“Our maniac reaction to every reproach—to accept responsibility as a people for every action of a Jew, and to make excuses in front of everybody including hell knows who. We demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them.” — Ze’ev Jabotinsky, 1911.
To Herzi Halevi’s generation, a Palestinian state is an article of faith. These Jews, indeed, do have a Devil. To their parents’ generation, that Devil was Prime Minister Menachem Begin; to theirs, it is Bibi. If they are still around after Netanyahu is gone, then the next leader who stands between them and submission to the Arabs will be the next Devil. They have already identified him, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and are trying to head him off at the pass.But all this is still only at the level of religion/ideology. Beneath that level is where the real fight takes place: between the ruling elite, mostly Ashkenazi, on the one hand, and the closest thing to citizens-in-arms, the IDF ground forces and their reserves, mostly Sephardi and Mizrahi, and mostly residents of Judea and Samaria, on the other.
The generation that “lost” the Yom Kippur War is the generation that needs Israel to be a “normal country” so they can recreate the Diaspora within Israel, and resume their place as wandering shadows kicked hither and yon by whoever might be so inclined, while they hope for a benevolent outsider to save them. They are responsible for Israel not seizing Damascus in 1973, despite the city being within their grasp, and all that follows from that failure. They won in 1973, yet gave back to the Muslims territory they had already won in 1967! More accurately, the ground forces won in 1973 and instead of giving it all up, as the leaders wanted, because it was all pointless anyway, insisted on forging ahead and taking more enemy territory, thereby precipitating the class war raging inside the IDF. This generation, now retired, considers the ground forces an impediment to a “normal” Israel and would sooner see those forces dismantled, and take refuge in their private club, the Israeli Air Force. They raised the generation that today controls all the levers of power in Israel. In a moment of exasperation, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert famously retorted:
We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies. We want to be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.
They handed the baton to the first post-Yom Kippur generation, the children of the demoralised, who now run the media, publishing, the universities, school education, the regulated economy, the largest companies, the legal establishment, the political establishment, and, of course, the defence and security establishment. They are not quite as crushed as their parents’ generation, but nonetheless are deformed enough to be unable to live with themselves unless they split their country and share it with someone, anyone, because they cannot bear the accusation of having “stolen” the land. Like dhimmis, they can only accept accusations, never oppose it. Even with a state and an army, their boldest response to accusations is to explain why it is not so. It is inconceivable to them that there in not a wrong that must be righted, that they are not the architects of that wrong, and that it is not them who must atone.
While some try to erase the Jewishness of their state, others abandon their own Jewishness. They are simply different kinds of capitulators. The Jews of Judea and Samaria negate them both. Compounding this, the Jews most committed to defending Israel are precisely those Jews making their lives in Judea and Samaria. The capitulators detest those “settlers” because, after their parents expelled the Jews from Gaza, those in “the occupied West Bank” are the last impediment to their “Palestinian state”. In Judea and Samaria, the IDF leadership’s disdain for the ground forces, and the capitulatory Jews’ contempt for the “settlers” converge. Here, the IDF hunts down Jews and coddles Arabs. Of course, while the IDF bulldozes the pitiful shacks of the hilltop youth, the Arabs hack away at Area-C, what else? Many capitulating Jews blame the communities of Judea and Samaria for whatever the Arabs do to them. To block a Palestinian state is to deny this first post-Yom Kippur generation the chance to redeem themselves. The establishing of a Palestinian state is their atonement.
