Ask Haviv Anything - Comment: We will protect our own

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Recorded Thursday, February 20thIsraelis watched horrified on Thursday, as Hamas gunmen conducted a ceremony handing over four coffins, two of them with the bodies of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, aged 1 and 4, when they were murdered in Gaza, along with their mother Shiri. Oded Lifshitz, 83, was the fourth body handed over to Israel. Around the ceremony, Gazan civilians cheered and threw rice, people brought their kids to watch.What should we make of this gruesome spectacle, of a festival conducted over the coffins of little children?Some thoughts on what Israelis, and with them, the whole Jewish world, just witnessed.Thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode in honor of those we lost on October 7th. Please join me on Patreon to support this project: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything

Hello, friends. I'm recording on the evening of Thursday, February 20th. Israel got back the bodies of Oded Lifsheets, 83, Firi Bibas, and her two boys. A baby and a four-year-old boy, Kfir and Ariel, who were taken hostage by Hamas, or by Palestinian civilians, rushing in to plunderer. They were taken as trophies. They were murdered in Gaza. I want to share with you some thoughts

on what the death of the Bebas boys means, not just not adults, a baby. Who takes a baby trophy? And Hamas, as they were sending the coffins to the, handing them over to the Red Cross, they held a ceremony in which our armed gunmen stood proudly alongside the coffins of a baby and a toddler. And ordinary people celebrated through rice at a day of it, brought their children to see it.

It was festive. Hamas was broadcasting that it was festive. They're proud. They're proud of having taken a baby and a child. toddler and of their deaths. Chamas has claimed that they were killed in an Israeli air strike. There's no evidence of it. They've never provided that evidence.

It seems to not be the case. If they were killed in an Israeli air strike targeting Hamas, that's on Chamas too. Who kidnaps a baby? Who holds a baby hostage? And so I want to share a couple of thoughts. And, um, it's a lot of, hard to share these thoughts because

it's hard to think right now. I look at the Bibas boys and I see my kids. And I know what Chamas wants to do to my kids. And there's not a lot left in me thinking those thoughts. Except for one pretty certain

thing about Chamas itself. But I'm going to step out of that and I'm going to try and tell you a few things. Nothing that. happened today, not that ceremony that around the world is being treated as a revelation. None of it's new. We've known it all from the very beginning. I want to tell you some things about Hamas itself, about its cruelty, and about why we should never for a moment think that its cruelty is emotion. That was a spectacle of victory, parading.

as a trophy, the dead children of others. That was part of the emotional matrix of what we saw today in Gaza. But it wasn't the fundamental thing. I remember reading Western intelligence agents who were psychoanalysts, looking into ISIS when it was producing videos of beheadings. Why would ISIS broadcast its atrocities, its crimes, its horrors to the world? and the conclusion drawn by these psychoanalysts was that these were recruitment videos. What ISIS was telling the world was if you're someone who finds it fascinating, finds it empowering,

finds it a source of self-esteem and strength and power, to hold some hostage, some prisoner, and cut their head off while they scream, join us and we have work for you that's what those videos were in a sense that's what these videos were Hamas is telling the Palestinians

we will hold their children in this way all their children they will be in our power and we will do it for God so it feels righteous that emotion was there absolutely it was a piece of the puzzle

but there was more to it and I want to tell you a little bit and talk about that added dimension. I'm mostly going to be talking about things that I have been writing abound at least 11 years now since the 2014 War. But before I get into it, I just want to start this extra episode,

the same way we've started the last three with gratitude to our sponsors, Joe and Shearerer Lieberman, who turned their sponsorship into something affirming and beautiful and a commemoration of those killed. until on October 7. And specifically today, I want to focus on the Bibas family,

because they lost more than Shiri and the two boys. I want today to remember Marguer Schneider Silberman, 63, the boy's grandma, and Yosef Jose Luis Silberman, or Yossi, 67. The grandpa. Both of them were murdered by Hamas Terrarian. on October 7 in Kibbutz near Oz. One of the three great

massacres of October 7 was near Oz. Margit and Yossi are Shiri's parents. And they are the grandparents of Ariel and Kifir. Yossi was born in Argentina. He had lived in Israel for 40 years. He was one of the very first

people to cultivate the crops of that Kibbutz, to cultivate those fields. He worked in the agriculture. The really astonishing and high tech agriculture of that kibbutz. Marguet immigrated to Israel in the 1970s from Peru along with her family. And the

last we saw of them was their abduction from the kibbutz alive. They were later found murdered and their bodies were officially identified. Two weeks after October 7 on October 21st.

