Everyone who came to America were illegals according to the natives who were here. That was the way it was back then.
Now Islamist terrorists continue to want to take over the entire world as do the Chinese, Russians and Iranians.
So what's new? Is man is a born predator?
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No, Joe, illegal immigrants didn’t build America
By Rich Lowry
President Biden claimed illegal immigrants "built this country" after he referred to Laken Riley's alleged killer as "illegal."
Joe Biden doesn’t have a problem with illegal immigrants.
He’s made that clear in his shame-faced retreat from his impromptu use of the term “illegal” during his State of the Union address.
He regrets using the offending word, doesn’t want to disrespect illegal immigrants and believes that they are absolutely essential to the success of the United States.
“Look, they built the country,” Biden told Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC. He added that they are “the reason our economy is growing.”
Yes, where would America be without the essential contribution made to its economic vigor by desperate people crossing the border in violation of our laws?
This is all very revealing. Biden certainly sounds more like a president who has had a largely open border rather than one who, as he’s been insisting lately, wants to shut down the border if only Republicans will pass the legislation he wants.
Why, if Biden’s correct, would we deny ourselves the benefits of illegal labor?
It’s true that illegal immigrants overwhelmingly work once they get here; it’s why they come in the first place, after all.
But the idea that a fraction of all immigrants, whose numbers have only drastically increased the past couple of decades, “built the country” is a ridiculous fabrication and a profound insult to American workers, past and present.
Prior to today, the highest percentage of all the foreign-born in the US population was 14.8%, around the turn of the 20th century.
Roughly one out of seven people obviously weren’t responsible for the construction of America.
As for illegal immigrants specifically, they didn’t constitute the majority of any job category in America as of 2018.
Even construction workers — involved in the literal building of the country’s physical plant — were 65% native-born.
Biden is exaggerating, too, when he suggests the economy is growing only because of illegal immigrants.
But it is true that legal and illegal immigrants have made an outsized contribution to recent economic growth.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which aren’t flawless but capture the big picture, the total number of employed people in the United States increased by 2.3 million between February 2020 and February 2024.
Over those four years, the foreign-born employment level increased by 3.3 million, whereas the level of native-born employment is still down by a million.
Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that roughly half of those immigrant jobs are going to illegal immigrants.
Needless to say, this isn’t the political bragging point that Biden might think.
“Bidenomics — it’s been great for immigrants regardless of legal status” is not a slogan the president should want to use in a campaign against Donald Trump.
To attribute our economic growth to immigrants is to ignore the contributions of the 85% of the country that is native-born, and all its work, investment and spending.
The deeper problem is how the surge in immigrant labor coincides with a decline labor-force participation among low-skilled Americans facing direct competition from the foreign born.
A report by Camarota notes that the labor-force participation rate of native-born men without a bachelor’s degree is 75.6%, still lower than the pre-pandemic level of 76.3% in the fourth quarter of 2019, and lower than in 2006 (80.5%) and 2000 (82.6%).
Constantly adding less-skilled immigrant workers to the labor force may increase overall GDP, but it doesn’t make the United States wealthier on a per capita basis, the more important metric.
According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis, greater levels of immigration will increase GDP “by an average of 0.2 percentage points a year from 2024 to 2034, leaving real GDP roughly 2 percent larger in 2034 than it would be otherwise.”
On the other hand, real GDP per person “would be 0.8 percent smaller.”
Biden gives no indication that he sees such trade-offs. Who’d want fewer of the migrants “building our country” when we can have ever more?
Twitter: @RichLowry
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They are mainly pathetic tribal interloping leaches who cause trouble wherever they go. They are corrupt and lying murderers as well.
Ask the Jordanians, Egyptians, Saudis. Ask most any Arabs etc.
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Defining terror
President Biden claims Palestinians are not Hamas but can’t come up with who else they are.
In the waning days of his first, and possibly last, term as president, Joe Biden is understandably looking to secure his legacy. As recent events have made clear, he pins a great deal of hope on being the man to bring peace at last to the Middle East. To foster this, he has been leaning into his brand as an elder statesman, dispensing advice that he considers both wise and sensible. It is in that spirit that he recently tweeted:
“I won't mince words. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. And Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. In fact, they're also suffering as a result of Hamas' terrorism. We need to be clear-eyed about that reality.”
Compared with other questionable statements he’s made of late, it scarcely deserves a mention. But when the leader of the free world makes a claim, it merits further inquiry. In particular, it brings to mind a certain question. If the Palestinian Arabs are not Hamas, who are they?
