Thursday, November 30, 2023
From Ian:
Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary
Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary
Gaza itself is a blown-out wasteland. I was there within the first week, embedded with the IDF and traveling in Israeli vehicles through the border opening that the terrorists had broken through. As well as a feeling of trepidation, there is a sense of victory in going through that crossing. Hamas had come for the Israelis. And now the IDF was coming back for the people who’d done this.Victor Davis Hanson: What Were the Hamas Monsters Thinking?
In Gaza itself, anything can happen. The Israelis were still bombing the north, where I was, and up from the al-Shifa hospital I watched the streams of Palestinians making their journey south. It was a pitiful sight, and a reminder of what Hamas has wrought on the people under its control.
While I was there, the IDF found a Hamas tunnel and blew it up in front of me. The earth shook. But the earth shook a lot that day. Machine-gun fire kept breaking out, as well as the rockets and air strikes. People often ask what it’s like in a live conflict zone. The truth is, absolutely anything can happen. You just have to hope that it doesn’t.
At one point, right in the middle of Gaza, I spoke to a senior IDF commander and asked if he had been here before.
“Yes,” he replied.
“When were you last here?” I asked.
“In 2005,” he said, “when I pulled family friends out of their houses. Now eighteen years later, here I am, back again.”
It is a reminder of the insolubility of the Gaza situation. Nobody has an answer to it. But why has this impossible problem been given to the Israelis to solve? Get someone else to resolve it. If the outside world thinks it knows what to do with a whole generation Hamas has indoctrinated into hate, then be my guest. Any takers? Any?
For now, the war is still on hold. The IDF is trained to go. But currently they sit around, like everyone, waiting and watching and wondering how long this suspension can continue. The pause strengthens Hamas and weakens Israel. Some people say that Israelis should be less sentimental. But when you see footage of a child running back into his father’s arms, you think again. And then you have to think of both these things at once.
The jihadists say they will win because they love death more than we love life. I think they are wrong. Israel will win precisely because they—we—love life. The Jews are ordered by God to “choose life” and even in the face of death, they do. The enemy can’t stop the great surge for life that comes up everywhere here in Israel, even in these days. The units I visit have unity and morale of a kind you would barely think possible. Because everybody now knows what the alternative to war is. The alternative is constant massacre.
Watching the sun go down tonight I think of Fallaci again, and when she returned from Vietnam, how she answered the little girl’s question, “What is life?”
What did Fallaci say to her?
“Life is something you’ve got to fill up well, without wasting any time. Even if you break it by filling it too full.”
For all the boasts about loving death, it was Hamas who cowardly murdered the unarmed, scampered back to the safety of their tunnels, and used their own kindred Gazans to shield them from death—delivered to them by supposed nerds who love life too much.‘They Can Go to Hell and Hide There’
Europeans also have had it with unlimited immigration from the Middle East. Restrictionist politicians throughout Europe are ascending as never before, in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Sweden.
They all reflect growing public anger that Europeans are hated by the very people who seek them out and wish to destroy their Enlightenment institutions by manipulating and discrediting them. The thousands who hit the streets to cheer on October 7 and damn their hosts only confirm a growing global consensus—in the West, Latin America, Asia, and even throughout the Middle East—that admitting migrants from Palestine or Gaza, or their supporters, is a veritable death wish.
Pro-Hamas protestors calling Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” and boasting about the Arab or Muslim vote in Michigan is incoherent. Not only do harassing Thanksgiving shoppers and parades, disrupting iconic American holidays and events, swarming highways and bridges, and preying on Jews alienate Americans. But also taking credit for ensuring Biden’s defeat will only distance the Democratic establishment, such as it is, from its embarrassing, loud, but ultimately relatively impotent Islamic constituency.
Shouting for mass death “From the River to the Sea” does not endear the pro-Hamas crowd to half of their fellow Democrats, much less unabashedly strutting their anti-Semitism. The current overt support for Hamas, in other words, has revealed to the nation the bankruptcy of the entire pro-Hamas/DEI base of the Democratic Party and will do much to ensure a conservative president in 2024.
