WAR IS CHESS

McDonalds has foolishly jettisoned the greatest advertising slogan in history—You Deserve A Break Today—so I’d like to resurrect it here for all those people who are feeling ambivalent, angry, confused or dismayed by the advance of the Israeli army into the Gaza Strip.

For three weeks now, I have yet to see any convincing analysis—in plainspeak—as to why Israel is absolutely correct in pursuing a Churchillian military victory over Hamas.

I hereby volunteer to set things straight for the peace-loving majority who understandably fail to grasp that any semblance of a truce will amount to a victory for Hamas. There will be no test at the end. Share this with the people you love. Then share it with the people you don’t love.

*

I will begin by saying I am not fond of Netanyahu. In a crowded room, my instinct would be to avoid him. Narratively, I will use only his last name in the same way one prefers to get it over with by saying Hitler, Mao, Stalin or Putin—or Trump. About half of the people of Israel feel much the same way about him as I do.

In the 1970s, the man nicknamed “Bibi” changed his surname to Nitai while studying at M.I.T. because he realized his birth name was too difficult for Americans to pronounce. During his record fifth term as Israel’s PM, after five decades in politics, he is now well into the process of getting himself imprisoned for corruption. Therefore, yes—we can argue, quite persuasively, that Netanyahu’s increasing legal jeopardy would explain his motive for maintaining his patriotic position atop the current military offensive.

As the first-ever Israeli Prime Minister to be born inside the country (1949, Tel Aviv) and a well-known crony of Donald Trump (Netanyahu first befriended Trump’s father Fred Trump when Netanyahu was serving as Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, 1984-1988), Netanyahu was officially charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in January of 2020 after a three-year investigation. The trial was stalled during Covid.

Not surprisingly, some Israelis are now suspicious as to how and why Israel’s ultra-smart civil defence system very weirdly failed to adequately detect and forestall the large-scale and bloodthirsty invasion of Hamas murderers, rapists and kidnappers on October 7, 2023. According to the Jerusalem Post, polling has revealed that a majority of Israelis (56%) believe Netanyahu must resign after the conflict and 86% laid the blame for failure to anticipate and combat the Hamas attack on the country’s leadership (Netanyahu).

One can get psychological and suggest Netanyahu also has a fraternal prerogative to avenge the murder of his military-martyr-brother, Yonatan Netanyahu (1946, New York). Yonatan died heroically when his Sayeret Matkat hostage-rescue unit for Operation Thunderbolt managed to save more than 100 mostly Israeli hostages who had been kidnapped by terrorists and flown to the tarmac of Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. Yonatan was the only Israeli rescuer who was killed, along with two of the hostages.

Benjamin and his younger brother Iddo both subsequently served in Sayeret Matkal. A psychiatrist could have a field day speculating on the extent to which “Bibi” yearns to match, emulate or even out-do his ultra-heroic, more handsome, older brother on a more spectacular historical and international stage having already served more years as Israel’s Prime Minister than anyone else.

How could they possible put that guy in prison, the world would surmise—if he vanquishes Hamas.

Well, forget all that.

War is hell.

And to the victor go the spoils.

A moralistic quagmire that has transfixed, appalled, enraged and mystified most of the under-informed people on the planet will be quickly forgotten or dismissed if Hamas surrenders.

If you don’t believe that, just look at 20^th century history.

In December of 1941, Japan made a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, killing mainly military personnel. Eventually, the Americans firebombed Tokyo in March of 1945. Codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, this overnight mission killed an estimated 100,000 non-combatants over a 16-square-mile area. The Americans then dropped two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, killing another 200,000 non-combatants. Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14 and the western world cheered. The Royal Family waved to cheering crowds from their Buckingham Palace balcony. “This is the day when fascism finally dies,” announced President Truman, erroneously.

Brute force won. Peace was declared.

In November of 1940, 300 German Luftwaffe bombers made a night raid on the armament production centre in Coventry in central England. According to Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert, they dropped 500 tons of explosives, 33,000 incendiary bombs and dozens of parachute mines. But the death toll was under 1,000 civilians. The King of England was said to have wept at the sight of the ruined St. Michael’s Cathedral.

