A reader posted a thoughtful comment.
Thanks. Having read “Ice Cold Revenge,” I just want to suggest you may be wrong about this: “No historical counterinsurgency offers Israel a model for victory.” To me, the successful marginalization of white supremacists in the US is the model for victory we should be looking at. It can be done, but requires vigilance. The Palestinians are an Arab and Muslim supremacist hate group, not a people in search of a state. “Palestine” is the Lost Cause myth Arabs came up with, after their 1948 jihad to destroy Israel was defeated. The myth was indulged by the West, because we needed oil and because, being habitually antisemitic, the Christian West assumed it would never be targeted, as Israel was. Instead, Islamists used “Palestine” to court neo-Nazis on the right and haters of the US, on the left. Palestinianism should have been crushed, along with the Nazis, in the aftermath of WW II. Still, I'm glad to have found your interesting substack.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I appreciate the tone and the engagement.
I don’t think the analogy to white supremacists in the U.S. really applies to the Israel–Hamas conflict.
After the Civil War, the Federal government did indeed crack down on the Ku Klux Klan—but only briefly. The Klan didn’t disappear; it morphed into the Dixiecrats, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and decades of entrenched white supremacy under Jim Crow, not to mention further iterations of the group.
For over 100 years, these forces ruled the South. It wasn’t until the 1960s—through massive federal intervention, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act—that the U.S. government meaningfully reasserted control. So if that’s the model for “marginalizing” an extremist movement, it’s a cautionary tale, not a success story.
Also worth noting: North and South came from the same cultural rootstock. They spoke the same language, worshipped the same way, and saw each other—however reluctantly—as part of the same nation. Each felt that they were carrying out the vision of the Founding Fathers. The historical irony is that this brought them to blows, but it also made reintegration possible, if slow and painful. Even during the Jim Crow period, Southerners furnished distinguished officers and brave soldiers to the US military.
There is no such shared identity between Israelis and Palestinians. If we follow the analogy through, Israel would be looking at a 100-year occupation of Gaza (and arguably the entire Palestinian territories), complete with the enormous drain on resources, personnel, and moral capital that implies—not to mention the international diplomatic cost. It’s unsustainable and it would transform Israel into something unrecognizable.
I understand the urge to frame Palestinian nationalism as something more sinister and totalizing, like Nazism. But I think that analogy does more harm than good. “Palestinianism,” if we want to use that word, is a political identity that—however contested—has deep regional, religious, and emotional resonance. If the solution is to “crush” it the way the Allies crushed the Nazis, then we’re talking about total war, total occupation, and reeducation.
Israel is simply too small to do that. Maybe it if had 15-20 million people they could, but they don’t and they can’t. And they don’t want to. No one in Israel is interested in integrating millions of Arabs into Israeli society, with full legal rights, as black Americans were in the 1870s and again, finally, in the 1960s. Or in remaking them in Israel’s image, as the US did with Japan. They are not interested. They don’t have the wherewithal.
Where I do agree with you is on the need for vigilance. The threat is real and ideological, and it’s not going away. But the response has to be smarter than brute force and it can’t be based on wishful thinking.
Security consists of totally hardening Israel’s borders, but also information warfare, diplomacy, regional alliances, and internal resilience. If you want to crush ideas you have to be brutally realistic about what they are in the first place.
Thanks again for engaging. I genuinely appreciate it.