Sometimes history on its own becomes dangerous

by Rabbi Pinchas Winston

Friday Night
YONAH WAS AGAINST telling the people of Nineveh that the end was nigh if they did not repent because he knew they would do teshuvah and save themselves. That would have been a good thing had the Jewish people back home responded to his warnings in the same way, but they hadn’t. Yonah wanted to avoid having to incriminate his own people, as much as they deserved it.

But Yonah was forced to go anyhow and, true to his concern, the people of Nineveh heeded his warning, did the requisite teshuvah, and avoided Divine retribution. Disconcerted, he brooded outside the city where he was told by God:

Now should I not take pity on Nineveh, the great city, in which there are many more than one hundred twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well? (Yonah 4:11)

But if so, why did the people of Nineveh need to do teshuvah in the first place? If they were so “innocent,” why were they in danger of destruction had not Yonah warned them? For the same reason that the Flood wiped away all of mankind except for Noach and his family, even though not everyone was culpable of being wiped away. There had certainly been many children who did not “know their right hand from their left” yet.

A lack of foreknowledge of a sin may mitigate a person’s culpability before God, but it doesn’t necessarily mitigate the sin’s impact on Creation. Sins which are only sins when intentionally committed cannot be sins when unintended, which spares Creation of the spiritual impact. But some sins, like a forbidden relationship for example, will still impact Creation even if it occurs by accident.

For example, if a woman was told by witnesses that her husband died and she remarried, after which the first husband later turned up perfectly alive, she has to divorce both husbands, even though it was only unintentional adultery. If she had a child from the second husband already, it will be, tragically, a mamzer. This is why the Bais Din is very careful about such situations and, why also tragically some women are unable to remarry.

Likewise, if a person steals accidentally, the person from whom they stole will suffer the same regardless. The “thief” may have done nothing wrong as far as they and God are concerned, but a wrong has occurred, and there is an impact on Creation nevertheless.

And it accumulates. Sinful behavior builds up if not eliminated through teshuvah or some kind of Divine rectification. Creation was made by God and is holy. It can only handle so much profanity by nature before it “breaks.” A straw cannot break a camel’s back unless it is on top of a large pile of other straws, even if they were all piled there for a good reason.

Therefore the Gemora says that every sixty to seventy years God brings a major calamity on the world to flush out the mamzerim, regardless of how they were created. He takes others as well to hide the Divine Providence, but that is the main reason, to rid the world of the spiritual impurity that has accumulated to the point of “breaking” Creation.

Shabbos Day
THUS THE ZOHAR speaks about a nation’s se’ah, a Biblical measurement that here is a metaphor for a nation’s fill of evil. Nations can commit evils for generations and not be made to suffer for it. But if their evils continue to accumulate to a point the world cannot tolerate, something will have to happen to restore the balance. Before God will let the world break, He’ll break those who brought it to that point.

That’s why it is a mistake to think that just because you got away with doing something wrong once, twice, three times, whatever, that you always will. You may have been saved by a miracle for one reason or another for the time being, but the spiritual impact of wrong acts has been accumulating. The secular world talks about luck running out. We talk about God deciding that enough is enough and hitting the person or people with Divine judgment to restore spiritual order once again.

There’s another issue as well. Sometimes history on its own becomes dangerous, meaning that God’s master plan for Creation requires certain things to happen that might be dangerous for man. For example, the final redemption has to come, and seemingly after the War of Gog and Magog. Given the prophecies describing it and Chazal’s warnings about it, those living at the time will need shemirah, a level of miraculous Divine protection to survive it.

That will be hard to get if a person has a history of anti-God behavior. And by anti-God we do not mean that they go to war against God like Nimrod and his group did in their time. It can just mean that they didn’t bother to find out if God existed and, if He did, why He cared about specific behavior.

It’s like a cavity. A cavity doesn’t happen overnight and might even take a while to actually show up. Not brushing properly or flossing as recommended may not cause any problems in the short run, but it will in the long run. Each day a person doesn’t brush or floss creates a vulnerability in the teeth that, at some time in the future, will show up as a painful cavity.

So, all those times that God did not respond to our negative behavior was not because He was busy or sleeping. If He was busy, it was because He was keeping track of what we were doing, waiting for the time when we reached our fill of such spiritually damaging behavior and needed a hard reboot.

Then there’s what is called “The Perfect Storm.” Originally it referred to rare weather conditions that cause epic storms when they happen, but it has been borrowed to refer to any disaster that results from rare conditions coinciding. Getting into an accident because of reckless driving is not a rare occurrence. But an accident occurring at night from reckless driving because it happened to rain and the street lights blacked out at the same time is a much rarer happening. Therefore, it is a “perfect storm” of destructive events.

And you have to also factor in Hashgochah Pratis—Divine Providence. Everything is Divine Providence, but some things are more obviously Divine Providence than others. In other words, sometimes God will cause a perfect storm to occur for the fulfillment of some aspect of the Divine plan for Creation. We go about our business as if there is no master plan for Creation, but not God. He always sticks to His plan for history, and that can require tweaking something, somewhere, in one form or another.

That’s why you can never take a future risk based upon a successful past one, or do something wrong because someone else did it and seemed to get away with it. The conditions are never the same, and you don’t know how close you are to God saying “Enough is enough.”

This is why the Torah doesn’t say that God will throw us out of Eretz Yisroel for sinning. It says the land will spit us out, which everyone takes to mean that God is really doing it. He is, but it is a way of telling us that even unintentional sins take a toll on the land and push the limit of how much it can take. Reach that line and something’s gonna break. Something just did.

Shalosh Seudot
THERE ARE TWO ways to look at the destruction caused by the Flood. History, Part 1 failed, and God decided to tear it down and build it up again. Or, History, Part 1 went as far as it was ever going to go, and History, Part 2, was the intended continuation going back to Creation itself.

There is an upside and downside to each possibility. According to the first scenario, History, Part 1 could have worked. It just didn’t, and so it needed to be rebooted, and was. So far so good? There have been a lot of rainbows over the millennia reminding us that, had God not promised not to flood the world again (with water), He would have done it several times again already.

According to the second take, History, Part 1, was never meant to work more than it did, so it only failed according to our expectations, not God’s (even though He sure sounded disappointed at the end of Parashas Bereishis). Part 2 was always in the works from Day One, and hopefully, and so far, it will take us the final distance to the Messianic Era…though world destruction is awfully close.

Likewise, the modern State. We would have liked to have believed—especially after the Holocaust—that that was it for intense and genocidal anti-Semitism. Now we finally had our own homeland once again, and it seemed to be a place of refuge from our haters. On Shemini Atzeres this year we found out otherwise. For those who thought getting back the land in 1948 was the final redemption (and not just a part of it), the illusion was shattered.

But what really is happening is the transition from Final Redemption, Phase 1 to Final Redemption, Phase 2. Whatever the State was supposed to accomplish in the first phase of the redemption process came to an end on the day of the Israeli version of 9/11. We are now moving towards the second and final stage, the one the prophets and gemora talked about long before we ever got this far.

Sadness, depression, despair, fear, etc. are all natural reactions to the current situation in Israel which will affect the entire world over the next while. But that’s because we thought the previous state of Israeli life would have worked just fine until Moshiach came. To our extreme disappointment, it didn’t.

It was failing for some time now in increments, and having fellow Israelis tell you that they consider the Arabs their brothers before they do a fellow Jews, was proving quite a challenge. But the deaths and the atrocities that followed at the hands of who the Leftist call their “bothers” took the failure to a whole other level.

It is clear, or at least clearer, that we are a people in transition. But to what?

Ain Od Milvado, Part 69
THE END GAME is, and has always been, “God will be King over the entire land, and on that day, God will be One, and His Name, One” (Zechariah 14:9). So, if it is your job to make that happen, given the world today, how would you do it? What script would you follow?

Mind you, we have already been told that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and that our ways are not His ways. Nevertheless, if you want to know what could be happening next, consider how to make the words of Zechariah HaNavi come true tomorrow, if not today. How is the world going to reach the point of ain od Milvado?

I think a combination of things will happen, depending on where a person is holding spiritually. People who are essentially good but poorly informed will have their eyes opened, one way or another, so they can realize the truth about God that has evaded them all this time. People who are essentially bad (and some we may not even recognize as such yet), will meet their end, also one way or another. The qualification for surviving into Yemos HaMoshiach is the ability to wholeheartedly accept the reality of God and His control over everything.

