On October 7, 2023, bands of vermin known as Hamas pored through the wall separating the Gaza Strip from the main political territory of Israel in an unprecedented sneak attack. After firing some 5000 rockets into Israeli territory, they immediately started their vicious, targeted attacks on specific areas primarily along the Gaza border.
Over the course of that awful day, these terrorists killed about 1140 people and injured even more. Victims included some foreign tourists and hundreds of Israeli soldiers, but the lion’s share of the day’s victims were innocent civilians, ranging in age from infancy to the elderly. Hamas also kidnapped about 250 people, also of all ages, taking them back into Gaza, splitting them up so that, presumably, the hostages and their keepers would be spread out all over the Gaza Strip.
We knew from the start why they chose to take hostages, of course. Hamas behaved exactly as terrorists often do – selecting hostages when they know retaliatory action would follow, hoping that the presence of hostages would dissuade Israel from its necessary response.
What was not so obvious to all viewers at the time was how the victims and hostages were chosen. Why – instead of attacking typical terrorist targets like shopping districts, schools, tourist buses and dining areas – did they select the targets they hit?
The terrorists’ direct rampage on October 7 was primarily concentrated on just a few locations: Supernova (a 24-hour music festival) and several moshavim. It’s important to note that these are not your typical concerts or residential neighborhoods, like we might find in the United States.
Supernova is a trance festival, with its roots in the wild concerts of the hippie era. And the moshavim are essentially kibbutzes, communal agricultural communities with a generally socialist structure.
The terrorists surrounded the concert grounds riding motorcycles and trucks, firing into the crowd and chasing people down, killing about 10% of the 3500 attendees. The killers also charged into several kibbutzes, pouring into the farmhouses and apartments, shooting families all together, and taking hostages back to Gaza.
Victims of all ages, both at the concert and in the kibbutzes, were beaten, tortured, gang-raped, and killed. The Hamas activists did as much evil as they could, as quickly as possible, to make the more terrifying impact before returning to their nests.
Something may seem strange about this choice of victims. Why did Hamas attack these people, rather than other groups, their political enemies for example? Oh, the music festival and the kibbutzes happened to be convenient, coincidentally, but if you subscribe to the theory that there are no coincidences, the answer will be evident from the developments of the weeks and months that followed. (The kibbutzes were convenient to the point where the terrorists breached the wall, but if they had chosen other targets, they would have breached the wall at some other point, to which those other targets would have been convenient, after all).
Most of the world is at least somewhat aware of the political situation in Israel. It’s the only actual republic in the middle east – a country with both regular elections and high voting participation. It’s the only country in the middle east in which Jews, muslims and Christians all vote and actually serve in elective offices, from alderman or mayor to members of the Knesset. So when there are political developments in Israel, they make the world news.
Philosophically, Israel’s voting population has always skewed to the left; the majority tends to be what we in the Western world would call liberal or even socialist, in terms of tax and regulatory policy, the safety net, and the general power of government. And even so, the most successful and longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history is Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, a conservative.
Netanyahu wins reelection again and again, or is returned to office following failed liberal replacement attempts, because the majority of Israelis know that they can trust him to place Israel’s security ahead of all other distractions – and they simply do not have that level of confidence in most of their other politicians.
The Israeli far left has therefore spent decades trying to destroy Netanyahu and his coalitions, and in this, they have the broad support of much of the rest of the world. The leftists who now lead the UK, the EU, Canada and the United States are all opposed to Netanyahu’s focus on keeping Israel strong both militarily and economically.
From the day that Hamas began working with Iran, Lebanon, and their other allies to plan the October 7 attacks, they knew two things: that Israel’s retaliation would be massive, and that they would need allies in Israel to blunt that retaliation, to soften the blows somewhat, to somehow convince the IDF to pull its punches. But how?
After an attack like they had in mind, there was no way that sane, sensible Israelis would oppose their government’s inclination to mount a full-fledge response. So who could they count on to oppose such righteous measures?
The Israeli left.
This may seem counterintuitive, but Hamas was right on target: the people most likely to do their bidding, if they planned it right, would be the very victims they intended to hit hardest.
