Everything has changed. Again.

L’shana tova tikateyvu and all that. Chin up.

I’ll be on the road for the next few days and my hiatus from the National Post ends late next week. I’ve been in the deepest depths of research and reorientation. A big thanks to subscribers for sticking around. Your patience will be duly rewarded. I’m emerging from it all in fairly fine fettle.

Everything has changed

The last time that headline appeared in a Real Story newsletter was October 10, 2023, marking the bloodiest catastrophe visited upon Israelis since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, three days earlier. Subhead: It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.

What happened two years ago was the most obscene act of terrorism in Israeli history, the single bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Now, Gaza is in ruins, tens of thousands are dead everybody’s thrashing around in the awfulness of the aftermath. And just in the past few days, pretty well the entire world has broken with the Netanyahu government about its war in Gaza and the way to end it.

But there’s cause for hope. I say that in full recognition that for all the momentous events and stirring speeches at the United Nations in New York, the whole thing could just as easily blow up in our faces.

Heralding the new year, 5786, which began at sunset last night.

Hope may seem an odd thing to cling to at the moment. Israel has never been as diplomatically isolated as it is today and the United States, the only ally that really matters to Israel, has never been as diplomatically distant from Europe and the rest of the liberal-democratic world.

If my transgression here is guarded optimism, I can explain it by going back to a standpoint I laid out in the National Post a week after the October 7 atrocities: The Palestinian problem is not Israel’s problem to solve alone.

Here’s where things stood on the day of the October 7 pogrom:

The “international community” was expecting Israel to police jihadist terror throughout the Middle East, and the United Nations had left Israel to carry the burden of a “Palestinian problem” that Israel could not hope to solve on its own.

The Netanyahu government had chosen to pursue a policy of collaborating with the Qataris to funnel billions of dollars into Gaza in the hopes that Hamas would busy itself with the sordid work of “governing” the dystopian exclave. The point was to nurture the divisions between Hamas and its corrupt and decrepit Palestinian Authority rival in the West Bank.

The policy was a catastrophe, and the unpardonable intelligence failures that allowed Hamas to plot, plan and execute its pogrom on October 7 is evidence enough of that.

It’s all to the good that Israel has decapitated Hezbollah, bloodied Khomeinist Iran and crippled the Houthis’ Ansarallah terror regime in Yemen. Israel may not have achieved a home run in its targeted attack on the remaining Hamas leadership in Qatar, but it was definitely an improvement over Netanyahu’s practice of sending escorts to Doha to accompany Qatari officials with satchels stuffed with millions of American dollars into Gaza City.

From the beginning, it has been obvious to close observers that unless the “international community” was prepared to properly address itself to the unsustainable nightmare Israelis and Palestinians were expected to endure, the bloodshed would go on.

Fury over meaningless gestures

For all the handwringing and anger about the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Australia, Portugal and Belgium joining the overwhelming majority of UN member states in the symbolic gesture of recognizing a non-existent Palestinian state, something else has been going on. While much of the Euro-American world has been disappearing up its own backside over whether to erect 150-foot statues of Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, it has gone mostly unnoticed.

It’s why those “Palestinian state” declarations have been piling up, and it’s about more than just the usual cowardice and tendency to appeasement that has afflicted the liberal democracies in recent years. It’s about more than just a Hail Mary now-or-never move against Netanyahu’s determination to foreclose forever, by further annexations in the West Bank, the possibility of a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

It’s the adhesion of Europe, the Arab States, the United Kingdom and almost everybody else to the UN’s Saudi-French “New York Declaration” of July 30. It’s a jumble, and there are holes in it. Even so:

It demands that Hamas surrenders and gives up all its weapons and releases all its remaining hostages, and requires the replacement of Israeli forces in Gaza with troops from a UN-commanded “temporary international stabilization mission.”

It anticipates a totally reformed and democratic Palestinian Authority that would gradually assume control over Gaza. It requires the complete banishment of Hamas from Palestinian politics altogether.

Fully free and fair Palestinian elections within a year: That would be the first test of whether the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas is sincere in his proclaimed agreement with the Declaration, which further anticipates a $53 billion reconstruction program as an alternative to U.S. President Donald Trump’s notion of a building a vast Mediterranean resort where Gaza once was, or whatever the hell that was about. The plan would also require an Israeli government ending its “land grabs” in the West Bank and a formal Israeli renunciation of any annexation project or settlement policy.

The Declaration fudges the unresolvable and non-existent Palestinian “right of return” to properties Israel expropriated after its War of Independence, but that’s a hell of an improvement over pretending that such a right even exists.

It may be impossibly utopian, but necessary, but so what? So was the creation of the State of Israel in the first place.

This is light years ahead of where matters stood on October 7, 2023. So chin up.

And Happy New Year.