The war’s aims won’t be achieved, the hostages won’t be returned through military pressure, security won’t be restored and Israel’s international ostracism won’t end.
Israeli soldiers run as they carry a stretcher towards a military helicopter during an exercise near the border with Lebanon, February, 2024.Credit: AP Photo/Ariel Schalit
We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology. There’s a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves.
Some of us maliciously lie. Others innocently. It would be better to find solace in some airy carb with a total-victory crust. But it might just be a bagel. When the solace ends, the hole remains. There’s no way around it. The good guys don’t always win.
My favorite book is “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It feels good all over to think that even after 51 years, nine months and four days, Florentino Ariza will consummate his love with Fermina Daza. Gabriel García Márquez was a fabulous writer, but letters don’t always reach their destination. Sometimes beautiful love is cut short, painful and bleeding until death arrives. That’s life. Sometimes there’s a good ending, but quite often there isn’t. Wars are like that, too.
After half a year, we could have been in a totally different place, but we’re being held hostage by the worst leadership in the country’s history – and a decent contender for the title of worst leadership anywhere, ever. Every military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit – the military action should lead to a better diplomatic reality. Israel has no diplomatic exit.
It has a scoundrel for a leader, someone with no capacity for leadership or decision-making, a person who loses his sense of good judgment over a free cigar. Yet the electorate put its faith in the current prime minister to the tune of 32 Knesset seats.
Theoretically, we could have been in a better place. The shock of the outbreak of the war could have been a starting point for a swift, powerful, aggressive, eminently justified campaign to quickly root out Hamas wherever that was possible. It could have then been replaced by a coalition of countries with money and good intentions to carry out reconstruction, with global and Arab backing, along with the Palestinian Authority. We could have created a viable alternative to Hamas in Gaza. After six months, there already might have been the first signs of independent government there. Every day and every minute, better decisions could have been made. But that’s whom we elected – a suit with a person attached.
We can’t say it, but we’ve lost. People have an inclination to believe in the best and be optimistic, hoping that tomorrow will be okay, that we are in a process that in the end will be more successful. That’s the most fundamental failure of human thought: the notion that the direction we are taking is a good one, that we just need to get there already – that in just a little more time, with a little more effort, the hostages will be returned, Hamas will surrender and Yahya Sinwar will be killed. After all, we’re the good guys, and good will triumph.
It’s the same mentality that leads to the notion that “the Iranian regime will soon implode” and other notions that have more to do with Hollywood scripts than life itself. They’re not the truth and it relates to something that’s uncomfortable. After all, it’s uncomfortable telling the public the truth.
It’s unpleasant to say, but we may not be able to safety return to Israel’s northern border.
My conclusion from October 7 as a journalist is that what’s “uncomfortable” is the most dangerous thing for our security and our future here, that being addicted to feeling good is itself what’s dangerous. We need to tell the truth, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it hurts, even if some people deplore it, even if it lowers morale.
We need to stand up to the Bibi-ist propaganda machines even if attack dogs are sniffing at our crotch. If on October 1, someone had said that the chief of military intelligence was incompetent, that military intelligence could plan successful operations but was incapable of providing a warning about a coming war, that the Shin Bet was dozing and that we were about to get the whooping of our lives, such a person would have been perceived as crazy, defeatist and out of touch. Certain politicians would have called for such a person to be charged with spreading false news. There were so many signs that the military was in bad shape, but we wouldn’t see them – because we believe things are all right.
It’s unpleasant to say, but we may not be able to safety return to Israel’s northern border, to what had been before. Hezbollah has changed that equation, to its own benefit. That’s the situation.
We constantly tell ourselves about an imaginary deadline – April, May, September 1 – and if Hezbollah keeps it up until then, we’ll give it a thorough shellacking. The deadline keeps being pushed back. The border region remains empty. The deceit continues. There now seems to be a high probability that for years, anyone driving along the border will be a target. Tel Hai will fall again.
And that’s true on every front: Not all hostages will return, either alive or dead. The whereabouts of some are lost, and their fate will remain unknown. They’ll be like the downed airforce navigator Ron Arad. Their relatives will go around sick with worry, fear and apprehension. From time to time, we’ll launch balloons in their memory.
No cabinet minister will restore our sense of personal security. Every Iranian threat will make us tremble. Our international standing was dealt a beating. Our leadership’s weakness was revealed to the outside. For years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that its awakened in time.
In part it’s the military’s sacred place in Israel that makes it so hard to admit defeat. You can’t say anything bad about the military. Only when it comes to October 7 are you specifically allowed to talk about a disgrace. Since then, we’ve been lions.
Granted that many combat soldiers are indeed lions. They got up and left home. They fought, demonstrated skill as soldiers and chalked up impressive tactical achievements. Our defeat doesn’t mean they’re not good soldiers, that they didn’t make an effort, that they didn’t deliver or risk their lives, that they weren’t prepared to do whatever was required. It means that the combination of military capabilities and the politicians’ conduct produced an unfavorable outcome. The spin doctors keep jumping up yelling that “you’re hurting soldiers’ morale.” In truth, that’s easy to put across because who wants to come out in opposition to the soldiers?
