Why they are dead

The Promising Land #7: American weakness kills Americans and America’s friends.

Image source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, State of Israel

How do you measure American power? In military capability? Diplomatic sway? Trade?

All useful metrics but there is another, more visceral test: when America demands that one of its citizens be released from captivity unharmed, do his captors comply or do they murder him?

On August 21, the Democrat National Convention hosted Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose 23-year-old son was being held by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. Hersh Goldberg-Polin was a dual American-Israeli citizen who was born in California and made aliyah with his parents at the age of seven. He was celebrating his birthday on October 7 when Palestinian gunmen swarmed the Nova music festival and butchered the defenceless youngsters gathered there. Footage from the day shows Hersh with part of his left arm blown off by a grenade as he is taken into captivity.

In giving Hersh’s parents a slot at the convention, the party that occupies the White House sent a message: this American must be returned to his family and the killing must end. Eight days after that message was sent, Hamas replied by shooting Hersh dead at close range, along with five other young Jews abducted from the Nova charnel house.

Ori Danino was a lion taken down by jackals. On October 7, the 25 year old helped other festival-goers escape the carnage, concealing them in his car then driving away at speed. But he couldn’t bear to leave others behind, so he drove back to try to get more people out. He was captured, held hostage for almost a year, and murdered. Ori is survived by parents Einav and Elchanan, four brothers and fiancée Liel Avraham, who called him ‘the best partner you can imagine’. Ori was from Giv’at Ze’ev, just north of Jerusalem, and he was buried in the city’s Mount Herzl cemetery. In a eulogy, his grandfather, rabbi Avraham Danino, said: ‘We expected to walk you to the chuppah, to dance at your wedding. But we got to bury you, and we should not take this for granted. There are many of those who haven’t got a grave.’

‘Shani, they’ve caught me’

Eden Yerushalmi’s is perhaps the most horrifying story of the six. The 24 year old from Tel Aviv was training to be a Pilates teacher and working as a bartender at Nova. She called her mother Shirit and sister Shani from the massacre and stayed on the phone with them for three hours as she lay among the bodies of her murdered friends, pretending to be dead. She described to her loved ones the sound of her friends’ blood dripping all around her. Eden made a break for a nearby wooded area but was discovered. Her final words over the phone were: ‘Shani, they’ve caught me.’

Alexander Lobanov, bar manager at the festival and a volunteer in his spare time. He lived in Ashkelon and was married to Michal. They had a toddler and Michal, who was pregnant at the time of Alexander’s abduction, gave birth five months ago. Alexander died without ever meeting his second child. He was 32.

Carmel Gat was visiting her family in Kibbutz Be’eri when the Palestinian invaders began their pogrom. They murdered her mother, Kinneret, and abducted her, along with her brother Alon, sister-in-law Yarden, and niece Geffen. While her brother and niece escaped, her sister-in-law was caught in the attempt, though she was eventually released after a deal brokered last November. Carmel, 40, was an occupational therapist and had enrolled in a master’s degree programme to bolster her qualifications. Her pastimes included travel and music.

Almog Sarusi, 27, was from Ra’anana and was attending the festival with his girlfriend Shahar. Shahar was shot as they were escaping and Almog was captured after he stayed behind and tried to save her. Almog enjoyed driving and cherished his white jeep. He also loved playing guitar. He is survived by parents Yigal and Nira and brother Amit. Shahar did not survive her injuries.

Hersh, Ori, Eden, Alexander, Carmel and Almog were murdered in a tunnel beneath Rafah. You remember Rafah. Not so long ago, all eyes were on it, in a slick public relations campaign designed to bring Western pressure to bear on Israel, which was poised to launch a major operation against the Hamas stronghold. The campaign worked. In March, Kamala Harris said it would be ‘a huge mistake’ for Israel to take Rafah and refused to rule out ‘consequences’ if the IDF entered the city. Israel limited its operations accordingly. Hamas was allowed to maintain its grip on the city and, sometime Thursday or Friday morning, gun down six hostages in its tunnels.

Now all eyes are being averted from Rafah. The voices who clamoured against the destruction of Hamas are issuing solemn statements and words of sympathy. That is all they have to offer: the lamentations of people who got their way.

How far the termites have spread

At a 2007 speech to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Christopher Hitchens — a thoroughgoing critic of Israel, incidentally — was confronted by an audience member regurgitating Islamist talking points in the vapid patois of educated American progressivism, right down to dubbing Western civilisation ‘the civilisation of the oppressors and the colonists’. In response, Hitchens observed: ‘You see how far the termites have spread, and how long and well they’ve dined.’

In the almost two decades since, the termites have grown fat off the load-bearing walls of Western civilisation. The disastrous expansion of the university sector has exposed many more young people to the curricular jihad that runs through arts, humanities and social science disciplines, including systematic demonisation of Western democracies; justification and veneration of tyrants and terrorists; reality-denying doctrines like postmodernism; and victimhood ideologies and their sundry incitements around race, gender and other immutable characteristics. As Andrew Sullivan says, ‘we all live on campus now’, and we see what comes of decades of mocking or downplaying educational extremism instead of working to eradicate it. What was fringe not so long ago is mainstream today, what was once incendiary now barely ignites a spark. Western liberal democracy’s domestic enemies can at last be as open about their intentions as its foreign foes.

