The Hostage Murders and the New Threat

By John Podhoretz

Sunday, September 01, 2024

 

An American has been murdered in the tunnels under Rafah—and by at least one IDF account at some point in the past day or so. Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s parents, Rachel and Jon, have represented the best of us, the most civilized, the most controlled, the most noble of us Jews battling to maintain our emotional stability in the face of what has gone on in Israel and in America since October 7. They are Jewish heroes. And now their son Hersh is a Jewish martyr. The crime done to him is unspeakable. The crime done to them is no less unspeakable. His body was found with five other survivors of 10/7, all of whom had families and loved ones and babies on the way.

 

And I cannot help but ask. I cannot. Had the Biden administration’s will not been bent and twisted in the months following the attack by the fiendish propaganda campaign causing them to worry about the war’s effect on Joe’s chances in Michigan—due to a population that effectively supported the terrorist monsters and cared not a whit for the eight Americans, let alone the 240 other innocents dragged into Hell—would Hersh and these others have survived? Imagine an Israel that had not found itself restrained and under assault, not told to pause, not scolded in pissy little phone calls with petulant American establishmentarians, without arms and aid held up, without being lectured about the geostrategic value of going slow or not going at all.

 

Imagine an Israel that was not told by its best friend in the world that offensive action in Gaza had become self-defeating, was not told that Israel should care more about feeding people in Gaza than about eliminating the threat to its 9 million citizens and pummelling Hamas until that evil group of thugs cried uncle and begged for way to negotiate to return the hostages.

 

Imagine an America that did not lose its nerve under a president whose team knew perfectly well he was infirm and was working desperately to stave off his eventual collapse and departure from the race to save their own rotten and misbegotten jobs. Imagine an America that had said, “You have right and justice on your side, and your actions in the first two months of the war succeeded in getting 78 hostages home. You keep on doing what you’re doing until they’re all home.” Imagine an America that wasn’t secretly ashamed by its own inability to secure victory in war and didn’t therefore see Israel’s insistence that victory was the only way forward as a moral rebuke to our own divided soul.

 

Imagine what might have been. Do not be unburdened by that. Be burdened by that. Ask yourself if an Israel that had done in Rafah over the past six weeks—had trapped the Hamas leadership, had begun eliminating the Hamas leadership, had pinpointed its attacks to a degree that the death toll in Gaza for all except Hamas seniors fell precipitously—had done this in March rather than in August.

 

Hamas is the evil here. America is not responsible for the deaths of anyone in Gaza, and anyone who says otherwise is a moral idiot—just like those deranged people who seem determined to blame Bibi Netanyahu for not surrendering to Hamas, as though the hostage deals of the past, like the one that freed Hamas mastermind Yahya Sinwar in 2011, weren’t among the root causes of this horrible conflict.

 

But we Americans are morally liable for our role in our backseat-driving in this war, for screaming at the Israelis at the wheel, unnerving them as they were trying to keep their eye on the road ahead.

 

Hersh Goldberg-Polin was 23 years old. There are two babies there, somewhere, in those tunnels that Kamala Harris said Israel should not go into. At her convention, Rachel and Jon spoke. America wept. Then Kamala Harris gave her speech and said Israel had the right to defend herself BUT there was too much killing and we needed a ceasefire and a hostage deal and a two-state solution and for the oceans to turn to lemonade, which is about as likely in the foreseeable future as a two-state solution.

 

And Hamas saw her, and saw Biden, and was so terrified by what they saw, so fearful of America’s martial response to their evil, that they killed Hersh and the five others whose bodies were found—and who knows who else yet.

 

This is a dangerous moment. This monstrous act of villainy will not quiet the campuses as the anniversary of October 7 approaches. No, it will embolden the very monsters who have been psychologically torturing Jewish students—and assaulting them in some cases—over the past year. The stories we’ve read in the past two days about the report of Columbia University’s anti-Semitism task force chill the blood. “Hillel Go to Hell,” read a banner at a Baruch College demonstration this week, in case you were wondering if things were going to quiet down.

 

The threats were real then and they are going to be even more real now, as those who support the destruction of the Jewish state and the crushing of the spirit and the freedom of American Jews make their moves over the next month. Their intention is to take over the anniversary of the massacre and turn it into a tribute, as they plan to do at the University of Maryland.

 

We don’t need to read Joe Biden issuing statements of outrage about Hersh. We need to see that things are going to be done to protect America’s Jews from the evil that might be visited upon us as we tick down the days until it’s been a year since Jews were plunged into this existential battle designed to destabilize the Jewish state and drive American Jews underground.

 

Joe Biden was sitting on the beach this afternoon as the Israelis recovered the bodies. He is a spent force, a quartered roasted duck. So what are you going to do about it, Ms. Harris? What are you going to do?