So we keep fooling ourselves.
Along with natural psychology, there are the machines plying lies and deceit. There’s a political camp the very survival of which pretty much depends on a “victory.” That camp has long since lost all touch with truth and reality. We’ve gotten to know its leader, that human Pinocchio. For months, he’s been talking of “total victory” and of being “a step away from victory.” And for a couple of months, he’s been saying that we’re going to enter Rafah “right away,” tomorrow, tomorrow, here I go. I would believe TV reality figure Ohad Buzaglo telling me I’m his one true love before I would believe one word from Netanyahu.
The system is to procrastinate for as long as possible, and in the meantime – lie. The army of spokespeople is hollering. And in recent months, right-wing Channel 14 has been giving rise to a new mouthpiece, a “shababnik,” as the ultra-Orthodox community calls people on the community’s margins, by the name of Motty Castel. If Yinon Magal and Erel Segal are submissive slaves to the father-king, Castel is a serf to the king’s son Yair Netanyahu. I’ve seen freer people at the Dungeon club.
This week Castel broke through Channel 14 screens to promise the people that victory is at hand: “I’m being contacted by a lot of citizens [who ask]: ‘Have we given up on Rafah?’ I’m saying with all due responsibility that we will enter Rafah. The prime minister has said too many times himself that we will enter Rafah and he can’t forgo entering Rafah. Furthermore, he also said in one interview that we’re going to have to do it on our own, contrary to the position of the United States. We will do it. You can calm down. It will happen.”
Rafah is the newest bluff that the mouthpieces are plying to fool us and make us think that victory is just moments away. By the time they enter Rafah, the actual event will have lost its significance. There may be an incursion, perhaps a tiny one, sometime – say in May. After that, they’ll peddle the next lie, that all we have to do is ________ (fill in the blank), and victory will be on its way. The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished.
The more the mouthpieces shout that “we’re winning,” the clearer it is that we’re losing. Lying is their craft. We need to get used to that. Life is less secure than before October 7. The beating we took will sting for years to come. The international ostracism won’t go away. And, of course, the dead won’t be coming back. Nor will many of the hostages.
For some of us, life will get back on track, with the petrifying fear of an imminent repeat. And for some of us, life won’t get back on track. Those people will walk among us like the living dead. That’s what we voted for. That’s how it is. We need to get used to the sad reality in our homeland.
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Comments
17 responses to “Saying What Can’t Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat”
The Israeli soldiers are willing to kill for the Zionist state but they aren’t willing to die for the Zionist state.
None of the TikTok generation Israeli Defense [sic] Force’s soldiers have the courage to venture down into Hamas’ tunnels. They’d rather keep waging war against Palestinian infants and toddlers.
The white supremacist Jews of Israel are cowards and losers. Let’s hope Hezbollah wipes Palestine clean of the low life genocidal Jews that have murdered their way into Palestine.
Jews are NOT white/Caucasian.
I will be “courteous”.
“Who is ‘we’ kemosabe?”
Point? – Don’t assume everyone is on your side.
Rothschild and Balfour had zero right to create Israel in the first place.
Everything since has been contrived and wrong.
You are quite right, Peter Corlis: “Rothschild and Balfour had zero right to create Israel in the first place.”
Israel is an illegal squatter state on Palestinian land
Israel will not stop until it has achieved its goals, that is, all of the land. Parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Sinai Peninsula. Natives of these countries will become 2nd class citizens for cheap labour.
The good guys have won. The good guys are the Palestinians. The Israelis are the bad guys who have inflicted the longest holocaust in modern history on the people whose land they have stolen and the most bestial, brutal, evil, cruel, murderous military colonial occupation in a century or more.
Israel is illegal and immoral. It always was. Israel debases Judaism and is a travesty in a civilized world, particularly since it claims to be a Western democracy. But Israel was invented in lies, founded in lies, constructed in lies and maintained it lies.
You are right, Israel has lost but it was never the good guy.
The writer demonstrates the same Israeli delusion he talks about.
He says: Theoretically, we could have been in a better place. The shock of the outbreak of the war could have been a starting point for a swift, powerful, aggressive, eminently justified campaign to quickly root out Hamas wherever that was possible.
As the occupier and coloniser and a brutal, cruel and murderous one at that, ISRAEL WAS NEVER JUSTIFIED IN RESPONDING TO OCTOBER 7 WITH GENOCIDAL VIOLENCE. Indeed, it had no right to respond with any violence.
Only an idiot thinks that ‘rooting out Hamas’ could ever be justified let alone possible. Hamas exists, because of the occupation and the continued colonial subjugation and dispossession of the Palestinians.
