What lessons can already be learned from October 7?

It might be only less than three weeks into the tragedy of Oct. 7, but there are already many lessons we can learn from the mistakes and suppositions we believed, all of which led us to the worst and most savage attack in Israel’s 75-year history as a nation.

The first misconception, which was the basis of the Abraham Accords, is that if we do all within our power to assist Palestinians, by helping them to attain upward mobility financially, economically, personally and in every other way that free and democratic nations enjoy, that we will have a grateful partner who will agree to lay down their weapons of war and focus on the development of their people. Why was this wrong?

It didn’t take into consideration the extreme and murderous ideology of Hamas, which presently governs the Palestinian people and for whom they voted to represent them. Their entire philosophy is grounded in a code of destruction where Jews must be eradicated at all costs. This was what their last two years of training was all about. They essentially mocked the well-known Jewish slogan of “Never Again,” turning it into “Yet Again.” 

Yasmin Mohammed, the president of Free Hearts and Free Minds, knows this only too well. The daughter of a Palestinian immigrant to America, from her native Gaza, was married off, by her mother, at age 19, to an Al Qaeda terrorist. It was within that intolerable life, which she was able to escape, that she quickly learned the mindset of these brutal killers. 

As she put it, in her Fox & Friends Interview with co-host Ainsley Earhardt on Oct. 23: “Even if you cut off the head of Hamas, two heads are going to grow back in its place. Islamic terrorists are not one organization, and you think you can kill Osama bin Laden, and the rest will fall, but from Al Qaeda grows Isis.” 

She went on to assure that those who appear to be Palestinian protesters are really Hamas supporters. She says: “You can’t ignore the screams of ‘Gas the Jews’ or ‘Khaybar, Khaybar,’ the prophet Mohammed’s cry for genocide of the Jews.” She says, “I’ve seen posters that say, ‘I fully support Hamas.’”  

These are not the profiles of a people who, if given enough advantages to better themselves, will abandon their inbred mission to annihilate the Jewish race.

The second misconception is that Hamas would be a better peace partner than Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who hadn’t been receptive to working towards peace in any meaningful way over the last several years.  

It was Hussein Agha, a close confidant of Abbas and said to be a scholar, who, in 2018, stated: “Theoretically, the natural partners for a kind of ‘peace’ now are Hamas and the Israeli right-wing. They are the only two partners that can reach an agreement that will be acceptable to both and at the same time fit their respective ideologies.”

In light of Oct. 7, how 'off the mark' does that statement sound? 

But the question begs to be asked: “Why didn’t we know the true nature of Hamas’ ideology?” Who believed that they weren’t as barbaric and sadistic as the same ISIS terrorists who beheaded their captives, taking pride in the recording of their atrocities for all the world to see? Why were we lulled into a false sense of the ability to co-exist with poisonous snakes and scorpions?

Perhaps it was our ongoing but unrealistic, aspiration to proclaim the impossible – that we have finally been able to defeat the enemy by making peace with the enemy. That was certainly Jared Kushner’s wishful thinking. 

Hamas operatives and other terror group members are not interested in wealth or culture, even though their top leaders live in the lap of luxury in such refuge states as Qatar, Turkey and even London. However, they didn’t earn their wealth by the sweat of their brow. They amassed it by syphoning it off the many naive private donors and government funds that were intended to go to poor and disenfranchised Palestinians, but instead ended up in the hands of the most depraved, savage terrorists who are now able to finance their
6-star hotel lifestyles while their people still languish in the worst conditions known to humanity, including being used as human shields.

Which brings me to the next lesson to be learned. Those who fund the Palestinians, by any means, whether financial or by demonstrating their support, are helping Hamas to arm themselves, kill innocents, keep their people oppressed and downtrodden, while also making sure they live as kings.

The transferring of billions of dollars to rogue regimes, such as Iran, must also be viewed as nothing more than the financing of death and terror, first to the Jewish state and then to the rest of the non-Muslim world who are seen as infidels. There must be an uprising of citizens, from every nation, who are committed to putting pressure on their governments to stop this insanity, which will only lead to more bloodshed and destruction.

There are so many more lessons which we can already be gleaned from this mother of all tragedies for the Jewish nation, including the need to vote in competent, insightful leaders, who recognize the road signs that should have been obvious to all, but which were, sadly, missed by so many.

Perhaps the greatest lesson we could learn, at this juncture, is that no matter how well-equipped and strong our nation's military is, in addition to the world’s super power, which has strategically placed its warships and other defense mechanisms in direct view of threatening forces, we, nonetheless, remain the people, chosen by God, to be a light to the nations. The best way to do that is to acknowledge that without His help, we could easily fall. It is only because of His mercy and faithfulness to the promises He made to Abraham, to whom He vowed to make us a great nation, that we stand at all.

We must, therefore, look only to Him to continue to preserve us as a people, go before us and utterly destroy our enemies, because if we make the mistake of only looking to our own strength, military might and intelligence, we just might discover that we will fall short of the victory that can only come from acknowledging our limitations, the first one being that we are not the Almighty!