To be sure, Biden is not the first to make such a claim. In the early days of the war, moderates filled social media with such slogans as “Free Hamas from Gaza.” Celebrities trying to find an unoffensive middle ground are quick to separate Hamas from civilian citizens of Gaza. It’s a very understandable desire. If the Palestinian Arabs are not Hamas, that carries with it two very important implications.
First, it means that the citizens of Gaza are innocent victims of the war, and should be treated as such. Instead of there being 134 hostages remaining in captivity in the Gaza Strip, there would be over two million, and the same heroic effort to liberate them should be made as has been done for Israel’s own people.
Moreover, if they are in fact innocent victims, Israel must take this into consideration when planning any future response. To date, Israel has gone above and beyond in limiting civilian causalities, even at the cost of their own soldiers. But if every civilian is a hostage, an entirely new paradigm comes into play.
Secondly, it means that Israel has a viable partner for peace. As this war has made clear to most Israelis, the two-state solution, never viable to begin with, is dead and buried. There is simply no second party to negotiate peace with. Yet even now the United States and Europe cling to long discarded dreams that there is another side with whom to bargain. And if the Palestinian Arabs are indeed a peaceful and separate group, they represent a viable and obtainable peace partner in future negotiations, and any two-state solution becomes once more a possibility.
With so much at stake, the President’s comments are certainly worth investigating. Especially with so much evidence to contradict them.
Israel had only recently left the Gaza Strip when the first legislative elections on 25 January 2006 Hamas won by an overwhelming majority of the vote. After the takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas on 14 June 2007, where Hamas executed its Fatah rivals (some by pushing them off rooftops) and claimed themselves as the sole legitimate government of the Palestinian National Authority, the normal citizens of Gaza happily went along with the changes.
But of course, in our early days, we all make poor decisions that we later come to regret. And perhaps it could be that the good citizens of the Gaza Strip, after so long under Hama’s brutal rule, recognized the error of their ways and repented their rash choices. The most recent PCPSR poll of Palestinian Arabs puts these theories to rest. The pool showed that 72% of all Palestinian Arabss supported the October 7 attacks.
More disturbing still, in the "moderate" 'West Bank', the number was 82%, a nearly 7-1 ratio over those opposed to mass murder and rape. in fact, in the 'West Bank', 85% of Palestinian Arabs are satisfied with how Hamas has been conducting itself since the war began.
Also worrisome is that a Hamas presidential candidate would win over Mahmoud Abbas by a nearly 5-1 margin if there were elections today. 60% of those who have an opinion support Hamas as a political party over all other parties combined. It seems that not only are the citizens of Gaza stratified customers, but the rest of the Palestinian Arab world is interested in importing the product.
But then again, these are just polls and actions do speak louder than words. So the actions of the average Gazan are well worth looking into, particularly their actions on October 7th. Hamas spent years creating the most complex system of tunnels the world has ever seen, massively larger than the entire London Underground.
It seems highly unlikely that such work could have gone unnoticed and indeed It was done in the open. Findings show that tunnels appeared as part of the building’s original blueprints. Including Shifa Hospital and the UNRWA headquarters. These tunnels were also dug under schools and even private homes.
Weapons were also found stashed in countless houses. If your government is building a vast underground tunnel system under your house and hiding RPGs under your bed, it seems likely that you might notice that something was going on. And the most recently reports find that 40-50% of Gazan citizens did know - not only about the tunnel network but about their intended use prior to the attack.
On the day of the program itself, it was the average non-Hamas citizens who followed Hamas terrorists into Israel, they made up the members of the third wave of the massacre. It has now been shown that these same Gazans who we are told are not Hamas, were not only complacent but active participants in all the types of unbelievable horrors that occurred that day.
And after the initial horrors had passed, it was these Palestinian Arab 'civilians' who took hostages, many of whom have still not been returned, some of whom are dead. When one hostage escaped, it was these none-soldiers who captured him and returned him to his capturers.
It’s hard to say that Palestinian Arabs are hostages of Hamas. How many hostages have hostages of their own?
It would seem that based on all the evidence, if Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs are different, it is a difference without a distinction Thus far, no other alternative has presented itself.
Where are the Gazan activists loudly denouncing Hamas?
Where are the protesters taking to the streets calling for the terror group to be overthrown?
Where is any voice issuing from Gaza that refutes anything related to Hamas’ actions?
To be fair, it could be argued that standing against Hamas is deadly. But this has been the case outside of Gaza as well during this war. The world over, Palestinian Arab protestors are quick and vocal to denounce Israel, but nary a word about their Hamas oppressors. Where is the international Palestinian community standing up and showing that they are different?