You could root out every last Hamas member and build a play Lego prison which suits Israel in Gaza and NOTHING would change. There would be a new Hamas, and if destroyed, another and another and another and another, each more determined, desperate and better trained until Palestine is free.
There are 6 million in Occupied Palestine, 2 million with inferior rights in what is called Israel and 8 million in the Diaspora and the problem which Israel calls Hamas could only ever end if the Israelis exterminated every Palestinian on earth, all 16 million of them.
IT’S THE OCCUPATION STUPID. It is not Hamas, the problem is Israel, the occupation, the theft of Palestine, nearly a century of cruelty and injustice and the continued colonial dispossession and murder of the native people of the land the Zionists,Israelis, Jews illegally occupy and colonise.
Rosross, Amen to that. Too bad our legislature in the DC can’t figure it out.
Even more critical, it is not your homeland. It was never your homeland and it will never be your homeland. It is Palestine where, for the moment a bit is called Israel.
Jews are a religion and no religion gets a right to a homeland or self determination.
Zionism is an atheist, fascist, political movement which laughingly claims God gave them Palestine. No political movement gets a right to a homeland or self determination.
Israelis are illegal. They always were. If they had been smart and not intolerant racist bigots they would have created one State where the European colonisers shared the land graciously and equally with the native Palestinians. But no, they believe the Palestinians are subhuman, sort of like insects, with no rights to anything. Idiocy writ large as egregious bigotry.
Israelis have made themselves not just illegal but truly evil as the last remnant of a racist colonial mindset which has no place in a civilized world.
They deserved to lose just as the Nazis deserved to lose and for the same reasons. The Star of David now ‘flies’ on equal footing with the Swastika in the minds of people of conscience and ethics around the world.
How is it possible that Israel lost? They are still bombing and killing hundreds every day. Victory is when Israel no longer exists and Palestine restored in full, AND Netanyahu and his murderous gang hung from the neck until dead. That is winning
“Certain politicians would have called for such a person to be charged with spreading false news. There were so many signs that the military was in bad shape, but we wouldn’t see them – because we believe things are all right.”
The first thing that disappears when any people are being whipped up into a war footing is the right to dissent, whether right or wrong, and in point of fact those are actually the EXACT people that you need most to hear from at these specific points in time – not those who are simply cheerleading the party line(s).
I read about this Israeli man, Meir Baruchin, a school-teacher, who had made some posts that I both agree with and disagree with, however I am quite convinced that he believes what he is saying and that his motivation is justice and the best outcomes not only for his own population, but other peoples, which is – once again – who you want to listen to in times such as these.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/13/it-is-a-time-of-witch-hunts-in-israel-teacher-held-in-solitary-confinement-for-posting-concern-about-gaza-deaths
What I noticed pertaining to Mr Baruchin’s ‘scourging’ is that depending on the ideology of the news outlets reporting his arrest, solitary confinement, firing, public abuse, each outlet stresses the most extreme opinions – I do not agree with the attributed quote of “It is permissible for an occupied people to do whatever is necessary to succeed in their struggle” for example, because there are limits to inflicting abuse even if your opponents are engaged in wrongdoing, however much of what is attributed to him is mundane, protected opinion.
To sack/search his home, confiscate his communication devices, jail him in solitary, and take video of him being harrassed enmasse by his students for this nonsense is in part an indictment of population dynamics innate to all humans when war is looming. When this is combined with extreme tribalism however, this is no longer considered merely wrong-think, but full treason or betrayal.
While I do not personally believe that Mr Baruchin is entirely correct, I think that if instead of him being strip searched, thrown in solitary confinement, subjecting him to orwellian assault to deter anyone else from speaking out, if those like Mr Baruchin had been part of the decision making process or involved in consultation from the outset, there would be a lot of people alive today that have instead died totally unnecessary deaths, both prior and subsequent to the Hamas attack on Israel.
If you look at the video of this man being hounded by teens with their cell phones protesting the fact that he had managed to retain his job, and consider that this is the future generation, the relevant lesson has not merely been missed, it has been completely trampled and rejected, which is a far more dangerous problem than Hamas or Hezbollah could ever present on their own.
Hamas, Hezbollah, or whatever, the white supremist Jews of Palestine/Israel have been murdering Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, and others for over 70 years. Millions have been murdered and tortured by the white Jews of Palestine. Retaliation against the white Jews in any form is justified and long overdue. Let’s hope we can force the genocidal maniac Jews back to New York and other places that they came from.
Jews are NOT white/Caucasian!
Jews will find a way to survive as they have always done, by cheating lying and murdering.America may not survive for the same reasons,
The international jew/synagogue of satan wants war and chaos, NOT peace and stability.
Make the drum and the chant so loud and incessant that they annihilate themselves out of self-hated.
9/11: israel did it
https://wikispooks.com/w/index.php?title=9-11/Israel_did_it&oldid=127470
Exterminate rats.