Will Israel Save Western Civilization?

The Real Housewives of Gaza

Ambitious title, no?  Maybe too ambitious.  But bear with me.  After all, Western Civilization,  as we knew it, has a serious, dare I say existential, problem. 

Just look at what has happened to the United Kingdom and France.

I chose it to grab readers about the chat -- Nashville, Tennessee to Ashdod, Israel—I had today (Oct 20) with filmmaker Pierre Rehov about  his extraordinarily compelling new documentary “Pogrom(s)” (about which more anon).

I was going to call it “The Real Housewives of Gaza” in honor of the discovery Mrs. Sinwar (née Abu Zamar) was apparently sporting a $32,000 Hermes Birkin handbag on her way into hiding beneath Khan Yunis moments before her husband launched the Oct. 7 atrocities.  (Whoever said those terror masters don’t know how to treat their wives?)

Her late husband evidently equipped himself  lavishly as well for his underground sojourn while the war he started raged above him--the people he supposedly adored and defended treated like cannon fodder.

But enough and back to Mr. Rehov’s excellent film and the monumental question in my title it ultimately asks as subtext.

It begins by documenting Oct 7 as many have never seen it.  Yes, it’s more graphic than most but not as graphic as it could have been, because of Mr. Rehov’s discretion and an Israeli tradition that forbids the display of recognizable dead bodies.

We have heard of much of this, even  the unviewable  rapes and decapitations of babies and, worst of all, in Rehov’s words, a pregnant mother being cut open and her fetus eviscerated in front of her—a scene beyond Goya’s black paintings or even Auschwitz.

Some of this has been questioned by the usual suspects in the MSM and the left, but Mr. Rehov assured me it was all true and more.  He had seen it himself on the cellphones of first responders while under the stricture most of these forbidden horrific images could not be reproduced.  What’s in his documentary is horrifying enough, but it could have been even more so.

I asked him how it felt, as a filmmaker who, by dint of his occupation, had to sit for days on end repeatedly watching these excruciating events on a monitor to edit his documentary.

His answer was surprising. He told me it was not that difficult for him—he did not overly react.  He is a Mizrachi Jew from Algeria and as a boy of seven experienced a bombing in his school in that North African country that mutilated his young classmates, severing limbs. It accustomed him to violence for the rest of his life.  He did not even seem particularly perturbed when he told me that, in the initial months after Oct 7,  he and his family would have to retreat to their safe room (mamad in Hebrew) ten times a day during missile attacks.

His film is called Pogrom(s), plural, with a subtitle of “Could America Be Next?”  because it looks both forward and backward. (If, by chance, you don’t know what a pogrom is,  it’s from the Russian for “to wreak havoc” and “refers to violent attack by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries.”) Starting with the gruesome events of Oct 7, the documentary moves on to happenings in the US and Europe of the “from the river to the sea” nature with which most of us are familiar.

Almost simultaneously it goes backwards into the seemingly endless history of pogroms, highlighting, among other actions, something I only vaguely recalled—that the yellow star worn by Jews to identify them did not originate with the Nazis but in the Islamic world one thousand years before.

This marked the Jews as dhimmis (non-Muslims) subject to paying jizya (a poll tax for protection). Christians were obviously in a similar position.  These latter parts I did remember..

All this led our conversation in the broader direction of my title. Mr. Rehov and I agreed we are at an historical turning point, something you truly feel at the end of his documentary.

The Ayatollah has made common cause with Russia, China and North Korea, among others.  Who will be for us?

NETANYAHU AS CHURCHILL

The filmmaker had previously not been a fan of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but now, like most Israelis, he sees him as the indispensable man during this multi-front war, their Churchill.

Netanyahu has fought on through thick and thin, often against the wishes and threats of the U. S. government.   Normally on the contentious side among themselves, Israelis are rallying around him to win the conflict against Iran and its proxies once and for all.  

This seems to be lost on, even to infuriate, our current administration that has called for a ceasefire virtually from day two.  This, of course, would have ensured the survival of Hamas and Hezbollah, not to mention the Houthis, etc., and therefore their masters in Tehran.   

Beginning with President Obama—whose allegiance Mr. Rehov indicated was questionable and who was I to disagree—Iran has been supported economically by the U. S., allegedly to discourage the Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons.  This is an illusory notion at best. What country has ever done its atomic research but in hiding, not the U. S. or the Soviet Union certainly? 

Nevertheless, we played the game, for whatever reasons, as if Iran would be the exception while the mullahs soldiered on with their work under ground. Who would stop it before they were in a position to hold the world hostage to the theocratic imperialism of Khomeinist Shiism?  Who will stand for the West that is in steep decline, as if having a nervous breakdown while losing touch with or even disdaining its core values?

Well, Israel, it seems.  They are clearly in the process of putting paid to Hamas and Hezbollah, what about the proverbial head of the snake?

But would the U. S. and its allies stop them from doing this and why?  They’re trying. President Biden has already placed Iran’s nuclear installations and oil refineries off limits, assuming Israel at this point would listen to him.  (I’m beginning to doubt it.)

The answers to the why part are not pleasant when you think about them.  Who’s on what side has become increasingly complicated.

AFTER NOVEMBER 5

You can see from the photograph I took during our Skype conversation there is another political leader Mr. Rehov admires.  The Trump placard sits on his desk.  He showed it to me, as he did a metal necklace fashioned in Israel from missile fragments that hangs around his neck..  It has the words “Bring them home now!” in English and Hebrew etched into it. Kindred spirits, it happened I was wearing the exact same one six thousand miles away as well as a baseball hat I seldom appear in in public for personal safety reasons with “Trump Won” scrawled in white faux chalk letters on black.

So I asked him the operative question that had been on my mind and on that of many others recently.  Did he think Netanyahu would wait until after the Nov 5 election to take his full revenge on Iran in the hopes Trump would win?  

He nodded in the affirmative.   

Perhaps Israel’s response to the Iranian missile attack, the largest ever in history, will come in two stages, one before November 5 and another, the large one, after.  We shall see how this plays out.