The Oslo Accords were not about bringing peace to a war-weary nation; it was about providing a desperately-needed illusion, one so robust that multiple intifadas could not break it. The Yom Kippur generation were incapable of perceiving what was happening. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s infamous response to the spate of Jewish deaths at the hands of Palestinians after Oslo comes to mind. Prof. Efraim Karsh recounts:
Chillingly euphemising the hundreds of murdered Israelis as ‘the victims of peace’, Rabin made his displeasure with Palestinian terrorism repeatedly known yet failed to take the necessary measures to stop its steady rise. …Rather than demand the PLO’s strict adherence to the accords, …Israel should seek to boost Arafat’s position through accommodation (e.g. releasing larger numbers of imprisoned terrorists) since ‘there is no other partner ready to make peace’. When Oslo critics warned of the process’s catastrophic implications, Rabin derided them as ‘peace cowards’ who were ‘scared to death of peace’. (p7)
Why did Gazans, armed terrorists and “innocent civilians” alike, feel safe to pour out onto the streets in their thousands the moment the latest ceasefire went into effect? Because they know that Jews are stupid enough to abide by agreements with them. It is something they can rely on. The Jews are even proud of that, yet they boast about knowing the Middle East.
Overnight on 6-7 October 2023, Hamas was getting ready to invade Israel right before Herzi Halevi’s eyes. He had waited a long time for exactly what he was seeing, three years, in fact, and knew exactly how it would unfold. We recall from his 1 October 2020 American football article:
Hamas and Hezbollah, are planning land-based attacks into our territory. These operations are …meant to cause damage, take captives, and …seriously affect the consciousness of the Israeli public and cause media buzz over something unprecedented that occurred. …It does not aim to win, in the classical sense of the word, and in this case, causing the state to lose control over the territory in which it exists, planting fear and causing instability are its achievement.
Which is more likely: that Halevi had prophesied what he saw that night; or that he expected what he saw? Shocking details of the treason that transpired on the night of 6-7 October 2023, and during the years, months and days leading up to the massacre were in the public domain by early December 2024. There were at least two aspects to Halevi’s treason: managing the war; and managing the Prime Minister. Ordering that the Prime Minister not be woken in the early hours of 7 October, is, apparently also Halevi’s doing. Why would he wake the Prime Minister if he knew what was coming and that it could, finally, deliver their Palestinian state?
The previous Bennett-Lapid government, in which Benny Gantz served as Defence Minister, was brazen about taking orders from Washington. Early in the current government’s term, the new Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, seemingly defied the Prime Minister to travel to Washington for meetings with US officials. Yet, after one such “unauthorised” trip (in April 2023?), the “errant” Yoav Gallant stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Prime Minister to announce, incongruously, the importance of saving the Palestinian Authority. The fact the the US, once the war got underway, insisted on the PA ruling Gaza after the end of the war, raises questions of whether it was even necessary to wake the Prime Minister at all that night.
Already in the 1970s, Benny Gantz endorsed those Israelis who had become mouthpieces for the “Palestinians”. The same Benny Gantz, while in the Bennett-Lapid government, found a way around the law, so the PA would continue to receive its Pay-for-Slay funds. Yet Gantz served in the War Cabinet! Why did Benny Gantz engineer Herzi Halevi’s promotion to Chief-of-Staff? When Halevi was appointed to the position, some in the media hailed him as a philosopher. Well, perhaps not quite a philosopher, but he is a General who sees war as a football game, for whom the Gaza Strip is a gridiron pitch with east-west Yard lines parallel down the strip. In the “game” against Hamas, naturally, players do not hold their positions, but move up and down the pitch, ten yards at a time with constant interruptions and weighed down by a mass of rules.
Incompetence is, in fact, a mild form of diminished responsibility, a reprimand that lets a culprit off the hook. Herzi Halevi is a General in the IDF. A General does not turn his soldiers into sitting ducks for the enemy because he is incompetent; he does so because he intends to do so. A friend in Israel suggests that the fatalities amongst IDF soldiers in Gaza is not Halevi intention, but the unintended outcome of his actions. My friend is right only in so far as this is not the immediate outcome of Halevi’s intentions.
