Haviv Rettig Gur
Israelis saw something on October 7 the rest of the world didn’t and still mostly refuses to see, something with ramifications for the future that are still hard to calculate. We have not yet begun to see the fallout from October 7 in the Israeli psyche, what a future Palestine looks like when Israelis know viscerally what Palestinians aspire to do to them. And no, it isn’t about occupation. Hamas only recently started pretending to be Palestinian nationalists or to fly the Palestinian flag. It’s about a vision of religious redemption and conquest that no peace offer or compromise can ever satisfy - the thing that caused terrorism to spike at every peace attempt for two generations. I’ll put it bluntly: Even in a best-case scenario for Palestinians, in which they emerge from the destruction of Hamas with a state, as so many western observers want for them (and on my good days, so do I), it’ll be a Somalia. The Israeli economy will be closed to it for a generation. Trust will be less than zero. The worst will be assumed for a very long time and reaching deep into Israel’s progressive far left. And that’s the best-case scenario.
Dave Rubin
I just watched the 47 minute video. “Massacred in the most brutal of ways” doesn’t even begin the describe it. Slicing heads off with knives and calmly waking away with the heads. Throwing grenades into rooms with small children. Burning people alive. Raped women laying in piles. Point blank shooting elderly people in their kitchen. For all the horror, the sickest part was the foaming out the mouth, laughing, joyous celebrating by the terrorists as they did it. (All the while yelling religious slogans, never “Free Palestine.) Israel has shown unbelievable restraint in the face of this deranged, savage evil. I’ll try to write a longer thread on it later, but words actually don’t exists to explain it properly.