What Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, and the other Islamist enemies of Israel have forgotten is that God chose the Jews to be a light unto the nations. Dispersed throughout the world, their light seems small and weak when times are good, but shines most brightly in the deepest darkness. The attacks of October 7 have stirred in the Jews — Hasidic and atheistic; Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Sephardic; Indian, Chinese, Australian, and American — what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory”. Today, in an existential crisis that may turn out to be the denouement of the central drama of Western civilisation, these unwilling protagonists — the whole people of Israel — are determined to defend themselves and the light they carry.
He’s got a point.
I commend this piece from Mark Steyn from 10 years ago which could have been written today with the exact same actors in the same context.
Steyn wrote about the old joke “…that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz” I think that is as applicable today but substitute Germans with the entirety of the West. While the West sees the Middle East as a situation to be managed, the Holocaust taught the Jews that they face existential threats and that they alone must be the final arbiter of how to deal with them if they are to survive. The idea that Israel doesn’t just accept ceasefire proposals or just die is so inconvenient to everyone else.
So when Tony Blinken calls for a “ceasefire”, Israelis understand that it is merely a pause that allows its existential enemies to survive another day in order to find a bigger, better rock to kill more Jews. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Obama’s friends in Tehran want Jews dead and are dead earnest about it, isn’t it only fair that Israel be allowed to return the favor?
Call it a hudna proper expression
https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1843217607379575121
In Larry Niven’s SF novel Ringworld, the main characters are of three species: humans, kzinti, and “puppeteers” (the name is Niven’s, wrongly suggestive, so I’ll call them “Pupps”). Kzinti are sentient felines – carnivorous, dominant, aggressive. Pupps are herbivorous, and so risk-averse that only the crazy-bravest dare to leave their hidden homeworld.
In the course of the story, a Kzin finds out that the Pupps secretly messed with the Kzinti. He also finds out that they are far more powerful than anyone else imagined. A human asks the Kzin whether he will tell his government what the Pupps did. The Kzin says yes.
“Then what happens?” says the human.
“We will build a great war fleet and attack!”
“And then?”
“And then the leaf-eaters would exterminate us down to the last kitten… I think I will not say anything,”
I think the parallel to Israel is obvious. Or it will be, if the jihadists and mullah push hard enough.