That soldiers keep dying in Gaza under avoidable circumstances might be the outcome of Halevi’s inappropriate football analogy. Although Benny Gantz had engineered Halevi into his position, it is unlikely that Gantz had prevailed on him to view the war as a football game. A General who lies to his own soldiers when they complain to him about lack of air support chooses that they should die, rather than change his football strategy of prioritising defence. From Benny Gantz’s point of view, the young IDF soldiers dying in Northern Gaza are not dying in vain. They are dying so Hamas can remain in power. Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi is the slow child of Israel’s demoralised generation, the ideal fall guy, except that he is far from innocent.
With each successive restriction the Biden Administration placed on the IDF in Gaza, the closer Halevi came to refereeing a football game. Referees enforce rules; they do not break them. Indifference to which side wins is the hallmark of a professional referee. Herzi Halevi was perfect for Benny Gantz, the unofficial Military Attaché of the Palestinian Authority. At the helm of the IDF, Halevi would not need to consciously, deliberately commit treason by placing his own soldiers in the line of fire of the enemy. Simply by acting as if both sides are playing by the rules gives the cheater the advantage. Benny Gantz could step back, safe in the knowledge that his man will deliver a Hamas victory just by being himself. This freed up Gantz (together with Gadi Eisenkot) to resign from the War Cabinet on 9 June 2024, when they calculated they could inflict the most damage on the government.
There is no suggestion here that Netanyahu is part of the Washington-Gantz-Gallant plot, but it is not possible that he was unaware of it. His conduct, both before and after 7 October, casts a huge shadow over the Prime Minister’s supposed Churchillian moment in the US Congress in July 2024, especially as Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot had both been included in the War Cabinet, while ministers whose loyalty to Israel was beyond question, such as Avigdor Lieberman and Itamar Ben-Gvir, were pointedly excluded.
After Gantz and Eisenkot resigned, why did the Prime Minister prefer to disband the War Cabinet, rather than fill the vacancies with loyal ministers? Was disbanding the War Cabinet Netanyahu’s way of keeping loyal ministers in the dark about what was really going on? Since the war was far from over, this raises a question as to the real purpose of the War Cabinet in the first place. On 13 October 2023, we drew attention to the ambiguities in the Prime Minister’s “Declaration of War” speech on 7 October, and our consequent suspicion that he had no intention of winning the war. To Muslim or ex-Muslim ears, the speech evoked tawriyah, lying by ambiguity. The questions continue to mount.
As the weeks and months passed, and they had shown enough “Jewish unity under existential threat,” Yoav Galant, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, Ronen Bar, Ehud Olmert, Gali Baharav-Miara, Ehud Barak, the activist generation beneath them, and of course, Herzi Halevi, took the opportunity provided by the war to kill two birds with one stone: get rid of Bibi and establish a Palestinians state. They all need the IDF to lose in Gaza, and they have been doing everything they can to bring an Israeli defeat about, especially by exploiting the captives to manipulate the nation and boy, did they manipulate the nation.
Had Netanyahu really been Churchill, he would have recalled that one cannot win a war under capitulatory, let alone treasonous, leadership. Neville Chamberlain would have put a Herzi Halevi in charge of His Majesty’s Armed Forces. Winston Churchill would have put him up against a wall – along with Benny Gantz, Ehud Barak, Gali Baharav-Miara, Ronen Bar, et alia. Could it be that an official inquiry into the “intelligence failure” is being avoided because no clean case can be made for Herzi Halevi as the fall guy, guilty as Hell as he might be? An October 7 inquiry will throw open not only the events of that night, but everything going back to 1973, a dragnet that will catch a lot of people. Come war or peace, they will never stop, and after one generation moves on, the next rises to continue the fight. This is how totalitarian societies keep going.
