Dastardly David, Gentleman Goliath and the Underdog Syndrome
Itโs natural to cheer on the underdog โ after all, who canโt help but encourage the plucky young bloke taking on a vastly more experienced and far bigger pugilist in the ring, only to win through sheer determined effort and some clever moves, whilst he leaps nimbly from foot to foot?
The classical underdog story is David and Goliath; the former, a fresh-faced youngster with nothing but a slingshot, standing up to the barbarian behemoth Goliath covered in armour and wielding a giant sword. The irony is that David is a young Jew and Goliath an older Philistine, and today we have the positions reversed with David being the poor, battered Philistine standing up to the incredibly powerful Israeli Goliath.
Naturally, the uninformed will want to root for David since all he has to counter Goliathโs weapons are some AK47 rifles, a few machine guns and some harmless rockets. Goliath, on the other hand, has a fearsome array of weapons, including laser-guided 2,000lbs bombs, tanks, drones, F-35 aircraft and thatโs just for breakfast. The brave Philistine fighters are putting up a valiant fight against their arch-nemesis and oppressor, who despite his incredibly overwhelming and ferocious weapons has apparently failed to beat him to the ground.
Letโs drop the metaphor, since we are basically past it at this juncture. All the supporters of the Gazans would have you believe is that Israel is wantonly slashing and burning its way through Gaza, killing everything in sight and razing every building it sees to the ground. Ever since the grotesque, libelous letter was published by the Lancet (https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1810322594215628816), the civilian death toll has sky-rocketed from the original and already ludicrous figure of 37,000 (debunked here: https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1808866740727578891) to a stratospheric 186,000.
Is Israel a hulking, destructive and mass-murdering Goliath? Are Hamas and ordinary Gazans embroiled in active fighting a fresh-faced David? Letโs see.
On the 6th of October 2023, there was still a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. No-one seriously expected a direct attack on Israeli soil; hence people went about celebrating Shabbat and Simchat Torah as usual, and a peace music festival was held in a field less than 2km from the Gaza border. When the attack commenced, the police, army and other forces had a hard time believing it was actually happening.
By the time the full extent of the horror was understood, 1,200 lives had been in lost in a brutal spree of pillaging, raping, murdering, torturing and hostage-taking. Israel and World Jewry was in shock. Not since the mind-numbing inhumanity of the Holocaust had Jews experienced such a horrific episode. The carnage, the delight terrorist took in their appalling, revolting attack was simply incomprehensible.
Needless to say that accompanying the shock and grief was a seething rage. Despite having given Gazanโs autonomy in 2005 at the ignominious expense of over 10,000 Jews, all that the so-called Palestinians (https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1811151386425577479) had repaid in gratitude was death, destruction and violence. This was the final straw.
At this juncture, Israel had a casus belli of epic proportions. They could have quite rightly razed Gaza to the ground in their attempts to retrieve their hostages and wipe Hamas off the face of the earth. Moreso, GoPro videos that Hamas themselves published online showed Gazans in civilian clothing participating in the massacre. Whilst this did not make all the Gazan civilians complicit, it certainly broadened the scope of culpability. After all, now they were seeking much more than simply the estimated 45,000 Hamas terrorists; now they were after thousands of Gazans who either participated directly in the slaughter, took civilians hostage or dragged their bodies through the streets.
It's worth considering what the IDF brings to the table in terms of military capability. The air force alone consists of over 300 aircraft gen-4 and gen-5 fighters, equipped with Israeli-developed avionics and sensors unique to the IDF, capable of launching sophisticated missiles and guided gravity munitions. They have hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces, 169,000 active personnel and a reserve army of roughly 465,000. The Israeli Navy has a slew of sophisticated surface and submarine vessels capable of firing shells and launching missiles from great distances. Given the will on the part of the Israelis, Gaza could have been flattened into rubble in a matter of a couple of hours; by the time the world would have commenced protesting, the strip would have been a smoking ruin, its citizens bombed to kingdom come.
