Dear Israel

Copyright (c), 2023, Thomas P. Kratman

Oct 09, 2023

All right, that’s not true. I do not hold you dear. I do not think we are allies; we have no formal alliance. Since you failed to hang the men responsible, I have never forgiven you, and never shall forgive you, for the attack on the Liberty which, yes, was deliberate. You are a different country doing a generally fine job of promoting your interests at the expense of anyone else’s, to include ours. You know, spying on us? Selling our tech, or at least trying to, to third parties? All that kind of thing?

I do not consider you saints. Need I say more than: “Arieh Biroh”? I don’t even consider you all that militarily effective, given the opposition. I’ve seen the opposition.

No, I don’t care in the slightest that you’re a democracy. “We are the friends of liberty everywhere but the guardians only of our own.”

In any case, however I’ve addressed it, I am not really writing this to you but past you to my fellow Americans, most of whom, where you are concerned, tend to be idiots of one stripe or another. Why, it’s almost as bad as the Ukraine.

Even so, if not allies, we do have a number of the same enemies. We do occasionally cooperate. You have, from time to time, passed us enemy weapons systems for study. Further, I do not blame you for the effectively Nazi and terrorist Jewish Defense League,[1] which was created here, and, indeed, note what an utter pain in the posterior ex-American[2] members of that organization, once emigrated to Israel, have been.[3]

I’m certain that you have more than your fair share of left wing and liberal idiots – Lord, forgive us our redundancies – as do we. For those of you who are sane, however, you do not need me to explain the problems. Our liberals and lefties do. But bear with me as I explain it as if to you, even though really to them.

1. Hamas and the Arabs, generally, already hate you so much, largely for seventy years of almost continuous military humiliation, exacerbated quite a bit by a particular Hadith[4], that nothing you can do positively will reduce that hate in the slightest.

2. The Arabs are exceptionally good at hanging onto their hatreds long past a time one would expect them to be forgotten. They will never stop hating you until the last Jew is dead.

3. They engage in terrorism for two reasons. One is that it’s the only thing at which they’re competent, mass violence-wise, and the other is that they probably do not understand why it doesn’t work, since it would work on them. That said, give Hamas its due; this attack was complex and clever and very successful. Your enemy will get better the more time and opportunity he has to learn.

4. You cannot concede anything, though you have been silly enough to have made concessions in the past, because any and every concession not only increases the prestige and power of the terrorists but increases your physical vulnerability.

5. Even though yours is close to being a third world military with good leadership, high initiative, fairly decent staff work, pretty good morale, and a lot of tanks and aircraft, so long as you are not so moronic as to put an idiotically intellectual IAF brigadier in charge of a ground operation, you can smash Hamas…temporarily.

6. But you can only smash them temporarily if you leave them so much as a kernel with which to start over. Arabs have come, it seems, not to expect to win any given engagement with you, but have learned to expect to win eventually, provided they’ll just keep trying. Thus, they will always keep trying. While they exist and see even the slightest hope, they will keep trying.

7. Bleeding hearts and anti-Semites in Europe and the never sufficiently to be despised and damned UN are completely against you. There is nothing you can do about that. You would be fools to try. I know you do try. You should stop.

8. Your population loss is not merely the eight hundred to a thousand or so you’ve lost directly to gunmen and missiles, nor the few dozen facing a very unenviable fate as hostages, nor the troops who will be killed in action. Instead, demoralized and fearful Jews are going to leave Israel, and possibly in substantial numbers. This was a more serious blow than immediate results suggest.

9. The number of civilians you have just seen murdered is more than in some of your wars. Remember you lost under a thousand in the Six Day War. The civilian death count from this is going to be higher.

10. Conventionally, the Arabs cannot do much to you. Syria is a wreck pretending to be a country and that only in some places. Egypt is not only relatively weaker than it was in, say, 1973, but the Egyptian Army appears to facing more inward than outward. Saudi Arabia and most of the Other Gulf Arabs spend a great deal on their military and get very little in return on their investment. Jordan has a decent military, but it is small.

11. You have a lingering distaste for gas chambers and ovens, something Hamas surely counts on.

12. Your nightmare scenario is Turkey coming in against you.

13. Iran is too far away properly to punish them. You lack the ground and air logistics assets. You cannot keep an aerial campaign going there. We used one aerial tanker, and more capable ones than you have, for every seven and a half strike aircraft, and that was to operate at only about forty percent of your range to Iran.