But don’t expect some Divine surveyor to show up at your front door with clipboard in hand to ask you a few personal questions. The asking has already begun. Things are happening just so to make us react this way or that way. It is this that the Divine “surveyors” are taking note of, and the test may be over before most people even realize it began.

So now’s the time. Don’t just watch the news and evaluate it like you have in the past. Heaven is talking to us through the events of today, and how we answer is already determining our future. Ain od Milvado. Make sure you know what it means, and make sure you know how to live by it.

Looking Back and Ahead

by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

We have learned that it is easy to put aside all the discord and strife in Israeli society; a ruthless enemy enables us to prioritize our common heritage, fate, and destiny. But we have also learned that it is not easy – not possible – to put aside Jewish history and our place in it. For those who fancied themselves in a post-Jewish history, post-Zionist world, the Simchat Torah massacre and the war with Hamas should have refocused their thinking and changed the way we all look at the world.

Certainly, all Jews anticipated that the establishment of the State of Israel relegated the horrific scenes of the massacre of Jewish men, women and children, the elderly, and the infants, to the bloody pages of our history. No longer would we have to behold the anguished spectacle of Jews murdered in cold blood, women raped by marauders, Jews carried off by inhuman abductors to an unknown fate in captivity, their homes destroyed, their possessions ransacked. It was all ancient history, even if “ancient” meant eighty years ago. A Jewish army and a Jewish government would protect us. But the laws of Jewish history have not been repealed, we have not yet arrived at its most glorious and concluding chapter, and so we were forced to witness images drawn directly from the tochachah, the rebuke and retribution of a straying people, that is recorded twice in the Torah.

That the government and security establishment presided over a colossal catastrophe is indisputable, and surely the day of reckoning will come. And we do have a military whose soldiers are courageous and dedicated, motivated now by a righteous zeal that is unmatched in our annals. Nonetheless, we are still ensnared in a pattern of weakness, to an extent an obsequiousness, to foreign powers, that I fear will stay our mighty hand.

It was only last week when Israeli government ministers spoke of a “zero assistance” policy, “not one drop, not one watt” to Gaza until all our hostages are released. That staunchness has already waned because of concern over the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza” and the so-called “rules of war.” Every Israeli should respond to the term “humanitarian crisis in Gaza” unequivocally: “there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. There are almost two hundred hostages being held in deprivation and agony in gross violation of the so-called ‘rules of war.’ So not one drop, not one watt, until all the hostages have been released. That is the only humanitarian crisis that concerns us at the moment.” That will take a steely will, of which our soldiers seem to possess more than do our politicians.

Besides, enough talk about the “innocent citizens of Gaza.” People with short or intentionally foggy memories do not seem to recall that the innocent citizens of Gaza elected Hamas to power in 2006. Hamas only began to rule when it violently expelled Mahmoud Abbas and the PA in 2007, as the PA was disinclined to accept the election results. But these innocent civilians voted into power Hamas, then as now a group of genocidal maniacs. Forgive me if my sympathies for them do not run deep. Indeed, has any group of Gazans – even a single Gazan resident – denounced the massacre and ravages, expressed shame that such monsters lived among them, even called them unrepresentative of and a disgrace to Islam? Not that I have heard. If anything, the vile images of the massacre have provoked glee, celebrations, and support, across Gaza, the PA, and much of the Muslim world. We have yet to hear the sobbing demands for soul-searching, so common among Jews. And the West has still, after all these decades, failed to internalize that martyrdom is a supreme religious value for these fanatics. They venerate their “love of death” (the words of Nasrallah himself) and see our love of life as pathetic weakness.

Sure, the children are innocent, but children always pay a price for the folly of their parents. As do citizens for the folly of the politicians and leaders. In our haste to dispatch Gazans to the southern portion of the Gaza Strip, aren’t we also allowing Hamas terrorists to go there and regroup? Aren’t we allowing the hostages to be dragged there as well? In resupplying the south of Gaza (which is just a few miles from the north, after all) aren’t we resupplying the enemy in the north as well?

And spare me as well the crocodile tears about the “rules of war.” Note that the Geneva Conventions were first adopted in 1864, updated several times, and supplemented in 1929 and 1949. The Hague Conventions are more than a century old. Not one Convention saved even one Jew during the Holocaust. Today, the international laws of war are abused in order to protect the wicked from the might of the righteous. Supporters of Hamas cynically use them to shield the evildoers from the consequences of their evil. They are employed as rhetorical weapons to constrain the power of good and decent people to eradicate evil. And they are wholly unrelated – even remotely – to the Torah’s morality of warfare.

There is no moral or logical reason whatsoever for one side in a deadly conflict to restrain its use of force to “acceptable” norms when the enemy has no restraints, no norms, and no inhibitions. It is a formula for suffering and defeat. Such asymmetrical warfare has been the bane of the West for decades. Israel has always paid the price for the ruminations of these armchair moralists who sit far from the carnage and are in no danger at all. It is intolerable that those who boast about their contempt for the “rules of war” should utilize them as a shield against the victims of their aggression. There should be no immunity for Hamas.

We should be grateful to President Joe Biden for his strong words of support and some of his helpful actions while still being mindful of the fact that his commitment to the two-state illusion, his desire to protect, preserve and strengthen the PA, and his reluctance to allow the destruction of Hamas will soon work to Israel’s detriment. He has said nice things and done nice things, but we forget at our peril that his kindnesses come accompanied by military shackles and diplomatic fantasies. He (or his advisors) will champion Israel’s destruction of Hamas, until pictures of dead civilians emerge. His impending visit will be a public show of support and a private display of pressure. (I hope I’m wrong.) He unequivocally supports Israel’s right of self-defense, but like much of the squishy left in Europe and America, he is less keen on Israel’s exercise of that right. Israel can try as it always does to avoid civilian casualties, but such are impossible when many of those civilians are not really civilians and even genuine civilians are used as human shields.

At this time, we need to recall some basic facts of our history. The first several commentaries of Rashi on Breisheet present the Torah’s narrative in a nutshell. We are taught of G-d’s creation of the world to remind us – us, not the nations – that G-d granted the land of Israel to the Jewish people. And the Torah starts with Breisheet, the first, the beginning, because both the Torah and the Jewish people are referred to as reisheet. In other words, G-d’s plan for His world was to establish the Jewish people, give them the Torah and the land of Israel, from which would emanate G-d’s moral law for mankind.

History teaches us that mankind has generally found that to be unacceptable and has hatefully and violently rejected it. There are those who reject G-d’s word, those who reject G-d’s messenger, and those who reject the sovereignty of the Jewish people in G-d’s land. Most of our enemies have rejected all three principles. This essential aspect of our story has never changed.

The great medieval commentator Rabbenu Bachye noted (Devarim 33:29) that one prerequisite for maintaining the land of Israel is the recognition that “no other nation (ummah) can reside there except for the Jewish nation.” It does not mean that individual Gentiles cannot reside in Israel; they can. But there cannot be another nation that claims sovereignty and rights. We have seen for the last century that such claims turn violent, weaken our grasp on the land, and are unending – this is the greatest challenge to Israel’s existence. Those claims will continue as long as we tolerate them and doubt, even partially, the justice of our cause. And that remains the real substance of the current strife – the denial of Israel’s right to exist.

Anything we do to encourage the fantasy of Israel’s disappearance is self-destructive. Talk of Israel conquering Gaza only to turn it over to Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust-denying terrorist in a suit, and the PA, is not worth the life of one Jewish soldier. It is not only that he literally pays people to murder us. It is that we have seen this horror movie before. It began 30 years ago with the Oslo delusion – and we have just witnessed its macabre and bloody climax. As many have stated, it is insane to do the same thing repeatedly and expect different results.

Yet, that is what the West will try to foist upon us. We can and must resist and, for once, seek to resolve a problem instead of kicking the can down the road. We have suffered a grievous blow – but the people of Israel are strong, resolute, united, and courageous. Indeed, “we have no other land,” we have no other Torah, and we have the One G-d of Israel.

The spirit of Israel is inspiring and contagious. Let us strengthen our leaders and each other, eschew half-hearted, temporary measures that will only embolden the murderers who (temporarily) reside near us, resist the fools’ errand of convincing our enemies and their supporters to love us, and remind the world – both friend and foe – that Jewish blood is not cheap. We endured a mini-Holocaust of one day. Let us transform that into a catalyst for victory and redemption. There are chapters yet to be written in the great book of Israel – chapters on faith and kindness, on heroism and courage, on unity and strength. Together, let us write those chapters without fear or foreboding but with trust in G-d and the eternity of the Jewish people.