And that president will likely deport anyone on a green card or student visa promoting Hamas terrorism, or violating U.S. law, while ensuring a travel ban from terrorist supporting regimes in the Middle East. Such measures will win overwhelming public support, despite media and academic outrage.
Strategically, Iran, Hamas, and the Palestinians may seem to have flummoxed Israel into endless concessions by metering out hostages for serial pauses. But again, no Israel government can retain power by allowing the mass murdering Hamas to survive and so it will not.
Despite all the blood-curdling rhetoric of Hezbollah and Iran, neither will attack Israel or U.S. assets in force, given no American president could afford not to retaliate disproportionately. And “disproportionately” would mean rendering Iran’s military and Hezbollah to something akin to the current status of Hamas.
So for now, Hamas and its American-residing apologists are full of themselves and feel they are leveraging and manipulating the West. But such haughtiness may be a delusion. Hamas in the Middle East and its enablers in Europe and America have done more to harm the Palestinian cause and the idea of Middle Eastern immigration to the West than at any time since 9/11.
It is hard to anger Westerners, but continue the death chants, the violent demonstrations, the creepy anti-Semitism, and the proud support for the Hamas bloodwork of October 7, and they will be surprised at the growing anger of otherwise postmodern Europeans and distracted Americans.
Just as Israel realizes that there is no living with Hamas killers, so the West is learning that it can no longer sustain universities that despise the culture that nourishes it or Middle Eastern immigrants, visiting students, and residents that use the gift of freedom and tolerance to promote their abhorrent anti-Semitism, violence, intolerance—and, yes, hatred of their generous hosts.
A day after scores of civilians died in an Israeli air strike on a market in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, we spoke with an eyewitness to the tragedy. While Hamas and its allies persist in charging that Israel targets innocents, our interviewee explains that Gazans pin their own survival strategy on the understanding that innocents serve Hamas as human shields.
“To stop Hamas members from walking in our narrow streets,” he explains, “[my neighbors] blocked the streets off with sheet metal, so no one could get in at night.” He goes on, “We know it’s Hamas that makes the problems. They’re the ones who hide among us. . . though it still doesn’t justify killing civilians.”
Fears have grown that this misery will needlessly be prolonged by Westerners who strive, in effect, to perpetuate Hamas rule, according to one Gazan woman.
Addressing protesters who have taken to the streets to demand a cease-fire on behalf of Palestinians, she calls on them to make a choice: “Either support the Palestinian people or the Hamas regime that oppresses them.” If protesters harbor a humanitarian motive, she asks, “Why don’t we see them demonstrating against Hamas?”
If the war ends with Hamas in power, the woman predicts, then they will repeat the October 7 scenario, but within Gaza: “They’ll brutalize everybody who didn’t stand with them in the war.”
In Episode Nine, a speaker in Jabaliya critiques a particular strand within the protest movement: Palestinian diaspora figures who have supported Hamas for years. They watch the conflict “with tea and popcorn, as if we’re a TV series,” he says, and cheer Hamas leaders without regard for the suffering they cause regular Gazans.
He points out Tamim Al-Barghouti, a U.S.-based activist whom The New Yorker described as “a spoken-word rock star.” Barghouti’s post–October 7 tweets include praise for the apparent rape and kidnapping of an Israeli woman and call for “Death to the Palestinian ’National’ Authority.”
“He hasn’t seen anything that happened in Gaza for 18 years,” the Jabaliya resident says.
All of the above bring us back to the patient at al-Shifa Hospital who Al Jazeera cut off mid-sentence.
For a sense of what he might have told viewers if he had been allowed, we reached another patient there—and gave her the space to say her piece. “Every Palestinian knows Shifa hospital is full of [Hamas fighters],” she explains, “but nobody can talk: death by the Jews is better than death by ISIS.” She also echoes a sentiment we have encountered repeatedly in interviews with Gazans post–October 7: “Hamas is the destruction of the Palestinian people. We’ve had enough. They need to be wiped out—because if they remain, the people will be wiped out.”
This conviction is the darker half of a Gazan worldview that, though prevalent, has been largely filtered out of most international coverage of the conflict. Its brighter half—the vision of a different future—is encapsulated here by a young woman who spoke with us in Gaza City last year.
