Hey, beloved tribe.
When I was a little kid, I had a book with the title Three To Get Ready. It was a chapter book about three kittens named Gigi, George and Ginger.
There are children’s books — like Frog and Toad, Charlotte’s Web and City Dog, Country Frog — that are as profound as anything I’ve ever read. And for me, at least one story within Three To Get Ready was so indelible that I hunted it down on the internet, decades after it had gone out of print, so that I could read it to my own kids.
In this story, it’s the kittens’ birthday and they each get a colorful rubber ball to play with. But when George’s ball rolls near Gigi, she takes it for herself. She sits with one paw on her own ball and one paw on George’s, and from that moment forward, she refuses to budge.
At first George is distressed. He spends some time trying to persuade Gigi to give back his ball. But she won’t. So after a while, he shrugs it off and he and Ginger play with her ball instead, batting it back and forth between them and chasing it around the room.
Gigi wants to join the fun, but she can’t. If she doesn’t continue to sit there, rooted to the spot with one paw on each ball, she will relinquish her control over both.
So she sits frozen as the other kittens frolic and play all afternoon. She sits still as stone as they have a delicious birthday dinner of fish. Soon she is miserable. She’s hungry and bored and her body starts to ache from holding her stiff pose for so many hours. She remains trapped in place as they move onto birthday cake and ice cream. She misses out on every good thing the day holds.
The genius of the story is that the reader mostly feels sorry for Gigi. The book is too artful to moralize. There’s no talk of good and evil, just the terrible paralysis and spiritual poverty of malice and greed.
I flash onto this story all the time whenever I think about what Islamism is doing to the Middle East.
Here it’s important to note that I’m talking about Islamism as opposed to Islam. I have no doubt whatsoever that most Muslims hold moderate views. It’s my understanding, per a recent Pew poll, that 75%-80% of Muslims would readily choose peace and a high quality of life over forcing the most extreme version of Islam on those with a different spiritual path.
The problem is that the slim minority of Muslims who are extremists — 20%-25% — is still 400,000,000 to 500,000,000 people, whereas there are only 15 million Jews in the entire world.
Western progressives have decided that Hamas is fighting for a Palestinian state, but this is pure projection. Hamas is not seeking, first and foremost, anything good for the Palestinian people. Their cardinal priority, instead, is the death and/or expulsion of every Jew in the region.
People constantly remark that Gaza could have been Singapore on the Mediterranean. But that wasn’t of any interest to their leadership. All those billions in international aid went not into infrastructure or economic development or education or health services. It all went into nothing but terror.
Hamas doesn’t want to make beautiful use of the land they have. They want to possess it all, even if that means they destroy it all.
Even on college campuses this past year, you could hear this sentiment echoed by their student activist proxies: We don’t want no two states! We want ALL OF IT!
Now, of course, they have some ability to hurt Israel, and they do. But generation in and generation out, they hurt the Palestinians exponentially more. And this will always be true, because Israel embodies the love and vitality of life itself, while jihadism is a death cult spiraling ever deeper into self-destruction.
Though the Western narrative insists on framing this set of dynamics as Israel vs. Palestine, it’s actually jihadism vs. moderate Islam and it’s playing out all over the Middle East. If jihadism is a giant squid, the Islamist Republic of Iran is its head. In every place where moderate and extremist Islam battle it out, the IRI is there to side with extremism and repress any hope of progress, pluralism and secular democracy.
And every country touched by those IRI tenacles is poisoned, weakened, imperiled.
The IRI went to extraordinary lengths to back the murderous Bashar al-Assad against the insurgents who opposed his despotism in Syria. It backed the Houthis and al-Qaeda against President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi in Yemen. It continues to back Hezbollah in Lebanon, which would likely be destroyed beyond repair if Iran manages to drag the terror group into a full-scale war with Israel. All those countries are in shambles in the wake of Iran’s interference.
I spent most of the weekend wondering whether another devastating war would be underway by Sunday evening after Hezbollah’s disastrous strike on Majdal Shams, a Druze town in the Golan Heights. And while it was not at all surprising that the U.S. media would try to frame this atrocity as somehow Israel’s guilt, the headlines took this disingenuous spin to Olympian heights.
ELEVEN DEAD IN ROCKET ATTACK ON ISRAELI-OCCUPIED GOLAN, screamed the BBC. Never mind that it was twelve dead, not eleven. There was no mention whatsoever of Hezbollah, or the fact that the victims were all children and teens playing soccer.
Can you imagine the howls of execration rising around the globe if Israel had shot that rocket and killed a dozen kids playing ball?
It feels as if the soul-crushing grind of these events will never end, and now Israel is perilously close to an all-out war on its northern front as well as in Gaza. Hezbollah is much better armed, much better trained and organized, and in every way about ten times more formidable than Hamas. Such a war would be catastrophic for all involved. It would make the interminable months since October 7th seem like a mere prelude. It would decimate Israel and leave Lebanon in the shape Gaza is in now. I pray the powers that be find a way to avert it, because it would be a war in which all sides would lose far too much.
And yet. I’m entirely confident that Lebanon would lose more. Israel would recover. But it’s very possible that Lebanon — already on the brink of the abyss — wouldn't ever.
One thin silver lining: over the weekend, Kamala Harris pledged “iron-clad” support for Israel in the wake of the Golan Heights attack. I don’t doubt her support of Israel at all, and I don’t care what kind of bone she has to throw Dearborn, Michigan between now and the election.
Okay, fam. Let’s hope the week gets better from here.
I’ll be back with you Wednesday and again on Friday, and then I’ll be out of the country for nearly the whole month of August.
Please note: I will absolutely post during that time! But not on anything resembling a regular schedule, because too many factors will be beyond my control.
In the meantime, let’s send both Israel and the Democratic Party all the help we can muster.
Much love to you all.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Slight typo in the 20-25% of Muslims. It should be 400-500 million, not hundred thousands.
Love the story of the kittens! Thanks. I almost hope Israel wars with Hezbollah; they shouldn't be there; we have to get rid of them.