The Palestinian cause is damaged
By Victor Davis Hanson, AM GREATNESS November 27, 2023
We know the multifaceted strategy of the monstrous Hamas operation of October 7.
In precivilizational fashion it wished to kill and mutilate the most vulnerable of all Israeli civilians and thus to shock the world that it was capable of—and proud about— anything, from decapitation to necrophilia. Such animalistic savagery, in the reckoning of Western therapeutic society, was supposedly to be seen as forced upon Hamas murderers by the “occupation.”
The killers felt they would shock the Israelis into concessions given their eagerness to commit the unspeakable. They took captives for tripartite reasons: to barter children and the elderly for their kindred terrorist murderers in Israeli jails; to use captives to force the Israelis to grant cease-fires and pauses in their retaliation; and to bank them as shields to protect Hamas kingpins from retaliation.
The terrorists shot thousands of rockets into Israel to overwhelm Iron Dome and terrify the entire civilian population.
All these tactics were aimed at long-term strategic goals: stop the Abraham Accords; obey the directives of Hamas’s Iranian terrorist masters as payment for their arms; discredit the radical Palestine Authority and Arab moderate nations as anemic in their opposition to the supposedly shared hated Zionist entity; and prompt an Israeli response that by necessity would involve collateral damage to human shields, and schools, mosques, and hospitals atop subterranean Hamas headquarters.
Yet if we know their despicable methods, aims, and strategies, why did they think the civilized world would support their barbarity or at least excuse it?
One, Hamas assumed antisemitism was prevalent throughout the West and was canonical in the Middle East. Palestinian authorities count on the fact that being an enemy of the Jews of Israel wins them empathy of the world and creating their own unique rules of passive-aggressive victimhood.
So Palestinians demand to be the only “refugees” in the world—not Greek Cypriots, Eastern European Germans, and Prussians, Kurds, Armenians, and certainly not a million Jews cleansed from the Arab Middle East.
Israelis are to be “settlers,” not millions of Middle Easterners who surge and settle into the West, form resistance communities, sneer at integration and assimilation, and use Western liberality to protect and project their own illiberality.
Second, Hamas relies on useful Western idiots. It understands its terrorists repel the majority of Americans. But it figures Western and globalist institutions—academia, the media, popular culture—in their wealth, ignorance, and self-importance, alleviate guilt and find resonance by mouthing the shibboleths of the “underdog.”
In particular, Hamas understands that the Palestinian cause has fused with the leftwing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry. Thus Hamas becomes the Middle-East counterpart to BLM, aggrieved minorities, and, more preposterously, the trans/gay/feminist movement. Meanwhile, Israelis are recalibrated as the demonized Western “colonialist” white supremacists.
Third, the Islamic expatriate populations of Europe and the U.S. have soared. In the strange logic of the Middle Easterner in the West—on a green card, or a student visa, or either as an illegal alien or a first-generation immigrant—he will envision the magnanimity of Americans and Europeans who offered him refuge from the violence, hatred, tyranny, racism, sexism, terrorism, and violence of his homeland all too often as weakness to be manipulated, not as generosity to be appreciated much less reciprocated.
Middle Eastern expatriates brag of their growing numbers and the political clout that Islam accrues in liberal democracies, without a clue of their hypocrisy of supporting illiberal tyrannies whose violence drove them out to the West in the first place.
So, we watch Middle Easterners in the U.S. trying to ruin iconic events such as crashing “Black Friday” shopping, disrupting the New York Thanksgiving parade, or tearing down American flags on Veterans’ Day.
Only in America would the Iranian terrorist theocracy’s ex-ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, be accorded a professorship at Oberlin or a former top diplomat for the Iranian regime Seyed Hossein Mousavian land a coveted billet at Princeton.
From such perches these expatriates are free to promote pro-Hamas, Iranian, anti-Semitic—and Anti-American—agendas. They consider their hosts not so much tolerant as stupid, in the sense that any American expatriate in Iran who whispered criticism of the theocratic regime would either be hanged or used as a barter hostage. Why would those whose careers were devoted to demonizing and harming the United States from their coveted billets in Iran even wish to move to the Great Satan, while keeping warm relations with their theocratic kingpins in Tehran?
