It’s up in the air
Israel’s fate obscured by clouds of war
When you see Israel from the air, as you could very early last Friday morning, you can see some of what the problem is.
Israel is a tiny sliver of a country, occupying a former strip of desert and rock between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. When soulless, clueless university students chant about imposing a Palestine between “the river to the sea,” they are referring to the Jordan and the Mediterranean — even if they don’t know it (and, based upon ample Youtube evidence, they don’t).
From up in the air, it is clear what the students want: They favour wiping away the Jewish state and the Jews, like so much dust on a tabletop, and handing all of it over to a death cult that professes to be Islamic, but is really just satanic.
Up here, too, you can see something else: Israel is green, and the surrounding Arab states mostly are not. It is lush, and they are mostly sand.
After 1948, Israel’s farmers — who for centuries had been denied the right to own and work the land by Europeans — laboured to transform the desert into something green and bountiful, so green you can see the clear outlines of it from thousands of feet in the air.
It is probably no coincidence, then, that the group Hamas specifically targeted on Oct. 7 — with rape, with kidnappings, with torture and with mass murder — were those Israeli farmers who did what Hamas and its ilk could never do: create life, not more death.
Another thing you glimpse from up in the clouds: No mountain ranges or bodies of water separate Israel and Gaza. They sit side by side and individual Israelis and Gazans can see each other looking out the back door.
There are no natural barriers, just the flimsy ones the Israelis erected themselves, which most of the time are just some chain link-style fencing, topped with bits of barbed wire. That is all.
So, on the morning of Oct. 7, there was very little to stop Hamas and their many Gazan citizen accomplices. They knocked holes in the fences with Toyota trucks or stolen farm equipment, and commenced killing off 1,200 men, women, children and babies.
As you look down on the north of Israel, you readily see another problem: Thousands of Israelis had homes and businesses within easy range of missiles and rockets from southern Lebanon, where battalions of heavily armed Hezbollah terrorists are found, lavishly equipped by the genocidal Iranian regime.
The Israelis don’t live in those homes anymore. They are refugees now, stuck in hotel rooms in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv where Hezbollah bombs and munitions are less likely to find them. They probably will never be able to live in Israel’s north again — not where they did, at least.
Same with the south: The lowslung kibbutzim are abandoned, inhabited for seven months by feral cats and mourning doves and starlings. They are ghost towns, these once-thriving farms in the south, and no one has come back to live in them. They look as they did on Oct. 7: Shattered, broken, charred, graveyards with burnedout homes for tombstones.
In the farthest south, another problem is present, but it is not as easy to see. The surviving Hamas leaders and terrorist legions cower there in a web of tunnels, surrounded with what few hostages are still alive — and surrounded by hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians, too, who detest Hamas perhaps more than Israelis do.
Westerners demanding Israel never bomb Rafah into rubble don’t understand one reason why Israel won’t: Their own people are there. More than a hundred hostages are believed to be held near the border with Egypt, and they would all be killed too.
There are other tunnels, however, stretching between Rafah and Egypt. Those are the tunnels Hamas used to smuggle into Gaza many, many weapons — weapons they then used to kill Israelis for two decades. When you know those Egypt-to-rafah tunnels are there, you understand why Israel must get rid of them. They’d be fools not to.
Down on the ground there is a political reality, not so much a geographic one. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu razes Rafah to the ground, he will have the blood of countless innocents on his hands — and he will have further enraged U.S. President Joe Biden, who does not need more bloodshed in this, a presidential election year. And Israel cannot survive militarily without the United States.
If the IDF doesn’t move into Rafah, Hamas’ leaders and remaining battalions will get away, taking the surviving hostages with them. And there will be another Oct. 7 (guaranteed) and Netanyahu’s farright government partners will abandon him (also guaranteed).
So that’s the view from way up above. There is a lot to see. There’s a lot unseen too, like what happens next — because, no matter how hard you look from up above, the future of this place remains unseen.