My dear friend, professional colleague, and soul brother, Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, recently published an article that “beat me to the punch” on some themes I express below, so I have to share some credit here with him for what I am about to write. But I wuz gonna write on it, and I of course will say it my way.
Imagine you are about to seek high office, and a sprightly 100-year-old guy applies to be your campaign manager. You ask for his credentials, and he shares his resumé. It is quite impressive: he was chief presidential campaign manager twice for Adlai Stevenson, years later for George McGovern, ran Gary Hart’s primary campaigns in 1984 and 1988, then guided Michael Dukakis, and finally moved to the GOP where he was presidential campaign manager first for John McCain and then for Mitt Romney. He also took on a smaller campaign once, guiding his client to a landslide victory as Chief Dog Catcher of Anytown, Delaware.
Our imaginary political expert even has had Israel experience. He ran the Meretz campaign in the last election, and now he has been chief political advisor to Merav Michaeli of Labor.
Well, you might think, this guy really has been around the block in the big time. A lifetime of experience on the highest level. And then it might occur to you: But this guy has not won a single race in the past 80 years, except that one Caninite conquest.
Would you take campaign advice from this guy, even if he still had the comparative youthful exuberance of a quinquagenarian?
I think of that analogy as the likes of Joseph R. Biden (D-Burisma) and Antony Blinken consult daily with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, offering Israel their American ideas on how to conduct the war against Hamas-ISIS in Gaza, how to negotiate hostage releases and prisoner exchanges, and such.
Consider that America has not won a single war (except Grenada) these past eighty years. Not the Korean War. Nor the Vietnam War. Made an absolute mess of Iraq, after saving Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Amid George W. Bush’s idiotic belief that America could imbue an Arab Muslim society with Western values of democracy and fundamental freedoms, America destroyed a Dream Conflagration that saw Saddam and the Ayatollahs embroiled in a potentially Eternal War. For eight glorious years, from 1980-1988, 500,000 Iraqis and Iranians killed each other at a combined cost of $1 trillion (and that was when a trillion dollars was worth a trillion dollars). And then Bush ruined it, leaving both warring sides focused on hating America instead.
America, G-d bless it, has made a mess of practically everything it has touched the past 80 years, culminating in its recent disgraceful exit from Afghanistan and now the eternal stalemate in Ukraine. America, once great, simply does not know how to win a war anymore.
George Washington knew war demanded total surrender, and he got it from Cornwallis. Actually, Cornwallis was so humiliated that he did not show up on the day of surrender, leaving it to Brigadier General Charles O’Hara to give up, while Cornwallis claimed to be home with a cold. George snubbed the Brit right back, having his second in command, Major General Benjamin Lincoln, accept Cornwallis’s sword. Likewise, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant knew what it took to win the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt knew hot to win. Harry Truman knew. You bomb the daylights, smithereens, and oxygen out of the enemy if nothing else does it, and you do not stop until you have them begging to give you total victory.
You pay lip service to the “rules of war” and the Geneva Convention, but you do as your opponents do: you disregard the rules if they do — and they always do — even as you officially claim to honor them, and you fight to win. Your goal is victory, not a “humanitarian pause” or a “ceasefire.” You do not make your boys, who are willing to give their lives for your flag, crazy.
How many “innocent German civilians” did America kill in World War II? A hundred? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
How about two million?
And how many “innocent Germans” did the U.S. expel from their homes and leave as homeless refugees?
That is how America beat the Nazi Germans. Not by Geneva Convention rules. The U.S. flattened Dresden and other German cities. And how much did that hurt America with the survivors, the future generations of Germans?
They emerged grateful to America and adopted American-style democracy. They have been America’s allies ever since, for nearly a century.
Ditto the Japanese — on steroids: Hiroshima. Nagasaki. What does the Geneva Convention say about that? “Do you think, Mr. President, if we drop those bombs on the Japs [the contemptuous language spoken in those years at that time amid war], we might accidentally also hurt mothers and children?”
Did anyone ask that of Harry Truman? And if they did, who doubts what he would have responded — and probably did? A six-letter word that starts with “F” and ends with “m.”
And how much did the Japanese eternally condemn America for it afterward? NEWS FLASH! Japan adopted American-style democracy and became America’s tightest of Asian allies, going on a century.