Four, behind all these considerations, is the reality of terrorism and the fear it instills in the West, given the 21st century history of Middle Easterners slaughtering thousands of Americans and Europeans. In crude terms, Hamas and its terrorist affiliates signal us, “damn Israel or be prepared for another 9/11.”
Five, Hamas is a death cult, an updated terrorist version of the more organized SS—with the qualifier it broadcasts rather than hides its savagery.
Radical Palestinians brag that they love death more than Israel loves life. So they count on Israel giving up three convicted terrorists to get back one elderly or young Israeli captive, on targeting civilians with rockets while Israelis drops leaflets warning of their bombing attacks, on coercing human shields that they assume Israel will avoid, on sanctioning raping, mutilating, and beheading in a way Israel would never conceive of reciprocating in kind, and on and on.
So will all these tactical and strategic methods work? For all the UN, media, and globalist support for Hamas, still perhaps not.
October 7 was a declaration by Hamas that all barbarity imaginable was now fair game. Yet its sheer evil has unleashed the IDF that perhaps not even Joe Biden, hostages, and “world opinion” can permanently stop.
For all the boasts about loving death, it was Hamas who cowardly murdered the unarmed, scampered back to the safety of their tunnels, and used their own kindred Gazans to shield them from death—delivered to them by supposed nerds who love life too much.
Europeans also have had it with unlimited immigration from the Middle East. Restrictionist politicians throughout Europe are ascending as never before, in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Sweden.
They all reflect growing public anger that Europeans are hated by the very people who seek them out and wish to destroy their Enlightenment institutions by manipulating and discrediting them. The thousands who hit the streets to cheer on October 7 and damn their hosts only confirm a growing global consensus—in the West, Latin America, Asia, and even throughout the Middle East—that admitting migrants from Palestine or Gaza, or their supporters, is a veritable death wish.
Pro-Hamas protestors calling Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” and boasting about the Arab or Muslim vote in Michigan is incoherent. Not only do harassing Thanksgiving shoppers and parades, disrupting iconic American holidays and events, swarming highways and bridges, and preying on Jews alienate Americans. But also taking credit for ensuring Biden’s defeat will only distance the Democratic establishment, such as it is, from its embarrassing, loud, but ultimately relatively impotent Islamic constituency.
Shouting for mass death “From the River to the Sea” does not endear the pro-Hamas crowd to half of their fellow Democrats, much less unabashedly strutting their anti-Semitism. The current overt support for Hamas, in other words, has revealed to the nation the bankruptcy of the entire pro-Hamas/DEI base of the Democratic Party and will do much to ensure a conservative president in 2024.
And that president will likely deport anyone on a green card or student visa promoting Hamas terrorism, or violating U.S. law, while ensuring a travel ban from terrorist supporting regimes in the Middle East. Such measures will win overwhelming public support, despite media and academic outrage.
Strategically, Iran, Hamas, and the Palestinians may seem to have flummoxed Israel into endless concessions by metering out hostages for serial pauses. But again, no Israel government can retain power by allowing the mass murdering Hamas to survive and so it will not.
Despite all the blood-curdling rhetoric of Hezbollah and Iran, neither will attack Israel or U.S. assets in force, given no American president could afford not to retaliate disproportionately. And “disproportionately” would mean rendering Iran’s military and Hezbollah to something akin to the current status of Hamas.
So for now, Hamas and its American-residing apologists are full of themselves and feel they are leveraging and manipulating the West. But such haughtiness may be a delusion. Hamas in the Middle East and its enablers in Europe and America have done more to harm the Palestinian cause and the idea of Middle Eastern immigration to the West than at any time since 9/11.
A truly brilliant article by Dr. Hanson. All of his points are spot on.
@Adam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHTNuBKtzHc
Sorry, this one at 2:58
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHTNuBKtzHc
The left used to say that Truman dropped the bomb as a warning to the Soviet Union and to keep them out of Japan; that it was the opening shot of the cold war. There was an excellent book I found in the bibliography of one of David Horowitz’s books – the famous American 2nd thoughter and founder of Frontpage Magazine not the publisher of TOI – can’t remember the author and title – which debunked the notion that this was even being discussed then and demonstrated how New Left historians delliberately pieced together excerpts from primary sources in order to mislead.