The Allies ultimately retaliated with a far more deadly and merciless firebombing of Dresden, Germany’s seventh largest city, in February of 1945. The RAF’s fearsome air raid on nearby Hamburg in July of 1943, Operation Gomorrah, had already established a terrifying precedent. Even though Dresden was known to be a haven for civilian refugees, the RAF (later supported by the United States Eighth Air Force) found themselves unchallenged and proceeded to accurately drop 880 tons of bombs on the city centre in 15 minutes, igniting a fiery conflagration. That was the beginning. A second wave of 550 Lancaster bombers arrived two-and-a-half hours later when the city was already aflame. Trees exploded from the heat of their own resin. Shoes melted on the hot asphalt streets. Iron and steel melted. The next day Dresden was attacked by more than 300 B-17 Flying Fortresses from the United States Eighth Air Force. They had difficulty finding any targets. The devastated city was bombed yet again on February 15 after more than 200 B-17s were unable to destroy an oil plant in nearby Leipzig due to fog, so they switched targets to Dresden. For good or bad measure, the Eighth Air Force returned on March 2 and April 17. The word merciless fails to apply.

Kurt Vonnegut has tried to generate some kind of memorial with his brave novel, Slaughterhouse Five. “The destruction of Dresden,” Winston Churchill rather delicately wrote, “remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” Frederick Taylor, as the author of Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (HarperCollins, 2004) has been more direct when he wrote, “When we think of Dresden, we wrestle with the limits of what is permissible, even in the best of causes.” While the horrific air raids on once-beautiful Dresden did not evince a surrender, they did avenge Nazi Germany’s repeated attacks on Coventry and ‘The Blitz” overall.

The Allies’ right to revenge was generally accepted as a form of survivalist sanity.

The Other Guys Started It.

*

How on earth can anyone say the surprise attack of raping and pillaging, murderous Hamas soldiers, while kidnapping approximately 200 civilians, can be considered different from Pearl Harbour and Coventry?

Why should Israel be expected to abide by the world’s hope that they should once again rise above natural human responses and somehow be obliged to manufacture a different response than the Americans or Brits had when their homelands were attacked?

Why should it even be further necessary to state a far greater percentage of Israel’s overall population was murdered on October 7, 2023 than the percentage of America’s population that was murdered during 9/11?

Allied forces never gave a two-week warning to civilians, urging them to evacuate Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden. But Israel repeatedly forewarned civilians in Gaza to evacuate southward, only to have merciless Hamas authorities set up roadblocks to prevent the flight of their human shields.

So, why are there not marches on streets around world objecting to the villainy of Hamas?

This is antisemitism, folks.

And this is why I believe Netanyahu’s bull-headed insensitivity, his shrewd understanding of military matters, and his extensive experience in international relations could very well best-serve Israel not only for now, but also for the security of generations of Israelis-to-come.

You are now getting to the good part.

*

The current conflict between Hamas and Israel must not be defined as yet another tiresome “Middle East crisis.”

It’s war.

In my country, the closest we have come to a war footing, domestically, psychologically, in my lifetime, was a fiercely-contested Summit Series hockey series against the Soviets during the Cold War, in 1972. Four games on the Russian front were followed by an ultimately successful and viciously fought four games on home ice (during which Paul Henderson, later a born-again Christian, bizarrely scored the winning goal of all the final three games). Our Team Canada captain Bobby Clarke was revered for decades for slashing the ankle of one of the Ruskies’ best players in Game Six and breaking his ankle, thereby giving the Canadian side a slight edge.

Another time, we had a separatist movement in our main French-speaking province, Quebec. It was called, coincidentally, the October Crisis. By 1970, more than 20 members of a militant separatist group calling themselves the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ) had been imprisoned for various acts of violence including letter bombs and bank heists.

