Israel Must Fight as if There are No Hostages
Israel Needs the Courageous Moral Imperative of Nathan Hale to Save itself from Demolition
By
David Gottfried
In 1939, Ben Gurion said that we Jews must fight the Nazis as if there were no British White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to the Holy Land and must fight the British as if there were no Nazis. Something like that is required now: We must fight “Palestinian” terrorists and their allies as if they did not have control over the bodies and lives of several dozen hostages.
Why the Peace Plan proposed by so much of the world, and endorsed by so many Israelis, is Toxic to Israel
The peace plan provides that the fighting in Gaza stop, the hostages be returned and the Philadelphia corridor, the boundary between Gaza and Egypt, not be manned or staffed or in any way controlled by Israeli forces. That way the Philadelphia Corridor can be a wide-open conduit for the influx of tons of weaponry from Iran.
We are advised to become more trusting and to realize that Hamas, perhaps, will suddenly become gentleman after having beheaded babies on October 7, driving nails into women’s vaginas, and slicing breasts off and then throwing them around as if they were beach balls, The New York Times, December 28, 2023, “Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” The New York Times is not exactly a right-wing rag.
A clear pattern had been evident ever since the end of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In that war, Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on the holiest day on our calendar, when our soldiers and entire citizenry was tired and hungry from fasting and prayers. After we won that war, and had surrounded several hundred thousand Egyptian troops, and then let them go, the same damn process has been happening again and again:
The Arabs, their apologists throughout the world and befuddled "liberals” in the West perpetually claim that Israel must give up territory that it occupied since the close of the 1967 War.
In the 1970’s, Israel gave back the Sinai Peninsula, or 80 percent of its territory, back to Egypt. The Sinai Peninsula, incidentally, contains Mount Sinai, where Moses received the ten commandments. We have never heard a peep out of the Arabs to express appreciation for our surrender of Sinai. Incidentally, the Sinai Peninsula also contained the only source of oil Israel ever had. (Egypt nearly strangled Israel to death, in 1967, by blockading Israeli’s Port of Eilat, the only entry point for oil to Israel.)
I wonder: How many of the mental midgets at Columbia and Harvard know that Israel gave up 80 percent of its territory to Egypt in the 1970’s.
Of course, such withdrawals are never enough to satisfy the Nazified Arab lands seeking to smother Israel to death. But we keep making concessions: In 2000 Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon, and in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. Those locales filled up with terrorists as soon as Israel withdrew, and their arsenals of missiles and other armaments have grown more and more prodigiously.
In 2000, Israel even offered to give up 96 percent of the West bank. Yasir Arafat rejected that proposal. Thank G-d he said no. If we had given up 96 percent of the West bank, Israel would have been 9 miles thick and subject to being split in two.
I don’t want to hear one more additional piece of bullcrap to the effect that Israel must give up more territory. They don’t want territorial adjustments; they want our utter annihilation. As Nassar said on the eve of the 1967 war: “Let’s rape the Jewish woman and drown the Jewish men in the Mediterranean Sea.”
Indeed, in 1958, when Israel had very little territory and barely clung to life as its half-starved remnants of Europe’s death camps were subject to constant attacks from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Eisenhower promulgated the “Alpha Plan,” a peace plan, or more accurately peace charade or scam, compelling Israel to give up half the Negev (the Southern half of Israel) and be united to Eilat with only a five mile corridor of territory. But the Arabs thought that was too generous to Israel.
The “Israeli Hostage Disease” and the Legacy of Nathan Hale
About 15 years ago, Israel made a fatal “peace deal” to release an Israeli held hostage by Arabs.
Israeli released 1000 Arab terrorists to gain the release of one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. That was a dangerous and deadly precedent. (Somehow the words deadly and dangerous do not begin to approximate the magnitude of the sin that was that “peace scam.” I feel as if I could only begin to express the dishonor and dismay of the circumstances of Shalit’s release if I were to upload human blood onto this document.)
Shalit’s release led to other Arab attacks in which we surrendered more Arab terrorists to gain the release of our captive people.
Can’t Israel see that all of this is leading, inexorably, to the annihilation of the Jewish State. We keep granting cease fires. After a cease fire, Iran keeps giving them more missiles. We keep entering into agreements in which we give the Arabs enormous prizes in return for the lives of Jews taken captive. They take more hostages, we give up more and more of our defenses to recover our hostages.
Some of my fellow Jews will say that I am lacking in Jewish sensibilities, that I fail to understand that Jews value life very highly and will move the earth to save human life.
However, I am not only a Jew. I am also an American, and I have absorbed the stalwart, harsh, resolute attitudes of my Christian, Americans friends.
For years, I have counseled my fellow Americans to pay heed to and adopt certain Jewish traits. Now I must ask my fellow Jews to stop slouching, to stand up straight, and to respect and emulate the ethos of Nathan Hale, an American spy executed by the British in the American Revolutionary War. His dying words: I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.
Shalit’s Mother was instrumental in obtaining his release, and she hectored the Israeli government to cede 1000 Arab terrorists, despicable murderers, to obtain her son’s life. Doubtless, his mother loved him very much. But how much can Shalit love himself. And I doubt that he has any right to love himself or to enjoy life. Instead of savoring the pleasure of living, which in his case is merely existing like a dumb animal, a mere creature of his mommy’s machinations, he could have died like Nathan Hale, and if Heaven does not exist, he could have at least had the contentment of dying with his self-respect intact.
Oh G-d, give me the courage to die the right way.
Remember, we have but one life to give for our country, whether it be the United States or Eretz Yisroel (The biblical term for Israel).
Live and fight and die with honor.
Well said!