There is now talk of President Trump losing faith in Bibi for being timid on Lebanon. Trump has just declared to the whole world his intention to annex Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland (sincere or not is beside the point). Netanyahu would do well to take his cue from Trump himself: annex Gaza; annex south Lebanon; annex southwestern Syria; annex Judea and Samaria; annex the Jordan panhandle. The door is wide open for Netanyahu to show Trump that he is not just like him, but better than him. Trump threatens annexation as a negotiating tactic; Netanyahu must annex to secure the Jewish state and raise Israel’s standing in the world. Negotiation comes after annexation, not before.
When the Trump administration opposed Israel’s request for a Hezbollah deal extension and expected Israel to fulfil the terms of the agreement, it was a test: can you stand up for yourself, or will you let yourself be walked over? Ultimately, Trump may want a deal, but he’ll start by first killing your top General. That, at least, makes the Middle East wary: they don’t know what this mad dog Westerner is going to do next. Netanyahu had that clout when he blew the gonads off thousands of Hezbollah killers, but then instead of wiping them all out and annexing south Lebanon, he made a deal with Hezbollah. It did not escape notice that the ground forces did not go into Lebanon and drive the Shi’a into Syria, where the Sunni would, of course, slaughter them and precipitate the downfall of the Iranian regime, but the air force could spend days bombing arsenals and weapons production facilities across Syria. Leave the Lebanese Shi’a where they are and they’ll slaughter the Christians, the Druze and the Jews.
Until Israelis learn to outsmart the Middle East at breaking agreements, they are no more Middle Eastern than their Western counterparts. Here, agreement is part of war, not part of peace. Occupying land to trade in peace agreements is profoundly stupid. You will lose the land and get no peace, because in the Middle East, a peace deal means you stop fighting and they change tactics.
Donald Trump is looking to Netanyahu to do with the Hezbollah agreement as he, Trump, did with the JCPOA: scrap it and then apply maximum pressure on Lebanon. Then Donald Trump might begin to respect Netanyahu again. To really impress both Trump and the Middle East, Netanyahu might, for once, ostentatiously break a peace agreement. But to really impress the Israelis who have thrown their weight behind him, Netanyahu will have to emulate President Abraham Lincoln and jail the top IDF and security leadership, the Attorney-General, the top “juristocracy” including the Supreme Court, the toxic media barons and their editors-in-chief. Everyone else, both within Israel and in the wider region, will get the message. War is not peace; war is war.
Israelis need to understand that you do not set up a country in the Middle East unless you intend to dominate the region. Domination does not have to mean oppression, if the other side wishes for a domination-submission order, if that is how reality makes sense to them, if that is what peace means to them. Under such conditions, if you refuse to dominate, somebody else perforce has to. The 1973 Yom Kippur generation had this reality kicked into their guts, and they chose to submit, rather than to dominate.
The Jews can safely dominate the Middle East precisely because they have no interest in oppressing and brutalising anyone else. Proof of this is the increasing number of vulnerable Middle Eastern peoples seeking Israeli annexation. Carpe diem, Israel. Carpe diem. Had the Ashkenazim the humility in the 1950s to listen to the Sephardim and the Mizrahim, the day might have come decades earlier, the State of Israel would have dominated the Middle East before the next war could break out. Instead, Israelis have been trying to make peace in a region that does not understand the concept. The hankering after Western peace is the Israelis’ greatest weakness.
When Donald Trump was reelected to the Presidency of the United States on 5 November 2024, Rightwing Israelis lavished terms like “extraordinary opportunity” and “God-given opportunity” upon the occasion, at least in English. That’s bold talk from journalists who are timid, uncertain and faint-hearted. They are not up to the measure of anything God-given, or extraordinary, because they peddle in clichés, platitudes and vague generalities. Extraordinary opportunities call for extraordinary Jews. Were are they? Answer: everywhere, in the generation now coming of age, in Judea and Samaria and, especially, in the IDF ground forces.
