Israel inching towards the i-word, sort of

Part 2

Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

This morning, seven days after the horrific Simchat Torah Massacre, I woke to two podcasts: the first by Israeli journalist Caroline Glick, “Israel at War - Week 1: The War for Jewish Survival,” on the JNS YouTube Channel; the second by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, “Hamas and Gaza: A Liberal Israeli’s View - Yuval Noah Harari,” on the The Rest Is Politics YouTube channel. These two podcasts together provide a very good backdrop to some of the key dilemmas facing both Israeli and Diaspora Jews in the existential crisis that jihad has just plunged them both into. I encourage readers to view these two podcasts one after the other for a relatively easy introduction into a highly-complex subject, particularly regarding the question of Palestinian guilt/innocence.

One week after the grotesque, criminal, jihad massacre of well over a thousand Jews in southern Israel, the clamour of “innocent civilians”, “those not involved” and “humanitarian crisis” grows louder as Israel launches her perfectly-legitimate response in Gaza. The Western media, chattering classes and politicians, and many on the Israeli Left, even now, as the second podcast demonstrates, attest to the success of “jihad of the tongue” in searing into the kafir mind that a Muslim’s life is worth more than the life of a Jew, a fundamental precept in Islam.

Lehi veteran Ezra Yachin, 95 (and again in uniform), said of the pre-state fighting to form a Jewish state, “Arabs killed and slaughtered entire families and murdered Jews everywhere. They threatened us and kept their promises.” (My emphasis) The advanced-in-age are repositories of wisdom and experience. Before we dismiss them as mistaken, we should at the very least rethink. Yachin understands the unique advantage the Jewish state has in combatting Muslim doctrinal Jew-killing. “Any nation that wants to win a war,” says Yachin, “kills innocents indiscriminately. Our advantage is that there are no innocents.” (My emphasis)

Ze’ev Jabotinsky was similarly clear: “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.” (My emphasis) One has to keep in mind that Jabotinsky arrived at his insight without Yachin’s advantage of knowing that the war Arab Muslims wage against Jews is jihad, a central tenet of Islam. Timor Aklin, an Israeli Arab former Muslim and convert to Judaism, expresses the same idea as Yachin of there being “no innocents.” On a Pulse of Israel podcast, Aklin says, “Respect him and suspect him. That’s how you should treat every Muslim in the world, unfortunately.”

I have on numerous occasions expressed Aklin’s warning somewhat differently: every Muslim might not be guilty, but no Muslim is innocent; the most that can be conceded is that a Muslim’s guilt is not proven. Ezra Yachin cuts closer to the bone: “Before the murder, every terrorist was innocent and was one of the ‘not involved’.” The police and other security services of the Jewish state have always known this, yet the “good Jews” insist that the murderers and others further down the murder chain, are entitled to their human rights and that they be treated without discrimination, especially when they are “citizens of Israel.” Such Jewish obsession with the rights of those they know want to kill them is not a new phenomenon. It has plagued the Jews since before the country was re-established. Even Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who worked himself to death, quite literally, had to find time to say something about it. In The Ethics of the Iron Wall, he writes:

There was a typical example in old Russia, when one of the oppressed nations, with one accord, launched a crusade against the Jews, boycotting them and pogroming them. At the same time, this nation was fighting to gain its own autonomy, without any attempt to conceal it means to use its autonomy for the purpose of oppressing the Jews. Worse than before. And yet, Jewish politicians and writers, (even Jewish nationalists) considered it their duty to support the autonomist efforts of their enemy, on the ground that autonomy is a sacred cause. …This sort of thing is not morality, it is twaddle.

The Labour/socialist Zionists and their contemporary incarnation, the woke/anti-Zionist Jews, insist on making peace with an enemy that insists on making war. It is an enemy that has no option but to make war, always, precisely because its existence is predicated on there being no Jews. The IDF might be the most moral army in the world, but Jews do not understand that their morality does not impress their enemies, instead, it diminishes Jews still further in their eyes, and boosts their enemies’ confidence no end. This makes the IDF the most stupid army in the world.

Muslims have nothing but contempt for the morality that the Jews try to impress them with. They understand and value power, and above all, gruesome, brutal power. The more brutal, the more they are impressed. Even their own brutal tyrants they accept, provided they are Muslim and, from time to time, provide them with the means of living, more or less. If Jews learn only one thing from the Simchat Torah Massacre, let it be that Muslims will only think of the massacre as a mistake, if they see the Jews commit even greater brutality on them. Anything less and the Muslims will proclaim victory. They already proclaim victory because they know that their enemy will be paralysed by arguments over “innocent civilians.” Regardless of what now happens in Gaza, unless the Muslims see brutality greater than theirs during the massacre, they have already won their next battle. All that remains is to fight it.

