The Never-Ending War, Part 1
The Never-Ending War, Part 1
By Daniel Ben Abraham
Members of the Mossad and IDF recently disagreed with Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to hostage negotiations as waging a “forever” war. So who is right? And what if neither are fully right? Who better understands this war than the Mossad, the IDF, and Netanyahu?
Netanyahu’s problem is obvious. As soon as Israel stops fighting in Gaza, Hamas will declare victory, reconstitute like the Taliban did and ISIS is trying to, and recruit 10,000 new members in months. That’s why Israel isn’t stopping or releasing the Philadelphi Corridor, and also why Hamas believes it is winning. “The day after”, international funds, weapons, and demands against Israel will pour in.
While Israel defines “winning” as killing individual Hamas member and leader, and recovering hostages, Hamas defines “winning” as the expansion of the global anti-Israel ideology. To Hamas, “winning” means being backed by Iran, in turn backed by Russia, China, and North Korea. To Hamas, “winning” is International Criminal Court condemnation of Israel, and 146 nations now recognizing a terrorist-led “Palestinian state” that wants to conquer Israel. Keeping the hostages lets Hamas further such global reshaping.
The “two-state solution” as generally thought of, is essentially now unviable, as it was reliant on the premise of a rational world. If the world is now so ideological and morally lost that it will recognize a terrorist-led Palestinian “state” that supports October 7th, then why wouldn’t the world also support a new prospective Palestinian state’s demands for open borders, weapons, and an army miles from Jerusalem?
Surrounded by her enemies, Israel only has the luxury of ending a war if and when she wins. This is because Israel’s enemies are a collective, self-sacrificing ideology, and Israel losing or even a stalemate is all they need to continue fighting, even at their own individual expense, for the collective anti-Israel ideological supergroup cause.
Israel is fighting a material war, while Hamas is fighting an ideological war. Dr. Yuval Bitton, former head of Israeli prison system intelligence said that Israel has not learned to understand Hamas. Israeli former spokesperson IDF Lt. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Conricus said in a PragerU interview with Marissa Streit, “Israel understands that it cannot defeat Hamas as an idea, as a call for extremist Muslims around the world and for Palestinians. That is not what Israel is trying to do.”
Is that right?
Israel has been fighting Hamas and Hezbollah for over 35 years, unable to destroy Hamas with bombs and bullets, because Hamas is an idea. That’s why, with Amalek, God told the Jewish people in the Torah to destroy “all memory” of them. But with killing Hamas members, the ideology still lives on in the fertile recruiting ground of the Palestinian population, now hating Israel more than ever.
Israel removed Hamas leader Haniyah, who was instantly replaced with Sinwar; like cutting off the head of a snake, only to have it grow another. While Israel has every right to try to win by eliminating enemy and it’s leadership, it is unfortunately fighting with bullets and bombs against an invisible, bulletproof, intangible, leaderless ideology willing to sacrifice human adherents for the power gains of the ideological entity.
Israel’s leaders are political, and inherently bound to celebrate political achievements like peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, and the Abraham Accords. While our international system is built by and between nations like Egypt and Jordan, we must not misunderstand the weaknesses of our nation-state system. The Arabs see themselves as one Arab “nation” far more closely than their respective modern nation-states. 84% polled across 480 million people in 16 Arab countries do not recognize Israel, and 89% do not believe in recognizing ties with Israel after 75 years. This is worse than a few decades ago, despite the peace treaties. Israel’s piece of paper with the leaders of six Arab countries is not peace, and such peace deals alone will not transform the Middle East into Israel acceptance without correctly addressing the bigger, and growing, ideological problem. The dominant Arab supergroup ideological entity is still at war with Israel, same as 1948, while Israel’s peace treaties are now being used as a weapon against her.
Hezbollah attacks with rockets, Hamas attacks with hostages, the international system attacks using a twisted and morally-backwards law-fare, while Egypt and Jordan attack by sealing their borders yet allowing tunnels and smuggling and fanning the ideological flames. The UAE stepped in to bail out Egypt economically, Iran met with North Korea and Pakistan days after Israel’s “demonstration” attack on a S-300 missile site, and reportedly the Ayatollah wants a bomb by November 5th. Even the United States demanded Israel not expand the war, is delaying weapons shipments, and passing U.N. Security Council ceasefire resolutions. It’s not all a big coincidence, but part of one collective ideological phenomenon that Israel is mistakenly fighting piecemeal and two-dimensionally.
