http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2023/11/the-gates-of-gaza.htmlTHE GATES OF GAZADaniel Greenfield
November 12, 2023
Excerpt:...On October 7 that day came and so did the killers yearning to “tear us to pieces”.
Samson could carry the gates of Gaza, but what undid his strength was the need to believe that the people he had been fighting for so long were just like him and could become his friends and lovers. Before Samson’s eyes, like those of Roi Rotberg, were gouged out, he had lost his moral vision.
To live with the starkness of the vision that Dayan laid out 67 years ago at a dusty gravesite near Gaza is too much for most normal people. Samson could not do it and neither could any Israeli leader, from Ben Gurion, who had to step in when Sharett failed, and to Sharon, who had led the 50s retaliation raids against Muslim villages, and to Netanyahu, who wanted to focus on geopolitics rather than the dirty realities that lay before him in Gaza and the West Bank.
It is easier for most to believe that some compromise must be possible, to turn over Gaza and the West Bank, to develop joint economic projects, to meet together as individuals, as one of the abducted women, a peace activist, had tried to do, to deny a reality too horrific to be real.
By the watchfires, sentries know not to look into the flame or they will lose their night vision. Israelis, on the edge of hell, have to continue to look into the abyss. Is it any wonder that so many find pretexts for looking away, develop Stockholm Syndrome, turn on each other, or escape into fantasies of coexistence, lay down the gates and let their enemies cut their hair?
The gates of Gaza are not just here, they are everywhere that the horde on the other side lurks.
Civilization is a set of borders that men once carved out of the wilderness. On one side the village, on the other the wolf and the savage baying for blood. The capitals of civilization have all been blinded. They hold up signs welcoming refugees and wonder why bombs go off. They accept the rationales, capitalism, colonialism, zionism and imperialism, for these horrors, and convince themselves that this time they can trust Delilah… because what is the alternative?
“We are tired of fighting; we are tired of being courageous; we are tired of winning; we are tired of defeating our enemies,” former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who finished the retreat that turned over Hamas to Gaza, had told American anti-Israel leftists at the Israel Policy Forum.
The gates of Gaza weigh heavy on even the strongest of men, never mind the weakest of them, who are tempted to put them down, and go to Delilah while dreaming of peace. The moral resilience to bear the weight of the struggle and resist the simplistic promises of a solution.
But when we cease to see the enemy for what it is, then we lose the knowledge of what is true. We let ourselves be tied down by our enemies with promises of peace and love, but they only blind and mock us. The Lord departs from us, the Philistines deface our monuments and kill us. And then at long last we wake up, surrounded by blood and ruin, and the knowledge that we must either perish, bear the gates of Gaza forever or go to wage war against the Philistines.
More at URL above...(excellent essay)
