Disarming This Enemy? Ha!

Peloni:  It is time to make Gaza Israeli again.  It was so for millenia, and only recently used as the den of savages from which the October 7 slaughter was launched.  Wars have consequences, and the return of Israeli lands to Israel should be the least gained from the mountain of suffering which came from the war which was launched against Israel by Hamas.

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

Forces of the 401st Special Operations Command and the Givati Brigade, as part of the operation, achieved operational control of the Rafah Crossing on the Gaza side, east of Rafah, May 2024. Photo by IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikipedia

In 1982, the IDF invaded Lebanon to drive the PLO away from the border and did, forcing them to retreat into Beirut where the war continued until U.S. diplomat Phillip Habib was able to arrange a ceasefire and even got the PLO to evacuate the country.

However, the last obstacle to the negotiations was the PLO demand that their gunmen be allowed to keep their personal weapons as they boarded the ships to carry them away to other Arab states. The PLO said it preferred to be killed by more Israeli bombs than suffer the humiliation of doing that.

And so it was that they did board trucks and buses with their weapons that sped them to the port at Junieh, and along the way they celebrated their “victory” in normative Arab fashion by firing off wild bursts of their AK-47s on automatic. They celebrated for having survived the Israeli assault, enabling them to kill Jews another day, and to hold on to their weapons. In this case, as their open-air trucks careened though city streets, some innocent Lebanese on the sidewalks fell wounded and dead.

And when these terrorists arrived at their countries of refuge, they were isolated in camps distant from towns. Their governments may have been persuaded to accept these “freedom fighters” but still knew what kind of “wild asses of men” they were.

Today, apparently, official Israel and the U.S. have no memory of that last demand not to be humiliated — a most important word in their culture. Just the other day in Lebanon, the headman in Hezballah Naim Qassim called the Israel-Lebanon agreement “null and void. It is a humiliation and disgrace.”

No one who remembers that PLO exit 44 years ago should be surprised today by the words of this Shiite terror leader in Beirut on the payroll in Teheran, inspired by the same Islamic-PLO spirit. Today’s demand that Hezballah and Hamas disarm is simply not unrealistic.

In the history of Western civilization, national armies have clashed in set-piece battles, and, the terrain permitting, non-combatant civilians have come with chairs and picnic baskets to watch the battle. I think there were such battles in the American Civil War between the Blue and the Grey with spectators; and in this civilization it was known that after certain battles/wars, the losers would literally surrender their weapons to the victors.

This seems to be the template in the minds of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu when they call for Hamas and Hezballah to hand over their weapons. But as they say in the Noo Yawk, “Fuggedabodit.” This behavior does not apply in this culture.

The IDF has this week warned that Hamas is back in control in the roughly half of the Gaza Strip it controls, rearming, fabricating new weapons and ammunition, training new recruits, planning on October 7 2.0, and that is thanks to both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu for different reasons.

For The Donald — his nickname in New York “cafe society” before he entered politics — he looks on Gaza with dollar signs in his eyes as real estate to be developed, an ideal place to build more gambling casinos as he did in Atlantic City, an “Israeli Riviera,” presumably with night clubs and half-naked show girls. That is why he wanted to end the war. And because Trump looks upon Israel as totally dependent on the U.S., he assumed he had the right to determine Gaza’s future — accompanied by a Netanyahu lacking a truly Zionist vision, to foresee, as he did immediately after October 7, a “better tomorrow” for the Gazans after Hamas has been disarmed, defeated and even expelled instead of exploiting the moment to make demands for Israel.

Even if in a different universe Hamas would hand over their personal weapons — that is all they have, no heavy military equipment – they would find a way to rearm by smuggling replacements into the Strip. They are already using drones to fly in war supplies.

In sum, calling for Hamas to hand over its weapons is not the remedy. The problem is not the existence of these weapons which are inert machines possessing no ill will toward Israel. The problem is not the existence of the weapons but the Muslim men who wield them. And since de facto the majority of the Gazans are in spirit supporters of Hamas – there is no serious opposition in Gaza — the goal must be the eviction from Gaza of, at least for starters, half of the population of 2 million, the freeloaders on the UNRWA rolls, the greatest welfare scam in history.

