The gamble

There has been a recent uptick in the ever-present screeching of Pallywood regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of the new-and-improved 15-point Gaza rehabilitation plan toward Palestinian statehood: the Board of Peace’s “take two” at reenergizing the stagnant situation of an impossible ideal.

It’s true that such public statements may be a political stunt designed to rev up one’s base and aid in coming elections. It’s also true that this plan is simply the next illusion to feign soon-to-be success and distract from the reality that failure is inevitable.

But anyone who objects to others’ objections against this Falestini fantasy must first ask the question: Why are we here, physically still in Gaza and existentially in this limbo of deal delusions?

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The answer to that is another date about which one won’t hear many screeching: Aug. 15, 2005 — the date that Israel left Gaza, the date that nearly 10,000 Jews were expelled from the land in order to gift it turnkey to another population. The date that Israel made the gigantic gamble which has paid only in dividends of pain.

It is said that only hindsight is 20/20, but every future sign was already there. The slew of painful images of Jews being forced from their homes forewarned what we would see broadcast via Gazan terrorists 18 years later.

In one of the greatest failed experiments of modern nations, the Israeli government wagered desperately and lost devastatingly on two key realities of external entities.

The first, of course, was the famous farce of “land for peace”: the hope that if one gives up land for a neighbor, the neighbor will give up their homicidal ideation in return — that uprooting all Jews would uproot any conflict. Stability for stability. A future for a future. But as we’ve seen since then, that was and continues to be a pipe dream.

Unrealistic trust was undeservedly extended to those who never earned nor could even understand such a concept. The misnomer of “disengagement” not only sanitized the agony of the operation but ironically forecast the deadly engagement that would soon be forced. About a month after the expulsion, security was stolen with the first of what would become the usual rocket attacks. Israelis themselves were stolen only one year later. And the grand finale of both tangible and intangible theft was what we witnessed almost three years ago. Because what the government naively banked on was assuming that the root of the problem was about land, when that was only a surface metaphor for much deeper and insidious beliefs.

When dark doctrine teaches to glorify and prioritize dying over living, when paradise and fulfillment can only be found in death and not in life on earth, there will always be a fatally irreconcilable problem between two incompatible concepts of society. Combining such dogmas of death with historically habitual hatred, modernized with irresponsible funding and governmental directives, predictably leads in just one direction, which we have already seen and will continue to see if not righted.

The writing was always on the wall. When a society values demise of others over prosperity for themselves, when one’s national identity is birthed from and based upon opposition to another, destruction for both is the only possible outcome of providing the former with the means to do so.

The second miscalculation was that this regional offering would finally buy Israel some global humanity in the world’s eyes. Of course, the fatal flaw in that wishful thinking is that one can’t ever buy humanity from those whose default is to consider one less than human.

In the double standard reserved only for this region, no one would ever second guess any other country’s need to eliminate the threat of terrorism to its people. Every other nation would be granted the acknowledgment that its own well-being would depend on its eradication and well worth the effort involved. However, too much of the world doesn’t see Israel as worthy of well-being and doesn’t value the lives of its citizens as full humans, so it doesn’t value its necessary elimination of threats against them.

It is the age-old dichotomy of Islamic infantilism versus antipathy for Jews yet again rearing its ugly head: No one believes Israel has the agency to ensure a secure future for itself, and no one believes that Gaza has the agency to support a terror-driven regime and ideology. But beyond that, it is a perfect example of the end result of infatuation with allowing appeasement and low expectations to reign over responsibility and accountability. And with such an inability or flat out refusal to address the core of this conflict, on some level, from explicitly obvious to unadmittedly unconscious, the world actually desires to keep in place this fatal status quo.

Hamas et al. read the global room, calculated effectively and hedged their bets on that poignant reality. They wagered on a predictable past with current coconspirators to enshrine future success. But while many others may always be homicidal, Jews must not become suicidal.

Through necessary survival over millennia, Jews have learned a noble but bad habit of tempering our specific suffering to that of all others, in order to prove our humanity against the antisemitism that insists we have none. This 20-year disaster is the direct result of trying to get the whole world to like and accept the Jewish state, to point and say, “see, we are human, too!”

Yet the depressing reality is that anything Israel does, short of complete capitulation, will be vilified around the globe, and therefore, the most important goal must become securing its own future survival. No longer can there be the luxury of clinging to past ideals over current issues, nor self-image over collective necessity. Israel simply cannot afford to make the mistake of trying to appease the world at the expense of its people again.

In the end, it’s really no coincidence that both gambles of external fantasies ultimately failed — because Israel should instead be gambling on itself.

As we’ve since harshly discovered, what “never again” means in action is a hell of a lot different than what “never again” has meant in theory. Israel was rebuilt for many reasons, but especially to ensure that the vast slaughters of the past could never happen again. Now, it is sorely understood, even by the previously most ardent supporters of fairytale symbiosis, that the premature dispensing of land in this untenable state only ensured more of what was intended to be prevented.

Golda Meir once famously stated that “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.” This truth is as appropriate today as it was when first spoken, and while other parties may genuinely prefer the more convenient option of dead and pitied, Jews can no longer allow others to dictate our survival nor our state’s existence for the sake of some standing in the international eye.

While much going forward remains clouded in the unknown, one thing is crystal clear: Insanity will always be trying some version of the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It is past time for Israel to stop doing what bad actors want and start doing what needs to be done — and to stop playing into others’ hands and start playing its own. PJC

Sarah Kendis is an oboist and writer in Pittsburgh, covering antisemitism and women’s issues. Her work has been published in sp!ked, Skeptic, The American Spectator and The Federalist.