Yet this did not happen. Much everyoneโs surprise, the Israeli government sat on its haunches for three weeks. Some small operations were carried out almost immediately, but the full ground invasion took three weeks to mobilise. During that process, the IDF formulated a plan that would require the mass movement of citizens in the strip, and in order to execute this plan they undertook heretofore unheard-of steps to prevent as many civilians dying as possible, employing leaflet drops, robocalls, text messages and direct calls by specially trained IDF members. Israel has formidable electronic capabilities that according to John Spencer, Chair of Urban War Studies at the MWI, West Point, no other army has. They employed all of these in their efforts to prevent a slaughter.
As the war drew on, the IDF realised that Hamas were using the IDFโs strengths and morality against them, ensuring higher casualties than were predicted. For example, Hamas prevented their own citizens from following evacuation orders in order to use them as human shields (https://reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-tells-gaza-residents-stay-home-israel-ground-offensive-looms-2023-10-13/); when people were evacuating Hamas shot at them. When the IDF attempted to shield the evacuees, Hamas attacked the soldiers protecting the civilians. Hamas even faked IDF leaflets telling citizens that evacuation corridors were only for emergencies. When it comes to distributing aid, Hamas are not below hijacking the lorries and preventing their own people from accessing food, hygiene supplies and other basic requisites. People who protested that Hamas had gone too far should surrender were beaten or shot. There is nothing new about this; when Hamas took over the Gaza strip in 2007 they engaged in fratricide at an appalling level (https://theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/15/israel4), and they have consistently used their own citizens as human shields (https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.pdf).
In order to counter these tactical abuses of civilians, the IDF developed new strategies, employing sophisticated electronics to scan known Hamas phones, using long range ID systems and filtering civilians for terrorists using human intelligence.
Hamas in the meanwhile were abusing every possible law they could; aside from holding civilian hostages captive (including babies) as bargaining chips, they fought the IDF in civilian clothing from inside civilian structures. The Gaza Metro โ a network of over 600km of tunnels โ allowed them to pop out almost anywhere, from under houses, mosques, hospitals and schools, run into a building and break out the weapons cached there. They would manoeuvre into position, take some shots and then drop their weapons to join the civilians in the area. Almost every building the IDF has entered has contained weapons; even protected status buildings such as hospital, schools and mosques are riddled with armaments and explosives (https://cbsnews.com/news/israel-photos-hamas-gaza-weapons-un-facilities-including-schools/ https://youtube.com/watch?v=7gLABy9s8Zc https://thecipherbrief.com/a-look-inside-hamass-weapons-arsenal). Hamas are not beyond using captures Israeli uniforms to disguise themselves as IDF soldiers, allowing them to manoeuvre in the open. They cynically baited the IDF into believing a WCK convoy was a Hamas one by firing off guns from on top of the vehicles (https://breitbart.com/middle-east/2024/04/06/report-hamas-may-have-baited-idf-into-striking-wck-convoy-in-error/). If there is a humanitarian or warfare law or custom that Hamas has not broken, it is because it is so obscure that practically no-one has heard of it.
All of this has slowed down the progress of the IDF. Instead of taking days, the war to date has been dragged out for almost nine months at the time of writing. Whilst the death toll of Gazans has been enormously exaggerated (https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1808866740727578891), the destruction has been widespread. At least 16% of Gaza lies in ruins. Whatever economy they had prior to the 7th has essentially evaporated. It will be a decade at least before they have a chance to enjoy self-rule, and since Israel will certainly not rebuild Gaza and perhaps claim reparations as well, the reconstruction will progress at snailโs pace.
This does beg the question: what did Hamas have in mind when they attacked Israel on the 7thin such a brutal, barbarian and animalistic fashion? Did they not expect a response of these proportions?
To answer this, some background of the situation must be fleshed out. On the 6th, Israel was a terribly divided country, across political and religious lines. Proposed changes to the judiciary led to mass protests, and Yom Kippur prayers in the centre of Tel Aviv were disturbed by a small rabble. The country was deeply mired in conflict, and even a group of soldiers refusing to serve in protest, which came as a shock to a country whose army is almost sacrosanct.
Hamas and probably the IRGC as well saw this as a serious opportunity to hit Israel hard, expecting an overwhelming attack to weaken Israelโs morale sufficiently to perhaps mount several more such incursions. In the past, Israelโs response to Hamas terror ranged from weak to lukewarm. Operation Cast Lead (2008โ2009) ended after three weeks with a mutual ceasefire; the conflict resulted in roughly 1,400 Palestinian and 13 Israeli deaths. Some 46,000 homes were destroyed, making more than 100,000 people homeless. Operation Protective Edge 2014 lasted for seven weeks with 2,000 Gazan deaths and a total of six Israeli civilians who were killed as a result of the conflict. Neither operations resulted in a decisive victory.
