Don't Spawn What You Can't Kill

A Lesson Learned From Gaming and how it Applies to Hamas

Photo by vignesh on Unsplash

Hamas recently signed a treaty stating that it would give up power in the Gaza Strip. I doubted whether they were sincere, based on the fact that they’ve signed multiple treaties, then reneged on them. Within days, they began executing civilians in order to “restore law and order.” That is not the action of a group that is giving up power. Anyone who is paying attention now knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that Hamas plans on retaining power and is punishing those that oppose it. They’ve already reneged on their agreement.

This would seem to make another war in the not so distant future not just a possibility, but an inevitability. Hamas won’t rest until they’ve purged the Jews from the land of Israel and renamed it Palestine. It is, to them, that simple. Keep fighting and the other side will give up.

It occurs to me that Hamas is fundamentally misunderstanding the situation here. They don’t seem to get the fact that Israel’s Jews have always seen the existence of a Jewish state as the only way to ensure the continuation of their people. Literal millennia of oppression, enslavement and genocide have convinced many Jews that their only chance at survival as a race and a religion is to have a country that fights for them because it’s their country. They see any attempt to end Israel as an attempt at ending the Jewish race and they’re right. October Seventh and the war that followed have only strengthened that belief.

But that’s just background. It’s not what this post is actually about. Not really. This post is about what could happen next and why Hamas should seek to avoid it. Hint: It’s to their best interests and the best interests of the people they rule over to do so.

As a form of illustration, I’m going to share a story. Once upon a time, circa 2001, I was playing a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game named Everquest. I was with a group of people doing what Everquest players did, and still do: Fighting things to get loot and earn experience to make our characters more powerful. The place we were at featured a pyramid type structure which stopped about two thirds of the way up and had a flat top, fully of skeletons.

We were a bunch of newer players and we were running around killing skeletons. There were six of us working together and it was pretty easy. We must’ve downed a few hundred of these things over a couple hours of working together. Then it happened: We had one guy who would run over and attack the skeletons and “pull” them back to us. One of the skeletons followed him back to where we were standing and proceeded to drop him like third hour French. Then our healer bit the dust. It was at about this time that someone noticed something and informed the rest of the group to “RUN! IT’S A RED!” (Red, in EQ speak, is a monster that is too tough to beat with your group. It has to do with game mechanics). We took off. The skeleton followed us.

As we ran, the skeleton would occasionally veer off and kill other players. We got a lot of characters killed and made a bunch of players angry. The thing that we had shouted at us repeatedly (in capital letters; this was before voice chat) was DON’T SPAWN WHAT YOU CAN’T KILL. And we obviously couldn’t kill the big bad we had created.

The lesson here for Hamas, and it’s patron Iran, is clear: You can’t kill Israel. You tried. You failed. Along the way they got a bunch of people killed in not just Gaza and Iran, but also Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. I feel like I’m forgetting someone, but you get the idea. They overpulled. They went after the monster they couldn’t handle and now a ton of people are dead because of it.

And no, don’t give me this crap about “genocide.” Civilian casualties happen in war and you can’t put a tunnel full of weapons and terrorists and assume that Israel won’t bomb it. Every death in the war, regardless of which side the dead person was on, was caused by Hamas and Iran. All of them. They pulled the skeleton.

But now, the zone has been wiped out. The skeleton has returned to its perch on the top of the pyramid. Everyone in the area is safe as long as it remains there. The key to the survival of the people of the Gaza Strip, and the people along the Lebanon side of the Israel/Lebanon border, and along the Israel/Syria border, and in coastal Yemen, or anywhere in Iran is simple: Leave Israel alone. It exists. You can’t change that.

Added to that is this: Leftists love telling us that you can’t kill an idea. Zionism is an idea. You can’t kill it. Don’t spawn it. Zionists, left to their own devices, will simply live and let live.

The Dome of the Rock still exists in Israel’s capital. Only Muslims are allowed to pray near it. Israel enforces that rule in an attempt to keep the peace. They’ve given land to attain peace. What they won’t do is let you kill their people. That will be met with whatever level of violence it takes to stop the killing. It’s that simple, and it’s likely to cost Israel’s enemies a heck of a lot more than it costs Israel.

When I was a kid, I was kind of aggressive. My mother had to teach me to keep my hands to myself. Those lessons were painful. They weren’t tens of thousands of people dead painful, but they sucked. My message to Hamas (or whatever terrorist organization arises to replace them if I’m wrong) is simple: Keep your hands to yourself. The skeleton is watching and it’s not afraid to do what it needs to do to defend itself, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.