Marguet and Yossi are survived by their last daughter. Dana and her children. and we remember them today. Folks, Hamas' cruelty is purposeful. We have to understand it.

It is also why this war isn't over. We have to understand that, analytically, not just emotionally. On July 14, 2014, in the middle of the war between Israel and Hamas, then at that time, one of Hamas's top spokespeople,

Samia Abu Zuchri, was giving an interview to Al-Aqsa TV. That's a Hamas television channel in Gaza. And he was asked about criticism of Hamas for dragging the Palestinians into what was then considered one of the most devastating wars Gaza had experienced. Through the murder of Israelis,

through constant confrontation. And his answer was fascinating. He told the interviewer a little bit angrily, the interviewer who challenged him that Hamas was hurting Gaza. He told him, We are paying a price, but we remember our brothers in Algeria, who had at least a million and a half martyrs.

In 1945 in a single day in Algeria, 45,000 Algerians died in a single day. It wasn't described in Algeria's history as forsaking the blood of the Algerians. That was the accusation leveled against Hamas about Palestinians. As some defeatists are describing today the number of martyrs, as trading with Palestinian blood and forsaking Palestinian blood, we are not leading our people to execution as we stand by and look on, no, we are leading them to confrontation. That was the quote, but he had a deep argument in that quote, the deep argument that this is the cost.

This is the cost of an anti-colonial war like Algeria. This is the cost of removing 130 year French occupation with a million and a half white French Europeans living in Algeria. This is the cost of liberation. That was his point. And it's worth paying that cost.

Hamas is a big and complicated story. It's many things. It is an anti-colonialist Algeria modeled organization that thinks strategically in ways that the National Liberation Front of Algeria thinks about decolonization. It is that.

It's also a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a restorationist idea that if the Jews can be removed from Muslim land, if the Jews can be conquered and dominated by Islam, then in some profound order of being, Islam begins its long road back to prominence and relevance and power and conquest and thus ultimately the redemption of the world.

These ideas percolate, these ideas animate Hamas, These ideas make Hamas' ideological leaders, able and willing to systematically plan the destruction of Gaza. This is a point I've come back to many, many times. It's a point Palestinian opponents of Hamas talk about. Hamas built a tunnel system that is the biggest thing Palestinians have ever built for the purpose of fighting a war that would destroy Gaza while allowing Hamas to come out of the rubble. And that's what the tunnel system did. and they thought of Israelis as monsters and evil and enemies of God

and therefore expected even more destruction than Gaza has actually suffered. Just to understand Hamas, if you think that the Israelis are good people struggling in a bad situation, and Hamas's strategy of building out a massive tunnel system meant to force the enemy to cut through cities to get to them is monsters. But if you think of the Israelis as monsters, that tunnel system is doubling. monstrous, because then the damage they expect inflicted on their own people is an order of magnitude higher. Hamas believes in permanent, violent confrontation, and believes that they have a promise from God that it cannot fail, and that every suffering that the Palestinian suffer is redemptive,

and that every failure is only a test of faith ahead of the inevitable triumph and victory. And for that reason, that was fundamentally the mental infrastructure that drove them to suicide bombings in the 90s that temporarily derailed the peace process and the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s that so far permanently basically derailed the peace process. The October 7 massacre was not an outlier in that regard. It was the apotheosis. was the crescendo of Hamas' fundamental strategy. It was not emotionally driven. It was not chaotic. It was intended to be joyful.

The videos that they put up of them celebrating as they killed. Those were the message. Those are the message of the ceremony earlier today, and those were the message of the body cams of the Hamas fighters, running through Jewish towns and villages and murdering everyone they saw. children and elderly and pets the point was the idea born in the algerian strategy of terrorizing the french out of algeria that we are something artificial the rootedness of palestinians and the artificialness of israelis is a major theme of palestinian identity of chamas rhetoric of the rhetoric of every one around the world who supports

and the rooted cannot be dislodged while the artificial cannot ultimately remain and so permanent never-ending cruelty and terror and cruelty that is as high as it could be the more cruelty the sooner the sooner the sooner the sooner the sooner is redeemed the sooner that's the theory of anti-colonial violence it is why anti-colonial violence everywhere is horrific and cruel and so sustained cruelty psychological and physical of every kind you can possibly bring to bear is the fundamental strategy and logic of chamas in the first week after october seven i wrote something that distilled my thoughts on this israelis are now convinced that the massacre on october seven in its enormity and astonishing cruelty and especially in the joy with which it was carried out wasn't a palestinian miscalculative because Palestinian independence wasn't its goal. The goal on October 7, as in the suicide bombings of the fall of 2000, was simply the complete removal of the Jews from this land. And with clarity comes closure.

