MASTER AND SERVANT
On October 7, 2023, the World was shocked by the savage, murderous, unprovoked surprise attack by Hamas on Israel.
1,200 Israeli men, women and children were not only killed but slaughtered, raped, beheaded, murdered…and hundreds of hostages taken.
Hamas, the governing body of Gaza, bordering Israel with only metal fences between them, is Iran’s military arm in a tiny strip of land adjoining Israel.
Controlled by the Ayatollahs of Iran, they did as they were ordered to do.
And yet the fundamental reason for this vicious attack and Israel’s ferocious, unrelenting response is essentially ignored by those who know and care, by a media no longer staffed by professional journalists and by young college and politically involved Americans who consider themselves progressives but project antisemitism in their fury over Israel’s response.
The reason for all of this is that Iran knew and feared a plan to have Saudi Arabia – its historical enemy – meet with Israel to develop a working agreement. Iran’s need was to sabotage that plan.
And so, they ordered their well-supported henchmen in Gaza, Hamas, to initiate the most violent and savage attack on Israel that it could and to escape with as many hostages as possible to use as pawns.
Iran knew that Israel’s now and always Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was attempting to keep himself out of prison for corruption by altering the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. It knew that tens of thousands of Israelis were marching in the streets against that plan and that elements of Israel’s military reserve were threatening to walk out.
Iran knew that the violence of the Hamas attack would enflame Israel to respond with its own ferocity – driving them to destroy the Hamas presence in Gaza and caring little about who would survive in the process.
Importantly, the Ayatollahs knew that the beleaguered Prime Minister of Israel would use what Hamas had accomplished for his own purposes.
But what the Iranians did not know was that Netanyahu and the Israeli government knew of the planned Hamas attack more than a year before it occurred. Mossad, its intelligence operation, known as the best in the World, informed the government that not only was such an attack planned, but that it would take place on October 7, 2023.
That information was simply ignored with the arrogant comment that Hamas wouldn’t dare and then buried never reaching the Israeli public. But perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps Netanyahu saw the possibilities of protecting his own skin more than protecting his own people.
So Israel was asleep literally and figuratively – or busy dancing at an international music festival – when Hamas attacked…flying in with parachutes attached to bicycles, using farm equipment to knock down the metal gates, appearing out of their maize of tunnels beneath Gaza and coming onto land in speed boats from the Sea.
The Masters of Iran knew exactly what to do and when to do it. Their servants, Hamas were successful. Netanyahu, did exactly what they expected him to do perfecting that success.
And we have what we have today.
THE PALESTINIANS
Some hard things should be said simply.
Minorities, the World over, are ignored or oppressed or looked down upon. They have few opportunities and must fight hard for those that exist and never stop fighting for what they have achieved.
The people now known as “Palestinians” today, came to the Middle East from Greece in 700AD to conquer the territory for almost one hundred years.
As succeeding powerful nation-states from Europe took charge over the centuries, these Greek Palestinians (as they were known) became stateless, living as they could in a land that no longer belonged to them.
They were then neither Arab nor Muslim. They did not count. They lived simply and quietly and were essentially moved from one territory to another. When Great Britain became the last rulers of the territory and within it the Arab nations that had been developed over time, the Palestinians were allowed a niche in territory belonging to Jordan and identified as Palestine.
As World War 11 drew to a close, the United Nations agreed that the Jewish people who had lost six million people to what was called the Holocaust, would be given Statehood in Palestine in an area that would include its biblical home, Jerusalem and be shared by the Palestinians living in that area.
Days after Israel declared its independence they were attacked in 1948 by Egypt, Syria and elements in Jordan and Iraq.
Historians indicate that the Arab nations decided to go to war with Israel in order to prevent Palestinian refugees displaced by the UN action establishing Israel from settling in their countries. They risked a war rather than deal with a Palestinian refugee problem.
As a result of winning that war, the State of Israel controlled the area that the UN had proposed for them as well as 60% of the area proposed for the Palestinians.
In the process, 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes…within months a similar number of Jewish immigrants from the area and Europe had moved in.
Now the Palestinian refugees were a serious problem.
No Arab state welcomed them. Not one.
They clung desperately to what remained for them in the former Palestine as they and the Israelis struggled to make something work without conflict.
America was deeply involved in the process – trying to develop a two-state solution that would be reasonable and could work.
Not one Arab state was involved in that process. They all refused to accept Israel’s presence in their midst and would not recognize its statehood. And the threat of armed conflict was always in the air.
They never bothered with the Palestinians at all.
THE ISRAELIS
It is difficult to see the pictures of Gazan cities blown to bits by the Israelis.
It is difficult to hear of the number of children who are dying from unattended wounds, or from starvation…to see hundreds of thousands of families with nowhere to go in that tiny strip of land known as Gaza; to learn of the famine-like conditions because supplies can’t safely get through hordes of people interfering with them…and to know that Israel is making no effort to open supply lines.
