Israel’s Hobson’s choice
[Hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin.”]
I’m in complete agreement with this:
… [Israel] is caught in an equation deliberately made insoluble. On October 7th, by massacring civilians and abducting hundreds of hostages, Hamas triggered a war with no bearable outcome. Israel was not only surprised. It was trapped.
It is important to understand: Hamas is not seeking victory, it seeks the destruction of Israel. They do not care if Gaza burns, as long as Israel bleeds. This is an eschatological strategy: lose everything, as long as the other falls with you. And their strategy relies on entanglement, on emotion, on manipulating Western consciences. Their strength is not military, it is dramaturgical.
And perhaps the most chilling thing is this: they have understood the West better than many Israeli strategists. Their real front is Western public opinion, not the IDF.
By taking hostages, they forbid peace. By hiding among civilians in the most densely populated territory in the world, they forbid war. Hamas has invented a geometry of the trap: Israel is locked in a war where every victory is a loss. In this asymmetrical, post-modern war, it is not reality that counts—it is the image of reality.
This trap could not work without the cooperation of Western democracies. By reversing the pressure—not on the hostage-takers, but on those trying to rescue them—they legitimize blackmail. By recognizing a Palestinian state unconditionally, they turn a terrorist strategy into political capital. …
The hostages are trophies, levers, spotlights trained on Gaza to keep the war going. They will not all be returned: that is precisely why they were taken.
This strategy was apparent almost from the start, when the West – and most especially the Western MSM – began to play its role with perfection. The template was set early on, with the fake news on October 17, 2023, of the bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital, which was picked up and spread by Western media without questioning the obvious impossibility of the Gazans having a body count in no time at all, and without even trying to ascertain whether the hospital was even damaged (it was not) or investigating the provenance of the explosives (Hamas in origin). Hamas could put out any lie whatsoever that would make Israel look bad, and the propaganda would be promulgated by the MSM and then amplified on social media. It was a winning formula – “winning” in the sense of making Israel look bad in the eyes of so much of the gullible, Israel-hating world.
Many many times I’ve heard it said, and read it written, that Israel is terrible at communicating its message. This is usually stated with a condescending and deprecating air, as though there’s something Israel could do that it isn’t doing. But these criticisms almost always ignore what I think is glaringly obvious, which is that it is actually impossible to accomplish this. The reason? It’s the old saying: a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on. Lies are easy to tell and no proof is demanded if the recipient is already predisposed to believe the lie. The truth countering it requires facts, and facts take time. Plus, they are brushed away as self-serving lies by those who don’t want to see.
Israel has indeed been in a trap since 10/7, and the hostages are the key to the trap. It would be bad enough to wage the war against Hamas even without them, because lies like the one about the Al-Ahli hospital explosion would be continually told by Hamas and believed by those who demonize Israel. But the hostages make the dilemma far far worse because they make it very difficult to prosecute the war in a timely and effective fashion.
Hamas has always known this. As I wrote on April 10, 2024, about six months after the hostages were taken [emphasis added]:
… [T]he remaining hostages (except for the Bibas family) are in two major categories: military members and civilian men over 18. I believe (but cannot prove) that these two groups – especially the military – were singled out by Hamas for harsher treatment from the start. “Harsher treatment” can mean many things, including death. But Hamas was always going to keep these groups back and use them to bargain for the entire prize: the release of all Palestinian prisoners (numbering in thousands) held in Israel, the end of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, and the continuation of Hamas’ own powerful death grip on Gaza.
That’s how valuable the hostages are to Hamas.
NOTE: According to this article, Hamas has recently accepted a deal for about half of the hostages, but Israel is demanding them all. Israel is correct to demand them, but I doubt Israel will ever get them. The alternative is more war.
The Triggernometry Podcast interviews John Spencer on this very topic “War Expert Debunks Gaza Lies” ( https://youtu.be/3liXH3ekmsI ), in the course of which the hosts bemoan their inability to get Bibi to join them for an interview.
Now they announce Bibi is coming: https://x.com/triggerpod/status/1957799216530534842
I miss Caroline Glick
There is much wise observation here.
sdferr — good to see Bibi going for the new unconventional media route, on up to Joe Rogan, like Trump, perhaps?
Going around das lugen presse is always good.