14. Your infantry is not all that good and hasn’t been in a long time. The reason is because you shunt superior human material to other arms. You’re still generally better than the Arabs but this isn’t saying much.

15. Let us be honest here; when you bomb something in Lebanon or Gaza after an attack has been launched on you, you do not expect, and never have expected, for it to do any good. You do it to placate the masses by appearing to be “doing something.”

So, what will actually secure you and your people from further attacks of this nature? At one extreme end, we have extermination. At the other we have concessions. The latter, as mentioned above, #4, won’t do you any good and will do you much harm. The former is probably impossible because of your own domestic left.

Between those extremes what is there? Let’s look at some more “reasonable” possibilities.

A. A weak handed juridical approach, wherein you fight to retake control of Gaza, keeping civilian casualties to a minimum, find the members of Hamas, try them – where you can amass personal evidence – and send some few of them to a prison where they will a) serve as rallying points against you and b) eventually be released, not even slightly improved. That whole minimalization of civilian casualties, too? One doubts that Hamas didn’t learn the lessons of your incursion into Lebanon, wherein Hezbollah had well prepared positions, well screened by skirts and diapers. Ultimately, that velvet glove approach not only costs you lives, it makes you ridiculous.

B. A more heavy-handed approach, wherein you ignore civilian casualties without any special attempt to drive those casualties up. This would seem to have the advantage of demotivating Hamas to hide behind skirts and diapers, but it really doesn’t. Those skirts and diapers are put out there for you to kill them, the better to make anti-Israeli propaganda in the US and Europe. This will still cost you a lot of infantry. It also doesn’t have much of an end game.

C. Surround them and starve them out? Shoot the civilians trying to leave – which is, yes, still legal unless you’ve been stupid enough to sign on to the Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions – to drive them back to eat up the food? That still, if it matters to you, incites European and American anti-Israeli leftism which may hurt your funding and trade. Remember, though, that no US or European forces will be arrayed against you for it. Instead, it will be your own lefties who force you to stop, that, or the threat of war from Turkey.

D. Advise Turkey that, should they come in against you, it will mean nukes, no ifs, ands, or buts. Attack Gaza. Take your losses. You will kill a lot of civilians; try for one hundred to one or so. Flatten buildings without warning at the first sign or resistance. Exterminate Hamas with or without trials. In other words, declare the lot unlawful combatants and take none of them prisoner, or court martial them as soon as they surrender then shoot them after hostilities. Have the police tag along to do paraffin tests to see if people have used firearms recently, then shoot those who have. Try – try really hard – to get their families where possible, but don’t advertise it much; it will advertise itself Kill the political and religious leaders who promote Hamas or even who failed to try to resist. Put the whole area under a harsh occupation government. Be assured that you will have a continuing loss of men for as long as you are there, but when they demonstrate they can cross and kill as many as they did on the 7^th of October, you can better afford to lose a few troops now and then.

A through C really don’t get you anything. No course of action is going to get you genuine peace, see items 1-3, above. So if you can’t have genuine peace, try for what you can get.

I’d suggest course of action D. It has the additional advantage that you will no longer have to blockade Gaza, because you will have full control. You will no longer have to try to bomb their tunnels and fortifications from the air, because you will be able to send in grunts and combat engineers to do the job. You will be able to control food and cut it off at will, in general or for certain persons or families. You will be able to not only establish, but protect an intelligence network. Remember, you were surprised a few days ago.

But the task ahead of you is unenviable whatever you do.

[1] The only difference between Meir Kahane, who founded the JDL, and Adolf Hitler was in just who they defined as the master race. Otherwise, one would expect them to have been great chums with many points of common interest and philosophy.

[2] No, however shoddy we have become about enforcing our own law of citizenship, dual citizenship for an American past the age of 18 is a logical impossibility. You may be us or someone else; you may not be both. Ever. Yes, under Israeli law, I have Right of Return. If I ever took them up on that I’d give up my American citizenship. I will never give up my American citizenship.

[3] For example, Alan Goodman and Baruch Goldstein, who murdered, respectively, one and twenty-nine innocent Arabs in cold blood. I cannot for the life of me understand why Goodman, who has been returned to the United States, has not been tried for the murder he committed on the Dome of the Rock, in 1982. No, there is no statute of limitations on murder. No, double jeopardy would not be an issue; different sovereigns and all. Perhaps it was part of a deal with Israel but I also cannot imagine why we should have made such a deal.