We are told the Israelis are committing genocide: TV news, newspaper and social media pictures tell that story. Young Americans are demonstrating against Israel, blocking traffic, making themselves heard.
As this is written, the UN is reporting that there is significant evidence that Hamas raped during their October 7th attack and are sexually molesting their hostages.
There is significant evidence that Hamas brutally murdered and behead children.
It doesn’t seem to matter to many Americans; to them, Israel is wrong.
And President Biden is getting major pressure from Democratic voters that he must stop thinking that he is working with the European Zionists who founded Israel: the David Ben Gurions, the Golda Meirs, the Yitzhak Rabins, the Moishe Dayans. They are all long dead.
Today Israel is all sabra – someone born and raised there.
Bibi Netanyahu is a politician protecting his own regime of hard-right religious believers who want all the Palestinians gone.
Have you ever met an Israeli…man or woman?
The first thing to know is that each and every man and women in Israel is a soldier. Each spent two years in the army when they became 18. Such military service is mandatory and has been for seventy years.
Psychologists will tell you that such an experience can mark a personality. So can the reason for it: being surrounded by nations eager to destroy you.
And so, meeting an Israeli or working with one, you will see arrogance, an insistence that they are right, a fierce desire to succeed in whatever personal endeavor…no matter what it takes.
Aggressive. Relentless. Commanding. And not always as smart as they think they are.
But too often the very perfect example of what antisemitic people think that all Jews are.
Israelis made grass grow in the desert…desalinated their greatest water reserves. Israelis are among the leading tech masters and excel in medical and scientific research.
Israelis export arms and munitions
Israelis are in the US making money.
And very much like the US, Israelis very best people do not go into politics.
When the dust had settled after Israeli’s successful war of Independence, tens of thousands of Palestinians, those not displaced from their homes and lives, were living and working in Israeli territory…rather peacefully at that moment in history.
They could very easily have sought citizenship in the Israeli democracy…but that fact became problematic. The rights of citizenship mean any number of things but the most important is a democracy is the right to vote.
At their growth rate, Israel realized that in time, there would be more Palestinian citizens in Israel than Jews; to make them citizens would mean that in time, Israel would no longer be a Jewish State but a Palestinian one.
And so, despite the relative ease between the two peoples, Israel could never grant citizenship to the Palestinians.
If there was to be a peace that lasted, it would have to be as the result of a two-state solution.
That fact now seems as unreal as ever.
THE AMERICAN ROLE
Despite the severe antisemitic voices raised by southern Senators during the last Roosevelt years and their continued opposition to the very idea of an independent Jewish State, Harry Truman supported its formation and the United States became then and now the World’s leading supporter of Israel.
While that remains true today as a matter of government policy, there are elements in the country which see Israel’s treatment of the Gazans as purely destructive and have raised the reality of antisemitism in America to new heights.
Antisemitism, like racism, is a caste system: fixed in time, timeless and unending. It just exists without any known way to get rid of it.
The young ‘progressives’ in America raised without the education required to at least understand history, constantly demonstrate shouting antisemitic language and threats to get America to abandon its support of Israel.
They have every right to criticize Israel’s response to what it is doing – bombing the Gaza Strip to bits. They make no mention of the fact that Israel failed to do anything at all to suppress the building of highly structured tunnels under apartment buildings, government buildings, hospitals, schools, nursing homes etc.
Nor are they old enough to remember hearing President Bill Clinton plead with the former Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, to sit with Israel and discuss Netanyahu’s plan for a two State solution. Arafat had headed the Palestinian Liberation Organization and then the Palestinian Authority and was the singular voice of the Palestinians at the time.
His rough accented voice responded “Please Bill, I cannot do that. They will kill me.”
America’s money and arms have been Israel’s singular support all these years.
This horrific moment in time for the first time, is a test of that support.
Netanyahu is Israel’s problem. He should not be ours. Working around him, as we are doing now, is a mistake…for Israel, for American Jews, and for American foreign policy.
If the Israel/Gaza scenario is truly as described below, one must conclude that the malevolent Iranian leadership was brilliant in planning and execution of the Oct. 7 events and accurately forecast what would follow.
It is also assumed above that Hamas is purely an instrument of Iran and would willingly carry out an operation that would result in great casualty to that organization, not to mention the Gazans under its authority.
If Israeli intelligence knew of the Oct. 7 attack in advance and the Likud leadership ignored it as unreliable, then the latter was negligent. If the leadership anticipated the attack and just allowed to happen, this inaction was an act of treason.
Web videos show IDF soldiers behaving badly in Gaza. The retaliation for the original attack has been going on much longer than the former and has received much more media coverage. However one’s opinion of culpability, it seems that evil triumphs.