Hamas insists on an all-or-nothing conflict. No compromise. One lives and one dies. Then no one in Palestinian politics can challenge that. and the great tragedy for the palestinians is that we don't know how to die we don't know how to disappear zionism has not made jewish blood invincible but it has made it extraordinarily expensive far more expensive than palestinians can afford and so chmas leads them again and again and again into the same brick wall and the more they crash against us the taller the wall grows one can seek out the ideological roots of Hamas's strategy of brutality in 20th century decolonization movements are in theologies of Islamic renewal, as I mentioned. But that history is mere background decor to the essential point, that this is a brutality that explodes against peace processes as much as against threats of annexation.

No peace and no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse, or grant Israeli Jews safety from the kind of wild, joyful hatred displayed on October 7. And that brutality, as of October 7 has made itself too dangerous to be tolerated. Hamas does not yet seem to realize how deep the Israeli public's determination goes. In the Israeli mind, any brutality Hamas can commit, it will commit. And so it cannot be allowed to ever commit any act ever again. Hamas just showed us they will celebrate over the dead body of a baby. They cannot be allowed to ever commit any act ever again.

Folks, they have lost, catastrophically. Back in 2014, I wrote these words. In the end, when all is said and done, it is Israel that has the upper hand. This is not because of its economic and military supremacy, which are effectively neutralized as a deterrent by Hamas' sheer willingness to suffer, and to have fellow Palestinians suffer alongside.

nor is it because Israel has been particularly effective in fighting the global public relations fight so critical to the conduct of this sort of war, asymmetrical war. It isn't even because of Israelis measurable and remarkable psychological resilience in the face of indiscriminate rocket fire or terrorism. No, Israel's supreme advantage in this war lies in the enemy's own misunderstanding of us. The entire edifice of Hamas as an organization, together with its affiliates allies and ideological fellow travelers is built to fight a particular kind of war with a very specific sort of enemy the tragic and ongoing catastrophe that is gaza i wrote in twenty fourteen will not be healed until the palestinian national movement starts seeing israelis for what they are a flawed but rooted people living in its home native sons rather than what the Palestinians wish they were.

Sunburned Frenchmen in a land not their own. Chamas is lost because Gaza has no future under Hamas. Chamas is lost because Gaza cannot be rebuilt, if the money has to go through Hamas. Chah is lost because even a Hezbollah strategy in which it sits alongside some fake government and actually rules the place quietly by having the largest militia. Won't work. Hamas is lost

because it has set the Palestinian national strategy on an all-or-nothing path. Hamas can no longer threaten Israel. Israel will never again hold back when it sees threats from Gaza. And Gaza has no future with Hamas. But Hamas doesn't know how to stop because it's fundamental.

It has destroyed too much. It has led to too much death and suffering. To ever admit the strategy was wrong and pick a different one. This ends only with Chanas's destruction. That's not a call to war. That's the argument that it probably isn't going to end soon.

That's a description of Gaza's coming suffering. Those are my very sad thoughts. There is no revenge large enough for the death of a child. Chaim Nachman Bialik taught us. And there's nothing. really that Israel needs to do to take revenge. Hamas

is doing the destroying in Gaza at this point. There will come a time when they will wake up, when they will see what we are, when they will finally understand why all of their efforts and all of their struggles and the very

thing they thought was their superpower, their willingness to suffer endlessly. Even that was useless and all their great faith didn't matter. There will comma time, then until that time our one task, and it is the only task

incumbent on us, is to protect our own. I'm sorry to Ariel and to Kfir. That we failed you and to your grandparents, Biosi and Marguet and to Mother Shiri. We failed you. We betrayed you. We betrayed ourselves.

Gaza will never threaten Israel again. we will protect our own thank you for joining me these are sad times we will come out of them stronger