Israelis are a happy people.
When we were growing up, our family vacations revolved around my dad’s chemistry conventions. Wherever the chemists met, we went for our summer break. One year, we found ourselves in Philadelphia. We arrived at our Holiday Inn room a little early, and a woman was just finishing her work there. We made some small talk, and she asked where we lived. As nobody knows where Wilmette, Illinois, is, we always said, “Chicago”. “Chicago?” she asked, as she made a motion with her hands as if she was firing a submachine gun. Her knowledge and opinion of Chicago ended some 40 years earlier than our arrival, when Al Capone and his generation were shooting the place up.
According to world opinion, Israel is a terrible place, and Israelis are a terrible people. If you were to join some blue-haired freaks at Columbia, they would relate how Israel is still performing a genocide in Gaza, though the IDF kills a couple of Nukhba terrorists a week. They will intone that Israel is still causing a famine, while pictures from Gaza require two frames apiece, as Gazans have become so fat from the one ton per person of aid that Israel has allowed into the Strip. They will say that Israel is involved in ethnic cleansing, while every Israeli knows that if he or she needs a pharmacist or doctor, odds are that it will be an Israeli Arab who takes care of them. And on and on. The left has created a mega-bogeyman to reinforce its natural Jew hatred and make Israel a pariah state. I almost forgot “apartheid” in a country where over 10 percent of its parliament (Knesset) members are from the supposedly disenfranchised Arabs.
One aspect of the Jewish calendar (and by no means unique to it) is the cycle of the year. Snow outside? Chanukah must be approaching. It’s Spring? Let’s get ready for Passover. And as it is now Fall, it’s definitely football season and even in Jerusalem a bit of football weather. It is also the time of the “High Holidays” and the holiday of Sukkot (Feast of the Tabernacles). Sukkot is an incredibly joyous holiday, and a lot of people make an effort to be in Israel for the festivities, as there are lots of parties and the overall atmosphere is quite happy. Many well-known Jewish singers perform in the country, and as for our neighborhood, the official language shifts from Hebrew to English for about two weeks. It’s a wonderful time in the country, and many spend more time with family and come to Jerusalem.
One night during the holiday, we went out for dinner. After we finished, we headed to Jaffa Street, the main drag of Jerusalem. In the more than 30 years that I have lived here, I have never seen the quantity of people that I did that night. Thousands thronged the streets. The city set up musicians, magicians and other performers in order to entertain the revelers. The tens of thousands who made their way to the Western Wall required the police to simply seal off the Old City, as no more people could safely be allowed in the open space before the ancient stones. During the month of prayers prior to the Jewish New Year, two million total visitors made their way to the Holy City for nightly prayers. Didn’t the Israelis get the memo that they are terrible, mean, awful people? They should be at home rending their clothing. What are they doing having a good time?
Kurt Schlichter has often pointed out on these pages that one of the most effective ways to deal with the present-day lunatic left is to laugh at them. They are so haughty and empty, their opinions so stupid and uninformed that rather than fight it out with them, we should just laugh in their faces. Many still go around with masks. Others are certain that Donald Trump is the criminal that their heroes in the previous administration claimed. They live in a demented world, completely unhinged and disconnected from what we call “Reality”. It’s wonderful when two people debate, each one armed with facts and a good intellect. The left today has nothing. Boys can’t be girls, there is no great climate change, Donald Trump is the most effective president in decades, the US war in Iran is righteous, and everything they say about Israel and Jews is garbage.
Israelis can debate and usually argue about everything. Let’s look at aid to Gaza. There will be many who would say that nothing should have been given to Hamas and its people. Let them eventually starve, or let them give up on Israeli terms before the first pita bread entered Gaza. There will be those who support the government’s approach, which to date has led to two million TONS of aid entering the Strip. And of course on the left, they would demand full and unfettered movement of food, medicine, tanks and airplanes into Gaza. Yet while Israelis can debate and many are foolish lefties, like those who produced the disgusting and false NAZA movie, most Israelis have a very clear view of the world — because they don’t have the liberty of wasting time debating who uses which bathroom and which 15 pronouns a person wants on his email signature. In Israel, you grow up very quickly. After the bombing we experienced, I said to my wife that our oldest son went from age seven to 20. He had to deal with things that no adult should have to consider. So Israelis don’t have time for the apartheid drivel when their bus driver is an Arab. They aren’t buying into the Gaza genocide nonsense, as the IDF warned people to move out of harm’s way. While the lefties in the US and Europe wring their hands, Israelis are singing and dancing in the streets.
It is very popular on X to show destroyed regions of Gaza. They committed genocide! Look! And yes, Israel destroyed a lot of structures in the enclave. Why? Virtually every house had either a tunnel entrance or weapons. A friend who fought in Gaza told me that his unit learned the hard way that terrorists used houses close to Israeli positions to fire RPGs at soldiers in Gazan homes. In order to reduce this problem — and they successfully lowered their casualty rate significantly — they reduced structures within a certain radius of their positions to rubble. So if one wants to talk about “Building Genocide,” where 70 percent of Gaza’s structures were destroyed or significantly damaged, then we can have an entirely new academic discipline for the Ivy League. If one realizes that buildings needed to be destroyed in order to fight in dense urban areas, then the human numbers (three percent of all Gazans killed; half terrorists) don’t add up to a genocide. Israelis know this, sleep well at night, and have no problem dancing along the light rail tracks in Jerusalem. There is no deep, heavy secret in the heart of every IDF veteran. They fought to the best of their ability and have inflicted enormous damage on Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis. Their success came at a heavy price. Israelis will always quibble about using too much force or not using enough; they will not buy into Western lies to make themselves into monsters that they are not.
One should look at pictures of Dresden, Tokyo, Basra and Fallujah. They were all heavily damaged; nobody gave a “get out of harm’s way” warning, yet no one talks about “genocide” in those cities. It’s the Jews, as it’s always the Jews. The Brits destroyed Basra to get rid of ISIS. Yawn. Israel flattened Gaza. Genocide!
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