“What Is Israel Supposed To Do?” And Other Disingenuous Questions
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“What Is Israel Supposed To Do?” And Other Disingenuous Questions
Israel | 9 May 2025 | 16:45 pm IST
Note to readers: I am publishing this from Israel at 16:45 IST in the immediate aftermath of a missile attack on central Israel from Yemen, for which Ynet Breaking News provides the timeline: 16:26 IST | Missile launch detected > 16:28 IST | Air raid sirens sound in central Israel > 16:32 IST | Ben Gurion Airport halts flights > 16:34 IST | Arrow 3 system intercepts missile launched from Yemen > 16:43 IST | No reports of impacts or casualties.
1 | INTRODUCTION
Recently I fell for clickbait: an essay entitled “‘What Is Israel Supposed To Do?’ And Other Stupid Questions” by fellow medium.com writer Steve QJ.
Steve’s diatribe offers no viable solutions to the conflict between militant Islam and the State of Israel — but does help amplify jihad’s global smear campaign aimed at demonizing Israel and dehumanizing Jews (strategies) in preparation for annihilating us (the goal).
2 | NATIONAL SUICIDE
I have been clear in everything that I have written on the subject to date: I hate war’s cruelty above all else, but also its absurdity; I recognize the horrific suffering of Israelis and our neighbors; and I have always believed in diplomacy — and better that this should take place before a war erupts!
But once an aggressor state or quasi-state has attacked a target nation — especially in a war whose explicit goal is to obliterate that nation and its people — then the target must respond because appeasement doesn’t work. If you don’t believe me, consult the ghost of Neville Chamberlain.
I refer to acts of war that have included:
On October 7, 2023, the massacre and (ongoing) abductions of (mostly) Israelis led by Iranian proxy Hamas from quasi-state Gaza
Since October 8, 2023, the war on Israel from Lebanese territory by Iranian proxy Hezbollah
Since mid-October 2023, the war on Israel from Yemen by Iranian proxy the Houthis
In 2024, on April 13th and again on October 1st, direct missile barrages on Israel from Iran
And that’s the shortlist and only so far in the devolution of this regional war that grinds on and that apparently escalated again five days ago with a successful ballistic-missile strike from Yemen (!) on Israel’s international airport.
I do not know what Israel is supposed to do in response to Islamist terrorism — which (as the sixth bullet point below indicates) is not our problem alone.
I do know what the State of Israel cannot do in response to the above-named acts of war: We cannot agree to commit national suicide by appeasing jihadist (Israel-eliminationist) regimes.
Yet national suicide is what perfidious Sec Gen António Guterres and the bombastic, virtue-signaling (but not virtuous) UN have been urging on us since October 7th!
And national suicide is what the Israel-eliminationist mobs overrunning Western streets and campuses would force on us!
And if you doubt the latter claim, ask yourself this:
Wouldn’t the mobs who call themselves pro-Palestinian — but who are in fact pro-jihad — be marching with both Palestinian and Israeli flags if they wanted a peaceful solution?
Wouldn’t they be denouncing the Hamas-led massacre and abductions?
Wouldn’t they have retired their bloodthirsty slogans calling for Israel’s destruction by any means necessary instead of celebrating — as a perverse gold standard — jihad’s atavistic and barbaric means?
And wouldn’t they — if they truly valued human life — call for an end to terrorism instead of chanting Globalize the Intifada! The slogan means Export Terrorism Everywhere! — which signals that 9/11 in the USA (2001), the Bataclan massacre in France (2015), the Manchester Arena bombing in the UK (2017), the Hamas-led massacre in Israel (2023), and recent mass beheadings of Christians in the DRC (February 2025) and mass shootings of tourists in Kashmir (April 2025) aren’t nearly enough to slake jihad-lovers’ thirst.
3 | NATIONALISM & INTERNATIONALISM
This and the next part of my essay focus on the language and concepts national, international, and colonial.
Since the end of WWII, dozens of nation-states have been created (you would think that an accurate stat would be easy to track down but apparently not).
Of these, the State of Israel was created as an expression of Jewish sovereign self-determination. This is what Zionism means — this is all that Zionism means! — and this is why I am a Zionist. In fact, Zionism has become a more deeply confirmed aspect of my personal identity given the orchestrated 1930s-level outpouring of Jew-hatred that has overtaken Western streets and campuses, and online platforms’ dark corners, in the wake of the October 7th atrocities.
I am not saying that human beings’ organizing ourselves into nation-states is the best possible way, but in the modern — post-feudal but not (sigh) post-imperial — era, this is what we have to work with. If historical adversaries practice good-faith diplomacy, then wars can be avoided or ended. If not, the current shitstorm (including the war on Israel by Iran and proxies, and Putin’s war on Ukraine) results.
One of the most hypocritical aspects of Israel-eliminationists’ rhetoric is their targeting for erasure from the roster of nations and the world map only the nation-state of Israel even though:
The United Nations wouldn’t exist if nation-states were not a thing.
