The only way forward*

By Andrzej Koraszewski, 5 December 2023 https://www.listyznaszegosadu.pl/the-only-way-forward

The title of an editorial by one of the most important and influential newspapers in the world, the New York Times, dated November 25, 2023, shows the only way. The article is accompanied by a picture of two doves passing a green twig between them and presents us with a vision of peace between Jews and Nazis. We simply need to understand that Jews and Nazis can live side by side in peace and friendship, and that, after all, shouldn't be difficult.

From the first paragraph, one wonders if the editorial board is serious about assuring its readers that "the editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate, and certain longstanding values".

Charting the only way begins thusly:

It is said that wars end when both sides conclude they have nothing more to gain by fighting. By that logic, Israel and the Palestinians should have long ago agreed to the only solution that makes sense: separate states side by side. They’ve tried, again and again, but in this cauldron of religious passion and competing grievances, peace has always lost out. Is there any chance that things will be different when the guns fall silent this time?

After this paragraph, one wonders whether to continue reading or whether it is a waste of time. Wars end either in total defeat and unconditional surrender, or in conquest, or in exhaustion, which usually means only a pause followed by a resumption of hostilities.

In the second part of this wisdom we have the “cauldron of religious passions,” a phrase that is misleading at first sight, but the reader may hope that things will be more honest further down. For the moment, it is worth recalling that Israel has never started any war. The Arabs have tried to destroy Israel from Day One, they have lost three major wars involving the armies of many Arab countries, they have renamed this conflict the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, in which the "Palestinians" have been assigned a task enshrined in the constitution of the Muslim Brotherhood before the creation of Israel, a task which was openly declared by the Arab countries in 1948, 1967, and 1973, and is a repeated announcement of the elimination of the State of Israel and its people. This goal is explicitly enshrined in the Hamas Charter and in the charter of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (now the Palestinian Authority) only slightly less clearly.

Both the Hamas Charter and the constitution of the Palestine Liberation Organisation have been slightly modified to suit the needs of the 21st-century Western Left.

The idea of a Palestinian state is absolutely clear: a Jew-free Palestine from the river to the sea, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.

Is there a chance that this time it will be different when the guns fall silent, ask the experts from the NYT. They write that there are some difficulties here:

On the face of it, it does not seem promising. The brutal attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 and the massive Israeli retaliatory assault on Gaza have already led to too much death and destruction and have ignited communal hatreds in the United States and beyond. Every eruption in the past — whether war, intifada or military raid — has only demonstrated that neither side can achieve its longed-for security, dignity or peace through violence. On the contrary, every eruption only hardens divisions and ensures more bloodshed next time.

Here we have a balanced picture, the only correct one, namely a “brutal attack” and a “massive retaliatory assault”, which have led to too many victims, and the conclusion that the desired security cannot be achieved by violence. Well, sometimes it can, sometimes physical destruction of the enemy is the only chance of survival.

The rest of this article is the Gospel of St. Thomas (Friedman), in which we get the proposal to hold the Israeli government and perhaps even Hamas leaders accountable (although the editors are aware that the latter is unlikely to succeed, but they don’t think it’s particularly important) and to entrust the leadership of both nations to peace-loving people.

In the conclusion of an editorial in the most important newspaper of the Western world we find a recipe for the implementation of this plan:

How that can work is clear. The urgent challenge, as soon as the guns fall silent, is for Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab states, the United States and all other parties with an interest in a settlement to get to work.

I used to run a school newspaper with my students, so I know this style all too well.

Thomas Friedman, who is apparently at least one of the authors of this article, can reasonably hope that the president of the world's most powerful state will not only read, but even take to heart, this recipe for the only way. The most I can do is respond to the concerns of an Internet user.

On a niche website where my texts have been published for ten years, an Internet user who goes by the nick SENEX wrote a comment to my article in which I tried to understand the horror of the war in Gaza. He wrote that he would like to cool down the emotions of the commentators (there were no emotions in the four comments preceding his post) and suggested reading the text titled “The Jew also kills”. (This is an article in a Polish daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, on November 18 under the headline “Why the left is the most anti-Israel? Out of great disappointment”, the title of which SENEX remembered differently for some reason.)