The Proper Objectives of the Campaign in Gaza

by Victor Rosenthal

At this moment, the IDF is poised to begin a ground invasion of Gaza. The objectives of the campaign, however, have not been spelled out with sufficient clarity by the political echelon, other than by saying that Hamas will be eliminated as a military threat and sovereign power in Gaza. The following are my ideas of appropriate short and long-term goals for the IDF.

The first and highest-priority objective must be the restoration of Israel’s honor and power of deterrence in the Middle East. This is the part that is the most difficult to understand for the West, particularly by the elites in the US and Europe, but it is an existential condition for the survival of our state. A person or a nation without honor will not live long in this region. What was done to us, what we allowed to be done to us, was so shameful that today we stand naked, a target for anyone who wants to kill us, to invade our country, to take our property, to defile our women, to enslave our children.

You can say that this point of view is atavistic and uncivilized, and perhaps it is when compared to the (supposedly) morally evolved West, but we live in the Middle East, not in Europe or America.* The law here is not the post-1945 international law of the West, it is a code that has evolved in the harsh conditions of the region over millennia. It has been impossible until now for our own Israeli elites to internalize this, but one hopes that the viciousness of the attack on us – the worst since the founding of the state and the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – will shake them out of their dream of living in a villa in the jungle.

So what does this imply for the IDF’s short-term objectives? I see it this way: all important Hamas leaders, wherever they are, and every commander, soldier, and civilian that took part in the terrorist attack should be killed. Not “brought to justice,” not captured and tried for war crimes, not imprisoned. Killed. Overall Gazan casualties will need to reach a level of ten times more than the number of Israelis murdered and violated. There are other important objectives for the invasion, like the rescue of hostages and the destruction of weapons and military infrastructure, but the recovery of honor – revenge, if you insist – must be top priority. Only thus can the appropriate message be sent to all the players in the region, and the rest of the world.

The long-term objective must be to ensure that this cannot happen again. And from a strategic standpoint, that implies that Israel must either implement a military occupation capable of controlling the population and preventing the rise of a new terrorist regime, or she must force a change in the population to one that will not become a threat. Most of our leadership believes that an occupation is untenable. It would tie down a large part of our army, be very expensive, and provide a focus for continued terrorism and insurrections. But at the same time they shrink from the alternative.

Population transfer is anathema to the West, despite the fact that they’ve done it countless times in the past. But the tribal nature of humans implies that it is often an absolute condition for peace. Antagonistic tribes must be separated by natural barriers that make predation difficult or impossible. The Gaza Envelope – the location of the Israeli communities next door to Gaza – is not viable for Jews unless the hostile Arab population is removed or somehow prevented from attacking them. Israel built a barrier above and below the ground at a cost of a billion dollars. Sophisticated sensors above ground and hundreds of tons of concrete below were intended to provide a sense of safety to the people on the Israeli side. But like all Maginot lines, simple and inexpensive ways were found to bypass it, and Hamas brought death and destruction to the Jewish farmers who had trusted their leaders to protect them.

Some of our leadership seems to believe that we can sail peacefully between the Scylla of occupation and the Charybdis of transfer. The Americans are promising that they will help us bribe the Palestinian Authority to take control and that will solve the problem. The foolishness (or malevolence) of this plan is so obvious that only the most deluded or corrupt Israeli could accept it. As if the murderous Fatah would be a better neighbor than the murderous Hamas!

No Jew will return to live in the Gaza envelope while Gaza remains populated by Arabs. Not one. Are we prepared to give up the Negev? That is, in essence, what the Americans are asking in return for their ammunition and diplomatic support.

On Friday I explained that Israel should force the major part of the Gazan population into the Sinai, where they will become the responsibility of the international community, which created the problem in the first place. The area should be secured by the development of Jewish settlements, and ultimately become a part of Israel. And for the sake of justice, land in Gaza and financial aid should be provided to the descendants of those Jews who were so cruelly expelled from their homes there in 2005.

__________________
* But Europe and America will soon have similar concerns, since the recent mass migration from our part of the world is bringing the Middle East to them.

Biden Sent $148 Million To ‘Palestinian’ Areas Weeks Before Attack On Israel

by Daniel Greenfield

In 2021, State Department officials warned that “there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza” and asked for a special exemption from sanctions on funding terrorists.

In 2022, Biden met with Palestinian Authority terror leader Mahmoud Abbas and boasted that, “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.”

While the Biden administration kept the assessment that it was at high risk of funding Hamas secret, the results could be seen in real time. After the Trump administration and congress cut off foreign aid to the terrorist areas in the West Bank and Gaza, the number of terrorist attacks dropped sharply. So did the casualties. In all of 2020, only three Israelis were killed.

In 2021, when Biden restored aid to the terrorists, Israeli casualties shot up 900%.

They have since consistently risen every year Biden was in office, up another 82% from 2021 to 2022. Even before the horrifying atrocities of the conclusion of the Jewish High Holy Days, twice as many Israelis had been killed in one month of Biden than in one year of Trump.

The money kept on rolling in even days before the attacks. On September 23, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield declared herself “proud to announce the United States is providing more than $73 million in additional funding to support UNRWA”.

In the first days of October, Secretary of State Blinken overrode a hold by Senator Jim Risch on $75 million in funding for UNRWA, which is largely staffed by Hamas. Risch had imposed a hold along with other Republican senators, requiring that Blinken certify every 180 days that UNRWA meets accountability criteria because of its “long history of employing people connected to terrorist movements like Hamas” and “using its schools to store Hamas weapons.”

“It is unthinkable that U.S. taxpayer dollars would be used to help fund such an organization,” Sen. Risch stated.

It was extremely ‘thinkable’ to the Biden administration which knew that it was the case. Despite that it authorized $148 million in aid in the weeks before Hamas launched its attack on Israel. Of that money, $75 million would be directly used for “humanitarian” purposes in Gaza.

Even after 9 Americans have been murdered and more taken hostage (a number that is likely to increase), no halt on aid and no review of past aid has been announced. There is every reason to think that payments to UNRWA will be made regardless of whether they benefit Hamas.

Biden’s UN Ambassador revealed that “in 2023 alone, the United States has contributed more than $296 million to UNRWA. And the Biden Administration has contributed nearly $1 billion since 2021.” Millions, tens of millions of that money, was inevitably used to murder, torture and behead concert goers, to fire rockets, to kidnap children and to finance Hamas operations.

After the High Holy Days atrocities, the European Union announced that it was halting its aid.

“The scale of terror and brutality against Israel and its people is a turning point. There can be no business as usual. As the biggest donor of the Palestinians, the European Commission is putting its full development portfolio under review, worth a total of EUR 691m,” the EU’s Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Oliver Varhelyi announced. “All payments immediately suspended. All projects put under review. All new budget proposals, including for 2023 postponed until further notice. Comprehensive assessment of the whole portfolio.”

“We will put all development aid payments on ice for the time being,” Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg stated. “The scale of the terror is so horrendous. It’s such a fracture that one cannot go back to business as usual.”

No such announcement has come out of the Biden administration. The EU has reacted with shock and horror to rapes, murders and caged children. There’s been nothing like it in D.C. Samantha Power tweeted a condemnation of Hamas, but made no mention of an end or even a review of USAID funding. Secretary of State Blinken likewise offered nothing on foreign aid. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield claimed to be “outraged and horrified” at the “appalling unprovoked, brutal attacks by Hamas terrorists”, but made no mention of ending aid to them.

That should be taken to mean that the Biden administration will go on funding the terrorists.

The European statements only highlight the callousness and lack of humanity in the Biden administration which has offered press releases, but no deviation from its pre-existing agenda.

Before this, the Biden administration was aware that there was a “high risk” that it was funding Hamas. And it could see rising violence and deaths keeping peace with the money it was sending into terrorist areas. Despite that it kept it up. Earlier this year it dispatched $148 million to UNRWA despite widely documented evidence that the UN agency’s workforce is dominated by Hamas terrorists who use its infrastructure to store weapons and carry out attacks.

While the Biden administration was sending hundreds of millions to the terrorists, it was enabling billions of dollars to make their way to Iran which was funding and training them.