What is clear is that Hamas never expected such wide-spread devastation. Instead, they probably forecast another short war with Israel in disarray. Hamas would mount several incursions, capture as many hostages as they could during the operations and then withdraw to negotiate for thousands of prisoners in Israeli jails to be freed. They would be able to flee to their tunnels at any time, making the process of hunting them down almost impossible.
This plan backfired horribly for Hamas. From the very first moment, they broke every rule of armed conflict. The bestiality and brutality of the attack achieved the exact opposite of what they expected. Not only did it shake Israel out of its torpor, but it also united the country and world Jewry in a way they had never been united previously.
Within a matter of days, reservists responded with a 140% turnout; commanders were frustrated at the lack of readily available equipment for their soldiers since no-one predicted such a response. As of 9th April 2024, donations from the Diaspora raised $1.4 billion (https://timesofisrael.com/donations-to-israel-since-october-7-topped-1-4-billion-government-reports/) and Israel Bonds sales raised a further $1.7 billion.
Israel now swore to do what they had never done before: utterly destroy Hamas. However, they made it clear that this was not going to be revenge, it was going to be justice.
Where Hamas broke every possible rule and acted like rabid barbarians, Israel took every possible step to reduce collateral damage and the expected carnage. Where Hamas simply raped, butchered and pillaged, Israel kept the IDF on a tight leash. Soldiers had very strict rules of engagement and monumental efforts were undertaken to keep civilian life functioning as well as possible under war conditions. As John Spencer writes (https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1812183672734589372): โIsrael has gone above and beyond what is traditionally required of armies. In Gaza, they faced 40,000 enemy defenders in dense urban terrain featuring some 400 miles of deep buried military tunnels a depth of 15 to over 200 feet deep purposely built under civilian and protected sites. The defenders were equipped with over 15,000 rockets and a full array of small arms, mortars, and improvised explosive devices. The enemy had defenses that took at least fifteen years to prepare and fortify. Hamas held over 200 hostages, disguised themselves as civilians, and used ordinary Gazans as human shields to manipulate external actors, especially the United States, to stop Israel from escalating and instead to push for a ceasefire. Largely because of Egypt, there was almost no possibility for the 2.2. million civilians in Gaza to completely flee the war zone by land.โ
Ultimately, Israel at war is the consummate gentleman; moral, considerate and firm in its mission to protect its people. Hamas, conversely, are the very embodiment of evil, with a callous disregard for its own people and cynically abusing the laws and customs of war for their own nefarious gains. Hamas is no fresh-faced David with his little slingshot. Hamas is a wildly immoral and bestial death cult with absolutely no regard for the very people that elected them.
Despite all this, the world does not see Hamas in its true light. Gazans are painted as innocent victims who are suffering under the brutality of the Israeli war machine. The appalling crimes against humanity that Hamas committed are either brushed under the carpet or denied outright, despite the copious evidence supplied by Hamas themselves. The incredible efforts of the IDF to prevent civilian casualties, and the unspeakable attacks Israel suffered are not simply ignored but distorted all out of recognition.
Why is this? How is it that the picture has been so successfully reversed?
Behind all of the various theories that might explain this is the IRGC and other bad actors, as discussed in this post: https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1807676708734042189.
What allows these machinations to succeed is partially due to the nature of people wanting to cheer on the underdog. This is the cognitive dissonance of beer glasses โ the mind only shows you what you want to see, not what you actually observe. It is also the fact that Jew-hatred has festered at every level since the very founding of Jewry, and this war has allowed Jew-haters across the globe to sanitise their anti-Semitism through the filter of anti-Zionism, which they then vomit onto their sheeple audiences through the medium of social media. The confluence of these impulses results in a narrative that paints the victim as the oppressor, and elevates raping, murdering, butchering and hostage-taking barbarian troglodytes to near-sainthood.
This is not a David and Goliath conflict. This is a conflict of barbarianism versus civilisation.
And itโs coming to the West.
