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I am posting this post of Elliot Resnick on my blog because fb links are unreliable and I would like to share these thoughts of Elliot Resnick with a link that works. These words of truth are left unsaid. If you search for it on fb and the above fb link doesn't work, try to search "Elliot Resnick Mike Huckabee" on fb.
Elliot Resnick posted this on his FB page close to the Tucker Huckabee interview Feb 2026.
Last Shabbos, I was asked to give a speech at a shul in Florida. Here's what I said:
Many of you probably know that Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Mike Huckabee. In this interview, Tucker repeatedly asked Huckabee why he's satisfied with the current borders of Israel when G-d promises Abraham in the Bible a land of Israel that runs from the Niles River to the Euphrates River. Tucker has become a rather nasty and dishonest individual, but I'm grateful to him for this line of questioning since all of a sudden people are now talking about the ideal borders of Israel being from the Nile to the Euphrates. I kind of like the sound of that, and it puts us on the offense instead of defense.
Way too many pro-Israel supporters make the standard *defensive* case for Israel. So they'll say something like: Israel stands up for LGBT rights. That's terrible. So-called LGBT rights are anti-Jewish. According to the Midrash, G-d destroyed almost all of humankind with the Great Flood because it legitimized same-sex marriage.
Another statement Israel defenders will proudly make is that Israel allows Arabs to sit in its Knesset. That's also terrible. Israel is a Jewish state. Only Jews therefore should be deciding its fate. Only Frenchmen should decide the fate of the French nation, only Japanese people should decide the fate of the Japanese nation, and only Jews should decide the fate of the Jewish nation.
It would be bad enough if the Arabs in the Knesset were just regular non-Jews. But they happen to be vicious anti-Semites. Yet, we allow them a say in the destiny of the Jewish nation. Are we insane?
We're lucky that Jerusalem Arabs don't have the right to vote in national elections and that many other Arabs boycott the elections. Otherwise there would be something like 25 Arabs in the Knesset, which would mean that never again would there be a right-wing government in Israel.
What else do Israel defenders say?
They proudly declare that IDF is the most moral army in the world since it risks the lives of its own soldiers in order to save the lives of enemy civilians. But that doesn't make it moral. That makes it the most *immoral* army in the world. No sane country places the lives of enemy civilians over those of its own army.
And they *are* enemy civilians. Wars are collective by their very nature. World War II, for example, was a conflict between America and Japan, America and Germany. It wasn't between the American and German and Japanese armies. It was a *national* conflict, not a conflict between individuals. That's why, for example, I doubt any of you know or care if the Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor survived World War II or not. We don't care because they didn't attack us as *individuals.* They attacked us as representatives of a nation.
And that nation was fully behind the war. Soldiers don't operate in a vacuum. They need food to eat, clothing to eat, weapons to shoot. Who grows that food, who makes that clothing, who fashions those weapons? Money is the sinews of war, Cicero said 2,000 years ago. Who pays taxes if not civilians? That means every working civilian is contributing to the war. And many women offer moral support to soldiers by writing them love letters.
So every civilian population in war is guilty. That's why sieges are moral. Sieges are one of the oldest forms of warfare known to man. And a siege is a form of collective punishment by its very nature. The besieging army literally starves the population into surrender. That's a term you'll find in any book about sieges, which have been a regular part of ware for millennia: "starve into surrender."
We all know about World War II during which the Allies killed almost a million civilians from the air, including 100,000 Japanese in a single night on March 9, 1945 in the Bombing of Tokyo. But leave that aside. Did you know that in World War I, the British killed something like 800,000 German civilians by imposing a blockade around Germany to prevent any vital supplies from getting into the country?
And we feel defensive about killing Arabs in Gaza?? Those Arabs are arguably the least innocent civilians in the history of warfare. If an American soldier accidentally wandered into Berlin or Tokyo in the middle of World War II, would he have been lynched? No, because although Germany and Japan were at war with America, the average German and Japanese civilian didn't hate Americans with a passion. The average Arab in Gaza, though, *does* hate Jews with a passion, and if any of you here walked into Gaza tomorrow with a yarmulke on your head, you would be lynched.