In reprisal, the FLQ first kidnapped a British trade commissioner, then they kidnapped and killed a Quebec Cabinet minister. In response, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to assert militaristic control of the entire population. This was much criticized as over-zealous, from far and wide. Arrogant and smart, Trudeau was accused of squashing a peanut with a sledgehammer.

The sledgehammer worked.

Winston Churchill is now globally admired as the guy who stood up to Hitler (with crucial Commonwealth support from Canada, Australia, India and others). Having just taken over as Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, “Winnie” addressed the British Parliament on June 4, 1940 and vowed “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Lesser known is his muttered statement in the aftermath. “And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!”

After the defeat of Hitler and Nazism, Churchill went down to defeat at the polls. Therefore, even if Netanyahu vanquishes Hamas, there is no guarantee he will be venerated on par with his martyred brother. (It is not far-fetched to imagine Netanayahu’s best hope might be to seek asylum in the United States. If President Trump gains a second term, who knows? He could be afforded sanctuary in the city-state of Mar-a-Lago.) It is still too early to judge Netanyahu’s place in history. We can only note that he appears to have opted for the sledgehammer approach.

There will always be those who will cry out for peace in times of war. Hamas has cynically gambled that those voices worldwide will be sufficient to achieve a so-called truce. “They” are seeking any internationally sanctioned agreement that would enable their despotic, election-phobic rule to be recognized internationally as genuine. But if they are a legitimate political entity, who is their spokesperson? And why can’t he dare show his face? (We know it’s not going to be a woman.)

And ties, as the old saying goes, are like kissing your sister.

A tie would be a victory for Hamas simply because they are the far, far weaker team.

Therefore, Hamas, from the outset, has been cynically playing for a tie. After only one brief and bloodthirsty incursion into Israel’s half, almost all of the play has been in their end. But a tie now would nonetheless enable them to be viewed, in political terms, as equals, having somehow managed to gain a tie in the record books.

Hamas is so obviously the weaker side that the unofficial referee (uninformed international opinion) wants to halt the game on the specious grounds of fair play. You wouldn’t want your daughter’s soccer team to lace up and play against Real Madrid, would you? Surrounded by adversaries, Israel has steadfastly and rather amazingly made themselves into an impregnable fortress in the Middle East. unbeatable. This generates the global perception that there is no “level playing” field in Middle East. The far more populous Arab countries that have got Israel surrounded, particularly Egypt, are basically once bitten, twice shy. So it is the reckless and foolish and pathetic and misogynistic Hamas is now hoping for some international referee (the embarrassingly corrupt United Nations) to call a halt to the game long before full-time. “God, Allah. Mercy, mercy!” the spectators cry out, “Let there be a draw!”

There’s no such country as Palestine. There never has been. It’s a fallacy, a political fantasy. The thugs who control the Gaza Strip are not so-called Palestinians so much as they are criminals. But news networks globally are happy to render their easy-to-get footage of “pro-Palestine” demonstrators in the streets of London while failing to provide any deeply historical context.

*

Now we come to the really important bit.

Netanyahu is not stupid. Netanyahu is not naïve. He knows that if he assents to a truce, any truce, he is agreeing to what can be compared to in chess as a stalemate. You do not have to be a Bobby Fischer or a Boris Spassky to realize this would be crazy. Currently, Israeli forces are sweeping the board. They have gobbled their opponents’ pawns with ease. The knights and bishops come next. Then the castles…

Any tie or stalemate to be overseen by the feckless and corrupt United Nations (in which, like FIFA, a vast percentage of the votes are effectively bought) would be a wonderful outcome for Hamas, born of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Since gaining political control of the Gaza Strip in June of 2007, murdering most of its main political opponents, Hamas has yet to hold a single election. Egypt has imposed an economic blockade and sealed its own borders with the Gaza Strip. Sympathizers to the so-called PLO cause might want to ask themselves why neighbouring Arabic countries (Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon) have yet to offer to provide refugee status to a single person from the Gaza Strip.