Yes, it’s true, Ukrainians, if they want to live in a free country, have to kill, and they have to do it more efficiently than the Russians who attack them. The Jews, if they want to live, have to kill, and they have to do it more efficiently than those who want to murder them. (For the time being, this applies only to Jews in Israel, because Jews living in an antisemitic world have a whole range of different opportunities, among the safest of which is writing editorials for the NYT and similar activities.)

To begin with, I suggest that you take a close look at the chart below, where you can see the number of rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli towns and villages.

Israel is a country more than fourteen times smaller than Poland, so we can multiply it fourteen times for simplicity and try to imagine our emotions if this hail of fire (accompanied by assassinations, arson, and other actions for peace) fell on our country. Such a thought experiment can be very difficult, it is almost unimaginable, there are no takers. So let’s go back to the term “cauldron of religious passion” used in the NYT editorial. Some readers may have been disturbed by my use of the term “Nazis.” Are Palestinians Nazis? The great leader of the Palestinians, Al-Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, comparing the similarities between Nazism and Islam, pointed primarily to the following principles: one people, one Reich, one leader; striving for this nation to conquer the world, recognising that the greatest enemy is the Jews and that their total elimination is the only way to peace. (It is worth recalling that the term “Islamic nation,” or ummah, is often used in Islamic writing, so Amin al-Husseini was not referring to the Palestinian people, but to a much broader category.)

How important is the dogma of Jews being the world's greatest evil? This dogma is the keystone of both Nazism and Islamism*, and Muslim children are often told that Judgment Day will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, and every stone and tree calls on them to kill the Jew hiding behind it.

The idea of exterminating the Jews is being inculcated loudly and openly by Hamas and only openly by President Abbas and his people.

Claims that Hamas and its murderous ideology do not represent the Palestinians are completely unfounded. The orgy of murder on October 7 enjoyed mass support in Gaza and the West Bank, and found fervent support from Muslim religious institutions in virtually all Muslim countries, as well as most politicians in Arab countries, Iran, and Turkey.

On November 24, 2023, Qatar-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashal spoke online at the Islamic Forum Conference of Parliamentarians, stating that the October 7 attack showed that Israel was as weak as a spider's web and it was a victory over Israel on a psychological, military and intelligence level. He announced that this victory would soon be completed, assuring his listeners that Hamas had intact stocks of weapons and ammunition after six weeks of fighting. Mashal said Hamas was following in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad and advised Western politicians to stop talking about Gaza after the fall of Hamas and start thinking about the region after the fall of Israel.

This may seem like empty talk, even ridiculous, if it were not for the fact that all over the Islamic world one hears voices saying how much the murders committed on October 7 have boosted the morale of the “Islamic nation”.

This speech might remind us of Heinrich Himmler's speech in Poznań on October 4, 1943, at a meeting with 96 senior SS officers, when he said:

Now I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of the simple things that are easy to talk about. "The Jewish people will be exterminated," says every member of our party, "of course – it is in the program of our party, the elimination of Jews, extermination, it will be done." [...] Someone who expresses himself in this way was not an eyewitness, he did not take part in it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses are lying next to each other, when 500 corpses are lying next to each other, or when 1,000 corpses are lying in front of us. To go through and in spite of that, apart from isolated cases of human weakness, to remain a decent person, it toughened us up. It is a glorious page of our history, never written and never to be written. The law belongs to us, we have a duty to our nation, and a nation that wants to murder us will be murdered.

The Islamic nation feels more toughened after October 7, 2023. They do not turn their eyes away from these murders, sometimes they soften something for the benefit of Western sympathisers, but they do not hide their pride and hope for continuation.

So, yes, the Jew also kills, but somehow in a different way, as if with less enthusiasm and with a different purpose.

Western Hamas sympathisers are torn, unsure whether the killings actually took place (although their friends have boasted about it, so one must look the other way), deny the rape, deny the killing of infants, and some are ready to claim that it was the Israelis themselves who killed their own civilians from helicopters. However, this is on the margin. The Grand Front is the mainstream media, which admits that they may not be impressed by everything about Hamas, but they work miracles to ensure that millions of viewers get the desired information that a Jew also kills.