The concept of a Palestinian state (i.e., the realization of Palestinian sovereign self-determination) wouldn’t exist if nation-states were not a thing.
4 | SETTLER-COLONIALISM & COLONIAL-IMPERIALISM
As for Steve’s name-calling (boo-hoo!) Israelis “settler-colonials” (in his parable about Izzy and Paul), that is a canard used by Islamists and the extreme Left in their joint smear campaign aimed at diplomatically isolating Israel via lawfare — and commercially and culturally isolating Israel via BDS.
Slapping the “settler-colonial” label on 7.7 million Israeli Jews is a subtle, sly rhetorical trick used by Israel-eliminationists to persuade the world that of all humanity’s vulnerable peoples, only the Jewish people has no right to sovereign self-determination.
These several strategies’ goal is to delegitimize (destroy) the State of Israel.
And here’s where the Islamic Republic of Iran (est. 1979) comes in because the ayatollahs have explicitly declared Israel’s destruction to be a merely strategic goal; their ultimate goal is to export the Iranian Revolution and Sharia law not only to a judenrein Middle East but also to Europe and North America (and apparently Australia as well). The term for this is colonial imperialism.
The caliphate (empire) envisioned by the ayatollahs would replace the State of Israel with a so-called Palestinian state that in fact would be an Iranian imperial — and military — outpost.
The prototype for such dusty outposts bristling with 21st-century armaments is what you’re really seeing today when you see Iran’s:
Using proxy Hamas to control Gaza and militarily target Israel
Using proxy Hezbollah to destabilize the elected Lebanese government, control southern Lebanon, and militarily target Israel
Using the Houthis to overpower Yemen’s elected government, control the capital Sanaa and northern Yemen, and (killing three birds with one stone) militarily target Israel while threatening global trade and destabilizing the entire Middle East
Should you doubt me re what Iran and its proxies are really after, go to MEMRI.org, which features the ayatollahs and their proxies openly declaring their theocratic-fascist designs on the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
All of which is a way of saying that the at-best naive and ignorant — and at-worst downright malicious — street and campus mobs and keyboard warriors who say that they want to free Palestine are really promoting Iranian imperial conquest.
And if Iran’s current proto-caliphate — which doesn’t give an actual f**k about Palestinians — does manage to achieve their desired colonial empire, any individual who is female or gay or atheist or Infidel-Christian or anyone other than a hardcore, totalitarian macho Muslim is really in for it oh boy!
They will receive the same punishments that the Iranian regime currently metes out to young women (whom they lash or lethally beat for daring to show a wisp of hair) and those women’s young male allies (who are hanged from cranes and their corpses left dangling for the public’s edification).
Don’t take my word for it; the regime publishes photos of male victims’ dangling corpses as one among many means of terrorizing their young people into submission.
5 | NIHILISM
And speaking of self-styled pro-Palestinians not giving a f**k about actual Palestinians or about the city Muslims call Al Quds (Jerusalem) and the land they call Palestine:
No one among Iran’s ayatollahs or the leadership of Iran’s proxies in their war against the Jews cares about actual Gazan lives — which does make logical sense since Islamists are full-blown totalitarians.
Totalitarians do not care about individual lives! Totalitarian regimes exploit their own people as fodder worth wasting in order to meet quotas. How do I know? Because they say so themselves:
Here is what Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (assassinated in July 2024 in Tehran) had to say on Lebanese TV in late October 2023: “We need the blood of women, children, and the elderly of Gaza.”
Here is Jordanian-Palestinian politician Talal Abu Ghazaleh, interviewed on Lebanese TV five days after October 7th: “A [father] carries his son on his shoulders, a man who says, I want my son to die. . . A mother says, ‘I gave birth to children so that they would be martyred.’” (The full interview makes explicit that Abu Ghazaleh looks forward to the sacrifice of millions of Palestinian lives.)
Doomscroll MEMRI.org if you can stomach more declarations from Islamists peddling mass death for Palestinian civilians.
Also obviously true: No Islamist state or quasi-state lobbing rockets and missiles at Israel cares whether they harm or kill any of Israel’s 2.1 million Christian, Druze, or Muslim Arabs (20.9% of the population).
Furthermore, the ayatollahs and their proxies who have lobbed missiles at Jerusalem clearly don’t give a (pardon the pun) flying f**k about Islam’s supposedly third holiest city (Al Quds) and third holiest site (the 7th-8th century C.E. Al-Aqsa Mosque atop Judaism’s ancient Temple Mount). How do I know? Because if a city is sacred to you, you don’t bomb it — and if a shrine is sacred to you, you don’t risk pulverizing it.
Nor do self-styled pro-Palestinians care about the land the Jews call Israel and the Arabs call Palestine. How do I know? Because if a land is precious to you, you don’t set it ablaze as did Hezbollah in cross-border attacks on Northern Israel that in 2024 caused massively destructive fires; you don’t publish incitement (as did Hamas last week while Israel battled the largest wildfires in its history) calling for arsonists to burn it all down.
