My wife and I had taken a short trip out of town and were standing on top of a mountain looking down over God’s splendid creation when the phone call came alerting us to its destruction.
Or that’s the way my mother made it seem.
Mom lives alone and watches a lot of news. I’d feel better about that if it wasn’t MSNBC she was watching, but that’s a story for another day.
On this pleasant and cool morning of Oct. 7 she was alerting me to fighting between Israel and one of its neighbors.
“Happens all the time,” I said.
“No, this time it’s different,” she responded.
It didn’t take long for me to discover that in this particular instance even MSNBC had gotten it right.
This fight between Israel and Hamas does have a different feel about it.
I didn’t investigate the fighting too much immediately. I try to check out of the news cycle on the weekends, but the story was so big it was everywhere, and it carried a science-fiction quality about it. Terrorists slowly falling from the sky in hang gliders, landing safely then going about to murder, rape and commit grotesque acts of atrocity without regard to sex, age, or circumstance. Just kill.
The death toll has passed 1,400, which considering Israel’s population of slightly more than 9,000,000 makes it more devastating than 9-11 was to the U.S.
In spite of my efforts to stay lightly informed for a few hours I knew I would dive into this story the following Monday. I did, and I’ve become much more educated. Some things I learned, and some things I knew were reinforced.
One story I wrote came from a Washington Watch interview conducted by Tony Perkins with former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
Friedman said it’s time for Israel to stop asking permission to defend itself.
“In the past Israel has, at the world’s insistence, managed a conflict, which means every few years Hamas will shoot some rockets, and Israel will retaliate. They’ll degrade Hamas’ capabilities, but then they’ll be built back. They’ll be built back with an enormous amount of money from Iran which has gotten way, way richer over the past three years. If you compare the amount of oil they sold in 2022 to the amount they sold in 2020 it’s about eight times the amount,” Friedman said.
The approach has to change.
Giving up land in exchange for peace has been a failed philosophy, Friedman explained.
“It will continue to fail. I wish we didn’t have to learn this lesson in such a painful way. The brutality is unthinkable, indescribable. I didn’t think human beings were capable of such brutality … the babies, forcing children to watch their parents being slaughtered, forcing parents to watch their children being slaughtered, taking Holocaust survivors, 90-year-old women, who never thought they would live to see this type of behavior again … they’re now being held hostage in Gaza.
“Israel has not been given permission from the world, including the United States, to win a war, and that’s why this thing keeps popping up over and over and over again. Right now, it’s not about managing a conflict, right now it’s about winning a war. They have to win the war,” Friedman said.
Yes, Israel has to win the war.
It has to win the real war in spite of what happens in a perception war where Israel will never win.
Scenes from major European cities and in the U.S. show us that.
Scenes from college campuses show us that.
What we see is people siding with evil. They will point to images of death and destruction among Palestinians, images no less tragic than murdered Israelis on Oct. 7, but far different.
Not all support Hamas’ doctrine of hate, but many do. They’re taught hate in their schools at very young ages.
These aren’t new facts, but they’re ignored by the demonstrators.
Hamas isn’t interested in peace. Its founding documents tell us that.
The Hamas Covenant of 1988 – its organizational charter – states that while its leaders may at times consent to peace talks mediated by a third party for strategic reasons necessary for the moment, true Hamas leaders participate without sincerity.
“These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters,” Article 13 of the charter states. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.”
This is who lives in Gaza, who governs that small strip of land on Israel’s Mediterranean coast.
Maybe they’ll govern it just a little while longer.
My mother was right: It looks different this time.
(Editor's Note: Click HERE and HERE for related stories Parrish wrote for AFN.)
