In response to my column, “Why is Hamas calling the shots?” a reader writes that the main message of the article suited him fine.
But why don’t I SCREAM…as I do Chapter 8, in the novel, Compulsive? “There,” he says, “in the entire book, you speak out forcefully, brilliantly, and uninhibited.”
Well, here I am. I am writing as loud as I can.
A novel, by the way, imposes no rules on the writer. He can create his own world. Journalism imposes limitations. The journalist must confine himself to the world as it is.
In the article, I predicted that Hamas was going to parcel out the hostages a few at a time to keep the ceasefires going month after month, until there’d be only one left, to test Israel, once again, into a do or die dilemma as it was during the Shalit trade…1,000 to one. We are not there yet, but…
BUT will Hamas’s leading butcher, the savage with a shave and a haircut, Yahya Sinwar, ever give up his ace in the hole?
If he runs out of hostages, he is left with no more cards or lives to play, and it’s game over…time for the IDF to get back in action.
So, look for more tricks from this slick operator, who always seems to have an edge against Israel, for the time being, and in a world gone mad.
Have you heard? Besides the Pro-Hamas riots throughout America, the fruitcakes who run Oakland City Council have passed a resolution in support of the terrorists.
Can you hear me SCREAM?
Most of them are 23-year-old BLM/SJP delinquents who know nothing about anything, yet they get to run a town, even a country.
Seemingly millions of them are Rashida Tlaib clones, and if you wonder who runs our foreign policy, you are correct if you say Obama, or Biden, or Blinken.
But you are even more correct if you say Rashida Tlaib. Stumbling in the polls, Biden needs her Michigan/Arab district to pull him up, 2024.
No surprise, then, that Biden has fully switched sides. Now he warns Israel against doing anything harmful toward those “innocent civilians.” (There are none.)
That is no way to run a war, and he knows this, by way of saying that Israel ought to quit, surrender, and prepare to get squeezed out of existence through a two-state solution.
Now do you hear me SCREAM?
I’m writing as loud as I can, and so asking, will Israel’s leaders have the stomach to resume the fight? Let’s hope so, but given the track record of submission, and appeasement, nothing is certain…and those out there who blame Bibi for everything, well, yes, the buck stops with him, all right.
But up to the moment when the clock struck Oct 7, 100,000 leftists were stampeding against him in order to shut down the country.
They said they would, and they did, and so Gaza wasn’t even on the radar…since it was all about Get Bibi. The tempest distracted the nation.
Hamas saw a nation teetering…and ripe for the taking.
Can the IDF get its mojo back, if the time comes? Never underestimate those guys. They are the finest. Resolve, they’ve got. But so much momentum has been lost.
Meanwhile, Sinwar sleeps well at night. He’s got Israel and the rest of the world whistling his tunes, and people are GRATEFUL to him for measuring out hostages.
Yes, in this rotten world he.is their champ.
How are we…how am I supposed to feel at this exchange, three Islamic criminals for one innocent Israeli…and then what?
Yes, we cheer and hold dear every family being united, but the overall grief is all-consuming and unbearable.
Okay, I said that novelists are free to create their own worlds. But I could never create a world like this.
All that said, Israel will prevail, in G-d’s time.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.