Netanyahu is at fault for missing a golden opportunity for Israel, purchased with the blood of thousands of Jews slaughtered, raped, tortured, to tell the world that we Israelis have had enough of these savage people since 1949 squatting on land that the United Nations Charter of 1945 recognized as legally Jewish land.

The Gaza Strip came to life in 1949 as a temporary shelter for Arab refugees from a war the Arabs started but then refused to take responsibility for the welfare of their brethren who ran from the fighting. The Arab states blamed the war on the United Nations for recognizing the right of the Jewish dhimmi to become independent of their Muslim overlords after 14 centuries of Islamic oppression. The Koran dictates that Jews must be “oppressed and humiliated” (there’s that word again). The Arabs said the UN was at fault, so their position was to let the UN take care of these people, the overwhelming majority of them being foreign migrant workers from all over the Arab world who had penetrated Mandatory Palestine looking for work. There was nothing “Palestinian” about them, and for the first decade after the war they were universally called generically as the “Arab refugees” until in 1959 when Gamal Nasser of Egypt rebranded them the “Kiyan Filistini” (Palestinian entity).

Over time, European nations with long histories of persecuting Jews, and individual charitable foundations in the U.S., became the principal benefactors of UNRWA, which uniquely in the history of humane support for war refugees did not work to resettle them in other countries of asylum to begin a new life. UNRWA was used to keep the camps in existence, to turn the Strip into one large terrorist base to bleed and torment Israel.

The camps became a must-visit destination for journalists from the New York Times, Le Monde, the BBC etc. to see the squalor and be told it was the fault of the Jews who stole their country; and be told that the camps will remain until the beneficiaries of UNRWA can return to their homes in Occupied Palestine. The Arabs got the UN to classify the children and grandchildren of the refugees as refugees too. Indeed, the identity of Palestinian refugee in UN eyes passes from generation to generation and will until the “Palestinians” recover their stolen country.

This was unique in the history of refugee populations. According to normal actuarial tables, such populations die off over time, versus the “Palestinian refugee” population as the only one ever to expand; from 590,000 in 1949 to today’s estimated 9.17 million, according to The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU)

And it is the otherwise excellent Benjamin Netanyahus’ fault for never having the vision starting on October 8 to call for the transfer of all the Muslims in Gaza out of Gaza. There is nothing more common in history than wars producing in their aftermath masses of refugees.

It is ironic that Netanyahu entitled his second book in English “A Place Among the Nations,” matching Marxist Shimon Peres’s desire to “normalize” the existence of the Jewish people without religion, because there is nothing more normal in human history than wars after which victors take land from the losers. Israel’s prime minister might have said, starting on October 8, “This enemy of ours in Gaza has been bleeding and murdering us, probably in every year of our nation’s existence since 1949, and we are sick of their presence next door. There is nothing more normal in history than the natural law of ‘to the victors go the spoils’ and Israel claims Gaza. After all, the 12 states of the American Midwest came to life on land the Americans won from Britain in the Revolution; California and eight other states arose from the spoils of the Mexican War 1846-48.”

If only Bibi had exercised the “normal” behavior of nations to demand Gaza as the righteous conclusion to generations of homicidal aggression out of that beachfront property.

Imagine you live in nice,one-family home in a neighborhood of one-family homes with your wife and three little girls, with nice next-door neighbors, who one day have to move and sell their house, into which come new neighbors who begin molesting your daughters. You don’t have to put up with that and seek a remedy.

Bibi might have said, “We Jews no longer will tolerate next door this community of sadistic antisemitic savages. We want them gone, and according to the UN Charter, we have the right to incorporate this 25-mile-long strip and repopulate it with Israelis — Jews, Christians, Druze, any body but Muslims.

In sum, the weapons in the hands of these “wild asses of men” are not the problem. They are the problem, on fire with their genocidal, antisemitic religion. Both Hamas and Hezballah exist thanks to Iran and until Iran’s genocidal regime receives the same fate as the Nazi regime in 1945, Israel will never know peace on its borders.

PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com and www.israelnewstalkradio.com