Who, then, according to Biden, are the Palestinian Arabs? The world may never know. The president has never given an answer. He is apparently content to define something by what it’s not. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know the answer himself.
More likely, the president is willfully turning a blind eye to the answer. It’s an answer that most Palestinian Arabs have made irrefutably clear. That what they want is the genocide of Jews and the total destruction of Israel.
Just as the president can claim that Palestinians are not Hamas, he might claim that I am not an ornithologist. But I do know that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is very likely a duck.
Ilan Goodman is a museum collections professional and exhibition curator. He also serves as a rabbi and educator. He made Aliyah to Israel in 2011 and lives with his wife and children in Beit Shemesh.
And:
Israel Has No Choice but to Fight On
By Bret Stephens
On Saturday, President Biden warned Benjamin Netanyahu’s
approach to the war in Gaza was “hurting Israel more than helping
Israel.” The Israeli prime minister replied the next day that Biden was “wrong.” The rift between the two leaders means that Israel risks losing its most important pillar of military and diplomatic support.
I’ve argued that Israel has no choice but to destroy Hamas as an
effective fighting force. Here I imagine a conversation with an
intelligent critic of that view.
Thousands of Gazan civilians, many of them children, have now
been killed, bombed in their homes or out of them. Now they
face a humanitarian catastrophe in the form of medicine and
food shortages, even starvation.
How can you possibly justify it?
Like all wars, this one is horrible and heartbreaking. But I blame
Hamas, not Israel, for the devastation.
Look, Hamas is a terrorist group whose leaders should face
justice for the massacres of Oct. 7. But it isn’t Hamas’s bombs,
missiles or artillery that have leveled Gaza. It’s Israel’s.
Right. And Hamas, which started the war, could put a halt to that rain
of fire tomorrow. It rejected a six-week cease-fire that would have
paused the fighting and allowed much more aid in exchange for the
release of roughly 40 of the remaining 100 Israeli hostages. It could
stop the fighting for good by simply surrendering.
Hamas may not want to stop the fighting, but there’s little we
can do about that. Israel can stop its assault, and thus spare
Palestinian lives. And because Biden has leverage on Israel, he
should use it.
The best way to get Hamas to stop fighting is to beat it. If Israel were
to end the war now, with several Hamas battalions intact, at least four things would happen.
First, it would be impossible to set up a political authority in Gaza that isn’t Hamas: If the Palestinian Authority or local Gazans tried to do so, they wouldn’t live for long.
Second, Hamas would reconstitute its military force as Hezbollah did in Lebanon after the 2006 war with Israel — and Hamas has promised to repeat the attacks of Oct. 7 “a second, a third, a fourth” time.
Third, the Israeli hostages would be stuck in their awful captivity indefinitely.
Fourth, there would never be a Palestinian state. No Israeli
government is going to agree to a Palestinian state in the West Bank
if it risks resembling Gaza.
All that is speculative. The reality is that children are hungry, the
sick aren’t getting medicine, innocent Palestinians are being
killed, now. It’s wrong to avert theoretical harms by causing
actual ones.
It might be more speculative if this weren’t the fifth major war that
Hamas has provoked since it seized power in Gaza in 2007. After
each war, Hamas’s capabilities have grown stronger and its
ambitions bolder. At some point this had to end; for Israelis, Oct. 7
was that point.
Maybe, but why can’t Israel be much more judicious in its use of
force?
Do you have any specific suggestions for how Israel can defeat
Hamas while being more sparing of civilians?
I’m not a military expert.
I’ve noticed that whenever Israel’s critics lecture the country on better calibrating its use of force, they don’t have any concrete suggestions.
Are Israelis smart enough to fight better, but too stupid to appreciate
the diplomatic consequences of not doing so?
Maybe they’re thirsty for vengeance.
The reality of urban warfare is that it’s exceptionally costly and
difficult. The United States under Barack Obama and Donald Trump
spent nine months helping Iraqi forces flatten the city of Mosul to
defeat ISIS, with results that looked even worse than Gaza does
today. I don’t remember calls for “Cease-Fire Now” then. Hamas has
made it even more difficult for Israel because, instead of sheltering
civilians in its immense network of tunnels, it shelters itself.
Even so, that doesn’t relieve Israel of the obligation to prevent a
humanitarian catastrophe.
It’s not as if Israel is not lifting a finger. On Sunday alone, 225
truckloads of aid entered Gaza through Israel, according to the Israeli
military. But you seem to think that the government of Israel’s primary responsibility is to the welfare of the people of Gaza. It isn’t. As with any government, its obligations are to its own people.