I agree with Frank Adam. The Arab-Israel war has continued as long as it has partly because Israel’s “frenemies,” the United States and Western Europe, have done everything they could to prevent an Israeli victory, but also because Israel’s leaders have committed themselves to s losing strategy of appeasing Israel’s. and humanities, worst enemies. I hop Frank is right that Israel’s soldiers and reservists have decided “enough is enough,”
Some analysts of the Allied military tactics in World Wqar II think that it could have been won without the “strategic bombing::” of German and Japanese cities, They point out that, while the strategic bombing campaign did result in some decrease in German arms production, it did not ernd all armaments production. The Gernan’s may have been short of weapons, but they were still well armed enough to fight to the bitter end, which they did. Many analysts of the
European war think that it could have been won by targeting German troop concentrations and coal and oil storage facilities, instead of German cities,
The U.S. bombing campaign against Japan in 1945, and certainly the two nuclear attacks, definitelly was a major factor in Emperor Hirohito’s decision to surrenswe, even defying the advice of some of his military advisors who tried to prevent him from announcing Japan’s surrender. However, some military analists believe tha Japan would have surrender even without the heavy bombing of Japanese cities, once Russia entered the wat against them. Japan’s military lraders were known to be terrified of the Sviet Union, and especially of communism, which they believed the Soviets would impose if they were to invade Japan after declaing war on them. The postwar “peacenik” analaysts argue that the U.S should have pressured the Russians to att5ack Japan earlier than they did, and see if that would lead Japan;s leaders, terified of the Communist threat, to surrender to the Americans. These postwar hindsight “peacenniks” think that the U.S. should have platyed the Soviet card and see if it worked before launching a massive bombing campaign and using nukes.
This would seem not to be so.
In speaking of 5000 Hamas fatalities commentators forget the wounded who on World War precedents are another two (14-18) or three (39 – 45) “slices” of 5000. For current best practice Western armies a fourth lot of 5000. As medicine improved with anti-biotics, field blood transfusions and speedy casevac the numbers of hit and saved rose and mortality reduced.
As Hamas has lost its hospitals but probably still has anti-biotic resupply, the ratio of wounded to dead has backed but even if 1 dead to 3 wounded (15k) – half the wounded will be recovered in a month or two; a quarter disabled for their lives and another quarter probably only recovered for “light duties”. The Hamas Adjutant General (personnel chief) is for the moment at least 15K to 20k short; of whom 7500 fit for return to service (if not already returning) next month; and 7500 wounded besides 5000 dead need replacing with new recruits who need training in which skill at arms is the easy bit and fitting into the organisation and tactical movement are the time requirements.
At this point the adage about rebels and guerillas need only survive to win arises – very true but the particularity of the Arab war on Israel’s existence is that it cuts both ways given the Arab war aim since 1948 is to get rid of Israel altogether. So Israel only has to survive to win which she has done well.
For those warning about radicalising the Arab(s) World. Talking of radicalising Arabs is putting a mulltiplier before an infinity sign. They have been wound up for decades over “Palestine” and there are diminished returns to how much more they can put into their Rumplestiltskin act. More important is that for the seventy years from the Peel Report of1937 till the Second Intifada (2000 -05) there was a serious partitionist faction in Israeli politics willing to live with a two state succession to British Palestine of whom the Oslo hopes were their last effective action. Politically they died when Abbas rejected Olmert. The 7th October /Shmeni Atzeret Massacre has buried any Israeli trust in Arabs accepting a two state solution or behaving other than as medieval sectarian bigots in fits of savagery regardless of Geneva Conventions.
All the national service conscripts and reservists who fought the Second Intifada and the five Hamas wars since 2007 – and they will be voting for another forty years – are not burying their resentments at having had to be called up to deal with a war that was settled in broad strokes a lifetime ago and has been kept going by religious bigots with medieval attitudes to the humanity and Enlightenment rights of others.