Every single day, Muslims see Israelis saying “We want peace”, “The Palestinians offer no partner for peace”, and pleas of that kind. Only the weak want peace. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whom the Left has effectively banished from Jewish history, understood this. If the Jews are pleading for peace from the Palestinians, it means only one thing: the Palestinians are the ones who decide war and peace. They are the stronger, and the strong want war so they may cement their power, preferably by putting an upstart lesser people in its place with a good and proper genocide. The stubborn self-enfeeblement of so many Jews frustrated Jabotinsky no end. In his November 1923 essay, The Iron Wall, he wrote:

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. (Emphasis in the original)

So many Jews, including Jewish leaders, plead for peace with the Palestinians, and do not understand why the Palestinians will not make peace with them. Of course the Jews are never going to get peace that way. They fail to see that it is not about Jews wanting peace with Arabs; it is about Arabs wanting war with Jews. They have to have that war and loose it utterly, before they will retreat for a while to engage in jihad of the tongue, propaganda, as Anwar Sadat did after 1973. This is where a brutal, invincible army comes in, to make sure that the Arabs never return from that retreat. Jabotinsky again:

It is quite another question whether it is always possible to realise a peaceful aim by peaceful means. For the answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs; but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.

These insights, written by one of the most influential Jews, have been easily accessible for a hundred years, time enough for finely-tuned lessons to be drawn from them, and adapted and applied to contemporary conditions. It is obvious as day that the way to attain peace with not only Palestinians, but Muslim Arabs in general, is to never express a desire for peace with them. Instead, what works is to always make sure the Palestinians understand that the full destructive might of the IDF can at any moment come down on their heads, and their entire extended family’s heads (because the death of an individual is welcomed, while harm to a family is a terrible fate), regardless of which side of the Green Line the Muslim Arab lives on. Yet it is extremely rare to hear a contemporary Jew demonstrate any of these insights. One such rare voice is that of the nation’s oldest war veteran, Ezra Yachin:

Whether the enemy is sitting in a car with an Israeli license plate or a car without an Israeli license plate, he is still an enemy. We should not distinguish between an Arab living in Gaza and an Arab living in Jerusalem, as both of them hate us. …Arabs in Gaza can’t see (into our towns and cities). Arabs in Jerusalem can. We are therefore more vulnerable to the enemy who lives in Jerusalem.

How many times are such warnings dismissed with the ridiculous sleight of hand, “They are citizens of Israel,” as if that piece of paper is any more able to prevent a genocide than the one Neville Chamberlain so triumphantly held up for all to see after his Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler? Yachin continues:

Whoever tries to fight us and kill us is an enemy and should be treated that way. And when fighting them, we need to fight like they are our enemies and not like they are common criminals. …We need to protect ourselves. When someone prepares to attack us, he should know how difficult it will be. He may be ready to commit suicide, but he won’t be ready to see his family killed when he goes to kill Jews.

Timor Aklin makes exactly the same point on the Pulse of Israel podcast:

Coexistence [between Jews and the Muslim community] is only possible if Israel is super-strong to the point that you can’t ever doubt its strength, to the point where there’s no point in going out there and attacking anyone. I mean, my life will end immediately. Not just my life, my mother’s life, my daughter’s life, my sister’s life, my husband’s life, my siblings, nephews, you have to have an iron fist in their face all the time. That’s the only thing they understand.

Treasonably, there to frustrate that iron fist is Israel’s Supreme Court. Ezra Yachin does not mince his words:

Our government does not control the country. You can choose a government and a Knesset, and when the government has a vendetta against us and wants to expel (Jews) from Gush Katif [Gaza, 2005], the Judiciary supports it. But if the government goes to destroy an Arab house, suddenly the Judiciary has a problem.

We have just seen the same thing again on the very day of the massacre: the Judiciary blocking the government from doing what needs to be done to save Israel, to save the Jewish people. According to Raphael Kreuzer

At a cabinet meeting on Simchat Torah night, Binyamin Netanyahu demanded that this stupid practice [“knock on the roof”] be abolished, and then the Defense Ministry, jurists and the Attorney General argued that it was illegal to cancel this procedure, because it would be contrary to the decisions of the High Court of Justice… (Electronically translated from the Hebrew)

Knowing the lengths that Jews were prepared to go to to denounce, vilify and sabotage Ze’ev Jabotinsky “at this twelfth hour,” I find it very hard to share Caroline Glick’s confidence, expressed in the above video, that Israeli Jews who spent decades dismantling the fighting capability of the Israel Defense Forces, debasing Zionism and enabling the Palestinians in their jihad, will, at the moment of consummation, put all their seditious madness aside and take up arms to defend the Jewish state alongside the very Jews that they, for nine months (at least), have bayed to have a civil war with, to say nothing of the militant capitulators in the Diaspora. Of course, Glick knows more about Jews than I do and I expect there might be something fundamental that I'm overlooking.

The way I see it, the Simchat Torah Massacre provides the perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to destroy Zionism without needing to first destroy the elected government of Israel. Over a thousand Jewish deaths will either save the Supreme Court from Israel, or save Israel from the Supreme Court. My fear is that a night of the long knives is nigh. It is only a question of who will wield those knives, and whose chests those knives will plunge into. I very, very much hope that my fear is misplaced, and that Caroline Glick is right.

Picture credits:

Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Francesco Hayez. The menorah is carried away by Roman soldiers, on the bottom-left corner. Oil on canvas, 1867.

Original design by Max and Gabriel Shamir; Tonyjeff, based on national symbol. - symbol created in 1948., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3498966