Israelis are mostly doing fine now. It’s Palestinians who are
dying. Israel has spent the last five months degrading Hamas’s military capabilities to the point that it seems to have run out of rockets to fire at Israel.
Around 200,000 Israelis are living as refugees inside their own country because its borders aren’t secure. No country can
tolerate that. Israel didn’t come into existence to showcase the
victimization of Jews. It came into existence to end their victimization.
Well, since you’re alluding to the Holocaust, it surely can’t be in
Israel’s interests to be seen perpetrating a version of it in Gaza.
Just look at the worldwide explosion of antisemitism since Oct.
7.
That analogy is false and offensive on many levels. Israel is fighting a war it didn’t seek, against an enemy sworn to its destruction and holding scores of its citizens hostage. If Israel had wanted to wipe out Gazans as Germans sought to wipe out Jews, it could have done so on the first day of the war.
Israel is fighting a tough war against an evil enemy that puts its own civilians in harm’s way. Maybe there should be more public pressure on Hamas to surrender than on Israel to save Hamas from the consequences of its actions.
As for anti-Semitism, the war hasn’t generated a torrent of
anti-Semitism so much as it has exposed it.
Probably a mix of the two. Still, you make the mistake of
imagining that Hamas can be defeated. You can’t kill an idea,
particularly by generating the terrible resentments that are
surely brewing in Gaza and throughout the Arab world.
By that logic, the Allies should have spared Germany because
National Socialism was also an idea. You may not be able to kill an
idea but you can defang it, just as you can persuade future
generations that some ideas have terrible consequences for those
who espouse them.
So what do you suggest the Biden administration do?
Help Israel win the war decisively so that Israelis and Palestinians
can someday win the peace.
And:
Hamas could be expelled from Qatar if deal not reached - WSJ report
Report: Arab negotiators aiming for an urgent two-day ceasefire before the beginning of Ramadan due to increased Rafah operations.
The Wall Street Journal published an interview with Senior Hamas official Husam Badran on Saturday, discussing Hamas's hard-line stance of only agreeing to a permanent ceasefire and shedding light on details of the negotiation process that are lesser known to the public.
Badran begins the interview by claiming that Hamas is still willing to negotiate a ceasefire deal, saying claims of Hamas disinterest come from Israel and America. “We didn’t declare negotiations have been stopped. We are the party most keen to stop this war,” he said.
According to Egyptian and Hamas officials, Qatar has threatened to expel Hamas officially from their base in Doha if they don't come to an agreement, but Badran denied this claim.
That being said, he stated that Hamas's official position is still a permanent ceasefire and allowing displaced Gazans to return to their homes.
As far as the negotiation process goes, he revealed that the discussion of swaps of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners has taken a back seat to relieving the humanitarian situation and ending the fighting.
Israelis demand the release of hostages held in captivity by Hamas,
He blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the failure of the talks so far. “The only complication in the negotiations is Netanyahu’s stance, who refuses to deal with anything on the table,” he said. “Netanyahu is the most dangerous [person] for the stability of this region. He is the fire starter.”
He also claimed that he was "concerned" about rising tensions in the West Bank if a deal is not reached before Ramadan. Later on in the report, however, he revealed that Hamas met in Moscow with other Palestinian officials, including secular politicians and the PIJ, where they agreed to "expand operations in the West Bank and Jerusalem."
The report had details of the negotiation process from statements by Israeli, US, and Arab officials as well, but didn't name them.
Other mediators are hoping for a short-term ceasefire with partial hostage releases
It said that unspecified Arab negotiators were aiming for an urgent two-day ceasefire before the beginning of Ramadan due to increased operations in Rafah.
The report also claimed that Arab mediators are trying to salvage a proposal that involves a 40-day ceasefire and the release of around 40 hostages.
According to the report, Egyptian officials said that they had hoped to resume talks on Saturday, but neither side was being cooperative. Arab mediators have also confirmed, according to the report, that Hamas has refused to give Israel a list of living hostages as part of a deal.
Badran denied that claim, saying there had been no official Israeli request for such a list. He said many of the prisoners are held by other factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, making them harder to locate and guarantee as part of a deal.
The report also talked about Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who recently broke his radio silence and has also made demands about a potential deal.
Sinwar believes Hamas currently has the upper hand in negotiations, according to Egyptian officials. They based this claim on internal political divisions within Israel, disagreements within Netanyahu’s wartime government, and mounting US pressure on Israel to do more to alleviate the suffering of Gazans.
