An Israeli peace activist was mugged by reality while being held hostage in Gaza
True peace, one that sees people of good will living in harmony with each other despite differing attitudes on some issues, is a wonderful thing. I’d certainly like to see a world like that, although faith tells us it won’t happen without divine intervention. In the real world, there are bad actors, but some once-naïve peace activists—including one former Israeli hostage—are giving up on their Utopian dreams and finally facing reality.
To understand the lunatic nature of leftist peace activists, let’s take a walk through the animal kingdom. Porcupines speak softly and carry big stickers (pun intended). Skunks speak softly and carry big stinks. If you leave them alone, they will leave you alone. If you attack, they will respond in very unpleasant ways.
Peace activists, however, don’t understand this defensive principle. They believe that, if you’re a rabbit who sees a fox coming your way (a fox that has as its raison d’etre eating rabbits) and you lie down on your back and show your tummy, the fox will be so charmed by your peaceful attitude that it will refrain from eating you.
If these activists weren’t dumb bunnies, they’d figure out that being a peace activist means encouraging the fox to be a vegetarian rather than encouraging the rabbit to serve itself up on a platter with a carrot in its mouth. Moreover, if they’re making this journey, I’d advise them to revisit the fable about the frog and the scorpion, the one that sees the scorpion sting the helpful frog carrying it across the river because that’s the scorpion’s nature. Put another way, some people have value systems that will yield to reason, and some do not. In the latter case, as we learned with the Nazis, only brute force will change their minds.
Even Israel has its peace activists, although their numbers are shrinking as they realize there’s no mileage in convincing Israeli bunnies to yield while providing excuses for the ravening Hamas fox. One new peace activist is someone who found herself spending two-and-a-half months in the fox’s den. Ada Sagi once believed peace was possible between Israel and Hamas, but has concluded that Hamas’s nature makes such peace impossible:
An Israeli peace activist who was seized from her home on 7 October and held hostage for 53 days in Gaza has told the BBC how her ordeal destroyed her belief that peace is possible between Palestinians and Israelis.
In her first UK interview since being freed in November, Ada Sagi, 75, also told Emma Barnett on Radio 4’s Today programme how she was held in an apartment by paid guards, that Hamas kept her in a hospital before her release - and that she now believes the world hates Jews.
“I don’t believe in peace, no. I don’t believe, sorry,” the Arabic and Hebrew teacher said. “I understand Hamas don’t want it.”
Ms Sagi lived for decades in the Nir Oz kibbutz near the Israel-Gaza border, trying to help reconciliation efforts by teaching Israelis Arabic to speak to their neighbours.
One of the truisms of leftism is that it’s a fantasy that sees totalitarians manipulate dreamers and psychopaths, which has been the case from the French Revolution to Marx to the Russian Revolution to present-day college campuses and Israeli kibbutzim. Leftist peace activism has survived for as long as it has in the once-civilized West because American capitalism propped it up.
Looking at Europe, which has long served as the American left’s role model, America absorbed the world’s defense costs during the Cold War and drove unprecedented prosperity. This meant that Europe’s socialist nations had surplus money for luxury things such as “socialized” (American-funded) medicine, cradle-to-grave (American-funded) child and elder care, six-week-long (American-funded) vacations, etc. It helped that, up until Europe invited in unlimited immigration from Third World countries that didn’t share their values, these nations also had the benefit of strong social cohesion, which allowed them to bask in their low-crime, gun-free status.
Now, though, America is on the way to being bankrupted itself, the Third World (especially the Muslim world is on the move), and the left’s self-loathing (including among the Israeli left) has denied the reality of human nature, something that permeates modern leftism in all countries which it appears, including Israel and America. Raw human nature, once leftism has stripped it of the Judeo-Christian reverence for the human soul, reveals us to be animals ourselves, only with cars and smartphones. And then, as Tennyson said, Nature is indeed “red in tooth and claw,” and never more so than when Nature appears in the form of Hamas.
It’s to be hoped that Ms. Sagi’s terrible experience, and that of others in Israel, brings American leftists to their senses without our first having to be so terribly mugged by reality.
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