” . . . Bibi going for the new unconventional media route . . . ”
He began with a full hour interview with Gadi Taub about 4 months or so ago: https://youtu.be/31bG_tEtRPE?si=xbwoH932jSOKndZJ
yes most of the print publications go from terrible, like haaretz to barely adequate like times of israel, ynet which is israelinews is pretty good but not comprehensive,
as for western press, which you would think would be more detached well of course the Times and the Post are terrible bookends but the journal isn’t much better, the news section, the op eds section is reasonably decent,
By the way, it is easy to imagine Caroline had or has a hand in facilitating Bibi’s appearance on Triggernometry, as she works for Bibi and sees the podcast world as her own.
Yes, I could certainly see that.
yes her latma series was a riot, so was the one that I can’t spell for the life of me,
but for progressives both there and here, they couldn’t get the joke, well the Oslo mirage stands in the way,
its a certain clericy of thought where the militanta are always noble they never lie, and the portrait of Jews is quite nearly out of Die Sturmer,
I’m sure some on te right, have qualms about Bibi’s strategies, which is understandable, but in the framework in which he operates, how else would it work,
Sharon made some really disastrous mistakes, partially out of exhaustion in giving up Gaza, where he had authority, at the outset of the beginning of the settlements, of course Kadima’s stewardship made it even worse,
the US and to a lesser extent, the UK had a similar knot to cut in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and we know how the former turned out, the latter is a chapter not yet written, although the earliy protests after October 7th were not reassuring,
”This trap could not work without the cooperation of Western democracies. By reversing the pressure—not on the hostage-takers, but on those trying to rescue them—they legitimize blackmail. By recognizing a Palestinian state unconditionally, they turn a terrorist strategy into political capital.”
This is true, and I find it depressing. I find the whole 10/7 atrocity and the West’s reaction to it extremely depressing.
The same reaction is now happening in Ukraine. Trump laments the huge loss of life among the Russian troops — 122,000 just this year according to Trump’s own figures — and browbeats Zelensky to stop killing them. He unconditionally recognizes Ukrainian territory as Russian — even territory that Russia hasn’t been able to conquer — legitimizing Russia’s conquest and murder. Trump is now doing what we find so abhorrent on the left but on a much greater scale.
And now it seems half of Israel is rising up against Netanyahu, trying to force him to surrender to Hamas. Just surrender, they say, and then the killing will stop. The same thing they tell Zelensky.
It’s like the West really does have a death wish. I think I’ll have another drink.
The planet has become anti-semitic and pro-Gazan Palestinians. I do not understand why. I see nothing admirable about Islam. Or Mohamed taking dictation from Allah, including “Kill the Christian, kill the Jew”.
the West suicide pact is much closer to home, with Starmer and Macron and the other chimps, with the exception of Meloni, understand the real threat, in that assembly Orban certainly does in practice, some of his erstwhile critics tried to go after some of the Gulf State figures, that have invested in the country,
the way the Koran and the Hadiths which I haven’t really investigated have appropriated mainly events from the Old Testament but some of the new, and seemingly without much notice,
so Allah not Yahwek speaks to Moses Abraham Noah et al,
The greater the evil, the greater the sacrifice that good must make to stop it. When the ‘good’ tell themselves that evil isn’t really evil and thus sacrifice isn’t really necessary… then as Burke pointed out, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Moral cowardice lies at the heart of those in the West who claim that Israel is provocating the conflict.
Churchill saw the appeasers in the West clearly, in desperation they pray in their minds to a God that in their hearts they don’t actually believe… that the Islamic crocodile will be satiated with just consuming the Jews.
But take heart! If the West commits suicide, Islam will be eliminated by the CCP. As predator’s never pretend to themselves that another predator is really a sheep. Not that the CCP’s 1984 style of governance wouldn’t be its own preview of hell.
Pres. Ronald Reagan knew that the principle’s upon which America’s was founded were truly, “the last best hope of man on Earth”.
here’s one example, how do you make heads or tails of this,
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-reviewing-truce-deal-okayed-by-hamas-despite-pms-seeming-dismissal-of-offer/
some good news
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/b1vh5mgkee#autoplay
If ever I am taken hostage by these ‘Sand Ramblers’ – (Egyptian expression for the nomadic desert tribes who plagued Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs) – just please consider me dead already and give them all the war we can make.
Make the rubble bounce, and then fuse it to glass. Happy to have that as my monument.
IMO, from the start, Israel should assume the hostages are dead or will be killed in the end by Hamas in any event.
The families insisting that Israel put the survival of the nation behind getting their family members back, even the bodies of known dead, are being incredibly, though understandably, selfish.
Israel needs to exterminate Hamas once and for all, its the only way to stop the terror cycle they endure. If the hostages don’t make it, well that’s sad, but the nation must come first.