Sleight-of-hand tricks employ dexterous hand movements designed to manipulate objects to distract spectators from what they ought to focus on.
One of the most classic maneuvers in sleight-of-hand card tricks is called the “Double Lift” whereby the identity of the top card in a deck is kept secret by lifting the top two cards together as one. This gives the appearance that only the top card was lifted while showing the spectator the second card in the deck.
Perhaps the most successful sleight-of-hand magician alive today is a man named Yaḥya Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza. While it is too early to definitively assess last month’s hostage-prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas, what is clear is that Sinwar was playing a card trick.
Here is how it works.
The State of Israel’s alleged chief ally and weapon supplier is the United States. To make this arrangement work, Israel feels the need to market itself as a state that is invariably in lockstep with American interests and stated values.
This is why so many of our leaders waltz around the world in search of the nearest media camera to describe how pained we are by all lives lost in this war. We proudly declare that we are the people who said that saving a life is akin to saving the world, without contextualizing or qualifying that statement. In so doing, we cling to platitudes that boldly reaffirm our status as victims who only respond to isolated immediate threats; not people who proactively assert their interests.
And who are we performing for? Who are our judges?
An eccentric tech billionaires with a messiah complex. Christian missionaries who exploit our pain in the name of Jesus. Congresspeople in a land far away seeking another electoral victory. We insist that they watch footage showing the naked corpses of our women and the final shrieks of our massacred youth so that their deaths might have meaning and give us legitimacy in the eyes of our overlords.
The judges nod in approval as if to say, “Yes, yes, you do have a case.” Perhaps they even shed tears. Real tears!
And Sinwar, the master magician, stares on. He’s seen and heard it all. He’s spent years in Israeli prison studying us. Watching. Waiting.
“Bring them home!” we chant. “Free the hostages!” We wear the buttons, we hold the signs, we chant the slogans. We even go to Washington.
We picked our card.
The moment had come. The deck was shuffled. Hostages were slowly being released. Talks of “deals” and “negotiations” were underway. We all breathed a sigh of relief watching families reunite, loved ones return home, and wounded innocents receive the medical aid they had been so inhumanely deprived of.
“Is this your card?” asked Sinwar and his minions in the media.
We missed the Double Lift.
“You got your hostages back. You said this was purely a defensive war. You bombed much of Gaza. What justifies your continued aggression?”
The walls closed in as we fumbled and floundered about how sorry we were for trying to win a war against an enemy that would commit one hundred “October 7 massacres” against us if it could.
We have no choice, after all! Can’t they see that?
No, they can’t.
Slowly, this image we painted of ourselves as a desperate client state with no desire to necessarily triumph over our enemies will erode. Instead of appearing like an object with a problem, we will appear as a subject with desires. This will cause much consternation to those who for centuries have viewed Jews as a people with a problem, a tragic people, a burdensome people, a people who just can’t seem to get it right.
Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands (or over a million) killed in Iraq by US-led forces, the Vietnam War, the 1.4 million Afghan refugees expelled from Pakistan, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen instigated by the Iran-Saudi proxy war all fade into irrelevance.
Jews simply cannot be allowed to decisively win a war. That is because the continued existence and empowerment of the Jewish people in the modern era is an affront to the millennia-old myths told in the Christian West and Islamic East about us being a replaced people who still haven’t gotten the memo.
In short, we violate the laws of “nature” – nature according to the global system they set up.
Sinwar, the magician, knows all of this.
Therefore, the proper message is the following: Peace comes through sovereignty, and sovereignty comes through victory.
We, the Jewish people, have the right and responsibility to possess the land of Israel. The price of raising a finger against us is catastrophe. Redemption of our current captives and the prevention of future captives will come about by decisively vanquishing our foes and establishing a new reality on the ground. Only then will the potential for peace and justice be able to materialize according to our prerogative.
We must believe this. We must internalize this. Our ancestor Avraham was only able to rescue Lot and his family from the four kings because of decisive victory on the battlefield—both physical and spiritual.
Let us not fall into the trap of the Zionist era where many of our political leaders tried convincing our country’s British rulers that our arms were “pure” and merely for acts of self-defense, but nothing more. In doing so, Dr. Israel Eldad of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Leḥi) underground movement writes in The First Tithe, we violated the first rule of war: don’t forfeit your initiative. You cannot win a war by losing it or not fighting it.
So, when the world asks us, “Is this your card?” we must answer, “You haven’t even got the right deck.”
