Israel (Continued)

There is a war going on in Gaza. So far, it has lasted eight months, with the Palestinians holding abducted Israelis in their hands. Some are old people. Some women have been gang raped. Some babies are dying in captivity.

Every day, the media reports new casualties. These are young men, most of them in their early twenties. No report on how many are wounded. Then, one watches the burials, the weeping mothers, and sisters, the broken fathers, and the heartaches. And one wonders: How much longer are we, the Jewish people, going to be dying, trying to stay alive?

But it does not seem that the world is crying with us. We are now considered to be the Jewish Nazis, killing innocent Palestinians, taking over land, not ours, and kicking their inhabitants into refugee camps, open-air prisons, with no future.

Most of the Israelis lament what is happening to the Palestinians. We are not butchers, heartless killers as the foreign media presents us, fed by Arab propaganda heavily financed by Qatar. Arabs are spending billions on public relations, donating huge sums to leading universities to teach Middle Eastern studies, which end up promoting the Palestinian agenda. Israel does not even have a portion of these resources, and its communication with the world is minimal, if at all. A significant portion of the news is fake news. One of them, with a very authoritarian voice, says that Israel's aspirations are for Greater Israel which includes not only Gaza and the West Bank but Egypt too, where the Jewish people were slaves three thousand years ago, and Iraq, Babylonia or Bavel, where Abraham was born. And that we, the Israelis, shoot to kill Palestinians for pleasure as a sport. Unbelievable but some of my American friends who send me those messages believe it all…

Many Israelis believe that entering Gaza was a mistake. Hamas, cannot be defeated because they represent the Palestinian people, and people cannot be defeated by force. They want the Jews out. On the other side, the Israeli government, dominated by a very religious, messianic, nationalistic party, wants the war and wants the Palestinians out. Both nations, the Palestinian and the Israeli Jewish are on a quasi-suicide track, killing each other with the unrealistic dream that they can kick each other out.

But what was Israel going to do to remove Hamas from power, raining daily missiles on Israeli settlements and then on October 7, butchering women and children, killing over a thousand people in their beds. Old men, old women, children, babies. And then taking over a thousand hostages. Israel retaliated, but Hamas was hiding in civilian establishments, hospitals, schools, in mosques, and the only way to get to them was by destroying civilian targets, which resulted in civilian casualties.

Israel did not rejoice in the destruction of Gaza. It brought food and medical supplies, but they ended up in the hands of Hamas. The rest of the Palestinians were left to die. And Hamas does not care how many Palestinians die. They announced they were willing to sacrifice one million Palestinians to win this war, to kick all the Jews out of the land it has now. As Bibi said, the problem is not that the Palestinians do not have a state. It is that the Jews have a state.

I suggested Israel donate to a trust the value of what the Palestinians lost and add to it its own resources to start a partnership with the Palestinians to build the Palestinian economy. A Marshall Plan for Gaza. That might change the mindset of the Palestinian people that we do not want to fight them, only Hamas wants to kill us all.

The Palestinian leadership, Hamas, wants none of it. They want the Jews out. Period. And the messianic Jews want none of it either. They want all Palestinians out. As long as these parties run the show, there cannot be any peace. To open the door to give a chance for peace, both the Israeli messianic parties and Hamas have to be out of power. Both nations have to accept reality and change their mindset from trying to kick each other out, to one of learning how to live next to each other in a fruitful, cooperative climate.