Be Careful What You Wish ForThree years after the October 7 pogrom, it will go down as a blunder of world-historical proportions.
Exactly one thousand and ninety-six days have passed since the worst mass killing of Jews after the end of the Holocaust in 1945. Three whole years have elapsed since the world watched Palestinian terrorists invade southern Israel, livestreaming themselves maiming, raping, torturing, burning, stabbing, shooting, blowing up, beheading, and kidnapping thousands of innocent Israelis, including women, children, and the elderly. Their heinous murder streak was well-planned and organized by terrorist armies like Hamas, yet it also relied on the willing, active, excited participation of ordinary Gazans, who relished the opportunity to engage in the orgy of antisemitic violence and provided detailed maps and plans of the kibbutzim in which they were previously welcomed as guest workers. Villages were burned to the ground, often with whole families still inside their homes, forced to choose whether to die via immolation or the depredations of the Palestinian murderers gleefully awaiting them outside. Children were tortured and murdered in front of their parents. Concertgoers – at a festival explicitly dedicated to fostering peace between Israel and the Palestinians – were brutally slaughtered, with the women often subjected to rape beforehand. Foreign guest workers, many of whom were Thai, were killed, with at least one of their bodies beheaded by farm implements. Gazan terrorists carried out their wicked deeds with immense pride and joy, taking their time to eat food from their victims’ pantries and elatedly call their parents with the good news that they killed Jews with their bare hands. They also brought back ‘trophies’, both living and dead. Two hundred and fifty-one people, ranging in age from Kfir Bibas, an infant of just nine months, to Shlomo Mansour, aged eighty-six, were forcibly taken into Gaza. (Both Bibas and Mansour were murdered.) There they were held captive in egregious conditions – primarily in underground dungeons within the sprawling Hamas tunnel network – with little to no food, water, or light. Most victims were sexually assaulted or otherwise tortured, whether psychologically or physically. The majority were held by terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but some were forced into slavery in the households of ordinary Gazans. Eighty-seven of the captives died, while some of the survivors were forced to remain in a situation approximating Hell for seven hundred and thirty-seven days. There was widespread celebration of these horrendous atrocities in the Islamic world, and even in the West, both among radicalized domestic Muslim populations and leftist progressives whose antipathy for Israel knows few bounds. The paragliders that were used by Hamas to assault the Nova music festival became symbols of righteous “resistance,” even being plastered on posters by major national student groups, just days after the massacre. Posters of hostages, on the other hand, were constant subjects of vandalism, further insulting the families of the victims. Marches in support of the Palestinian terrorists were organized before the bodies were cold, while terrorists were still rampaging across southern Israel. They conveniently found themselves right in front of Jewish cultural and religious institutions, shouting genocidal slogans and menacing patrons. Jews across the West have been attacked, accosted, and sometimes even killed, solely for the crime of their faith and ethnicity. And despite all these egregious actions, the vast majority of worldwide media, global institutions, and the vaunted “international community” has come down heavily in support of the Palestinian cause. Israel has been smeared as a genocidaire, despite the majority of those killed in the complex and intense urban warfare campaign being combatants. Israel has been blamed for atrocities that never happened. It has been charged with bogus war crimes by the International Criminal Court. It has been sanctioned, boycotted, and ostracized by major European nations, including some former friends. Its citizens have been turned away from public accommodations, its supporters declared Nazis, and its leaders threatened with arrest. But Israel isn’t losing. It is winning. And it is winning so profoundly that it might completely reshape the entire Middle East for decades to come.
Wars are not fought on the Internet. They are not fought in the media. They are not fought in the elite precincts of international organizations. They are fought on the battlefield. And, folks, the battlefield has been tilted so heavily in Israel’s favor that it is hard to imagine a more triumphant outcome. On October 7, 2023, Hamas and its Palestinian brethren rampaged through the Gaza Envelope, Hezbollah activated its forces for a massive rocket and artillery barrage in the north, and the Iranian regime marshaled all of its strength to push Israel to the brink of total destruction. Yet, Israel survived. It thrived. It turned the tables and has now defeated or degraded every last one of those threats. Hamas is a shell of itself, with most of its fighters killed, the remainder on the run, and its underground terror infrastructure obliterated. Its weapons caches have been raided, its leaders blown to smithereens, and the threat it poses to Israel diminished to the point of near-irrelevance – all while Israel secured the release of every last hostage, living or dead. Hezbollah has seen its pre-war arsenal annihilated, its fighters taken out in a mass surprise attack, its forces pushed miles back from the Israeli border, and its mountain fortresses raided and captured. Even the official government in Beirut has made noises about disarming, defanging, and excising this Iranian cancer on the Lebanese body politic. The Houthis have been smacked so hard by Jerusalem that they stopped even trying to sink Israeli ships, tacitly suing for peace. Bashar al-Assad lives in exile in a Moscow dacha, his regime collapsing without its Iranian and Hezbollah backing, thus ending Syria’s status as a base for the Iranians to besiege Israel. Iran itself has been beaten like a rented mule, with Israel establishing air dominance over the country and destroying whatever it pleases, whenever it pleases. Alongside the US, Israel has turned Tehran from a budding regional hegemon to a pitiful rump unable to fund or supply its vaunted proxy network, with a collapsing economy and leaders too afraid to leave their bunkers. It has ceased attacking Israel, fearing the response – justifiably so given the action thus far. Yahya Sinwar died like a dog while trying to flee Gaza. Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated by a bomb hidden in his Tehran guesthouse. Hassan Nasrallah was detonated in his underground lair by a massive ground-penetrating munition. Hezbollah fighters were maimed and killed by exploding beepers. Iran’s Supreme Leader was killed by Israeli bombs, alongside the majority of his top military officials. Over 80% of the October 7 attackers have been systematically hunted down and killed. The ties between Israel and the UAE are as tight as ever. Israeli and Lebanese leaders met and signed agreements for the first time in decades. Israeli military technology has proven incredibly effective, as have its armed forces and intelligence services. Israel is about to fight a contentious election, and some of the key issues are completely unrelated to the nation’s security – something nigh-unfathomable three years ago. The past one thousand and ninety-six days have shown the war started by Hamas and Iran – one intended to end the state of Israel and kill every last Jew living there – to have been one of history’s greatest geopolitical blunders. It has backfired completely, with every single one of Israel’s enemies being brought low by the conflict they willingly launched. This spectacular reversal is quite easily the most serious in my lifetime, matched only in modern times by the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler’s invasion of Russia. And this generational beatdown isn’t even through yet; the Houthis are embroiled in their toughest fight in years against a Saudi-backed Yemeni government making significant advances, Hezbollah continues to weaken, Hamas remains a shell of itself, and the Iranian regime may yet collapse entirely under the ever-increasing weight of total economic warfare. If those outcomes are indeed achieved, Israel will be safer than it has been in its entire history, the diplomatic picture of the region will shift in Jerusalem’s direction – the Arab world is always notorious for going with the strong horse, and Israel will look like a prime stallion – and the Iranian people may finally be free from half a century of repression. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas, and Iran decided to launch a war on October 7, 2023 with the express purpose of destroying a nation. They were successful in that quest, just not in the way they expected. The moral of the story, three years on, is a timeless one: be careful what you wish for.
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