That is how you win friends and influence people: by bombing them to smithereens when they dare lift a finger against you and draw first blood. That is how America became great the first time around: not by worrying about Geneva Conventions or United Nations Human Rights Councils led by the likes of Iran and Cuba, but by never drawing first blood — and pulverizing anyone who does.
The Geneva Conventions and Protocols in place today were reached after World War II in 1949. And what else happened after World War II in 1949?
America stopped winning wars.
It is not righteous to play by rules that the enemy does not honor. It is evil to sacrifice one’s own boys’ lives on an altar to a fake morality that does not exist, a “global morality” that is neither global nor moral. The enemy hides behind civilians, leveraging them cynically as human shields. For example, the headquarters of Hamas-ISIS being located in Gaza tunnels under a hospital. They figure Israel never would strike deliberately at a hospital.
Biden and Blinken are counseling Bibi and his military staff with the wisdom of a country that has not won a single serious war in 80 years.
In the Biblical Book of Genesis, the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam begged G-d Almig-ty to spare the cities of Sodom and Gommorah if ten righteous people could be found there. Notably, he did not ask G-d to spare those cities for the sake of the children and women, but for the ten righteous. And there were not even ten righteous to be found. Can you name a Mother Teresa that has emerged in Gaza? A Father Damien of Molokai? A Thomas More?
It is false morality to cry for the children of Gaza killed inadvertently while Israel targets Hamas-ISIS murderers and, as collateral damage, unavoidably kills Hamas’s human shields. A war must be won. Hamas-ISIS never ever will rest until it eradicates Israel and drives the Jews into the Mediterranean, fulfilling the murderous mantra of Rashida Tlaib, censured by the House of Representatives: “From the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterannean) Sea, [fictitious] ‘Palestine’ Must Be Free.” Israel has every right to stop this.
In six wars since Israel handed Gaza to the Arabs scot-free in 2005, allowing them to build a heaven and haven if only they so had desired, Hamas-ISIS repeatedly has reminded Israel that Gaza concrete and steel will be devoted to building rockets and grenades, missiles and attack drones, and a national underground tunnel network aimed at destroying Israel. The billions in cash they have received from Qatar, the European Union, and America over the past two decades has gone to financing their terror network and employing some 40,000 full-time murderers living in those tunnels, all training to murder Jews and destroy Israel. In 18 years, they never even built their own electric grid or water system.
It is a corrupt and perverted mindset to encourage allowing one’s own boys to die so that “the world” may “admire” that a country fights with tohar ha-neshek (“clean armaments”), in accord with Geneva, while the enemy slaughters peace activists at Trance Dance Raves, rapes girls both living and murdered, butchers babies, cuts off heads, and cuts open living pregnant women to tear out and stab their fetuses and then burn both fetus and women, even while alive. The only morality is to destroy them. Not merely to win, but to destroy them so completely that their leaders’ remains cannot even be identified by dental records.
Any body count that emerges in Gaza is moral — whether 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 — as long as Israel does not wantonly target civilians. But if civilians fall as human shields to a Hamas-ISIS that hides behind hospitals, schools, residential apartment buildings, ambulances, and such, so be it. America did it in Dreden and throughout Germany. America did it to Japan.
Back during the Holocaust, as emigrating European Jews desperately tried finding haven in the Americas, a Canadian immigration agent was asked how many Jewish refugees his country would be willing to admit. His response: “Even none is too many.”
That’s how many of her own boys Israel should sacrifice on the altar of the Geneva Accords and Protocols of 1949 while exterminating Hamas-ISIS.
The mindset of the Conceptzia is deeply ingrained in Benny Gantz, no less than in Binyamin Netanyahu. The War Cabinet should be expanded to included two former defense ministers, Avigdor Liberman and Naftali Bennett, and two voices reflecting voters whose parties comprise the coalition, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. None of those four appeals to everyone, and they even have personal conflicts. For example, Liberman’s views on religion are unacceptable, and Bennett is a proven public liar whose voters cannot trust him. But the first two have critically valuable insights from their stints as Defense Minister, and none of these four ever bought into the Conceptzia. The present War Cabinet is utterly incomplete and not gaining access to serious ideas and strategies beyond their concessionist way of thinking, influenced unduly by a country that has not won a war in 80 years.
Adapted by the writer for The Jewish Press from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