So we shouldn't be boasting that we killed so few civilians in Gaza. We actually should have killed many more since the only way to win a war is to crush the will of the enemy. In "On War," probably the most famous book on warfare ever written, Carl von Clausewitz writes that every war should have three aims. One of them is to subdue the will of the enemy.
In World War I, we didn't succeed in doing that. People like Hitler werre able to convince themselves that the government stabbed the army in the back – that if the army had just been allowed to fight a little longer, it would have won. After World War II, no German could think that. All he had to was walk outside his house and see all the death and destruction around him. He knew to the very core of his being that he had lost.
And *because* the Germans and Japanese knew they had lost, America was able to become best friends with Germany and Japan almost immediately after the war ended. The Arabs, though, have never been made to feel like they've lost. That's why we've been fighting them for 100 years now.
So no, we shouldn't boast that the IDF risks the lives of its own soldiers to save the lives of enemy civilians, we shouldn't boast that Arabs sit in the Knesset, and we shouldn't boast that Israel recognizes LGBT rights. We should be embarrassed by all that.
Instead, we should defend Israel unapologetically – from a Jewish perspective. The Land of Israel is ours by historical right, it's ours by the laws of conquest, but, most importantly, it's ours by divine right. G-d gave the Land to us. Period. We actually have a greater right to our land than any other nation on earth. G-d never promised Italy to the Italians, Greece to the Greeks, or China to the Chinese. But He did promise the land of Israel to the people of Israel.
Unfortunately, there's much anti-Semitism in the world. Many people therefore will hate us no matter what we do or say. But some people *do* make up their mind about a conflict based on what they hear from the two sides. So, what do they hear from the two parties in the Middle East?
Well, from the Arabs they hear a simple message: The Land is ours and we want it now – all of it. What do they hear from us? Generally they hear: We're willing to give the Arabs a Palestinian state as soon as they're ready to live with us in peace. That's basically an admission that justice is on the side of the Arabs because no one normal gives up something that's his just because someone else wants it. Most of you here own houses. Would you give part of it to someone just because he started throwing rocks at you? No, you would call the police. You would make sure he stopped throwing rocks at you. You wouldn't give him part of your house.
So what do we expect from the world? If we ourselves don't say the land is ours, why should we expect others to think that it is?
You all know the famous story with King Solomon. Two women of ill repute come before him. Both had given birth recently and one of them had accidentally smothered her baby in the middle of the night. So what did she do? She switched her dead baby with the baby of her colleague. The colleague objected. She said, "That's not baby. My baby is the live one." The other woman said, "No, my baby is the live one. Yours is the dead one."
So they go to King Solomon and what does he say? He says take a sword and cut the baby in half. Give one half to one mother and the other half to the other mother. At that point, the true mother says, "Don't touch the baby. It's fine, you can give it to my colleague." What did the friend say? "Cut it in half. I don't mind." And what does Solomon say? He says the true mother is the one who isn’t willing to split the baby.
Okay, back to the present day: Who is willing to split the Land of Israel? We or the Arabs? And since the answer is we – we are the ones willing to split it – can we blame the world for thinking like Solomon that the Arabs are the true owners since they aren't willing to split it?
The Talmud states that if two people grab a garment, both claiming that it's theirs, they swear to that effect and they each get half the garment (or its monetary equivalent). If one says the whole garment is his and the other says only half of it is his, one gets three-quarters of the garment, the other party gets one quarter. The lesson is clear:
When something is yours, unapologetically say so. We shouldn't be talking about giving the Arabs a state in Gaza or the West Bank. Instead, we should be talking like Tucker Carlson about a state of Israel that runs from the Nile to the Euphrates.
