Monday, September 22, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
Why Israel can’t just “wrap up this war”
Bill Ackman reports that “young conservatives [are] getting tired of defending Israel.”
My colleagues at CAMERA and I have spent the past two years responding to a tsunami of lies about Israel, beginning in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, with the claim that Israel caused the attack on itself. Then there was the claim that Israel attacked Al Ahli hospital, killing hundreds of people; the claim that Israel intentionally targeted World Central Kitchen aid workers; the claim that Israeli snipers were shooting Palestinian children in the head; and the starvation and genocide libels, including the absurd claims that 83 percent of casualties were civilians and that 14,000 babies were imminently about to die of starvation. It’s exhausting.
It would be tempting for me to say that no one wants Israel to end the war more than I do. But I’m pretty sure that every single IDF soldier fighting in Gaza, not to mention the wives and mothers of those soldiers, wants Israel to conclude a lot more than I want it. Certainly, those with actual skin in the game want that more than Megyn Kelly, who said on her September 16 podcast that “Israel needs to wrap up this war .... This is a crisis for Israel, [a] PR crisis.”
We all have war fatigue, and we all want it to be over. If only it were that simple.
Hamas are fundamentalist jihadists. They are not motivated by any kind of rational thought. That’s why ending this conflict is so tragically intractable. Hamas doesn’t pursue its ‘self-interest’ according to the secular assumptions of many in the foreign policy establishment. There is no amount of destruction of Gaza that will make them sit up and say, “you know what, maybe October 7 was a mistake.” If that were possible, they would have already surrendered.
If the organization is left intact in Gaza, they will rebuild and attack Israel again. Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, stated in no uncertain terms, “The Al-Aqsa Deluge [as Hamas calls its October 7 attack] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” He continued, “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it.” Hamad even recently appeared on Al Jazeera celebrating what he called the “fruits of October 7.”
Even if it takes ten or 20 years or longer for them to rebuild, and for Israel to fall again into the October 6, 2023 complacency that provided the window of opportunity, such onslaughts will keep happening if Israel doesn’t decisively end Hamas’s grip over Gaza. Not only could the next attack potentially be worse, the response would likely be even stronger. That’s not good for anyone directly involved, except for the jihadists.
It must be noted that the comments above were made in the context of discussions over Charlie Kirk, whose funeral was on Sunday. I never met Charlie or attended any of his events – I’m not in his target demographic – but obviously his killing was horrific and my heart goes out to his wife, his children, his parents and his staff. May his memory be a blessing for them. Beyond that, I’m not going to address the type of ludicrous conspiracy theories that have sprung up in the wake of his assasination.
Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society wrote recently on Substack that destroying Hamas is impossible. Israel has done the impossible before, and more than once. Now it must do so again, even if some of its supporters in the West are weary.
Prior to this war, according to the ADL, over a billion people in the world harbored antisemitic attitudes. (By 2025, that number has doubled.) This compares to less than 16 million Jews worldwide. We are vastly outnumbered in the public relations sphere. Israel is surely well-aware of how the public relations war is going for it. But that doesn’t change the reality on the ground.
A government’s primary responsibility is the protection of its citizens, not good PR. As Golda Meir once said, “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.”
So yes, young conservatives, yes, Megyn Kelly, we get it. We’re tired, too.
But for Israel, this is existential, and there is no choice but to see it through. As long as Hamas is alive in Gaza, Israel must keep fighting, and as long as those enemies promote slanders in the public square, we will keep rebutting them. You don’t have to be with us, though it would be great if you were. But please don’t be against us, just because you’re tired of it.
Karen Bekker is the assistant director of the Media Response Team at CAMERA.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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