The Jewish instinct to explain themselves no matter who accuses them or what they are accused of, aggrandised by the appellation hasbara, has an even more damning side to it: the taking, in the name of all Jews, of responsibility for the faults of every Jew. All the understating of treason, the euphemisms in which Jewish iniquities are couched, the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” that got Israel to that fateful October and continue despite that fateful October, are another aspect of hasbara: this time, Jews accusing themselves, and explaining to themselves that they are “not bad, not so bad, not all so bad”. Ze’ev Jabotinsky did not get everything right, but by God, he got more right than any Jew alive today. How apt this passage from his 1911 essay “Instead of excessive apology”:
Our maniac reaction to every reproach—to accept responsibility as a people for every action of a Jew, and to make excuses in front of everybody including hell knows who. …We demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them.
…and to treat them as other people treat theirs.
Picture credit:
Haim Zach/GPO
“0n the other hand, not every single piece of information needs to be shown in the public domain. I just hope that the retribution for certain deeds does not become a subject for discussion internationally. I’m sure you can connect the dots here.”
What do you mean? Is that a warning?
Well it’s not going to work because I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.
I was referring to events that are only too real and well publicised, that is that Egypt broke the treaty and that laid the basis for October 7
It seems to me you do not think that as important as I do.
Please explain what’s going on in your reply to me.
It might help if you read carefully what I wrote in my two comments and understand there is nothing but true things and I resent being lectured by you about things that are not involved with me.
Then do answer my points which ARE very important to answer. And my points are extremely clearly put.
So far you have worked in a truly evil way to muddy the waters and I don’t even know you.
fquigley
Thanks for your response. With regard to the tunnels under the Gaza-Sinai border, sure, I didn’t mention them. I would like to point out that the Israeli intelligence services certainly knew about them – maybe not all of them but most, but nobody mentioned them until they were in action. There are lots of other issues that need clarification too and I sure hope that they will be worked on. On the other hand, not every single piece of information needs to be shown in the public domain. I just hope that the retribution for certain deeds does not become a subject for discussion internationally. I’m sure you can connect the dots here.
Dreuveni
The news of the tunnels running under the Sinai Egypt border with Gaza was completely damning for Egypt.
That led directly to October 7
On your comment you do not refer to that
But a realisation of the ending of the truce is of huge importance
It enables the IDF to take total control of all aspects of the war especially the provision of food directly by Israel.. But in the Sinai.
Step number one was always separating Hamas from the civilians.
Anjuri has done a good job in explaining Israeli subjective weakness
Their big target has to be keeping America abreast of the key strategy. Especially the Christian America. And Netanyahu was not the only one to travel and speak to Congress. It needed to be done often.
NB
This is ongoing. All of these things are still needing to be done.
While all these arguments for and against Netanyahu and Halevi are valid up to a point, the big Damocles sword over Netanyahu’s head was on the level of the Obama betrayal. Biden would have delivered a resolution of the UNSC to cripple all efforts to reach any kind of solution that could be accepted by the rest of the world. That threat is currently on hold. Now Netanyahu needs to find his way in the new quagmire that Trump is trumpeting all around with Musk’s help. It is probably best to wait a few and see if all those NGOs in Israel will become reasonable and permit a resolution of the judicial issues before continuing.
All of the following needs Jews becoming truly independent as a people and nation.
Yes Sinai was at the centre of how to fight this war against Hamas following October 7 which was an existentialist issue for Jews. El Sisi broke the Sadat-Begin treaty, that aspect of things needed to be definitively stated. Central to Hamas was the massive tunnels crossing from Sinai into Gaza through which the arms entered. The border opened not by talk but by force, the civilians could leave, the IDF could be directed to utterly defeat and pressure Hamas, an offer made to the enemy supervised by an independent country which would guarantee their freedom out of the area – in return for unharmed release of the Jewish hostages. End the Arab plantation of Gaza by a wildlife and nature “plantation” which could well become the global centre and focus against global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels used by capitalism. For Jews to recover their soul as a guide to the world in what is surely an earth which will challenge mankind to the fullest extreme, in a completely new form of earth being.