Arab and Israeli officials said that they fear that Sinwar is deliberately undermining the talks in the hope that Ramadan will galvanize popular Arab support for Hamas and that there will be an escalation of tensions in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
And:
The Prime Minister's Office issued a statement in the name of the Mossad, stating that the Hamas terror group seems uninterested in a hostage swap deal.
"Mossad chief David Barnea met Friday with the head of the CIA, Bill Burns, as part of the unending efforts to advance another agreement to bring back the hostages," the statement read.
"At this stage, Hamas is redoubling its position as one who is not interested in a deal and is aiming to ignite the region during Ramadan, at the expense of the Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.
"It should be emphasized that at all times, the negotiations and cooperation with the brokers are ongoing, in an attempt to reduce the gaps and advance agreements."
Earlier this week, it was reported that Hamas is unwilling to compromise on the release of archterrorist Marwan Barghouti.
According to Maariv, which quoted the Jordanian news outlet Al Ra'i al-Youm, Khalil al-Hayya, deputy to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, also sent a document to Egypt's intelligence chief, saying that Hamas demands a cessation of the war in Gaza for one week before the hostages are released, as well as Israel's complete withdrawal from Gaza and international guarantees that the Israeli forces will not return to the area.
Hamas is also demanding freedom of movement throughout Gaza and that those evacuated from northern Gaza be allowed to return home. The terror group will also not provide the information on which hostages will be released or their conditions, and the Israeli hostages will be released in stages.
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Charlie Kirk and "Pastor John" are a breath of fresh air. Their kind might be able to save our union but it will require more, like them, to take risks, be prepared to lose possessions and stand up to the neo Marxists who have taken control.
We gave Henry and Jess a check and I gave Henry Charlie Kirk's "How We Win." Everyone one should read it because it is outstanding, readable and "oh so right on!"
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Pray for Pastor John’s Resistance Against Woke School Boards
TPUSA Faith
Richard,
“We did the Pledge of The Allegiance, and it was a sham to listen to people get quiet when we said that we're a nation under God."
Was what Pastor John Amanchukwu said when getting up to speak at a school board meeting for Mesa Public Schools in Arizona.
Pastor John is continuing to fight for children as he stands against WOKE School Boards while on his School Board Watchlist Accountability Tour.
He delivered an amazing speech in front of Mesa Public Schools. I’d encourage you to watch it, Richard.
Pastor John Amanchukwu
Pastor John needs YOUR prayers more than anything. Pray for him as he goes into the darkness of the school system to FIGHT for your children’s heart and minds
These School Boards are pushing polices that allow for your children and grandchildren to read books about transgenderism and homosexuality without the parent’s consent.
So, Pastor John is not just combating School Boards; he’s fighting for the hearts and minds of our children, the next generation of believers.
My friends at TPUSA Faith are making a stand for the inerrancy of Scripture, the sanctity of life, and the God-given distinction between male and female. And TPUSA Faith is doing this in your children’s and grandchildren’s schools. But we need your help to continue this fight.
Please PRAY for Pastor John as he gears up to continue his School Board Watchlist Tour.
Thank you for standing with TPUSA Faith and Pastor John as we fight for this great nation and to protect our children.
God bless you
Charlie Kirk
TPUSA Faith
+++++++++++++++++++
I never doubted it.
The truth has a way of coming out as long as good people seek it because it is there underneath scumbags like Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and you know the rest.
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NewsLink: Liz Cheney, January 6 Committee Suppressed Exonerating Evidence Of Trump’s Push For National Guard
Former Rep. Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee suppressed evidence that President Donald Trump pushed for 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the nation’s capital. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.
| READ MORE ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Bari Weiss: The Holiday From History Is Over A free society is only as strong as the citizens willing to defend it. Reflections and videos from my time on the ground in Israel |
|
This is a special kind of story. Inside my column you’re going to see three mini-documentaries from our recent trip to Israel. The first two cover the massacres at the Nova Music Festival and Kibbutz Kfar Aza and the aftermath of those tragedies. In the third, we travel to the West Bank to talk to ordinary Palestinians about October 7, the war, and their futures. To watch the other interviews I did on that trip, and to make sure you never miss a Free Press video, subscribe to our YouTube channel. —BW
KIBBUTZ KFAR AZA — On a recent Tuesday morning I found myself two kilometers from Gaza. Every few minutes we could hear the boom of a 155 mm howitzer sending fire across the border, but I was trying to focus on the historian Michael Oren, who was talking to me not about the war raging around us but about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general who walked the world 500 years before Jesus was born, some 200 kilometers from the spot we were standing.
