WHERE IS THE TRIUMPHALISM?

PALESTINIANISM PERFECTED THE MILLENNIA-LONG WAR ON JEWS. EVEN THEY FAILED.

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

This is a quote from Golda Meir that has always seemed to me to be condescending and sanctimonious.

As I considered her words more deeply after the events of the past week — the ceasefire agreement, the return of the remaining hostages and the end (for now) of the conflict — I have a different perspective on what she meant. I think her words expose the heart of this conflict in a way nothing else does.

In the long history of anti-Jewish agitation and atrocities, Palestinianism stands out as having perfected the artform. This is to take nothing away from the enemies of the past, whose imagination and creativity in devising new and ever more effective ways of tormenting and annihilating Jews has been outstanding. But Palestinianism has identified an Achilles heel that no other enemy has devised.

On the streets of Israel right now, we are seeing jubilation. But this jubilation is not the triumphalism of victors of past wars in human history. It is celebration at the return of the hostages and of the end of the war. It is not celebrating victory in the war. (In fairness, it remains to be seen whether the current cessation of violence represents an actual victory, but that is aside from my point for now.)

Overwhelmingly, Israelis are celebrating an end to the death and destruction on both sides. This is something that may be almost unknown in the history of humans fighting one another.

This is where Golda’s words took on fresh meaning for me. Despite the incessant wall of noise we have heard worldwide over the past two years about Israelis (and Jews) embodying the essence of immorality and malevolence, precisely the opposite has been proven true.

Let’s step back a couple thousand years.

Jews literally invented thou shalt not kill. (Or, if you are inclined that way, had thou shalt not kill endowed upon them by God.) This was a central part of the covenant that took place when the Hebrew people became a nation at Mount Sinai. Yeah, there were 612 other commandments Moses brought down the hill, but this one is sort of the biggie, the one that placed the sanctity of life at the heart of what it means to be a Jew — and, through Jews and their God-endowed role as a light unto the nations, to humankind. Remember: until this moment in history (or theology, as you wish), there was no people who claimed any divine interdiction against the idea of murder. This is the foundation stone, also, of a larger struggle with righteousness, justice, morality, ethics and humanity that is at the heart of what it is to be a Jew.

Thou shalt not kill is a foundation stone of the larger infrastructure of ethical monotheism that Jews introduced to the world.

Across the centuries, partly because of their tenacity in clinging to these ethical values, Jews were cast out and their sense of belonging was systematically negated by the societies in which they lived. Their religiosity was denied — seen as outside the realm of societal and divine acceptance and relegated to the margins of spiritual legitimacy. This negation transformed into a racial one: Jews were told they did not fit into the national or ethnic categories of the lands they called home. And then, under the Nazis, this negation reached its most horrifying form: a denial of their very humanity, a monstrous lie that Jews did not even belong to the human species.

And yet, even that ultimate attempt to physically annihilate the Jews failed. Not only that, but the surviving Jews incredibly clung no less tenaciously to the ethical values of their ancestors. Even the most comprehensive, thorough, genocidal external forces could not eradicate the Jewish presence from the world.

This is around the time when a group of Arab and Muslim thinkers invented a new strategy, exploiting the people who would come to be called Palestinians in a backdoor strategy to undermine Jewish identity and existence from the inside.

They would devise a strategy in which the Jews were forced to betray their own values, to destroy the thing that made Jews Jews so that the devastation was no longer merely an external action upon the Jewish people but one that penetrated the physical existence of Jewish identity and poisoned the internal, spiritual redoubt that had sustained the Jewish people despite the centuries of external assault. It would force the Jews to act against their own values and, if all went according to plan, destroy the only thing no one else could take away from them: their morality, their struggle to seek justice, their censorious duty to thou shalt not kill.

Palestinianism’s master strategy, its genius if you will, is to ensure that the very people who gave humankind the concept of thou shalt not kill are backed into corners where the options are to kill or to see their own children, parents, siblings and neighbors raped, immolated, beheaded, eviscerated again, again and again.

A people whose very identity is wrapped up in debating and struggling over what is moral and just are insistently, endlessly, immorally and unjustly forced into situations where they face no moral or just options.

Palestinianism, the motivating ideology of Hamas and Israel’s other most venal enemies, raises children to kill and be killed, to view martyrdom as the acme of human achievement. It is an ideology that believes Palestinian lives are worth less than the objective, however fruitless, of defeating Zionism.

It does not seek to minimize the number of dead Palestinians, but to maximize the number. It deliberately and emphatically teaches young Palestinians that death is better than life, that life is filthy and detestable and death is sacred and desirable. This message is inculcated into young Palestinians with their mother’s milk, through every aspect of Palestinian society — education, religion, popular culture. There are millions of examples of this, perhaps none more succinct than the monument at Al-Quds University declaring: “Beware of natural death; do not die, but amidst the hail of bullets.”

