Dr Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders of Israel and a [constructive] critic of the Jewish state when she believes it is warranted. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human, where she may be contacted.
Dear beloved people of Israel,
Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur 5785 found you at war.
It is a war that was inevitable, whether initiated by you or by your enemy. Yet, I implore you to defeat your enemy utterly. Compromising on this will prove fatal for you. Let me explain.
You are under enormous pressure from what you believe to be your ally and benefactor to fight this war only to get to compromise with your enemy, the forces of jihad. If your aim in this war is to “get to the negotiating table,” then you will be defeated, because this is the Middle East.
Not defeating your enemy is to leave your enemy victorious, and so yourself defeated. Every time you mowed the lawn (or “changed the equation”) in Gaza, you left Hamas stronger, because you defeated yourselves by not defeating Hamas. In their eyes, they humiliated you. Each time Hamas celebrated victory, you scoffed at their irrationality and delusion. Alas, it was you who were irrational and deluded. I will clarify.
Soon after 7 October last year, the question “What does victory look like?” seemed to be on everyone’s lips. The answers were serious in the beginning, e.g., “wipe out Hamas”, the kind of answer that was a good starting point. But the backsliding began straight after, underpinned by “You can’t defeat the ideology”, never identified, but always presented as an axiom. I am here to tell you that you have no choice but to defeat “the ideology”. This will be clear if you see the war the way your enemy sees it.
When Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the joint Houses of the US Congress in July, he briefly referred to the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. This history is most relevant to the challenges you face, and it was a good move to bring it into the discussion. He touched on how these two totalitarian Powers were defeated, but disappointingly, skipped over what was most significant: defeating those enemies utterly and destroying their ideologies. Eighty years on from that victory, and we are still too squeamish to remind ourselves of what we had to do. Back then, we were clear.
Fortunately, there may be no need, this time, for a Dresden or a Hiroshima, before “the ideology” can be destroyed. Peculiar to the ideology currently across the frontline from you is a generalised seeking of death, unlike Kokka-Shinto, in which the honour to seek death was bestowed upon only a select few. This means that the ideology that drives the war in which you find yourselves now embroiled must be vulnerable to something other than the death of your enemy. This vulnerability you must find.
I encourage you to look at the long history of jihad and what constituted defeat for those engaged in it (I am assuming that by now, you know that the war against you is a jihad). Please keep international relations, geopolitics and conflict resolution out of it, for they are of no use in this instance. What are adherents of “the ideology” worldwide still reeling about to this day?
Place the history of jihad alongside any Friday sermon, khutbah, in which Israel (or prior to 1948, Palestine) was brought up. What leaps off the page is a universal anguish at Muslims having lost land that they had previously conquered in jihad. Of course, they will have been militarily defeated before losing territory. They recognised their defeat not in being vanquished in battle, but in being humiliated. There are many kinds of humiliation: getting your manhood blown off by a Jew-rigged pager is one of them; getting cornered or frog-marched by a woman or a dog is another; getting killed or captured underground is a third. A jihad army unable to defend Muslim territory is the ultimate humiliation, and the IRGC is the cockiest of all jihad armies.
Loss of “Muslim land” in Lebanon is the key to defeating the Iranian regime.
This is also why, if you want peace in Gaza, you cannot allow a Palestinian Arab administration of any kind in that territory, for the Muslims will not have lost land. Muslims must be left with no control whatsoever over anything in Gaza. Only then will Hamas be sufficiently humiliated to lose their stature amongst the “innocent Palestinians”. There are lesser humiliations, intermediate, if you like, such as putting a captured Sinwar on display.
Yes, yes, I know you are not barbarians, but do you want to win against barbarians, or not? Jews must resettle Gaza en masse so the character of the area changes, making the “loss of Muslim land” in-your-face and inescapable. This will be defeat from the point of view of your jihad enemy. Only then will you have victory in Gaza.
The same applies to south Lebanon that jihad had seized from the Christians. Any talk of enforcing Tzipi Livni’s ridiculous UNSC Resolution 1701, or otherwise merely driving Hezbollah to north of the Litani River, is not a humiliation and therefor not a defeat. It simply gets Hezbollah back to their Hudaybiyyah starting point. It’s like setting the clock back to the first day after Oslo. You have to ask yourselves: what will humiliate them?
You already have a massive advantage in that Hezbollah and the IRGC are reeling from the compounded effect of at least six humiliations: getting duped by Jews into having rigged pagers; so many of them getting their genitalia blown off; becoming the laughingstock of the Arab world; getting their leader killed; getting their leader killed underground; getting their leader killed on a Friday.
That’s a lot of humiliation, and you are going to have to top that. Please take me seriously when I say the Shi’a must lose territory. I seems to me that the easiest would be to concentrate them all into the northern Bekaa Valley and to control both the heights around them, and the connection to Syria. For this to work, you have to annex, yes annex, all of Lebanon south of the Awali River, not just the Litani. Thus will you secure your control over the Bekaa Valley and permanently remove territory from Muslim control.
Better still, though, would be to expel the Lebanese Shi’a into Syria, and let the Syrian people deal with them, a task they would gladly take on. I know that you recoil from what you’ve just read, but your instinct will be to make the same mistake as you are now making in Gaza: “they are not all members of Hamas.” That is not how it works.
You have to go back a thousand years to understand this. Their bond is allegiance, not membership. Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, the Taliban, ISIS, etc, etc, are not political parties that people join (even if many do do that), they are the contemporary version of tribes that people pledge allegiance to.
The mothers weeping on television at the death of Hassan Nasrallah and pledging their future children to “the resistance” are not members of Hezbollah, they are loyal to Hezbollah. Israelis were found imprisoned in the attics of private homes in Gaza, because their civilian owners are loyal to Hamas, just as the actual members of Hamas are loyal to Hamas. Do not make this mistake in Lebanon, for you will risk losing against Iran. Permanently driven out of the territory will not only destroy Hezbollah’s stature, and hence the wider Shi’a population’s loyalty to it, it will seriously humiliate the regime in Iran and set off a civil war within the organs of that state for losing Muslim land.
“Bringing the hostages back” does not mean that your enemy is defeated. “Returning the people to their homes in the North” does not mean that your enemy is defeated. From your enemy’s perspective, these are only compromises, not defeats, because they continue to exist, and they have not lost an inch of land.
The closing year has been a terrible one, but it bequeathed the new year with momentum and a fighting spirit. That spirit will have the highest impact over the next thirty-five days, when the more damage you can do to Iran, the higher the chances of a favourable US election outcome in November. Let me explain.
According to OSINT expert and U.S. Army veteran, Ryan McBeth:
America loves a winner. One of the things that Americans understand is audacity. Audacity being the desire to do something that’s so bold that it just shocks your enemy. Most Americans see that and they go, Wow! They are fighting back. There is a culture in this country that goes all the way back to 1776, when America fought the British and it’s one of the reasons so many Americans have guns. We all believe that one day, if we have to, we're going to cast away tyranny. That plays in the mindset of the average American: this idea of fighting tyranny.
The average American goes to the polls to elect a new President in thirty-five days, exactly. You have thirty-five days to wow the average American with your audacity, thirty-five days to fight tyranny, thirty-five days to make three kings: one in Tehran, one in Washington and one in Jerusalem.
Yes, dear people of Israel, on your shoulders lies a task no less weighty than that of kingmakers. Go forth in audacious war, and make kings.
Thank you for reading this letter to the end. I wish you, beloved people of Israel, Shanah Tovah.