And a New King Arose in Egypt

Israel, D.C. and the Hamas Surrender Deal

Every country fights Islamic terrorism alone. What should have been a world war against a common enemy has become a lonely battle in which each country strives separately against a global threat. And within each country, individuals have been abandoned by their governments to face sudden death.

This is not just Israel's story. It is all our stories. But it is most clearly seen in Israel.

Jews tend to view this as antisemitism and it's often in the mix. But it's not just antisemitism. It's cowardice. The world powers, old and new, recruit their own Jihadists, form their dirty deals for oil and blood, and sell each other out. That they sell out Israel is a given. What else would you expect of people who sell out their own children to grooming gangs and let mosques rise in every one of their cities?

The blood was hardly dry on the streets of the French Quarter before we had all officially moved on for the hundredth time. And there is every reason to think that we will go on moving on for the foreseeable future. People wait for some fundamental wake-up call that will break with the old corrupt blindness.

For now at least they have waited in vain.

Insurgent politicians arise, talking big, but offer only differences of style not substance.

The Surrender to Hamas Deal is a bipartisan betrayal of Israel in which the outgoing Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration got together to throttle Israel and demand that it accept a Hamas deal, overseen by its state sponsor Qatar, trading thousands of terrorists for hostages, live or dead, abandoning Gaza, and allowing Hamas under a fake 'technocratic' government to take it over again. Followed by an extended reconstruction that the United States will be paying for.

This is not "peace through strength", it's "war through weakness". It demonstrates once again that if Islamic terrorists take hostages, keep fighting and have their allies run information campaigns, they will win even if they lose. The Surrender to Hamas Deal sells out American interests along with Israeli ones. The next step is the Hamas-PLO unity government put together under Chinese and Russian aegis in Beijing and Moscow since Oct 7 which the United States will now have to arm, fund and recognize.

America has once again sold out allies and empowered enemies. The message once more is that it's better to be our enemies than our friends. And that the best possible strategy is to be a terrorist.

The old boys and the new boys in D.C. got together to carry out the same policy. When it came down to it, the only differences were style, not substance. And the policy is surrendering to Islamic terrorism. That has implications beyond Israel. And those implications are catastrophically bad for America.

"Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim/That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him/'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back/And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac," Bob Dylan sang a long time ago in Neighborhood Bully.

That may have been the old Israel. The one that dismissed the UN as 'Oom Shmoom.' The new Israel, the one of Netanyahu and Start-Up Nation. The one that sees Hasbara as an existential strategy cares very much. It waits around for someone to take its side and to see that truth that Dylan sang. It spends so much time arguing with the world that eventually it loses its belief in its own rightness. And gives in.

Then it waits once more for global support that will never come.

The old Israel understood that leaders who sell out their own countries to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and that ilk can hardly be expected not sell out Israel. It isn't that they're antisemites. They can hardly be expected to do for Israel what they will not do for America, England and France.

The old Israel understood that it had to stand alone because no one would stand with it. Knew that it had to believe in itself because no government, whatever promises were made during election campaigns at rubber chicken dinners, would stand with it.

The new Israel keeps winning wars and losing faith. It waits for a better day, but no better day is coming. And unless the world wakes up and fights back, the demographic trends and political radicalization will not make the western world any friendlier to Israel.

The early days of January should have made it finally clear that there is nothing to wait for. Perhaps the day will come when an American government wakes up and takes a stand against Islamic terrorism.

And perhaps the L-rd and all His angels will sweep the enemy from the field.

It is difficult to know which day will come sooner.

This Shabbat, Jews all over the world will read the story of Exodus or Shemos which begins with the rise of a new Pharaoh who does not know Joseph. That Pharaoh dies and the Jews welcome the news of a new ruler. But when their enslavement does not change, they cry out to G-d as they never had before because now they know not to put their trust in any prince. Now they know that their one king is G-d.

And then G-d hears. And then G-d acts.

For now Israel stands alone. It stands faced with a crisis caused by a generation of giving in to pressure from D.C. politicians. The process that began with Prime Minister Shamir agreeing to take back Hamas terrorists and negotiate, however indirectly, with the PLO over a Palestinian State, that continued with the Oslo Accords, the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza, negotiation after negotiation, that has nurtured, armed and created an enemy state inside Israel is the greatest threat to its survival.

'Palestinianism', not Iran, is the greatest threat to Israel. The answer is not geopolitics of regional accords, it's the defense of the land and its borders against an enemy that lies within them.

Israel, like America and Europe, has fallen for the absurd internationalist nonsense that the primary problem is to cope with international affairs in international forums rather than to clean house.

In America and Europe that means mobs of migrants flooding across the border while their governments are concerned about geopolitical problems. In Israel that meant treating the Abraham Accords like the greatest thing since Sinai while ignoring the enemy armies preparing across the border in Gaza.

Israeli leaders have spent too long looking to America for hope when they should have looked to their own people. The future of Israel does not lie in making apps or in lobbying D.C., but in the settlements where armed family men stand watch against the enemy. And if there is any hope to be found for confronting Islamic terror, it will not be in D.C., but in those small settlements.

And perhaps out of those small villages will come the hope of not only Israel, but the world.