“Cincinnatus was a farmer. All he wanted was to be at his plow,” Oren told me as the winter rain poured down. “But every time he went back to his farm the Roman Republic came to him and said, ‘We need you to come back. We need you to lead an army.’ ”
“The Cincinnatus myth was the foundational myth for the American Revolution, specifically for Washington himself,” Oren said. “It is also the most foundational Israeli myth. It is David Ben-Gurion. It is Moshe Dayan. It is Ariel Sharon. These people just wanted to farm. But they were called to pick up arms and defend their country. Israel is the Cincinnatus nation.”
Many have never heard the name Cincinnatus in Israel, where the Romans are remembered more as the empire that destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, slaughtered and sold its inhabitants, and renamed the land Syria Palestina. But the Jewish people—who long outlived that empire and reconstituted the Jewish national home in the land the Romans had once conquered—are also democratic heirs to Cincinnatus.
On the morning of October 7, ordinary Israelis left their offices, closed their laptops, and abandoned their fields to pick up weapons, in many cases without waiting for instructions from the state or its army.
On that black morning, and in the weeks and months since, these men and women have displayed the kind of heroism most thought belonged to the mythic past, or the generation of 1948, when the armies of five invading Arab nations turned every kibbutz and moshav, and every town and village, into a battlefield.
For twenty-first-century inhabitants of the Middle East’s start-up nation, such individual and collective courage had become something to be studied in the past—not enacted in the present. Not inside the land of Israel. Not in the twenty-first century. And certainly not by them.
But I met successors to Cincinnatus everywhere I went.
They are ordinary Israelis like Inbar Lieberman. Lieberman is a 25-year-old woman who is the security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am. She killed five terrorists by herself on October 7. The rest of her team repelled an additional 20 over the course of four hours. “I’m not a hero,” she says. “I wasn’t there by myself.”
Ordinary Israelis like my friend Jessica’s father-in-law, Noam Tibon, a 62-year-old grandfather who got in a jeep with his pistol and his wife, Miri. He drove south from Tel Aviv and shot his way through terrorists to liberate his son and granddaughters, who were hiding in their safe room in Kibbutz Nahal Oz from hundreds of Hamas terrorists who were swarming the kibbutz.
Or like Yair Golan, another 61-year-old retired general—his career cut short because of his leftist views—who drove alone through the fields near the Gaza Strip and followed pins dropped by panicked young people hiding in the bushes at the Nova music festival to save them.
Or like the special forces reservist who had just returned from vacation outside Israel. Then he got the call. “I didn’t understand by any means the scale of what we were about to get into. We’re on our way out and the commander says, all right, guys, load your weapons. We’re about to get into a firefight. And I was like, oh, shit, I did not see my Saturday going this way.” He went on: “There was no centralized command. No one was telling us what to do. We were just doing our job and going from one place to the other and doing our best.”
Or like Masad Armilat, the 23-year-old Arab Israeli I bumped into at a gas station where we stopped to buy a coffee near the killing fields of the music festival. On that day Armilat, who typically works in the storeroom, saved scores of wounded people. Meantime, his father “left his house and helped close all the paths into Ofakim, where the terrorists would have entered.”
Or like Rachel Goldberg Polin, who told me more than 100 days after her only son, Hersh, had his arm blown off and was taken into Gaza—she didn’t know if he was alive or dead: “I still think we have so many blessings.” She invoked Psalm 23—the poem King David wrote about his cup overflowing. “Right now it overflows with tears,” she said, “but I know it will overflow with joy again.”
Or like Arab Israeli news broadcaster, Lucy Aharish, who recalled watching that morning as her husband, Fauda actor Tsahi Halevi, having aged out of the reserves, nevertheless put on his old uniform and walked out the door. She thought through a plan she never imagined she would need: “If the terrorists come into this building, should I hide my son Adam in the washing machine? Or in the closet?”
To understand why this kind of courage—physical and psychological and even spiritual—needed to be summoned, and needs to be still, you need to understand the extent of what happened on that day.
This is a necessity not only because without an honest reckoning of the horror unleashed by Iran’s proxy on October 7 it is impossible to understand the existential urgency of the war of defense Israel is fighting, but also because nobody—not even America—is immune from history. And because, ultimately, a free society—including our own—is only as strong as the citizens willing to defend it.
Since the earliest hours of Saturday, October 7, we have been reporting on the war in Israel. Within 48 hours of the attack—before we understood that the southern part of Israel was still overrun with terrorists—our team had interviewed dozens of people: survivors who crawled out of the music festival, off-duty soldiers and older men who grabbed guns and headed into the fire, families whose loved ones had been stolen away into parts unknown. In the weeks and months since, we have published more than 50 pieces about this subject.