The recent release of $6 billion to Iran through its Qatari allies, who also serve as state sponsors of Hamas, was only the latest in a series of payments that, like those of the Obama administration, illicitly bypassed American laws, in this case by going through South Korea.

Even more significantly, the Biden administration failed to enforce sanctions on Iran’s oil shipments to China. While officially the sanctions remained in place, the Islamic terrorist state was swimming in Chinese money from its massive increase in shipments to the PRC.

Beyond the $6 billion in the prisoner swap deal, the Biden administration had covertly agreed to stop intercepting and seizing Iranian oil tankers allowing the terror state to move 1.6 million barrels to China a day. Under Biden, Iran has been able to gain $47 billion from its China trade.

In September, Iman Nasseri, the managing director of the FGE energy consulting firm, suggested that, “I think Iranians have been given unwritten confirmation … that there won’t be any further sanctions on the crude buyers as long as they are engaged in the unofficial negotiations.”

The Biden administration was covertly undermining sanctions even while claiming that they were still in place. Iran’s newfound wealth was used to launch attacks on Americans in Iraq and to finance the extensive infrastructure and planning for the High Holy Days atrocities.

It is unknown how much of the sanctions relief to Iran and the foreign aid to the terrorist areas in Israel financed the High Holy Days atrocities, but there is no doubt that such sizable infusions of money would have played a role in making the unprecedented scale of the attacks possible.

And the Biden administration isn’t even expressing regret or imposing a pause on aid.

The devastating attacks, the murdered Israelis, the raped women and the caged children, fulfilled the foreign policy aims of the Biden administration which were to weaken Israel, and specifically Prime Minister Netanyahu, and to make the terrorists into the focus of negotiations, replacing the anti-Iran Abraham Accords with another round of anti-Israel peace talks.

The Biden administration was warned that its aid money would go to Hamas. It watched terrorist attacks increase every year that money resumed flowing to the terrorist areas. It filled its administration with advocates for terrorism against Israel including its envoy to the terrorists, Hady Amr, and now its policies paid off with the worst day of terror in Israel’s history.

Terrorism costs money. And we’re the ones paying for it.

Rav Kook's Ein Ayah: An Intellectual Fear of Hashem and To Be Loved by Hashem and by Man

Both pieces of Ein Ayah relate to the following gemara.

Gemara: A favorite saying of Abayei was: A person should always be cunning in his fear of Hashem, respond softly and prevent anger, and speak in peace with his brothers and relatives and every person, including the idol worshipper in the market, so that he will be beloved Above and cherished below and be accepted by people.

An Intellectual Fear of Hashem

Ein Ayah: (based on Berachot 2:60)

"A person should always be cunning in his yirah (fear of Hashem)" - There is a difference between one who acts according to the form of fear of Hashem that the sechel (intellect) indicates and one who acts according to the power of dimayon (roughly, imagination) alone. In the first view, from the perspective of dimayon, fear of Hashem has to do with the fear of Hashem alone, and it has nothing to do with the ways of the world, mankind, and the dignity of human beings. Since the fear of Hashem fills his heart and all of his emotions, where will these human obligations find a place in his heart?

However, one who looks at yirah with his intellect will recognize that the purpose of yirah is to improve all of his paths in the most complete and pleasant manner and attract many to yirah, service of Hashem, and the path of the good. Therefore, one should not follow the form based on dimayon but based on the guidelines of the intellect in regards to the details of the fear. In so doing, he will realize that the great branches of true yirah are dignity of human beings, the ways of peace, and the way of the world. Then he will respond softly and prevent anger and speak in peace with his brothers and relatives and every person, including the idol worshipper in the market. Yirat Hashem will not bother him in so doing, nor will it take away from his ability to fulfill these human obligations, which is a crown of glory for a person and also serve to sanctify Hashem's name and spread the fear of Hashem in the world.

Regarding the idea of orma (cunning), which is built on wisdom, this has to do with the purity of the sechel without the outer coatings of dimayon. It is conceptually related to erom (naked), as the exteriors are removed. The tendency is that an intellectual form will immediately take on imaginary forms that will confound it and darken its beauty. Therefore, the wise of the heart will investigate the depths of the sechel and accept it with its purity without the coverings of dimayon until he is considered arum (with the person being called "arum b'yirah").

To Be Loved by Hashem and by Man

Ein Ayah: (based on Berachot 2:61)

Being "loved below" is not necessarily a praise. Sometimes a talmidchacham is loved by the people of his place because he does not rebuke them on religious matters. However, being loved Above comes from the essence of goodness and straightness. On the other hand, even in this world, the nature of the spirit cherishes good, even though good stands up against desires and therefore is not always loved, and a person sometimes hates the one who guides him to be good. However, this cherishing comes from a special internal recognition. This is found in one who straightens his path to go in the way of straightness with Hashem and people. He is fitting of being cherished, and in this way, everyone will get the feeling in their heart to want to follow his path and be like him. Although not everyone will actually end up following in the ways of goodness because of the power of the evil inclination, it is still a pleasant thing.

Man's Inclination is Evil from his Youth

by HaRav Mordechai Greenberg
Nasi HaYeshiva, Kerem B'Yavneh

"Noach was a righteous man, perfect in his generations." (Bereisheet 6:9) Some of our Sages expound this positively: Certainly, had he been in a generation of righteous people he would have been more righteous. Some expound it derogatorily: Relative to his generation he was righteous, but had he been in Avraham's generation he would not have been considered at all. (Rashi)

The question is: If it is possible to expound positively, why do some expound derogatorily? Furthermore, "Had he been in Avraham's generation he would not have been considered at all." Just because Avraham was greater, Noach would not have been considered at all?

In the Ger school of thought, they explain as follows: "Noach walked with Elokim." Elokim in gematriya equals hateva (Nature). Noach's fear of G-d came from contemplation of Nature and natural science. In contrast, Hashem told Avraham: "Go out of your horoscope!," since from Avraham begin the two-thousand years of Torah, and only through Torah is it possible to reach true fear of G-d. This is the derogatory interpretation, that Noach thought it possible to reach fear of G-d through worldly wisdom. This is why it says, "perfect in his generations," since in Avraham's generation, after it was possible to delve in Torah wisdom, one who learns fear of G-d through natural wisdom is not considered anything.

About Avimelech's self-exoneration, "In the innocence of my heart ... I did this" (Bereisheet 20:5), Avraham responds, "I said: There is but no fear of G-d in this place." (20:11) The Malbim explains:

[Avraham] informed him that even if we see a person, or nation, that is a great philosopher, and he set for himself just practices and trained himself in good traits based on his intelligence, and he does justice and righteousness based on his understanding – even so, we cannot trust this person or nation that at the time that his desire sways him to do bad, that his intelligence will always overcome his desire. Just the opposite, when his desire burns in him for a beautiful woman or his friend's wealth and no one sees, then his mind will also mislead him to murder, commit adultery, and do all evil. Only one force exists in a person's soul that we can rely on it that he will not sin, and that is the trait of fear of G-d, as it says, "Fear of G-d is the discipline of wisdom," "Fear of G-d is the beginning of wisdom." About this [Avraham] said: "I said – even though I see that your nation are people of good traits, doing justice and righteousness, and I did not see in them anything wrong, [there is] just one fault – that there is no fear of G-d in this place."

Similarly, Rav Kook zt"l opened his work Orot Hakodesh as follows:

The sacred wisdom is above all wisdom, in that it turns the desire and character of those who learn it ... whereas all secular sciences do not have this ability ... Therefore they cannot make those who delve in them into a new being, to uproot him from the essence of his negative traits, and to establish him in a state of a new reality, pure and alive with the light of true life, which endures forever.

So, too, in the beginning of his work, Mussar Hakodesh:

Secular ethics are not deep, and do not enter the inner parts of the soul. Even though a person is drawn after it to good, by recognizing the integrity that is in logic, this guidance does not have enduring grasp before the storming of various desires, when they arise strongly. Certainly this weak ethic is not able to lead broadly, human society in its depth and vastness, to penetrate the depths of the soul, and to turn for mankind and the individual person a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone. There is no alternative, other than he should be directed based on Divine ethics.

He further wrote at length about the goal of education (Igrot HaReiyah #170):

The goal of education is to prepare a person for his ideal form, whose central point is to make him good and just. From the time that Avraham Avinu began to call in G-d's Name, it was our heritage, that the more that calling in G-d's name in rooted in a person heart – his goodness and justness will increase, and he will be more satisfied to himself and the entire society.

