De-escalation. Have you heard the word yet on cable news?
Suddenly, it is everywhere, all at once. Make no mistake — it is pernicious, obscene, and unique to Israel.
The word is premised upon a history of Jew hatred that stretches back to antiquity, and represents a singular proposition that has endured through the centuries, but ended forever in 1948. The proposition is that Jews are to be hunted, murdered, gassed and killed without trial, without mercy and without resistance. The ubiquitous media question about “de-escalation” is a chimera that conceals a malignancy, which is this: why are you Jews fighting back? Why do you insist on living? Being? Surviving? Creating? Flourishing?
There is a fundamental moral proposition at hand in the hours that will precede a storm of death, including the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians, among them the elderly, children, mothers and fathers. How can any nation or people de-escalate a conflict with people who want to see their extinction? There is a terrible amount of death that lies ahead. It will have been caused by the Iranian terror state and its terrorist agents, not the state of Israel, which is now at war because it was attacked by surprise at dawn.
The 10/7 attack was conducted against civilians, who were murdered in the desert at a music festival, in their homes, in their cars, on the street and running for their lives. It was the most violent day for unarmed Jews since 1945 — since the Holocaust. The murderers came by paraglider, boat and foot, but that doesn’t matter. It’s incidental. They came to kill Jews. They came to murder the hope of peace and reconciliation. They came, like always, to kill the Jews. The world has always had a peculiar reaction when Jews are killed en masse. Typically, it induces an instinct to look away, or worse, to blame the Jews for the hatred they incur. It takes a special type of hate to blame the murdered for their murders. There is a name for this immorality. It is called anti-semitism.
Let’s be clear about what will happen next.
There will be war.
There will be death, horror and destruction.
It will play out on international television. The images will be shattering. The world now faces a growing reality that regional conflicts will spread, grow and escalate into a global catastrophe. The Russian/Iranian axis is stoking instability and conflict between Serbia and Kosovo and Azerbaijan and Armenia.
What will the Chinese do with the world focused on Ukraine and the Middle East? Will they move on Taiwan? The United States stands at the edge of fighting in the Arabian Sea and the South China Sea, while maintaining the ability of Ukraine to defend itself. A new era of history has begun, and it will be violent.
There is an extraordinary account of a late night meeting that took place between FDR and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King in the White House from Nigel Hamilton’s “FDR at War“ trilogy. The two leaders talked late into the night. King returned to his room and wrote down the details of the conversation.
FDR outlined to King his vision for what would come after victory in World War II. He said something chilling from the perspective of 2023. He said that nothing lasts forever, and that included his vision for the future. He told King that he hoped it would endure for as long as everyone who was alive on the day the war was won was still alive. The youngest of those people are 77 years old today.
We have arrived at the hinge of history yet again.
Jared Kushner, tasked with brokering a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, changed the strategy of a two-state solution by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the U.S. embassy there. His "peace plan" was so unbalanced toward Israel that it had zero chance of success. Kushner cared very little about most of the roles he assumed during the crazy Trump years, but he cared a lot about Israel. His lack of experience, his unbalanced view along with his self-righteous arrogance set the stage for this. With no viable approach for peace along with our withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, increased tensions and new alliances surfaced that were left to metastasize over the coming years. I realize this is just one piece of the puzzle and it is more nuanced than my description above, but let's not forget that the US strategy changed during the Trump years and the results were more instability and increased hostility.
What of the innocents boxed into Gaza? Is their plight not at the hands of Israeli Leaders? Should not we observe that these innocents appear as persecuted as the Jewish innocents? How long can they endure having their homes bulldozed by “settlers”? Should they cower in their streets hoping that Israeli forces will eventually stop taking their homes or squeezing them into an ever smaller Ghetto? History is strikingly myopic, no?