Apocalypse

Giulio Meotti

Several days ago a video was shot in the Israeli town of Netivot, a dusty corner of the world in the Negev desert. The latest Hamas rocket missed a wedding party by few meters. In Netivot, hundreds of people were drinking, laughing and dancing. It would have been a massacre.

The video explains better than thousands of “analyses” the current historical process arrayed against Israel: the collapse of the Arab regimes that signed peace deals with the Jewish State; the strengthening of the terror organizations Hamas and Hezbollah; Turkey that has been lost to the West; a weak US administration and political Islam that is on the rise everywhere. The only development awaited is the announcement that Iran has developed the atomic bomb.

In the mindset of the Islamic multitudes and Western appeasers, the goal is clear: they want an Israel that packs up and goes away.

A fascinating novel written by the Dutch best selling author Leon de Winter, titled “The Right of Return”, tells a story of Israel’s imagined apocalypse and all out war for survival. The book is going to be published in many European countries, but not in Tel Aviv. The Israeli publishing houses perceive the book as demoralizing, but it is not meant to cause demoralization, it is meant to awaken the public to the dangers surrounding Israel.

De Winter’s novel describes a State of Israel in 2024 that is reduced to the City-State of Tel Aviv. Even adjoining Jaffa is cut off from the city.

“I gave in to the deepest pessimistic corners of my soul”, De Winter said. “It is not what I think will happen, but rather what I fear could happen”. A friend and defender of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her fight against Islamic ideology, De Winter describes an Israel that is basically the area of greater Tel Aviv, with the northern part of the Negev, including Dimona. The north is gone, the south is gone, Jerusalem is gone. No Jews are living in Judea and Samaria.

What’s left is a heavily fortified and secured but small area, with the remaining and largely old population centered around Tel Aviv. Cameras and drones keep vigil on the Jewish population, and the rare journey into the unprotected Palestinian-dominated territories requires passing through check-points that are far more heavily secured than contemporary ones.

The book has a desperate undertone. The country falls apart because of external pressure - continuous rocket bombardments and suicide attacks - that cause families to leave, and in addition, because of internal erosion: the Israeli Arabs and the hareidi Jews move away from the Zionist heart of the nation. Those with a criminal record, those who are old, a group fascinated to be part of an apocalypse, and those who just want to stay and defend the country no matter what happens, stay behind.

De Winter doesn’t tell us what happened, whether Israel shrinks because of a "peace process" or because of the Islamic war of attrition. “I couldn’t make it concrete, I had to jump over those years, but I always imagined a process of erosion, an increasing pressure with terrorist attacks that will pressure people to leave”, De Winter tell us. “What we see happening in Egypt right now, is part of that process”.

The main focus of the book is on Bram Mannheim, originally a Dutch Jew who makes aliyah when he is 18 and becomes, at a young age, a celebrated leftist professor. He teaches history of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University. But tragedy hits when, in 2008, he has moved to Princeton with his wife and young son to become a professor there. His 4-year-old son disappears. His marriage collapses, his life stops, and he turns into a madman, a psychotic transient wandering around in the States.

His old father finds him and brings him back to Tel Aviv. And in 2024, Bram runs a little bureau that helps parents of children who have disappeared as well in this Jewish ghetto-city called Israel. And after a devastating attack, apparently executed by a young Jew who disappeared in the same period as Bram’s child, Bram starts to hope again, starts to think that maybe his son is still alive, just like these other Jewish boys - a group that seems to have been kidnapped and trained to become Muslim suicide killers, Jewish children who will come back to Israel to kill their parents.

De Winter is one of the rare Jewish writers of the Diaspora still able to shed the real drama of Israel’s struggle for survival. “I am an admirer of the Zionist project, of the historical necessity to create a safe haven for European Jews as a reaction to 19th century anti-Semitism”, De Winter said. “I fear that Israel will not see its first centennial. Not because of a lack of vitality or commitment, but because after many decades in a region where they have been met with violence, wars, and hatred, the Israeli Jews will conclude that they love their children more than their country”.

De Winter’s unique book is a glimpse into Israel’s nightmares, however, they remain nightime imaginings.

De Winter projects rational, Western, self-oriented processes on Israeli society, a society that has fought many major wars and suffered suicide bombers, rockets and other forms of barbarian terror non-stop since Israel's 1948 creation as a state. Perhaps due to having had enough of bloodsoaked Jewish history in the Diaspora, as he says, perhaps because Israelis are a tough breed, perhaps out of idealism, or all of the above, the 62 years of Israel's existence that include over a thousand civilian victims in one year in what is known as the Oslo War of terror, have had an effect opposite to the one De Winter predicts for 2024.