Knesset Yisrael was designated of all the nations to raise high the flag of this axiom in the world: That the goodness and justice of a person is his loftiest goal, and that calling in G-d's name and implanting this point is the most guaranteed preparation for this goal. And since the purpose of rooting the calling in G-d's name, with heart and soul, in the individual and nation as a whole requires regular study from man's early childhood, therefore the study of Torah took the primary place in Jewish education. Specifically the study of Torah, and not other studies, whose goal is only to prepare a person for the battle of life, and not to make him good and just before G-d and man. This is the classical way that our ancestors always followed, and in this way Israel's name was preserved, and they succeeded and flourished, that from the outstanding Sages of each generation came out beacons of light for the nation and the entire world.

Rav Kook on Noach: The Walk of the Righteous

Not all tzaddikim are equal. Different individuals attain different levels of holiness and righteousness. The Torah calls our attention to these distinctions when it describes Noach and Avraham with similar yet slightly different phrases.

Regarding Noach, the Torah states that he “walked with God” (Ber. 6:9). To Avraham, on the other hand, God commanded, “Walk before Me” (Ber. 17:1). Noah walked with God, while Avraham walked before God. What is the difference? Which is better?

Interestingly, we find in the Torah a third expression for living a holy life. The Torah charges us to “walk after the Lord, your God” (Devarim 13:5). Where does “walking after God” fit in?

Repairing the Universe
We must first understand this metaphor of “walking.” Why not “standing with God” or “running with God”?

After Adam sinned and the natural order underwent a drastic shift, God did not seek to correct the world instantaneously. Rather, humanity was to gradually correct itelf, repairing the universe in stages until “the earth will be filled with awareness of God” (Yishayahu 11:9). This is the inner significance of the walk of the righteous: a slow but steady moral progression.

Similarly, the Sages wrote that prophecy is not revealed to the world all at once, but in a measured fashion, according to our ability to receive and assimilate it (Vayikra Rabbah 15:2). This principle is true for all forms of Divine wisdom. Enlightenment is granted to each generation in a measure appropriate for that generation, in order to uplift it and prepare it for the future.

Before the Torah’s revelation at Sinai, the world was not ready to receive its full light. Enlightenment is only bestowed according to the world’s capacity to accept it. Nonetheless, the universe always contained a hidden potential for its future spiritual level, when it could absorb the Torah’s light. 

Two Paths of Progress
But how does this explain the difference between the ‘walk’ of Noach and Avraham?

Before Sinai, there were two paths of spiritual growth. The first path was to perfect oneself according to the spiritual state appropriate for that generation. This is called “walking with God“: perfecting oneself in accordance with the Divine ideals and aspirations that were ordained for that time.

A higher path was to aspire to a level beyond the normal state for that era. This was an extraordinary spiritual effort, in order to prepare for and hasten the highest level of enlightenment — that of the Torah itself. This striving for the spiritual betterment of future generations is referred to as “walking before God,” or walking ahead of God.

The Torah tells us that Noach “walked with God.” Noach was just and good according to the standards ordained for his time. For this reason, the Torah emphasizes that Noach was “faultless in his generation.” His level of righteousness corresponded to the moral expectations for his generation.

Avraham, on the other hand, sought to awaken the entire world to integrity and holiness. Avraham “walked before God,” preparing the world to be ready for the greatest enlightenment, the Torah. Since Abraham helped ready the world for the Torah, the Sages wrote that he fulfilled the Torah before it was given (Yoma 28b).

Striving for Sinai
What about the third form of walking, “walking after God”?

Once the Torah was given, and God revealed the purest Divine light, we struggle to merit that pristine light that was revealed and subsequently hidden from us. It is impossible for us to reach the enlightened state of Sinai without first correcting our various failings. Therefore, we cannot be expected to “walk with God,” and certainly not “before God.” All we can hope for is to “walk after God” — to strive after the historic level of enlightenment that was revealed at Sinai. In our efforts to reach this level, we prepare ourselves to approach this state of enlightenment, until God “renews our days as of old” (Eicha 5:21).

(Gold from the Land of Israel pp. 28-30. Adapted from Midbar Shur, pp. 101-103 by Rav Chanan Morrison)

Greatness

by Rabbi Dov Berel Wein

The greater a person is or believes he or she is, the smaller the room for error in one’s life decisions. Had Noach been merely Mr. Noach, his choice of beginning the world again with a vineyard and wine would have been acceptable and even understandable. After all, the trauma of the destruction of so many human beings in the waters of the great flood required some sort of release of tension and an escape mechanism. But he was not just plain Noach when the Lord commanded him to build his ark and restart humanity. 

He was Noach, the righteous man of his generation, the person who represented goodness and service to God and humanity. He was special, an exalted person who overcame the influences of a wicked and dissolute society and withstood its ridicule and insults. A person of such noble character and pious nature should not begin the rebuilding of human society with vineyards and wine.

It sent the wrong message to his progeny and through them to all later generations as well. Holy people are to be held to holy standards of behavior and endeavor. There are no one-size fits all in ethical and moral standards of behavior. The rabbis of Midrash taught us that with a greater human capacity for holiness there is a commensurate capacity for dissolute behavior as well.

The Talmud states that it is the scholarly righteous who have the strongest evil inclination within them. The responsibility for spiritual greatness is commensurate with the capacity for the holy greatness of each individual person. This is why Noach finds himself criticized by Midrash, and later Jewish biblical commentators, in spite of the Torah’s glowing compliments paid to him in its initial description.

A person of the stature of Noach should not be found drunk and disheveled in his tent, an inviting figure for the debauchery of his own offspring. The failure of greatness is depressing. As King Solomon put it: "If the flame has consumed the great cedars, then what else can be the fate of the hyssop of the wall?"

Greatness carries with it enormous burdens and fateful consequences. As we pride ourselves on being the "chosen people" we are held by Heaven to behave and live our lives as being a chosen people. Wine and drunkenness will not suffice for a nation that is destined to be a be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, a special people.

Burdened by this greatness the Jewish people have fallen short of the mark numerous times in our history. But we have always risen again to attempt to fulfill our destiny and realize our potential. It is this characteristic of resilience, inherited from our father Abraham, that has been the key to our survival. We have constantly dealt with great ideas and issues. Drunkenness, whether physical or spiritual, has never been a trait of Jewish society. We are aware of the story and fate of Noach, but we pursue the greatness of Abraham as our goal in life.

Savages

by Daniel Greenfield

We’re in a war between savages and civilization. Everything else is a detail.

Some of us woke up to that war when planes crashed into skyscrapers. Others when we saw beheading videos spread across social media. What we saw in Israel, Hamas terrorists raping, mutilating and defiling corpses, is another bloody wake-up call. There will be many others.

Beyond the politics and the geopolitics, we still haven’t come to terms with what we’re fighting.

The barbarism of murdering women and children, taking them as hostages, and posting photos of their dead bodies to social media, is not a byproduct of Islamic warfare, it’s the whole point.

Cruelty, beheading, burning to death, torturing and mutilating are the essence of Islam. This is how Islamic warfare was practiced beginning with Mohammed for over a thousand years. It’s how it continues to be practiced, whether it’s ISIS fighting other Muslims, Azebajani troops killing Armenians, Hamas attacking Israelis, or Islamic terrorists plotting carnage in Western nations.

Islam was born out of a war by barbarians against the civilized societies of Persia and Byzantium. Despite academic mythmaking, its vision never extended beyond rape and slavery, its empires fell into power struggles, beginning with Sunnis and Shiites, and its cultural and scientific accomplishments were all looted from conquered peoples. When civilization finally toppled the Ottoman Empire with some help from its internal barbarians, the cycle began again.

Israel is just one front in a global war between savages and civilization. And not all of the savages bow to Allah. There are inner city gangs across the American hemisphere that behead and torture their victims. And there are children of civilization that turn into savages. Savagery is not a condition of birth: it is a choice. People born into savagery can become civilized and those born into the highest echelons of civilization can prey on us like the worst vicious animals.

The question is how do civilized societies confront savagery? Do we blame ourselves for having made the savages what they are through our capitalism and colonialism even though they have behaved this way long before modern western civilization amounted to anything? Or do we set forth to reeducate them, to build modern nations for them and teach them to become civilized?

We have sent forth our sons and daughters to make peace with them and to educate them. Our societies opened themselves to embrace and celebrate the virtues of the noble savage. When we realized that we could not coexist with savages, we tried to remake our societies to serve them. All of that has been tried and civilization is still drowning in the violence of the savages.

