Am I the only one among progressive commentators who thinks that the Hamas raid on October 7 is the best thing that’s happened to Israel since the Six Day War? It seems I am. I keep reading the likes of Alistair Crooke, Colonel MacGregor, Scott Ritter, and Chris Hedges and others on Unz.com that Israel is facing an existential disaster. I don’t get it.

I’m no fan of Israel, as anyone who has read my essays here knows. But it seems to me that Israel has the wind in its sails.

What has happened? Israel was attacked, attacked so well and so audaciously that, as Jonathan Cook has documented and Israelis surely understand by now, it had to kill its own people — indeed a great number of them — in order to keep Hamas from taking more hostages down into its tunnels. The raid is widely considered a stroke of political and military genius, its results precisely forecast.

I hope the leaders of Hamas are satisfied; things have gone rather badly for their fellow Palestinians. Those on the surface of Gaza — what a horror! — have been bombed, terrorized, starved and herded south like cattle, soon to be pushed out into Egypt. In the West Bank, the IDF is still getting warmed up, but a similar fate awaits Palestinians there. The Israeli public is fully on board with their government’s actions, and damn the consequences. They are sick of the terror, the missiles, and the dread that accosts them when a particularly well-shaven Palestinian boards their bus.

Yes, the rest of the world is raising holy hell, but America’s political class was sequestered fair and square by Israel’s friends long ago, and that’s the class that counts (at least for the moment). As long as the Yanks swing the veto axe and keep sending those 155mm artillery shells — sorry, Ukraine — the rest of the world can scream all it wants. Muslim-led countries have contained themselves — except for the Houthis. But they’re doing it largely to demonstrate their legitimacy as a governing body for Yemen. Ain’t image everything? Outside of them, what government is going to step up to bat for the Palestinians only to get battered cities and a ruined economy for its trouble?

And yes, for decades Israelis will be shunned everywhere from business meetings to tennis stadiums, but Jews know a thing or two about playing the long game, and they know that eventually things will get back to normal, at least with the Americans and Europeans.

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Which leaves Hamas. Netanyahu is now saying that the fight against Hamas will take years. I wish he would explain why, because I don’t see that at all. His enemy lurks in, lives in and attacks from tunnels hundreds of feet below Gaza. After three months, the air can’t be so great down there. And supplies must be running low; nothing has gone in since October 7. Or did those industrious Palestinians really dig out caverns the size of Amazon Fulfillment Centers and prepare them with food, water, medicines, and weapons to supply thousands of fighters for years? Unless Hamas has a secret submarine base that connects to the Mediterranean — who knows? Have they found an underground wellspring? And just what kind of food are their fighters eating? Some kind of Muslim-approved Spam? What about the effects of living for months underground? Only the effects on their eyesight must be awful.

And let’s not forget the obvious, or at least it’s obvious to me: tunnels, caverns and bunkers mean that practically the entire Hamas fighting force inhabits a relatively small space with no retreat available. How hard can it be for the Israelis to flood the network, firebomb it, or gas it?

Well, yes, there are the poor hostages to consider, but will a government that killed its own citizens in order to keep them out of Hamas’s clutches really trouble itself about a hundred or so hostages? I think not. Once Gaza is cleared and the West Bank show is well underway, the “war cabinet” will make its excuses and the hostages will share the same fate as Hamas fighters, the difference being that the hostages will get their names engraved on a monument. Their families will grieve, but the rest of the nation will dance all night once they have finished the job begun in 1948.

After that, Israelis will prepare for a long period of isolation — assuaged by their American friends/stoolies — but there are worse fates: ask the Chinese. Besides, this eternally paranoid people probably figures the rest of the world can go to the devil — and probably will.

Surely I’m wrong about all this. Surely the above-mentioned savants will walk all over me. But as I see it, if Israelis keep the fight local and don’t tarry too long in shoving out the Palestinians, they will soon realize their dream of an Israel “from the river to the sea.”