These developments have been aggravated by others. Mainstream left and liberal political parties, think tanks, media outlets and other institutions have either drifted into ideological cul-de-sacs or been captured altogether by farther-left activists who had no place being members of them in the first instance. Too many erstwhile moderates have become comfortable making excuses for extremists with whom they happen to share a party affiliation. The writing was on the wall on October 7 when it emerged that Hamas had killed scores of Americans and taken others hostage. We waited for these Americans and their stories to rush to the top of the news agenda but they never got there. Journalistic elites, just like their political counterparts, had already decided who would be the victims in this story, and American Jews did not fit the profile.

Liberals against liberalism

Meanwhile, social media has encouraged all the worst temptations of movement politics, from tribalism and mob behaviour to reductionist language and performative radicalism. It is arguable that the grim sight of fiery-eyed young fanatics (usually women) tearing down posters of kidnapped babies was born of the theatrical stridency and dehumanisation encouraged by Twitter and TikTok. Then there are more fundamental societal changes. Mass immigration without meaningful integration has created a situation in which calls for intifada can be heard on the streets of London and 46 per cent of British Muslims say they have more sympathy for Hamas than for Israel. (The same percentage of Muslims aged 18 to 34 believe Hamas did not commit rapes and murders on October 7.)

Eleven months on, the Palestinian attack on Israel has exposed Western elites as weak and morally corrupted, no longer willing to stand by allies or stand up for reason and truth, all too ready to allow international law and global institutions to be placed in the service of anti-Zionist politics and antisemitic prejudice. And those are some of the better elites. Others have abandoned careers and lifetimes of moderation and thoughtfulness to tag along with radical mobs marching through the institutions. Liberals are doing damage to liberalism that reactionaries could only dream of, and they’re doing it because they will not confront the extremists on their side. Because they cannot see any malefactor beyond Donald Trump, Brexit and the far right. Because some of those in the vanguard of delegitimising Israel belong to racial, ethnic or other minority groups high in the progressive hierarchy of victimhood. Because hating Israel is now high-status and in progressivism, a fashion movement as much as a political one, status is an indicator of esteem and belonging much more than ideology or faction.

These political pathologies have converged in the policymaking of European and other Western nations and, most alarmingly of all, in the United States. The policy of creating ‘daylight’ between the US and Israel in order to improve post-9/11 relations with the Muslim world was introduced by Barack Obama, and could be seen in that administration’s open contempt for the Jewish state and its willingness to imperil Israel’s security — and that of the wider world — in pursuit of a deal with Iran that did little to prevent Tehran’s acquisition of the bomb. The radicals who held junior and mid-level posts under Obama are now senior staffers under Joe Biden, and this has been especially harmful in foreign relations. Hostility towards Israel has a pedigree at the US State Department, just as it does at the UK Foreign Office, but that hostility has become the norm throughout the executive branch. We all live on campus now and the Biden administration lives in Foggy Bottom.

America is gone

Where the United States could hitherto be relied upon to support Israel’s security and right to self-defence, the messages out of the White House, the Senate and the Democrat Party since October 7 have been more equivocal. Friendly disagreements are no longer friendly, constructive criticism has taken on the tone and tenor of condemnation, and the US-Israel alliance has come under even more strain than it did during Obama’s eight years. At strategically vital points throughout the last eleven months, the United States has stepped in to fend off Israel as it prepared to launch major offensives against Hamas. Whatever the White House says in public, its revealed preferences show that it does not want Hamas removed from power. It wants a return to the status quo ante October 7, which would represent not so much a tie as a points victory for Hamas. Worse, the United States has been at the forefront of efforts to involve Qatar in peace negotiations, the same Qatar which plays host to the leadership of Hamas and pumps out Islamist propaganda through its Al-Jazeera Arabic news service. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that US policy in the Middle East is now predicated on punishing America’s friends and rewarding its enemies. A kind of collective madness has taken grip in Washington.

Israel’s fightback has been so protracted because it has been forced to fight back against not only Hamas but Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah, the Europeans and, unforgivably, the United States. It has been calumnied with the absurd lie that it is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza and even now its political and military leaders face the threat of arrest by organisations which no longer pretend to be neutral or objective when it comes to Israel. Its destruction and the killing of its citizens are openly agitated for on the streets and campuses of Western nations otherwise eager to criminalise extremist speech. After the bloodiest, most savage, most sadistic pogrom ever launched against its citizens, Israel has found itself alone in the world against enemies who know it is alone and have been emboldened by this fact.

This is why Hersh Goldberg-Polin is dead. Hamas murdered him because it could, because it knows it need no longer fear the wrath of the United States for slaying a US citizen. The United States no longer feels wrathful over such things. It reserves its indignation for its friends, not its enemies. This, in turn, is why Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi are dead. Hamas murdered them because, if it was confident of facing no US reprisals for killing an American, it could be sure it would not face any for killing citizens of other nations.

This is what happens when Atlas shrugs, when the world superpower walks away from its global leadership role, its elites so convinced of their country’s unexpungeable wickedness that they cannot bring themselves to uphold the international order their forebears created. The significance of the last eleven months might be lost on Americans and Europeans, but they can see it clearly in Jerusalem — and in Gaza, Ramallah, Beirut, Tehran, and Doha. They can see it in Beijing and Moscow, too. They see that America is gone and Israel is alone.