How many people protest when they see headlines such as in Gazeta Wyborcza that there has been a “prisoner exchange” or in Svenska Dagbladet that there is a “hostage exchange”? Did Reuters' “report” that Hamas had “freed 13 more Israeli soldiers” cause a scandal?

In the Muslim world, there have been no protests against Hamas's crimes (we see isolated voices from dissidents), but in the Western world, hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets demanding the punishment of Israel, the elimination of Israel, and “Palestine from the river to the sea.” However, there are still people protesting against the genocide committed by Hamas and the announcement of its continuation.

The silent majority frowns at these latest protests, wants assurances that “Jews also kill”, demands a ceasefire in order to save the genocidal mob under the banner of humanitarianism.

Dissidents disturb, irritate, disrupt normal life.

I mainly observe the Western world, I look at who is invited to the discussion panels by TV stations and editorial offices of large newspapers. Our Polish backyard is a shadow of the great world, copying these patterns with great accuracy.

Ireneusz Cieślik, a former journalist on the Catholic monthly magazine Więź, wrote an angry text titled “The Silence of Shepherds, the Silence of the Lambs”.

Cieślik asks:

Why, after the most horrific massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, on the website Więź.pl was there no place for an editorial statement expressing pain, sympathy, indignation, and condemnation of the perpetrators?

The journalist and theologian knows well and feels disgust for the evasive statements of the Vatican, but he feels even more sadness for the stand of “his” editorial office. (Those who are interested in the voices of dissidents have read similar texts many times in a wide variety of languages.)

The editors of Więź published this article, and also published a response by the editor-in-chief of Więź, Zbigniew Nosowski, under the title “When there are no word.”

Editor Nosowski writes in this seemingly somewhat embarrassed reply:

Yes, I admit to the – otherwise growing – helplessness and lack of words in the face of this unfolding tragedy. Both I and others on the editorial team were at a loss for words, both on the day of the terrorist attack and afterwards.

You’re right that we didn’t publish editorial comments on this. We didn’t want to play know-it-alls – even though journalists should know everything and have solutions to every problem at hand – because we see more and more clearly that there are no good answers. So we reacted in a different way.

We learn that this different way was prayer. The editor-in-chief of Więź goes on to write that it was not about accusing Israel, but...

This “but” swells for him and testifies to a deep need for what Tadeusz Mazowiecki (the first editor-in-chief of Więź) described, saying:

There are no antisemites among us. No one, except one fanatic or another, will admit to such a name today. In fact, gentle and kind people have always said: "I’m not an antisemite, I condemn this kind of attitude,... but these Jews.”

Editor-in-chief Nosowski is more honest, or perhaps even wiser, than the authors of the editorial in the New York Times, because he writes at the end of his polemic that he would very much like peace, but he does not know the solution, he has the impression that “the search for a lasting solution is becoming more and more unrealistic every day”, which is caused by “a lack of readiness for talks”. He would probably be indignant to hear the claim that the push to build a Nazi state alongside the Jewish state has for years encouraged terrorists and inflamed the conflict to the point we saw on October 7, and that this push raises hopes that it could be repeated on a much larger scale.

The Jews do not want to kill, but they have no other choice in the “only way” assigned to them. Not all Palestinians want to be knights of Muhammad. We will only know how many are willing to give up this role when the Palestinians, because of the total defeat of Nazism, stop hanging traitors who demand peace with the Jews. However, this is a long way to go, and it is not the only one.

Translated by Małgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson

* Editorial note: The editor has serious reservations about the term “Islamist”, especially as used here.

Picture credits:

Times of Israel, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-november-27-2023/

https://antoniatejedabarros.com/

Comments:

On Dec 8, 2023, 23:34 +0200, Ben Dor A. wrote:

Dear Anjuli Pandavar

Happy Hanukkah 🕎

Thank you for this article.

Regretfully most Western mainstream media are the same or worse than the NYT.
The most wretched organizations are BBC, CNN, Guardian, NPR Independent and many others.

We have one of our own, Ha'aretz.
Best Regards