The fundamental truth is that civilization and savagery are innately at war with one another.

Savages are offended by the existence of civilization. When they see one, they want to destroy it. There can be no peace with savages because, contrary to Islam, peace is a condition of civilization. To have peace, you must be civilized. Savages don’t even view peace as a value apart from the conclusion of a successful conquest which then sets the stage for the next one.

Civilized people develop complex mechanisms of exchange, but savages see no reason why they shouldn’t take something or someone if they are too weak to defend themselves. No amount of lectures will ever convince a savage that anything other than clan relations should prevent him from stealing a car or raping a woman if there will be no clear consequences.

That’s because savages, unlike civilized people, have no conscience, and therefore no soul.

Islam, unlike Judaism and Christianity, is not a religion of the soul, but entirely of power. From its genocidal chant, “Allahu Akbar” that proclaims the physical supremacy of Allah to all other religions through the military victories of its followers, everything is reduced to conquest. The truth of Islam is validated through war. When Jihadists conquer and rape non-Muslims, they are proving that Islam is true and that the religions of the conquered are false. That’s why ISIS Jihadists would tell the Yazidi girls they were raping that rape brought them “closer to Allah”

Civilizations have become too sophisticated and decadent to understand such concepts. When faced with barbarism, they go down a dialectic rabbit hole that explains the savages in terms of how civilized people interacted with them. Did they hurt their feelings, overthrow their governments or draw mean cartoons? Did capitalism leave them adrift in the world economy? How did we fail to integrate the newest generation of immigrants with all the welfare checks?

These sophomoric sessions are pointless. A hyena doesn’t eat your chickens because you failed to integrate it. That’s just what hyenas do. Man at the base state is a predator and savages strive to be the alpha predators. Civilizations become superior predators because they provide room for arts and sciences, because they think about something other than how they are superior to their neighbors and will prove it by killing their sons and raping their daughters.

But when civilizations spend too much time thinking, they forget that one reason they came into being was to build something better than a state of savagery. Decadent civilizations internalize all the criticism and their peoples endlessly quarrel and think that the worst possible things in the world are the ones that exist among their own people. Savages remind us otherwise.

Much like a hurricane reminds us of the alternative to houses and famine reminds us of the alternative to food, savages remind us of the alternative to civilization. Unfortunately truly decadent civilizations need constant reminders of all of these things. We have to be constantly told that food doesn’t magically emerge from a supermarket, that houses are not the natural state of being and that not being murdered by savages in your home is a new way of life.

Tolerate savages, give them enough rope and they will do all of these things to you. And more.

Savagery should not be confused with stupidity. Civilizations have been brought down by savages and civilizations were built by savages who became civilized. Savages are clever and cunning. They are alert to the weaknesses of civilized people and experts at finding ways around whatever walls and security systems that civilized people build to protect themselves.

Civilizations that spend enough time allowing savages to hang around will fall. Tolerating savages is actually a sign that a civilization has turned decadent. Welcoming and advocating for savages means that the end is nigh. Viable civilizations drive savages away. They do it not just to protect themselves but because banishing savages is what makes a civilization civilized.

When civilizations forget what the difference between themselves and the savages are, they lose their sense of right and wrong, and they can no longer explain why savagery is wrong. When faced with the worst imaginable crimes, they can still equivocate a case for the criminals.

Hamas terrorists can rape and kill their victims, and defenders will rally to explain why the issue is actually more complicated than it seems. This happens with Islamic terrorists all the time.

Savages and decadent civilizations have no firm concept of right and wrong. Everything is subjectively opportunistic and there can be scenarios in which raping a woman, killing her and then posting a photo of her body to social media so her family can see is actually right.

That is why civilization has to defeat savagery, without equivocation, apologies or sympathy, not only to win, but to revive its own soul. Negotiations and laws of war are for peer civilization. Savages offer nothing and so are owed nothing. They keep no agreements except when it suits them. Their word is worthless and their morality is non-existent.

A civilization that does not understand all this will learn it the hard way.

Civilizations are built on the suppression of savagery: both internally and externally.. When civilizations defeat savages, learning, art, science and ideas thrive. And when civilizations allow savages to ravage them, they lose their people, their morality and eventually their existence.

No form of war is more sacred than that of civilization against savagery. It is these wars that made Christianity and Judaism, not to mention all the ideas of western civilization, as well as those of Asia and India, possible. This is once again the defining struggle of our age.

Either civilization or the savages will prevail. Any attempt at a middle ground is suicide.

Our grandchildren will either make great things or they will be hunted by roaming savages like the teenage girls at a concert in Israel or those similarly hunted in venues in Europe.

All the hopes of mankind depend on the utter and total defeat of the savages, not just in Israel, but in America, in Europe, in India and Asia, and around the world. This is not the struggle of any single nation, but the crisis of mankind. Either humanity will rise or we will fall.

To Win a War, Fight One

by Daniel Greenfield

As highly civilized people, we're lost touch with some basic concepts. Like war.

We complain that we never win wars anymore, but that's because we don't fight them. Instead we have limited interventions against insurgents. We try to stabilize failed states. Sometimes we go in, take out a few terrorists and then go back home. Veterans, whose wounds are very real, sit around wondering what it was all for. So do the families of the men who died fighting in a war that was never a war.

To win a war, you have to fight one.

If your enemy is fighting a war and you're fighting something less than a war, the enemy will win.

Police actions, nation building exercises and the like have vague and poorly defined objectives, while wars have very clear ones.

Wars are either won or lost. That's why modern governments rarely like fighting them. Or doing anything that has clear and measurable results. Once you declare a war, you know you have to win.

We fight things that are not wars to 'stabilize' regions. Wars are not fought for stability, but destruction. To win a war, destroy the enemy. That's what the United States did in WWII, raining mass death and destruction on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in ways that still make modern liberals cringe.

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They have sown the wind, and so they shall reap the whirlwind," RAF Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Arthur Harris bluntly stated.

"The harder we push, the more Germans we kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing harder means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that," Patton told the Third Army.

FDR's obsession with taking the war to Japan led to the Doolittle Raid. One of the bombs from that raid hit a school. “It is quite impossible to bomb a military objective that has civilian residences near it without danger of harming the civilian residences as well. That is a hazard of war," Doolittle had warned.

That is what war is. It's why wars should not be fought lightly. But when you fight them, fight to win.

A just war is based on a fundamental moral clarity about your enemies, not your tactics. War crimes are a meaningless term except when applied to violations of an agreement between the two combatants or civilians that are not a party to the conflict. That is not the case in Gaza. And is rarely the case when fighting Islamic terrorists.

The United States met the Japanese torture, execution, abuse, medical experiments and cannibalism of our troops with increased determination to win at any cost. This was the cost for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were not war crimes, this was how a regime of monsters that committed unspeakable atrocities was finally forced to surrender.

That is what fighting to win means.

Winning against Hamas does not mean dropping a few bombs on buildings, staging a limited incursion, taking out a few Hamas leaders and then letting Turkey and Egypt negotiate a truce. That's not a war.

Winning means destroying Hamas, its leaders, its terrorists and its supporters by any means necessary, and securing the territory they operated from so that it can be used to stage similar attacks.

Can Israel fight and win such a war? Yes, it can. Will it? That's the question.

Israel, like America, has tried not fighting wars. That is what led to the horrors of the High Holy Day attacks. It may want to fight and win a war before it's too late.

The Catastrophe of 2023

by Victor Rosenthal

I don’t have the words to describe the cruelty and brutality of our enemies. That would take a Chaim Nachman Bialik, but I’m sure you can find descriptions, photos, videos, and recordings of unanswered cries for help in other places. At least 650 of us were murdered and thousands injured in a typical Arab Muslim blood frenzy. More than 100 were taken hostage, to be tortured over the coming days, months, and perhaps years.

Although the attack itself was a surprise, the horrifying nature of it should not have been. This is who they are, who they have always been, and what they do. A lot has been written about Hamas’ motivation. Did they want to damage the possibility of an Israeli-Saudi agreement? Did they want to encourage Qatar to send them more funds? The truth is simpler: they wanted to kill Jews as cruelly as possible. Yes, they intend to use their hostages to try to free Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, but that’s only an intermediate objective. The long-term goal is to kill enough Jews so that the rest of us will either leave or be forced to accept subjection to Arab Muslim rule.