Does Hamas really have no weakness here, or is it just one Israel has not been able to discover or access yet?
If you believe in God, there is always a solution.
And if Mashiach were here, he might tell you that wars are like riddles, and if you figure out the riddle, you win.
We now live in a world where it is immoral to destroy the Palestinians like Amalek, and as such, the enemy is able to continue this war forever, unless we solve the riddle. The riddle of this war goes to the very fundamentals of who or what Israel’s true enemy is. And, it’s a riddle that Israel has allowed to remain unanswered for far too long.
The way to win Israel’s wars, is not just eliminating individual soldiers or even leaders and pieces of paper with leaderships, but on an ideological level. The Jewish people must learn to break the ideological unity of its attackers and their populations, and turn the Palestinians against Hamas, Hamas against Hezbollah, Egypt against Hamas, Lebanon against Hezbollah, Hamas and Hezbollah against Iran, and Russia and China against them all as is actually in their best interests. The Jewish people must learn to weaken and dismantle hostile ideologies themselves on the macro-level, and watch the adherents follow suit, their hostile ambitions falling apart by the millions when we turn the correct key.
And the riddle of how to do this may go to the very fundamentals of not just this Gaza War, but the far broader war.
What if there is a more specific, nuanced reason Israel won the wars of ’67 and ’73 that we don’t understand? What if Israel’s true victory wasn’t material, but nuanced ideological?
After all, the opposite of war…is nuance.
What if Israel didn’t win the 6-Day War in 1967 because she destroyed enough tanks and planes of the Arab armies? Rather, what if the true reason was, that further Arab losses risked the Arab leaderships’ subgroup ideologies going to war against their own broader supergroup Arab ideology? What if the military win was just tangential to the true cause, Israel’s ideological victory of turning the Arab populations against their own leaders for their defeat?
What if Israel didn’t win the 1973 Yom Kippur War because she destroyed enough Egyptian tanks and was able to trap the Egyptian army? What if, the true reasons, again, were ideological? What if Israel was able to put Egypt’s leadership’s subgroup ideology at risk of removal by its own broader Arab supergroup ideology?
What if the precise, nuanced reasons for Israel’s victories were not material, but ideological, and simply happened to be triggered by the military victories?
And what if there are ways to trigger such victories over enemy ideologies now? It is on this ideological level that Israel must learn to defend herself in the face of these new threats.
Hamas has nothing to lose in the material sense, because it’s a leaderless supersubgroup ideology. It is a next-level enemy created by Israel’s very victories in ’67 and ’73, without the political weaknesses of the Arab states’ leaderships. It is a terrorist group shaped and fashioned precisely outside international law which governs nation-states, to support and gain credit for but not attribute blame to the Palestinians. The enemy has simply morphed outside the rules of the nation-state international law system Israel is bound to fight its defensive wars by.
But terrorist groups do have weaknesses if you know where they are hidden. Anti-Israel ideologies cannot be destroyed by bombs and bullets, yet, for example, they cannot withstand a diversity of ideological viewpoint.
Did you think the burka is a cultural dress? No, it’s a uniform to extinguish diversity of ideological viewpoint.
When millions gather on the streets for pro-Palestinian protests, do you think that’s speech? It’s the opposite of speech. It is individuals connecting through contagious neurochemistry to the collective ideological hive mind which controls them subconsciously.
When a terrorist carries out a suicide bombing, do you think that’s an attack? The attack is secondary to the hive mind communicating with its adherents, identifying a target to polarize against. That ideological entity sends drones like a bee hive sending bees to die to protect the hive - the true, sovereign entity.
It’s not a binary question of whether to control the Corridor or not, by itself.
When you understand the ideological entities Israel faces, their weaknesses reveal themselves.
And you know you’ve found them, because when you hit the nail on the head, they release the hostages immediately.
When you turn the key, they fall like dominos.
The solutions are out there just waiting to be discovered.