in a world where everybody’s talking about the other and diversity, but there’s no one as deaf to otherness as the progressives. They imagine everybody to be exactly like them. Everybody would love diversity, exactly like them… except Jews. They don’t imagine Jews to be exactly like them, because Jews are the hegemonic oppressor. The world is divided dichotomously between oppressed and oppressors and we are the oppressors. ...So the women who were mutilated and raped by Hamas; that was their fault. They are to blame, because they’re the oppressors, and even death does not relieve them of that burden. So we were completely unable to imagine the Palestinian national movement. The Palestinians support the atrocities of October 7 in massive numbers.

Picture credits:

Julien Harneis from Conakry, Guinea - Our blood has won, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11127986

Screenshots from Google maps