There is also a spiritual/psychological objective. By torture and murder, by the blood of their victims and of their “martyrs,” they add to their honor and subtract from that of the Jews. This strengthens them and weakens us. Although most Westerners don’t understand this, honor is real, and the loss of honor can be catastrophic. It will not be enough for Israel to control the territory of Gaza, Judea and Samaria. To survive in this place, the Jews of Israel must regain their honor.*

I also don’t have the inside information to explain who in Israel was responsible for the failures. How was none of the planning for this picked up by our intelligence? Where were the helicopter gunships when the terrorists were pouring through the gaps in the fence? Where was the army for the first five hours of the attack? Isn’t the border monitored 24/7 by high-tech sensors as well as by human soldiers? Did we not learn from 1973 not to send everyone home for the holidays? I could go on.

There will be answers to all of these questions, and more. Assuming that the State of Israel survives long enough, there will be the Commission of Inquiry to end all Commissions of Inquiry. Politicians and military officers will lose their jobs in disgrace. Lessons will be said to have been learned. Procedures will be put in place. But we will not remain here unless we are capable, as a culture, of learning and internalizing some concepts that seem to have been lost to the West roughly since the end of World War II. For example, those of Honor, Enemy, and War.

Honor and deterrence are two sides of the same coin. If you do not aggressively defend yourself against the efforts of others to take your property, if you do not retaliate against injuries inflicted on you, if you try to guarantee peace by paying ransom, then you send a message that you are prey, and you will be the victims of predators. Israel has been paying ransom to Hamas in various forms for decades; this is the result. Honor and deterrence are achieved by disproportional retaliation, not by attempts to improve the enemy’s economic condition.

An enemy is someone who wants to kill you. The best way to defend oneself against an enemy (as the sages of the Talmud noted) is to “arise and kill him first.” Israel’s approach to self-defense has become primarily passive, not active. We hunker down in our safe rooms and try to ward off the blows of our enemies, as demonstrated by Iron Dome, a device that is both impractical (it can be overwhelmed by massive barrages of rockets and drone swarms) and economically unsustainable (each interceptor costs $40,000 while rockets and drones can cost a few hundred dollars). And then our enemies come on motorcycles and pickup trucks and drag us out of our “safe” rooms.

And finally, war is … war. The goal of war is victory, the imposition of your will on what is left of the enemy, such as was done to Germany and Japan in WWII. If there is no victory, then the war continues. A ceasefire that allows the losing side to rearm, such as those that followed the numerous previous wars between Israel and Hamas, is a battle lost. The policy of the US has always been to deny Israel victory, for some reason that is still incomprehensible to me, but at some point – as Menachem Begin realized when he ordered the air force to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor – Israel needs to defy the US.

If the goal of war is victory, then the policy of not attacking a military target because of the presence of civilians is irrational: the enemy will simply place its assets among civilians. The laws of war take account of this, and permit attacks in which collateral damage is proportional to military advantage. I needn’t mention that even this degree of restraint was not observed by the Allies in WWII, when strategic bombing deliberately targeted civilians. Israel’s excessive concern for the “optics” of its actions is exploited by her enemies – and hostile media and NGOs accuse her of war crimes in any event.

After WWII, there were large movements of populations as a result of the political changes wrought by the war. Hundreds of thousands of “innocent” ethnic Germans in countries east of Germany were expelled. Needless to say, millions of Jews that had survived the Holocaust could not return to their former homes. When Jordan conquered Judea and Samaria in 1948, Jews were forced to flee. Victory against our enemies and Gaza and Judea/Samaria must also lead to the emigration of many who are implacably hostile to the Jewish state.

So what are the chances that Israel will change her policies of appeasement and paying ransoms to those of aggressive and necessarily brutal retaliation? One positive sign is that Israel cut off the supply of electricity and fuel to Gaza (but not yet water). It’s impossible to predict, but one thing to keep in mind is that those making decisions, both in the political and military echelons, are the ones responsible for the present policy, and they are not likely to be replaced in the near term.

I do not consider myself a religious person, but it’s hard to avoid mentioning that the Torah prescribes a very harsh approach to Israel’s historical enemy, Amalek. King Saul was removed from his position because, he failed to carry out the order from the prophet Samuel to wipe out the Amalekites, all of them, including their children and animals. I don’t advocate killing either children or animals, but our enemy’s policy of using human shields – a war crime – will naturally result in more collateral damage. And we need to understand this and not shrink from doing what is necessary to win, despite the suffering that this will cause to enemy populations.

We live in the Middle East and not in Europe or America. European-style moral considerations are not in play here, nor even European-style rationality. In the Middle East, if someone hurts you, you take revenge – or they will hurt you again. If you don’t internalize this, you will not understand events here.

We are at the beginning of a long and probably vicious struggle, which may end with the destruction of Hamas, the death of its leaders, and a massive number of refugees from Gaza. Or it may continue, and move into an even more bitter conflict with Hezbollah, and ultimately the “head of the snake” in Iran.

May we receive the strength we must have for victory in all these conflicts, in order to preserve the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
_____________________
* There are relevant parallels for the USA and Europe.

Palestinians' War on Israel and US Senators' Delusional 'Two-State Solution'

by Bassam Tawil

• Less than 48 hours after 20 US Democratic Senators urged President Joe Biden to push for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Iran's Palestinian terror proxies launched a massive attack on Israel, killing more than 700 Israeli men, women and children, and wounding thousands more. An unknown number of Israelis (estimated at more than 100), including infants, toddlers and an elderly Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair, have also been kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip.
• This war, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, was caused directly by Iran, which funds and directs Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and by the appeasement of the Iranian regime by the Biden administration and its allies.
• The two groups [Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad] do not recognize the Oslo Accords that were signed between the PLO and Israel in 1993-1995, and they are opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state only in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The only solution they believe in is one that would see Israel replaced with an Islamic state.
• If the Democratic senators have it their way, the future Palestinian state will also be controlled by Hamas and PIJ.
• Instead of condemning the Palestinians for transforming the Gaza Strip into a base for Jihad against Israel, the Senators who signed the letter are asking the Biden Administration to give the Palestinians another state in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Like the Gaza Strip, the new Palestinian state will also be quickly transformed into an Iran-backed terror entity and a base for pursuing the Jihad against Israel.
• In the past two years, Hamas and PIJ have increased their terror activities in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, has done nothing to stop terror attacks against Israelis. Abbas knows that the day he orders his security forces to crack down on the terrorists, his people will condemn him as a traitor and collaborator with Israel.
• Instead of denouncing the terrorists, Abbas continues to reward them with monthly stipends through what is known as a "Pay-for-Slay" program. In 2021, the Palestinian Authority spent no less than 841 million shekels ($270.75 million) paying rewards to terrorists. 600 million shekels ($193.16 million) were paid to imprisoned terrorists and released terrorists and another 241 million shekels ($77.59 million), at least, were paid to wounded terrorists and the families of dead terrorists. That totals, in just one year, $541.5 million (nearly 1.7 billion shekels).
• In their letter, [the Senators] make no mention of the tens of thousands of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel over the past two decades -- into a country roughly the size of New Jersey (22,000 km2), or the thousands of rockets that are raining down on Israel since October 7. Imagine thousands of rockets fired into New Jersey.
• The Senators also failed to mention the wave of Palestinian terrorism that Israel has been facing over the past two years in the West Bank. Hardly a day passes without Israelis being targeted with shootings, stabbings, and car-rammings.
• The Senators further ignore Abbas's "Pay-for-Slay" program that rewards terrorists and their families, as well as the Palestinians' ongoing campaign of incitement to violence... The Senators want to give a state to a Palestinian president who pays salaries to terrorists and goads them to murder on a regular basis.
• The Senators calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state also ignored the fact that the Palestinians have never abandoned the Palestine Liberation Organization's 1974 "Ten Point Plan" (also known as the "phased plan") for the "comprehensive liberation" of all the land stretching "from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea" -- a euphemism for the destruction of Israel.
• The Palestinians [in 2005] were given, with no conditions, the entire Gaza Strip. They replied by launching tens of thousands of rockets into Israel. These are inconvenient facts that the 20 Democratic Senators, who appear to be shockingly uninformed, do not want to acknowledge.
• It now remains to be seen whether the same Senators who are pushing for the establishment of a Palestinian terror state will speak out against this latest grisly massacre of Jews.