So I thought I knew.
But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and standing in a killing field.
That’s where I met a young woman named Michal Ohana one recent afternoon.
Watch Michal and other survivors:
It was a windy day and we sat in plastic chairs in the spot where terrorists came to murder her and her friends. Michal had come from Portugal, where she was surfing, and had come here, to the site of the Nova music festival, because her friends were organizing it and they threw the best parties. She told me about hiding under a tank for seven or eight hours. “At some point I just saw that I was bleeding, and I understood that they had shot me in the leg. It was just war,” she said. “They fired the RPG on the tank. They threw grenades at us. I lost my hearing. And it was just waiting for death. We all knew we were going to die, we just didn’t know which way and when.” She said the Shema and waited.
So did Mazal. She’s Ethiopian Israeli and a new survivor in a land built by the old ones, who smokes as she talks about how the terrorists tied ropes around her legs and started dragging her into Gaza. By some miracle they thought she was dead. Her two best friends were—murdered on either side of her next to the highway.
“It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life. And I’ve seen a lot. And I’ve fought a lot,” Yair Golan, the retired general, tells me of what he witnessed that morning. “It’s hard to explain all this, what it looks like. I drove my car [on the road] between bodies. Bodies were spread all over the route, you know, from both sides of the route. On my right-hand side there were still fighting exchanges in kibbutzim.” He said it was “like entering into hell. Entering into a different universe.”
That’s what the special forces soldier who was early to the scene told me too. He had seen a lot in his more than eight years in service. But he says “nothing came close” to what he witnessed October 7.
“We saw from pretty far off the whole road that it was packed with cars. Hundreds of cars blocking the road, and all of them are blown up, destroyed, run over by tanks on fire. Absolute chaos. That’s the only way I can describe the feeling on this day. It was like a zombie apocalypse. Like those crazy films where you see the beginning when everything just goes to shit. That was the vibe. Everything’s on fire. Everything. You smell burning plastic and bodies and you hear gunshots everywhere.”
The fires that raged at Kibbutz Kfar Aza have long since burned themselves out. I stood there in what was once a family’s home but now was just blackened walls with no roof. The people who lived in this home were identified by their bones and their teeth. What was once a floor is now dust.
A few blocks away I stood in the burnt-out shell of a humble bungalow. A young couple named Sivan and Naor once loved each other here. There are remnants of them: a new pair of Sambas. An old bra. Some dirty dishes in the sink. But mostly there are holes. Hundreds and hundreds of gaping bullet holes in the room where the 23-year-olds were slaughtered. There are words scribbled on the wall: “Human remains on the sofa.”
Step into Kibbutz Kfar Aza:
“The word pain is a privilege compared to what we feel,” Rachel Goldberg Polin says to me about the experience of Hamas stealing her son, and I feel the words more than hear them. “Trauma is being hit by a truck after the truck has moved on. The truck is still on us. It’s like asking someone who is being raped what being raped was like.”
There was not a single conversation that I had in the week I spent in Israel where the person did not say a version of the following: There was an October 6 version of me and an October 7 version of me. I am forever changed. I am a different person.
And that is another sense in which the story of the ancient Roman requires modification. The binary of war and peace, the pastoral and the military, is a retrospective luxury of powerful nations or empires. A small democracy, whose very existence is contested by populous autocracies, does not have the privilege, as Cincinnatus did, of going from the field of battle to the field to till. Israel’s citizen-soldiers are scientists, artists, and farmers, just as they are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Israeli citizens, whether they serve or not, are not—as one Hamas leader said of Gazans—someone else’s problem.
“It’s like after you knock your finger with a hammer, you don’t feel anything for a while,” the journalist Gadi Taub said, describing what Israelis have gone through since Hamas’s invasion. “People haven’t begun to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it will change Israel. The tectonic plates have moved, and nothing in the system has yet absorbed or changed to accommodate what happened.”
The public intellectual and Bible scholar Micah Goodman told me in Jerusalem that the country went through a collective near-death experience. Imagine an entire society that, between sunrise and sunset, peered together into the abyss. “For the first time in our lives, we had a moment where we could imagine that the whole thing was over. That the whole thing ended. You know how when individuals have a near-death experience, they’re transformed. Because they learned that life should not be trivialized. As a country, we had a near-death experience, and now we’re transformed because we know that Jewish sovereignty should not be taken for granted. It can’t be trivialized.”
