In Hamas's eyes: whichever side humiliates the other wins

To understand them, it is useless to start from us. To understand them, we need to start from them. A Palestinian state, something that only the Jews ever wanted, the Palestinians can no longer dangle as a carrot before them.

In Hamas's eyes: whichever side humiliates the other wins
The prospect of humiliation is the only deterrence.

My latest op-ed in Arutz 7 Israel National News

October 7, 7/7, 9/11. In context, the date in US format is enough to fix in the mind a particular act of Muslim holy mass murder, or, as one immigrant especially undeserving of US generosity famously said of the earliest of these religion-defining incidents of savagery, “some people did something,” a trivial incident not worth remembering, long-forgotten. “Forget about last week!” barked Mohamed Hijab a few days after his fellow Muslims “did something” on October 7. Why do we, that is, the West, “keep banging on” about workers dying in Qatar, demanded an exasperated Qatari spokesperson, “Death is part of life”. “Life is not precious,” said a triumphant Gazan mother whose baby’s life Jewish doctors in an Israeli hospital had just saved, to a Jewish journalist who had gone out of his way to arrange funding to save her baby. Her dream for her recovering baby was that he should become a suicide bomber in Jerusalem.

Far from appalling Israelis, this woman saddened them. The woman’s husband, a little more world-wise, coached her in what to say to put this right, after all, they were still in an Israeli hospital. Israeli Jews were happy that she had now changed her mind and the offending footage was removed from the Internet, leaving only the heartwarming, illusion-affirming words of the Jewish journalist, “Life is precious”. October 7 finally made most Israeli Jews understand that they are dealing with a death cult.

There is widespread Jewish Israeli—not Arab Israeli, not Diaspora Jewish—dissatisfaction with what the Gazans are getting away with in the latest “hostage-release deal”, with calls for the death penalty for terrorists, and demands for resumption of the war. This is progress over a nation springing into action to save a baby who was always going to be raised to kill them. Up to 7 October, they demanded more of themselves in order to attain peace with the Palestinians.

In the Diaspora, many Jews doubled down in their determination to capitulate, others broke the habit of a lifetime to abandon those they had hitherto ritually placed their hopes in and had now shown their true Jew-hating colours, while others still, took the decision that every Diaspora Jew hopes he or she would never have to take. In Prague, I was astonished to hear, more than a year after the massacre of October 7, a rabbi stress to his students, repeatedly, “To get peace, you must give something.” Some people gave something. In the Talmud, some people gave half the cloth, then again they gave half the cloth, then again they gave half the cloth… If the Prague rabbi could see where all this would eventually end up, he concealed it well from his students.

For the majority of Israeli Jews, thankfully, October 7 killed the axiom, “To get peace, you must give something.” The more far-sighted are for the first time, taking a hard look at their enemy, and staying focussed long enough to notice that the assumed rules do not apply. Their condemnations of the Palestinians say more about them than about this enemy: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”, “They could have had Singapore-on-the-Med”, “They broke the ceasefire”, “They are not a partner for peace”, etc. The simple prefix, If we were them, we would… makes it possible to clear up all these Palestinian mysteries, for it immediately posits, If they were us, they would… It becomes easier to grasp that they are not us. To understand them, it is useless to start from us. To understand them, we need to start from them.

We can start with their great aphorism, life is not precious, stemming from the idea that this life is but a test for the real life to come after death, and the basis of the boast “We love death more than you love life”. If they did not believe that “the next life” is the real life, the Ahira, they would not be Muslim; they would be kafir, the worst possible state of existence. Parents and teachers drum it into children: this dunya and the Ahira, this dunya and the Ahira, this dunya and the Ahira… And then tableeghis challenge lay Muslims, “Do you want success in this life, or in the next life?” This message is everywhere.

So the “opportunities” that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss are not opportunities at all; they are enticements to invest in this life, rather than in the next. To tell them that they could have had Singapore-on-the-Med is to offend them, for it implies that they ought to value this life more than the next, that there is something more important than killing Jews. Such admonishments simply drive them to deny this life with greater fervour. Moreover, they are not only Muslims, but Palestinians. Their existence is predicated on the non-existence of the Jews. Even Jews who understand and accept that the Palestinians are not interested in a state, only wanting there to be no Jewish state, in most cases fail to understand that the Palestinians cannot exist while the Jews exist. They have a monstrous identity so crafted out of Islam, nationalism and nihilism as to create a people who conceive, bear and raise children expressly so those children can grow up to kill themselves killing Jews.

October 7 did not bring the Jewish people all the way to this appreciation, but most of them in Israel are today on that journey. It is now very common to hear Israeli Jews say, “They want to kill us all,” as opposed to “Why can’t we all just get along?” This makes things more difficult for those who wage jihad against Israel, because the quest for a Palestinian state, something that only the Jews ever wanted, the Palestinians can no longer dangle as a carrot before them. Whether through finally realising that the whole “peace process leading to a Palestinian state” was a scam, or through deciding that to give the Palestinians a state is to reward them for October 7, the outcome is the same: no Palestinian state. While the latter only means that Jews will no longer play along, the former means that Jews equip themselves to be ready for any jihad deceit that could in future come their way from any quarter, especially from Israel’s ostensible friends, or from her own ruling elite, particularly the Supreme Court and the leaders of the security and defence establishment.