Pictured: Hamas terrorists who were killed on the way to murder Israelis, near the city of Sderot, Israel on October 8, 2023. (Photo by Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

Less than 48 hours after 20 US Democratic Senators urged President Joe Biden to push for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Iran's Palestinian terror proxies launched a massive attack on Israel, killing more than 700 Israeli men, women and children, and wounding thousands more. An unknown number of Israelis (estimated at more than 100), including infants, toddlers and an elderly Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair, have also been kidnapped and taken to the Gaza Strip.

This war, as reported on October 8 by the Wall Street Journal, was caused directly by Iran, which has made no secret of its desire to "eradicate" Israel -- and America -- and which funds and directs Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and by the appeasement of the Iranian regime by the Biden administration and its allies.

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The Ayatollah's Plan for Israel and Palestine

by Amir Taheri 

• The book has received approval from Khamenei's office and is thus the most authoritative document regarding his position on the issue.
• Khamenei makes his position clear from the start: Israel has no right to exist as a state. He claims his strategy for the destruction of Israel is not based on anti-Semitism, which he describes as a European phenomenon. His position is based on "well-established Islamic principles."
• According to Khamenei, Israel, which he labels an "enemy" and "foe," is a special case for three reasons. The first is that it is a loyal "ally of the American Great Satan" and a key element in its "evil scheme" to dominate "the heartland of the Ummah."
• Khamenei describes Israel as "a cancerous tumor" whose elimination would mean that "the West's hegemony and threats will be discredited" in the Middle East. In its place, he boasts, "the hegemony of Iran will be promoted."
• Khamenei's tears for "the sufferings of Palestinian Muslims" are also unconvincing. To start with, not all Palestinians are Muslims. And, if it were only Muslim sufferers who deserved sympathy, why doesn't he beat his chest about the Burmese Rohingya and the Chechens massacred and enchained by Vladimir Putin, not to mention Muslims daily killed by fellow-Muslims across the globe?
• In the early days of his mission, the Prophet Muhammad toyed with the idea of making Jerusalem the focal point of prayers for Islam. He soon abandoned the idea and adopted his hometown of Mecca. For that reason, some classical Muslim writers refer to Jerusalem as "the discarded one," like a first wife who is replaced by a new favorite. In the 11th century the Shiite Fatimid Caliph, Al-Hakim even ordered the destruction of Jerusalem.
• Dozens of maps circulate in the Muslim world, showing the extent of Muslim territories lost to the infidel that must be recovered. These include large parts of Russia and Europe, almost a third of China, the whole of India and parts of the Philippines and Thailand.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei describes Israel as "a cancerous tumor" whose elimination would mean that "the West's hegemony and threats will be discredited" in the Middle East. (Image source: khamenei.ir)


"The flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem."

This is how the blurb of "Palestine," a new book, published by Islamic Revolution Editions last week in Tehran, identifies the author.

The author is "Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Husseini Khamenei," the "Supreme Guide" of the Islamic Republic in Iran, a man whose fatwa has been recognized by U.S. President Barack Obama as having the force of law.

Edited by Saeed Solh-Mirzai, the 416-page book has received approval from Khamenei's office and is thus the most authoritative document regarding his position on the issue.

Khamenei makes his position clear from the start: Israel has no right to exist as a state.

He uses three words. One is "nabudi" which means "annihilation". The other is "imha" which means "fading out," and, finally, there is "zaval" meaning "effacement."

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Only War

by Daniel Greenfield

What should a nation do when its women and children are murdered and taken hostage.

Israel has the same choice it always had. That choice becomes clearer each year and with each atrocity.

It can carry out another "limited incursion" into Gaza, bomb the homes of some terrorists and then go home, hopefully with the hostages, and wait for something like it or worse to happen again.

Or it can actually go to war and win.

Israel, like America, doesn't win wars anymore. It has operations. It takes out terrorist leaders and occasionally terrorist cells. And then it goes home. But when home is within a stone's throw of where monsters live, then there's no way to go home. Home is where the monsters are.

A war ends with victory. The destruction of the enemy. The Islamic terrorists have been waging a war meant to end in victory since Israel was reborn. Unless Israel fights to win, it will be lost.

What does a war look like? It is not "proportionate" or "limited". It is not based on "deterrence" and does not end with a "truce". If at the end of the war, the enemy still exists, you have not won.

Israel has yet to fight a war against the terrorists. Let alone win one.

It's been 30 years since the Israeli Left sold the myth of peace with the Arab Muslim invaders in Gaza and the West Bank and under 20 years since building walls and defenses was sold as the alternative.

Neither of those were ever a viable option against a genocidal enemy.

The myth of peace and the myth of defense never took into account the reality of who the enemy is.

The enemy is not Hamas, a grand name for an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, backed and financed by Iran, it is a culture that has been out to kill Jews and all non-Muslims since the days of Mohammed.

What we have seen in the Hamas attacks, the murder of elderly women and children, the degradation of a murdered woman's corpse, and all the rest of the atrocities, comes from the same ideology and culture as the one that beheaded prisoners and burned them to death in Syria and Iraq, that raped imprisoned political prisoners so that they would not die virgins in Iran, and that sexually assaulted 12-year-old girls in Iraq by men who declared that rape "brought them closer to Allah." The same one that flew planes into skyscrapers, set off bombs at a marathon and drove trucks into spectators.

These are only a few of the more recent and notable atrocities in over a thousand years of terror.

It is impossible to live in peace with the Religion of Peace except in temporary truces or through strength. And strength does not mean possessing devastating weapons that a nation is too afraid to actually use. It does not mean building walls and hoping that each time the enemy comes, they can be thrown back.

The bloody lesson that is being taught yet again is that playing defense gives the enemy the initiative, the momentum and the choice of battlefield.

The Simchat Torah massacres are being called Israel's 9/11. They have one thing in common which is that both America and Israel came to believe that they could rely on intelligence and occasional targeted air strikes to hold off Islamic terrorists. But the terrorists only have to get it right once. They can and do fail most of the time, but when they succeed, a nation burns. Given enough tries, enough training and enough support, they will eventually succeed. That's simple statistics. And then what is happening now happens.

Playing defense is what leads to 9/11 or the mass butchery of Israelis that happened during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.

Playing defense is slow suicide.

The first rule of co-existing with Islamic Jihadists is that you can't.

You can't make peace with them and you can't have an 'understanding' with them. You can only deter them for so long. Eventually they will break through your defenses. And then planes will crash into skyscrapers and young people will be massacred at a concert. Worse will come if you don't learn those lessons.

Either you defeat Islamic terrorists or they will defeat you. The idea of a middle ground is an illusion that lasts only as long as your capabilities do.

The only thing that works is going on the offensive.

Going on the offensive what was made Israel possible. Draining swamps and making the desert bloom was all well and good, but it was citizen militias and then an early national military that made the country of an oppressed minority into a viable possibility by striking ruthlessly at the enemy.

Until the 1980s, Israel did not tolerate Jihadists within its borders. By the 1990s, it had not only learned to tolerate them, it had made a deal with them. By the oughts, it learned to accept them as a fact of life. Shvitzers with big titles bragged that there was an understanding, that the terrorists knew not to go too far or there would be more air strikes. By this decade, Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv got used to being in bomb shelters again. Now, the terrorists broke through in a full-fledged assault on Israeli territory beyond the so-called 'Green Line'.

There is big talk now about permanently ending the military capabilities of Hamas. I truly hope that it's sincere because such big talk has been heard before. And then the air strikes kill women and children in Gaza. The world condemns Israel. The United States threatens to cut off support. And it all falls apart.

Sharon's Disengagement from Gaza, as many have noted, has failed. The idea that Israel can isolate Gaza and prevent Hamas from killing more Israelis is deader than the estimated 700 victims. A number that will only continue growing. And it's been dead long before that.

Israel has a choice between eliminating Hamas from Gaza or reliving this Simchat Torah again. And worse.

There are no other choices on the menu. Neither peace nor deterrence will work. Only war.

A war ends when the enemy does.

How many times must we repeat Bialik's 'City of Slaughter' in a country that was built to put an end to such things? How many times must we go down to the graves of murdered women and children who died because we lacked, not the physical courage, but the moral courage, to put an end to their killers?

How much longer must we choose every other option but war while imagining that rejecting war is somehow noble or will spare lives?

How much longer must we live in a fantasy world in which hard choices don't have to be made?

When an enemy wants to exterminate you: your choice is war or death. Peace and deterrence mean death. War means survival.