Israel’s founding fathers and mothers, having known a period when Jews didn’t have a state—a period in which six million Jews were murdered—understood the difference between statelessness and sovereignty in their bones. The paradox of their extraordinary achievement is that modern Israelis, who might appreciate the distinction intellectually, could dismiss the dread alternative even when presented with visible evidence of a fragility they consigned to the past. Or at least they could until October 7. On that day, the thought exercise became real.
If Israel, in other words, is currently fighting a second war of independence—an existential war necessary for the survival of the state, as everyone here believes—then the young men and women of this country are more than soldiers. They are latter-day Ben-Gurions. They are a new generation of founders. Indeed, as Gadi Taub told me in Tel Aviv, one of the slogans of this war is lo noflim midor tachach! Which loosely translates to do not fall short of the ’48 generation.
Hearing that phrase, I couldn’t help but think of America. These days in the U.S., it is nearly impossible to imagine a modern George Washington—a leader who would charge into battle ahead of the troops, put the nation ahead of himself, and willingly give up power. Can you picture the people running our hedge funds and start-ups leaving them behind for the battlefield? Or a rallying cry about not falling short of the 1776ers?
And yet before October 7, despite the country’s universal draft, many Israelis say they, too, believed that history and heroism were things that belonged to the past. Theirs was a nation, like ours, that was addicted to likes and to TikTok, hopelessly unserious, run by an elite with all of the noblesse but none of the oblige.
Then the most serious thing imaginable was upon them. And the most serious men and women I have ever encountered emerged to confront it.
They sound like the writer Haviv Rettig Gur: “We will continue as our forefathers and foremothers did before us: to live on our sword. We will defend ourselves. We will stand united against enemies who want to destroy us. And they actually want to destroy us. This isn’t World War I–style propaganda. They say it. They’re actually coming for us,” he told me in Jerusalem. “We’ve become humble and we’ve become simple: we stand up for ourselves.”
Listen to the voices of Palestinians:
Like everyone paying close attention to this war, I am thinking about the future or death of the two-state solution. I am thinking about Hezbollah in the north and when that front might explode. I am thinking about the impossibility of a nuclear Iran. I am thinking about the Red Sea and Rafah and the young men setting out to those places. I am thinking about the innocents killed in Gaza. I am thinking about the women and children trapped there by terrorist leaders and the kidnapped Israelis still held there—all of them hostages.
But the questions that echo inside me since I returned home—flying from a country living inside history to a country where many people believe we are still outside of it, immune to it—are more basic ones.
Questions like: What would I do? What would the people I know do if we were thrust into a near-death experience? If we had to fight for homes and our families, and the homes and families of our fellow citizens? The kind of seriousness I saw in ordinary Israelis—where does it come from? Does courage emerge spontaneously out of necessity? Or is there a quiet wellspring inside some people or some cultures waiting to be tapped? Do we have that here in America? Would we answer the call if it came? Or would we be like the Americans in this recent poll who admitted that they would flee rather than fight?
Those are questions whose relevance grows more urgent by the day for those of us living in the free world.
I asked Haviv Gur if he thinks that a similar waking-up moment will come for America and Americans.
“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there was a long period of time when there was nothing in the Pacific that could have stopped a Japanese landing in California. And that sense of vulnerability created what Americans still today think of as the greatest generation,” Gur said. “Everyone should feel safe all the time. But crisis is a powerful and profound and often extraordinarily positive influence on our lives.”
Today we feel so far from the truths that reality forced on our greatest generation. So many have lost sight of the fact that there are some things worth fighting for if they are not to perish from the earth.
But as Gur put it: “The basic Israeli message is we are still human. We’re still living in a human world. We are still living in history. Be ready.”
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In a previous memo, I mentioned we attended a lecture, by Seamus Bruner, who discussed the coming loss of your freedoms because radical billionaires want government to grow and become all powerful.
He talked about the various entities, like the Rockefeller Foundation, who are behind all of this and how Bill Gates, Soros and Bezos are making fortunes off greening America. Lo and behold, the story of green cement was in today's WSJ and the benefactors are Bezos, Gates and Soros as Seamus discussed. The same is true regarding Gates purchase of farm land and so it goes.
I won't be around to watch those remaining getting stripped of their freedoms and free choices to live as they wish because, through technology, government will control your choices, your every move and even your bank account, savings and investments. Add to the "loss list," the car you drive, the way you heat your home, if you even can afford one, and the list is endless.
1984 is coming to a theater near you and it is going to be staggeringly tragic.
Yes, pandemics were meant to control you so expect more as your freedoms dribble away and the billionaires make profits of your misery.
Sad indeed!
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