This much must be said…the Hamas terrorists know how to play Israel…for suckers.
They’ve been doing it for years. They are still laughing about how they got Gaza in the first place. One morning, a few decades ago, the Israelis simply gave it to them.
That is worth a knee-slapping guffaw whether you are Hamas, or the Palestinian Authority, which was also gifted with numerous concessions.
Land for peace…you know? No peace? Well, we tried…with sacred Jewish territory. According to some, leftists, for example, nothing in Israel is sacred.
Everything, even Jerusalem, is negotiable.
At the bargaining table, surely the poker table, the Jews always lose, even when they hold a winning hand; Moshe Dayan, for instance, and the Temple Mount.
Jordan is still laughing at that giveaway to the Islamic Waqf. Too often, we Jews try to be more merciful than G-d. Abraham contested the Almighty for Sodom, and lost.
We’ve been lousy gamblers ever since, and the world is always ready to let us pull up a chair at any game of chance, because they can spot a sucker from a mile away.
Like gambling, as we say it here, life is about separating the winners from the losers. Fortunately, the Israelis are winners. Because they’ve been blessed with a Biblical spirit that is unconquerable, and as we noted it in a recent column about Mark Twain saying, “Jews are like horses. If they knew their own strength, we should be afraid to ride them.”
Abraham to Moses to David…who else has a legacy like this for bravery…and we are beholding it again from today’s IDF.
Meantime, however, away we go with the politics of foolishness and folly. Quick joke. For days, a farmer kept watching a man pushing wheelbarrows up ahead.
What could he be stealing, the farmer wondered. Until he realized that the man was stealing wheelbarrows.
Not funny, right?
Nor is it funny when thousands of trucks kept driving into Gaza carrying what cargo? Did Israeli Security not wonder what this was, and if it was cement, what for?
It was to build tunnels, stupid…and right under our noses…and nobody did anything to stop this…so that now our IDF guys have to risk life and limb to dismantle all that inch by inch.
Likewise, the Israelis are being hustled so far as the wounded as a consequence of the brutal fighting in Gaza.
Is this another case of Jews being more merciful than G-d? In Psalm 59, David says, “Destroy them in wrath. Dear Lord…destroy them until they are no more.”
Yet we learn that since Oct. 7, after all they did to us, at least 25 wounded Hamas terrorists were to be provided with the finest medical services at Israeli hospitals.
Do I need to repeat this? Because for me, this is totally incomprehensible. This takes the prize for folly of the worst kind. Some even call it treason.
In Israel, this is an ongoing discussion. What’s to discuss? You are at war, or you’re not? This is our bitterest enemy. What’s next for them? Dinner and a movie?
Damn this thing compassion, says Joshua Kane when he hesitates at a chance to finish off Ibrahim Hassan in the novel Indecent Proposal. So Jewish.
At present, there is an apparent dispute between two agencies over this very issue. The one says it is policy to provide medical care for wounded terrorists.
The other, led by the Health Minister, says, absolutely not, and fortunately, so far, this is the side that prevails, for a welcome touch of sanity.
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.