If Israel can be coerced by the United States (also playing chess by parking two aircraft carriers offshore) to consent to any internationally brokered “peace deal,” the blood-curdling and hideous attack by Hamas on October 7 will be air-brushed away because Israel will be viewed as an inhumane invader who killed helpless civilians (prevented from moving south by Hamas) while maneuvering their tanks through bombed-out streets, seemingly disinterested in the fate of Israeli hostages stowed in underground tunnels, some beneath hospitals and schools.

If the overt instigator of this war, Hamas, the much weaker side, can succeed in gaining sufficient sympathy and Israel backs off and goes home, Netanyahu will be dooming future generations of Israelis to remain on military alert, diverting an enormous percentage of the country’s GNP to military preparedness, and absolutely nothing with be gained by yet another war in which Israel was forced to fight. Netanyahu would be leaving the door open to the possibility of yet another onslaught of Hamas thugs and zealots on motorbikes to rape and pillage with impunity without even a U.N. censure.

The Telegraph (in Britain) rather neatly summarized the current illegitimacy of the United Nations on November 1, 2023, “The international talking-shop is dominated by dictatorships interested in anything but their own people’s welfare.” Since most of the corruption-induced votes are dictated by China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, the list of U.N. censures and proclamations condemning Israel for defending itself is mind-bogglingly long. In 2020, for instance, the U.N. condemned Israel 17 times but only six times for rest of world combined. By 2013, the United Nations Human Rights Council had condemned Israel with 45 resolutions since its creation in 2006, amounting to 45.9% of all country-specific resolutions passed by the UNHRC—basically almost equal to such resolutions shared by the rest of the planet.

I am therefore sorry to break the news to you—but Israel must win. Only if you have been living in a Facebook-induced fog for a decade or two could one possibly place any faith in the United Nations, whether they have an earnest and well-meaning Secretary-General or not.

This time, if Israel does not win, they are admitting to the world and themselves that they are as dumb as Charlie Brown. In the once-popular and endemic Charlie Brown comic strip by Charles Schulz known as Peanuts, there was a running gag. Its ever-naïve and trusting lead character named Charlie Brown, once every year, would ask his cynical and shrewd playmate Lucy to hold the football for him so he could attempt to kick a field, America football-style. In order to kick the oblong football through the goalposts, the place-kicker (Charlie) must rely on holder (Lucy) to keep the ball upright. And every year, without fail, having given Charlie Brown her promise not to do so once again, Lucy always pulls the football away at the last second. Good-hearted Charlie Brown always goes flying through the air and lands with a thud. Every year, Charlie Brown wants to believe this time it could be different.

Forget the field goal, folks.

Benjamin Netanyahu will not agree to play Charlie Brown. This time he’s running it in for a touchdown, rugby-style, with the full-force of the Israeli military behind him.

A lot more people will die if world opinion halts this Hamas/Israel contest that Hamas has asked for.

That is exactly the same logic that the United States of America now uses to justify Hiroshima.

*

There. You’re the One. You Deserved A Sociological/Historical/UncommonSensical Break Today.

Thank you for allowing me to e-serve you drive-thru directions to get you out of this pervasive fog of darkness and dismay.

According to anthropologists, Jews have been living in the environs now called Israel for about four millennia. Jews, you may or may not recall, are those same folks whose sufferings and wisdom (The Old Testament) gave rise to Christianity (The New Testament). The fate of the world’s first and only democracy established by, and predominantly managed by, Jews, has now galvanized the attention of much of the planet. I don’t have high expectations, but I have taken three days to generate this essay to provide some comfort to Jews and to reassure them it is perfectly justifiable to vanquish terrorists and assure their bloodthirsty atrocities will not occur again. Britain did it to the Nazis, after they first recklessly annexed Sudetenland (and proceeded to give us all the Holocaust to demonstrate just how deeply wicked human beings can be). The Americans under Obama scoured the planet to murder Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (Osama bid Laden) in Pakistan in 2011. Nobody objected.

One returns the question that was raised at the outset.

Why on earth should Israelis be expected to adhere to different standards?

The only answer I can come up with is indentured, ingrained, ill-informed, misguided, moronic, pestilent antisemitism.

A.T.

(November 14, 2023)