There is a traditional rule in dealing with hostage situations: you must assume that the hostages have already been killed. View them as casualties – already – so that fear of hurting them doesn’t cause you to make foolish decisions and avoid necessary targets just because some of your hostages might be kept there.
Conservatives understand this.
But as the terrorists rightly anticipated, most bleeding-heart liberals can’t understand this logic at all.
In order for hostage-taking to be effective, the hostages’ families and friends need to be willing to demonstrate against their own government to oppose the only rational retaliatory policy. Hostages have to be taken who are likely to come from communities illogical enough, self-destructive enough, gullible enough, to demand “peace talks” and “restraint” instead of the potent military response that any rational onlooker would see as being imperative.
Who better for such a call than the residents of agricultural communes and the wild young attendees at an international trance party?
For the most part – excluding the military casualties of course – the poor innocent victims of Hamas on October 7 were the kind of people who would always have supported outreach, conciliation, funding, even statehood for the so-called “palestinians” of the Gaza Strip. These were largely the kind of people who supported Labor and similar liberal parties in the Knesset, people who hired “palestinians” from Gaza as laborers out of pity or multicultural solidarity, people who never saw a “peace proposal” that wasn’t worth considering, people who were first to call for Netanyahu’s ouster on the trumped-up charge of the hour.
And naturally, once these people were wounded, kidnapped, or killed, it was a good bet that their next-of-kin would be of the same mindset, and would be vocal about it.
The gambit worked.
Contrary to all logic, many of these poor injured, killed, and kidnapped – and their support base on the outside, all over the world – have unwittingly become the voice of Hamas both in Israeli politics and on the world stage.
(Nota Bene: this is not victim-blaming in any way. The victims of October 7 were utterly innocent in every way; this is an analysis of how the hostage situation was virtually certain to be interpreted and politicized).
We have now seen over six months of the hostages and their plight being weaponized successfully against the Netanyahu government and the Israeli defense. Instead of being the rallying cry for an all-out assault, as it should be, they have led the effort to convince other governments and global organizations to pressure Israel to back down and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, even now, when the overthrow of Hamas ought to be in sight.
This isn’t even a case of Stockholm Syndrome, in which a tortured kidnap victim’s fear and vulnerability can sometimes beget an allegiance to his captors. This is worse.
This is just an example of a liberal worldview reverting to type. Even after the Israeli hardliners have been tragically proven right about the nature of the enemy, many on the left simply close their eyes to the truth, and fight against the very government that is trying so hard to defend, protect, and avenge them.
There was once a popular definition in American politics: “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” If we had expected this truism to apply in Israel, we have found that we were sadly mistaken. Even after being mugged – even after watching whole families butchered, people gang-raped for sport and paraded around Gaza as trophies by the terrorists – many in the Israeli left are still unable to shake their rose-colored glasses and see the world as it is.
Thank the good Lord that Binyamin Netanyahu is still at the helm, and that his coalition has the backbone to resist the unwitting allies of the terrorists within their own citizenry.
Israel must see this thing through to the end.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party Chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available only on Amazon, in either paperback or eBook. His latest book, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volume Three,” was just published in November, 2023.
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Mr Di Leo wrote:
This has been proved time after time after time. President Jimmy Carter was so concerned about the hostages held by Iran that he enabled the mad mullahs and subverted our own policy. President Reagan, despite his tough words, traded arms to Iran for hostages held by Hezbollah, which won their freedom, but simply placed a value on hostage-taking and saw more hostages seized. We’ve seen American policy eased because North Korea seized hostages, and one, who was returned, Otto Warmbier, was virtually brain dead.
What would have happened if Mr Carter had told the Ayatollah Khoumeini that our people had to be on a plane, headed out of Iran, safe, healthy and within 72 hours, or we would simply regard them as the unfortunate American casualties in the response which turned Tehran and Qom into radioactive black holes in the ground, and meant it? Those hostages would have been returned, and Iran not enabled for the last 44 years.
The Reagan Doctrine. Look what happened after Reagan replaced Pres. Jimmah Cahter.
If ever there was a time that anyone should have made a certain piece of desert into a glass wasteland, 1980 would have been a good time.