October 8, 2023

On Saturday morning at dawn, Hamas, supposedly representing all Palestinian people, invaded Israel, causing widespread panic, mayhem, death, and destruction.  No precursor event launched this attack, one of five over the last 25 years.  The attack was punctuated by firing thousands of rockets all over Israel, overwhelming Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome and David’s Sling air defense system. 

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With no chance of militarily defeating Israel, what precipitated the attack, and what is the deeper meaning for America and Israel, who have been joined at the hip almost since Israel’s inception?  The answers might surprise you as we uncover deeper meaning to what at first is simply naked aggression masked as a desire to see a Palestinian state.

Forget for a moment the origins of how Sunni Hamas wound up controlling Gaza City and how Shia Hezb’allah came to dominate the West Bank of Israel along with the Palestinian Authority, which is the nominal government for the Palestinian territories and is closely aligned with the Fatah political party.  The bit players on the ground are the pawns in what’s going on.  The real players are Iran and other Arab countries that use the Palestinian situation to settle scores at times and at other times feign concern for the Palestinians, who represent a destabilizing force in the Middle East that threatens the stability of several host nations like Jordan (where they tried to topple the country), Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudia Arabia, where more than five million live, mostly in camps and mainly in poverty. 

Iran and its proxies state that Israel is a pariah nation with no legal standing to exist, and that Allah has promised them that they will be returned to their “rightful” lands.  This is the basis for all the terrorism that has been the hallmark of the Palestinian experience since 1948.

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Missing from the debate is that there has never been a Palestinian country…ever.  Upon the creation of Israel in 1948, the grand mufti in Egypt ordered all Arabs living in the new State of Israel to leave or be killed.  Khaled el-Azm, Syrian prime minister after the 1948 War, in his 1972 memoirs stated:

Since 1948, it is we who have demanded the return of the refugees, while it is we who made them leave.  We brought disaster upon a million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure on them to leave.  We have accustomed them to begging[.] … [W]e have participated in lowering their morale and social level[.] … Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing stones upon men, women, and children … all this in the service of political purposes[.]

Enter the Blood Deal.  For my hyper-conservative friends, yes, oil is at the root of the Middle East’s almost magnetic power and pull.  Without oil, the Middle East would be much like Africa, at least as far as the world and particularly America are concerned.  Oil is our demi-god.  We deal with the Middle East out of necessity, for oil is the fuel for the engine of the world and, therefore, gives outsized power and influence to an otherwise dreary part of the world.  The Palestinians have been made into the fulcrum of this area of the world.

President Trump made peace between Israel and several Arab countries through the groundbreaking Abraham Accords, which ignored the Palestinian question for the first time and also led to the moving of our embassy to Jerusalem after decades of hand-wringing.  Iran and its proxies hated that peace and swore to destroy the deal and prevent the main country that matters, Saudia Arabia, from coming to peace with Israel.  This is the proximate reason for the events of October 7.

An existential crisis for a free people is our desire to do the right thing, the moral thing, versus the reality of evil facing us head-on.

The main objective of the invasion of Israel was twofold:

  1. Show that Israel is vulnerable and divided, especially since Israel is in the midst of a deep conversation on the powers of its Supreme Court and the Knesset.
  2. Capture as many hostages as possible.  Use the emotional power of that horrible and calculated action to gain leverage.