With one exception, nothing about October 7 surprised me.
The only exception was Israel’s lack of preparation. This also surprised almost all Israelis. My guess is that a combination of Iranian technology and Israeli complacency and incompetence led to the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Nothing else surprised me. Not the butchery; not sadism; not hatred of Jews; not the theology that made the massacre possible; not the support, or even the joy, in Gaza and among countless Muslims around the world; not the reactions in our universities; and not the support of the left (not the liberals).
The Middle East dispute
Since the 1970s, when I was a graduate student at the School of International Affairs at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, I had known what the Middle East conflict was: the Muslim rejection of a state Jew in the middle of the Muslim world. As far as I remember, my teachers – most fluent in Arabic and all experts on the Middle East – were wrong. Being secular themselves and generally having a sympathetic view of the Arab world, they believed and taught that the issue was one of land.
They were wrong. It was always about Muslim rejection of a Jewish state in their midst and a religious desire to destroy it.
In 2014, I presented a video for PragerU called “The Middle East Problem”. He explains the Middle East problem in five minutes.
This is how it begins:
When I was in graduate school at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University…semester after semester we studied the Middle East conflict as if it were the most complex conflict in the world when in fact, it’s probably the easiest conflict in the world. explain. This may be the hardest to solve, but it’s the easiest to explain.
In a nutshell, it is this: one side wants the other dead.
Fifty years ago, I knew that. Muslims know this. The Jews of Israel know this. And now, unless you’re on the left, you know that.
I ended the video with another truism:
Finally, think about these two questions: If, tomorrow, Israel laid down its arms and announced: “We will fight no more,” what would happen? What if the Arab countries around Israel laid down their arms and announced, “We will fight no more,” what would happen?
In the first case, there would be an immediate destruction of the State of Israel and the massacre of its Jewish population. In the second case, peace would be assured the next day.
Since October 7, you know it too.
Why are Jews hated?
There is no hatred comparable to the hatred of Jews. This is the longest hatred in history. It is the most universal. And this is the only exterminationist hatred: those who hate the Jews want them to be destroyed. There is a Hebrew statement that is probably two thousand years old and is recited during the Passover Seder service: “In every generation they rise up to destroy us. »
Note that the phrase does not say “to persecute us” or “to enslave us,” but “to annihilate us.”
The question is why?
I wrote a whole book – Why the Jews? — 40 years ago, explaining anti-Semitism. But I can sum it up in a few sentences: Jew hatred is largely the result of Jews being the chosen people. You can laugh at this idea if you are secular and inclined to do so. But those who hate the Jews did not laugh at this idea; they hated the Jews because of it – because they believed it and/or because it was true.
The Jews introduced humanity to the God that most of the world believes in; gave birth to the Bible which is the basis of the New Testament and the Koran; gave the Christian world its Messiah; and gave his morality to much of the world through the Torah, the Prophets and the Ten Commandments. Those who hate this moral code hate the Jews. The two groups that have attempted to exterminate Jews over the past hundred years, the Nazis and the Islamists (not all Muslims), hate this moral code. And they hate Jews because they embody it – compared to the Nazis and the Islamic regime of Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas, Israel is made up of saints.
So when I read about the horrors inflicted by Hamas on young Jews, old Jews, and Jewish babies, I was horrified, but not at all surprised. This is what the most harm of all generations does to the Jews. And that’s why non-Jews who dismiss Iran, Hamas, or Hezbollah as the Jews’ problem are fools. Tens of millions of non-Jews were killed because most people saw Hitler and the Nazis as the Jews’ problem.
In fact, aside from a growing hatred of Hamas and its Muslim and left-wing supporters, the only effect the events of October 7 had on me was to strengthen my faith in the election of the Jews.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and columnist. His commentary on Deuteronomy, the third volume of The Rational Biblehis five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible, was published in October 2022. He is the co-founder of Prager University and can be contacted at dennisprager.com.
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