6 | DEMILITARIZE AND DERADICALIZE
So no, I don’t know what Israel is supposed to do to end this regional war that Israel-eliminationists claim to be a dispute about Palestinian land and sovereignty.
I do know what must happen in Gaza the day after (unless this conflict escalates into WWIII and/or a nuclear war, in which case all bets are off):
DEMOLISH MILITARY INFRASTRUCTURE
Civil engineers must demolish the militarized tunnel network that honeycombs the Gaza Strip, from which the Gazan government (Hamas) launched the October 7th massacre and abductions.
Gazan residential buildings, hospitals, mosques, and UN facilities — all of which Hamas and affiliate UNRWA have used to conceal command centers and weapons storage-and-launch sites, and to score propaganda and lawfare points, and for hiding chained or caged, starved and tortured Israeli hostages — must also be demilitarized.
EDUCATE FOR PEACE
Any postwar plan for Gaza must give UNRWA the boot, and must replace the UNRWA schools with a trustworthy provider of textbooks, teachers, and a curriculum that will give the kids 21st-century skills and civic virtues and will educate for peace.
If you go here, you’ll find the opposite: videos scripted and filmed by proud, even doting, camp counselors and classroom teachers in which Palestinian children act out in plays (!) the stabbings and throat-slittings of “the Jews” — and parrot Palestinian adults’ merciless, depraved ambitions for their own kids:
“Children are taught that waging jihad is a religious duty and that martyrdom earns the believer a greater reward in heaven than any other action or virtue. The objective of jihad, they learn, is to liberate Palestine, from the river to the sea, from the Jews, who have no right to exist there, and to eliminate the state of Israel. The messages imparted to children . . . demonize the Jews, presenting them as the eternal enemies of the Muslims, as subhuman “descendants of apes and pigs,” and as bloodthirsty savages with whom no dialogue or reconciliation is possible.”
In these plays, Palestinian children are directed to mime the stabbings, slashings, and shootings of “Jews” (played by classmates) so that such gestures go deep, deep into their muscle memory and can be invoked when it becomes their turn to butcher real Jews:
We saw the results on October 7th.
Such deliberate warping of Palestinian children’s hearts, minds, and souls by the manipulative adults in their lives represents an extreme form of child abuse.
A haunting, scripted interview with such a lost child was recently published by UN Watch. Meet 12-year-old UNRWA student Aya from Tulkarm (in the West Bank, not Gaza). Aya confidently replies to leading questions put to her by an adult male by parroting her teachers’ violent hatred of “the Jews” — and, I would argue, reveals her self-hatred (expressed as a personal — although obviously brainwashed — desire to martyr herself):
At the 1:34 timestamp, Aya is asked,“What do you learn in school about peace?” She hesitates, fidgets, and seems bewildered by the question before finally replying, “That we don’t like Israel.”
Evidently, the concept of peace is foreign to Aya — so foreign that it does not even belong to her vocabulary. Evidently, the adults in her young life have deliberately kept her so ignorant of any alternative to the jihadist death cult in which they have raised her, and with whose rabid ideology they have poisoned her, that she can’t even imagine much less hope for peace.
Although to be fair, Palestinian adults who saturate their children with violent Jew-hatred and self-hatred have themselves been raised as nihilists; jihadist sociopathy and psychopathy are transgenerational.
This video starring Aya is the best possible argument I can make for the necessity of defunding UNRWA’s filthy “schools” that are factories for grooming and indoctrinating the next generation of jihadis.
7 | NOT A STUPID QUESTION
In this essay, I have asked the same necessary question posed by Steve QJ — “What Is Israel Supposed To Do?” — but obviously we otherwise disagree:
I do not agree with Steve that asking what should be done is a stupid question in the sense that he apparently means — i.e., a simple and straightforward moral question with easy-breezy answers that those dastardly Israelis evade from (cue the slurs) genocidal settler-colonial motives.
Furthermore, unlike Steve QJ, I am not a third party to the Iranian-led regional war of aggression targeting the State of Israel — in which the October 7th atrocities and abductions led by Iranian-proxy Hamas were only the opening salvo.
I am a civilian living in the war zone — living (so far) through the war — and perhaps for this reason I do not bring glibness or hubris or factual and experiential ignorance or moral posturing to Steve’s question — which is not a simple question at all given jihadis’ barbarism and rabid, obsessional Jew-hatred. Thus the dilemma of what Israel is supposed to do given jihadis as neighbors confronts us with heart-shredding existential and moral conundrums.
As for duplicitous, faux-humanitarian third parties who call themselves pro-Palestinian but are in fact pro-jihad — they should ask themselves why they are so heavily invested in:
Denying, excusing, or glorifying October 7th
Parroting Israel-eliminationists’ talking points
Absolving jihadis of their crimes as long as Jews are the target
Withholding human empathy from Israeli massacre and rape victims and hostages
Like Golda Meir said:"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel".
Very well stated and explained..