Moshe Levi is a freelance writer.
The only rule of Calvinball, as played by the titular protagonists of the popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, is that you can never play it the same way twice. As long as some new nonsense rule is implemented, it remains a valid game. While it’s great fun for a boy and his tiger pal, in the real world, Calvinball gets played for much higher stakes: lives, nations, democracy as a global project.
The trouble is that Israel is stuck in a game of Calvinball with Hamas, with the likes of the ICJ and UN serving as referees. How many times during this war for the rescue of our hostages and the extermination of the mad butchers who have become the darlings of cities across the democratic world does it feel like somebody has stopped the ‘game’, so to speak, and shouted, “new rule, new rule”?
New rule: just because you personally video yourself on GoPro cameras murdering and abducting Jews doesn’t mean you’re guilty of it.
New rule: if your country is attacked by hundreds of drones and missiles, you must not retaliate.
New rule: if you chase Jews off campus for refusing to grovel to terrorist supporters it’s not antisemitism, it’s just being “anti-Zionist”.
This is pure idiocy run amuck. The laws of war were established to prevent barbarity and wanton slaughter. They are a tool of the free world, founded on the principles of justice and conducting battle with honor when there is no alternative. For the laws of war to be leveraged to shield Islamist criminals, gangsters, murderers and rapists is a mockery. No country that considers itself a member of the democratic, just world should give the time of day to Hamas soldiers pleading for protection under laws of war which, strictly observed, would have seen their whole terrorist cabal imprisoned for life years ago.
When a terrorist army goes on a spree of mass murder, it’s celebrated as “decolonization” in universities once held in esteem. The victims of this onslaught are blamed for getting in the way of a genocidal Islamist empire fixated on purging Jews from their own land. The media whitewashes the murderers with what-about and both-sides cliches, the streets and campuses fill up with young radicals cheering for more death and slaughter, and the game of Calvinball continues.
There is no questioning of this spew of new rules or skewed definitions. If one of the droves of Palestinian Arab refugees Canada has allowed in stubbed their toe in Toronto, it would be taken to somehow constitute genocide in Gaza.
What does it take to end this cycle? Fighting in the courts and on social media is a losing strategy, because those are exactly the places where Hamas sympathizers are most prone to cry out “new rule!” every time their green-headband-sporting heroes boast about how many Jews they have killed, want to kill, and would kill if they got the chance.
To finish this absurd game of Calvinball requires that Israel and the Jewish people at large muster and blunt this onslaught of idiocy thrown at us. It takes willpower to brave the endless tide of jeers and “new rule!” cries, but Bnei Yisrael have always been a brazen people. If there is one thing we have it is willpower.
Here are some rules that could be followed:
-When a terrorist organization uses civilian houses to imprison hostages in, there can be no teeth-gnashing and wailing on social media when those houses are raided by Israeli soldiers to free those hostages and the terrorists who held them there shot.
-When a city is laced with tunnels for an army of murderous Islamists to wage guerrilla war from, it is plain military strategy to demolish every building that might hide a tunnel entrance.
-If a nation suffers a bloody massacre launched from an easily-identifiable enclave with set borders, that nation is being nothing but sensible to stop sending hundreds of trucks of aid across those borders to help the perpetrators of that massacre.
The people who break rules- rules of, literally, life and death, rules of how a war can be fought between nations -cannot come wailing and weeping to hide behind those laws when they happen to be losing a war they began with a brutal and grotesque violation of any envisioning of those exact laws. Israel can and should employ every tactic the nation's government considers necessary for victory, and may we soon see Hamas and their cultists reap a bountiful harvest from their bloody sowing.