At the risk of Jewcentricity, there is nothing more anti-Jewish than this, of teaching your children that death is better than life. But the entire thing is Jewcentric, because the Palestinian strategy of nihilism, of teaching kids to grow into martyrs, is a direct strategy aimed at the Jews. They will kill the Jews, sure. But they will take it a step further and kill that which makes Jews Jews: the very concept of the sanctity of life — Jewish life, Palestinian life and, as we saw on October 7, all life that stands in their way, Canadian, Nepalese, American, Thai, whatever.

Palestinianism has mastered a strategy that even the most venal enemies of the past had never perfected. It is about backing Jews into a corner, not to free Palestine, but to prove the Jews are not the people they claim to be, to force the hands of the Jews in ways that undermine not only the world’s belief that Jews are the carriers of ethical monotheism, that they are the inventors and guardians of thou shalt not kill. It is to “prove” that, for all the holier-than-thou Jewish words of morality, justice and sanctity of life, they are not only no better than the rest of us reprobates but arguably the worst of our entire sinful species.

This was the brilliance of the genocide libel. There is no moral affront greater than genocide. And there is no affront to Jewish values greater than this. Indeed, the very term had to be invented to describe the 20th-century Jewish historical experience. So the genocide libel does triple duty. It inverts Jewish victimhood, accusing the Jews of perpetrating the worst atrocities of their own people. It turns the world against the Jews the way accusations of well-poisonings and blood libels did in centuries past. But — and here is the brilliance of Palestinianism — it does what every external attempt to annihilate the Jews could not: it discredits and subverts the very thing that makes Jews who they are.

If this can be proven — if the Jewish ideas of thou shalt not kill and the much vaunted quest for tikkun olam, of justice, justice you shall pursue and lovingkindness and pikuach nefesh, and every person created in God’s image, and seeking peace and loving the stranger — can be proven to be nothing more than PR bumf and so many empty words, then the Jews will be destroyed, once and for all, not from the outside but through internal decay.

From the realization that, for all their chosenness and morality-babble and justice-pursuing, they are no better and probably worse than everyone else, then the very underpinnings of Jewish identity will be expunged and the entire people and their civilization will collapse of its own hypocrisy and cynicism, proven, finally, to be a sham.

Jews, in the strategy of Palestinianism, will be proven not only as imposters with no claim to the land but imposters with no claim to the thing that, even above the sanctity of the Jewish people’s connection to the land of Zion and Jerusalem itself, defines them: their claim to be the carriers of ethical monotheism, strivers for morality and pursuers of justice. Palestinianism seeks to “prove” the Jews are not people who believe in thou shalt not kill, who not only have no claim to the land Palestinians claim as theirs, but no claim to the morality upon which Jews have built their entire identity. When Palestinianism succeeds, Jews will cease to exist not only in their national form, Israel, but as a people, having proven, finally, that their identity, built on self-righteous assumptions of ethics, human conscience and goodness, is a complete and total deception.

Palestinianism has found the Achilles heel that millennia of enemies of the Jews, for all their creativity and innovation, could never quite figure, not only to take away Zion from the Jews, to steal the land where their history resides, but to force Jews to do that which is most abhorrent to their morality, to undermine the very things that define them to themselves, to the world and, for those who believe, to God. To force them to betray their own most scared values: to kill.

Has Palestinianism — and through it, the broader Arab and Muslim consensus and the marching millions worldwide — finally done what all the combined enemies of the Jewish people through history have failed to do, to divest from Jewish people the only thing more important to their identity than the land of Israel itself: their claim to morality, their quest for justice, the covenant they have to bring to humanity humanity iself?

Precisely not. Decidedly not.

Because everything I read and everything I hear from my Jewish friends and from Jewish commentators in the last several days is that now is a time for moral reckoning. A political one, yes. But a moral reckoning, above all.

The very fact that, for so many Jews, this moment is seen not as a time for triumphalism or resting on laurels of victory, but as the beginning of a time of reflection and teshuvah, is evidence of the real victory.

Now that the war is over (for now) Jews are responding as they do — by agonizing over their state’s actions, by agitating for justice not only for themselves but for Palestinians. They are not engaged in gloating, chest-beating, jingoism or anything resembling triumphalism.

On the contrary, Israelis and Jews worldwide seem overwhelmingly to be launching a process of introspection, analyzing what they were forced to do in the horrific depths of an unprecedented war, what moral compromises and affronts to justice were perpetrated in their names.

If there is any triumph in this war, this is it. It is not military victory that is the victory here. It is the joy that the hostages have returned and the realization that (for now) the dying on both sides will end.

This is what Golda meant with her words.

Above all, the fact that Jewish people are engaged in that process of moral interrogation, and have never stopped questioning what is ethical and just, especially in the most unimaginably trying situations like we have witnessed in the past two years, is the surest proof that the culmination of 2,000 years of increasingly imaginative strategies to strip the Jewish people not only of their lives but of that which is most sacred to them, their commitment to all life but also to morality and justice, have failed profoundly.

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