A critical aspect of such readiness is seeing victory and defeat from the enemy’s perspective. Western analysts, including Israelis, see the rubble-strewn Gaza and observe with incredulity Gazans jubilantly proclaiming victory. Indeed, they have been victorious, at least for now. All the obscene spectacles of gun-totting, military-fatigued Jew-killers “protecting” their captives from a forest of “civilian” phone cameras are designed to humiliate Israel. The on-stage waving, the framed certificates, the party bags; in the propaganda war, Israel is nowhere. And for Arabs, defeat is not a signature on an instrument of surrender, but being humiliated by their enemy.

Humiliation consists in the abasement of rulers, the killing of men and raping and enslavement of women and children. For Hamas, the handover of captives are acts of war. The Palestinians extract the deepest possible humiliation of Israeli leaders and Israeli men out of the handover of captives, partly in retaliation for the intense humiliation surrounding the circumstances of Yahya Sinwar’s death. Sinwar lying dead in the rubble at the feet of Israeli soldiers with a huge hole in his head humiliated Muslims the world over so profoundly, that they tried everything to salvage some honour out of his killing. All this Hamas has been able to do to Israel, because someone thought that a peace deal would be a good idea.

Their ethics arose in the desert, a place of boundless space. It matters little whether boundaries shift back and forth, or simply remain undefined. Superimpose Islam onto such ethics and geography, and land becomes fundamental. Muslims are under religious obligation to emigrate from their land to infidel lands, reduce those lands to conditions suitable for Islam and turn the target population Muslim, thereby expedite "all worship for Allah alone". Several centuries of savagery ensured that things went their way. They expanded “Muslim land” to the Pillars of Hercules, the Gates of Vienna, the Jade Gate and the Sunda Strait. It did not matter which Muslim ruler ruled such territory, so long as it remained forever “Muslim land” and continuously expanded through jihad and emigration.

Thus, a deeper humiliation than the abasements and degradations mentioned above, is losing “Muslim land” to infidels. The Reconquista was such a humiliation. Western colonialism was such a humiliation. Israel is the gravest of all such humiliations, for it was the loss of "Muslim land" to Jews. Long before any Arab thought of himself as a "Palestinian" in contradistinction to an Israeli, the Muslim Brotherhood had been hard at work organising Muslims from around the world to wage jihad against "Jewish modernism" in Mandatory Palestine, the aim being to kill every Jew there. The displaced Arabs from their disastrous 1948 war offered a ready pool from which a rival population could be mobilised to continue the war. They just needed a name, a leader and a cause.

The manufacture of the "Palestinians" out of this flotsam and jetsam allowed Muslims, especially Arabs, to outsource the killing of the Jews to this contrived "nation," imbuing it with a special status and responsibility in the ummah. At the same time (paradoxically for us, but perfectly consistently for them) this special status makes Palestinians vulnerable to permanent limbo between existence and non-existence, and thus weaponising the kernel of Islamic disdain for this life into a full-blown nihilistic culture that gives life to each next generation so they can kill themselves killing Jews. Their Arab Muslim brethren need to keep them in that monstrous condition so the world will pressure Israel to grant them a state, a step that will substantially weaken the Jewish state and enable a rerun of the 1948 attempt to seize as much of the country for themselves before their brothers can. They’ll have no need of Palestinians after that, and the Palestinians will have no need of themselves. That is their true tragedy.

The obvious counter to the Muslim conquest of land in the immediate context of the war in Gaza is to clear the entire Muslim population out of Gaza, help the near-extinct Christians to re-establish themselves and, crucially, repopulate Gaza with Jews, end-to-end. The general principle ought to be that land only ever changes hands in one direction: away from Muslims. Wherever an opportunity arises to seize land from Muslims, seize land from Muslims. Piling humiliation upon humiliation in this way will contribute to finally breaking jihad. This will not be a permanent solution, but it will be a manageable one, provided the Jews are free of delusions and Israel is free of traitors.


Picture credits:

https://x.com/vcmancinelli/status/1884946665771041021/photo/1

IDF


Comments:

On 4 February 2025 at 01:44, Ron Jontof-Hutter wrote:

Dear Dr Pandavar,

I read your article in Israel National News about humiliation.

Absolutely correct! Israel's problem is that it sees total victory purely in terms of a military victory as would be in the western way of thinking. But in Arab culture thousands of dead bodies leaves them unfazed compared to a few Israelis in body bags.

Humiliation is their weak point. Hence they must be relentlessly hammered with humiliation-sometimes quite simply. We know they are a misogynistic society.So then have female soldiers without helmets guarding the squatting Hamas terrorists, hands tied behind their backs and place on Arab social media. etc etc. With humiliation add trauma and demoralization and that will ensure total victory. We need more psych warfare.

As a trained psychologist I have always advocated for increasing psych warfare that is culture relevant. Are you part of such a group? I'd be happy to share ideas.

Thanks
Kind regards
Ron