Early this morning I saw a young neighbor, 17 or 18 years old, leaving to commence military training, weighed down by a huge backpack and flanked by two smiling parents, friends of mine whose smiles didn’t fool me. I knew they were doing their best to mask the nervousness they felt inside, especially with another son already battle-fatigued from his tours of duty in Syria and Gaza. I tried to offer my own masked smiles and encouragement, concealing the anger I felt at seeing yet another neighbor’s kid shuffling off to a war that Hamas started and that so much of the world has encouraged and sustained.
But while I wish that our swords would turn into ploughshares already, a moment’s thought made me aware that here’s yet one more young man I saw growing up turning into a superhero before my eyes. Just yesterday, I saw another neighborhood youth come back from Gaza. I remember him as a remarkable Torah scholar with refined taste and manners, yet here he was with bulging muscles from the heavy equipment he’s always needing to carry. And so I realized: It’s not just this kid or that one who is returning home with superpowers. It is Israel that is becoming one right under the nose of a world hellbent on blocking the Jewish state’s peace and advancement.
For the undeniable truth is that Israel today is far more powerful than it was on October 7, 2023, in both absolute and relative terms. And this is despite fighting an exhausting war that has been euphemistically referred to as bearing seven fronts when a thousand is more like it. While the seven fronts pertain to our Arab and Islamic neighbors who have been pillaging, kidnapping, murdering and shooting missiles, most of the non-Muslim world joined in on their fight from Day One in various kinds of dogpiling efforts from the moral support of ripping fliers with pictures of kidnapped babies while authorities looked the other way to various boycotts, libels, sanctions, threats, and sabotage efforts.
Whether it is the New York Times spinning made-up narratives out of threads supplied by Hamas to impart legitimacy to claims of genocide or mass starvation or European governments’ announcements that they will recognize a Palestinian Arab terror state; or the United States, before the change in government, prohibiting Palestinian Arabs from leaving an active war zone, gumming up that war zone with “humanitarian aid” projects and lending its weight to various slanders about Israel and its leadership, the barrage of snarling opposition has ceaselessly come from every direction.
And yet despite all of this, and I would argue because of all of this, Israel today is stronger and every one of its opponents is considerably weaker. I used to joke (in a black-humored way) that there was a Hezbollah missile pointed directly at my home—just the well-worth-it price of living here. But that cost of doing business, as it were, has been obliterated along with the Radwan Force’s private parts.
The same can be said for the Woke-Islamist alliance that animated the previous US administration. They worked day and night, and set in motion a flow of hundreds of millions of US taxpayers’ dollars to bring down the government of a democratic ally and ensure an Israeli defeat, yet today they are as impotent as Hezbollah. And while it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that they will return to power, they and all of their partners in the thousand-front war against Israel will find that Israel today (and even more so tomorrow) is an enormously more powerful and resourceful country.
If a future “progressive” antisemitic leader returns to the White House, he will find that Israel has an abundance of weapons of its own manufacture that the US previously withheld. And while the Biden Administration’s “Taliban partners” may still be in power in Afghanistan, its Hamas and Palestinian Authority “pay to slay” allies will no longer be employable partners in crime.
A funny thing is happening to the Western world (if it is possible to find humor in losing one’s collective mind). While there is nothing funny about dementia when it arises in decent people, there is poetic justice in its lodging itself in the twisted thinking of pro-genocide, pro-rape supporters of Islamo-barbarians.
Take, for example, France and the UK, the first two countries to announce their intention to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly next month. These once great empires are throwing their plunging prestige behind an initiative that will absolutely never occur yet which is ironically and unintentionally taking shape in their very own countries. Want to see the two-state solution in action? Look no further than France’s "banlieues”—a word that once just meant suburbs but today connotes France’s 751 “sensitive urban zones,” where a native Frenchman dare not enter, where violence, looting, torching cars and Sharia law are all part of the charm.
And how’s the two-state solution working out in the UK? Ceding Luton and Leicester might not have seemed at first too great a loss, but now much of London is a no-go zone while Rotherham’s grooming gangs preying on British girls have spread nationwide.
See what’s going on here?
All those diplomatic demands for a two-state solution slung at Israel didn’t go nowhere. Their force has slowly hollowed out the societies issuing these demands. That’s why a majority of schoolkids in Brussels are Muslim, 41 pecent in Vienna.
Americans are also experimenting with the two-state solution. Barack Obama pledged to “fundamentally transform” the United States and he did just that in his three terms. New York City is on the cusp of providing a two-state paradigm for the greater New York area, buttressed by Patterson in the Jersey banlieues. Michigan, America’s first Palestinian Arab state, is represented in Congress by the keffiyeh-wearing and terrorism-adjacent Rashida Tlaib.
So if the “progressives” return to power determined to confront Israel, cheered on by the growing population of nihilst youth raised on the crude propaganda pumped out by failed mainstream media institutions, they will instead take down their own country.
The last two years have shown just how resistant Israel is to concerted global military and economic pressure, yet the woke ideology compels devastatingly effective self-destruction even as it takes swipes at the Jewish state.
-The French blocked Israeli participation in their international arms exhibition, but countries (even those professing distaste for Zionists) are lined up to buy our defense products.
The UK’s foreign secretary protests Israeli building plans in its capital while Londoners can safely navigate an ever-shrinking ambit of their own capital city.
-Woke cities in the US threaten to boycott Israel economically, yet global investors have pushed Israel’s stock market to the world’s top performer.
-Even Arab billionaires know where their pita is buttered and vote with their pocketbooks for Israel because to them business is business.
Paradoxically, the way events have unfolded have shown that the more the hatred flows, the stronger Israel has become and the more Israel’s opponents have weakened. So the next time you get rankled by the 24/7 chorus of hatred that’s been raining down on us with added intensity over the past couple of years, open your mind to what all of this metaphysical energy is doing: crippling its exponents and strengthening us. I’d love to see those kids from my neighborhood invest in peaceful enterprises instead of having to shove off for Gaza. But I know they are transforming themselves, and their country, into superpowers.
This article was written in honor of the writer's late mother z"l, whose yahrzeit was this week.
Gil Weinreich, author of Superpower: Israel’s Unstoppable Rise (2016), lives in Israel’s eternal capital. His latest book is a work of historical fiction set in Babylonia during the months of Elul and Tishrei called Who Killed Rav Adda bar Abba?: A Talmudic Murder Mystery.