NEWS ABOUT THE RECOVERY OF JUDI WEINSTEIN'S AND HER HUSBAND'S BODIES

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My wife and I were married in 1971. Judi and her family were guests at our wedding. So the news that Judi and her husband's bodies were recovered a couple of days ago was especially poignant.

'I think he is dead’: US-Israeli couple’s chilling call for help on Oct. 7

Judi Weinstein-Haggai calmly explained that her husband was shot before both were killed by terrorists. The IDF recovered their bodies on Thursday.

NOAM DVIR AND EREZ LINN

Judi and Gadi Haggai. Credit: Courtesy.

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(June 6, 2025 / Israel Hayom)

A recording from Judi Weinstein-Haggai to the Magen David Adom emergency medical service captures the harrowing moments as she and her husband, Gadi Haggai, came under attack by terrorists during their routine morning walk on Oct. 7, 2023.

The couple was brutally murdered and taken by the terrorists to Gaza, who held on to their bodies for over a year and a half until their recovery by the IDF in an overnight operation on Thursday.

Judi and Gadi Haggai used to take a morning walk around Kibbutz Nir Oz. On Oct. 7, shortly before 7 a.m., they were among the first civilians to encounter the terrorists who were attacking the kibbutz.

In the call to Magen David Adom, Judi tells the operator that she is “in our fields” near the community and that her husband had been shot. The call, and subsequent events, paint a grim picture of the assault that ultimately led to their murder and abduction by the Mujahideen Brigades.

Judi and Gadi Haggai. Screenshot: Facebook.

Judi, her voice strained, informs the dispatcher, “My husband was killed, I think he’s dead.”

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She describes Gadi as face down, “with parts of his brain … outside his head, everything is covered in blood,” and confirms he was unresponsive. She adds that she herself had been wounded: “I was injured in the face and hand.”

The audio of the call reveals Judi’s desperate pleas. “Yes, please, help us,” she implores. The dispatcher, attempting to gather critical information, asks, “Is he conscious?” Judi replies “I don’t know,” later reiterating, “He’s not responding.”

When asked about the nature of the attack, Judi specifies, “A weapon, there were guys on a motorcycle.”

The dispatcher sought clarification, “Were there terrorists, were there terrorists who shot at you with a weapon?” to which Judi affirms, “Yes.” She confirms again, “Yes, they shot at us.”

Judi identifies the assailants as terrorists on a motorcycle. Asked if she was in a safe place, she replies, “No, outside, no, no, no, under a tree, he’s by the road.”

The dispatcher asks if terrorists were still present. “Not at the moment,” Judi responds. Throughout the exchange, the dispatcher tries to reassure her, stating, “We, listen, we’re on our way with the army,” and repeatedly urges her, “Listen, I want you to please take care of yourself, okay?” Judi replies, “I’ll try.”

Their daughter Iris, wrote of that morning: “On the darkest of Saturdays, my amazing mother and my beloved father were taking their usual walk around the kibbutz. They were among the first civilians to encounter the terrorists between 6:50-6:56 a.m. My heart stopped on 10/7.”

The Haggais were among the many victims brutally murdered during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre. Responsibility for their murder and abduction was claimed by the Mujahideen Brigades, a Salafist-jihadist terrorist group.

This same organization was also responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Kfir and Ariel.

A gifted couple

Gadi Haggai, 72 at the time of his murder, was a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz, a father of four, and a grandfather of seven. He was described as a sharp and talented man—a gifted wind instrument player from the age of three, deeply connected to the land, a chef and an advocate for healthy vegan nutrition and sports. He held American and Israeli citizenship.

Judi Lynn Weinstein-Haggai, 70 when she was murdered, was an English teacher specializing in children with special needs and attention deficit disorders. Judi also worked with children suffering from anxiety due to the complex security situation in the communities near Gaza, using meditation and mindfulness techniques.

Beyond teaching, she was a poet, an entrepreneur and deeply dedicated to promoting peace and fellowship. Judi held American, Canadian and Israeli citizenship.

In the joint operation conducted by the IDF and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) in the Khan Yunis area of the Gaza Strip overnight on Wednesday, the bodies of Judi and Gadi Haggai were recovered and returned to Israel for burial.

The recovery of their bodies occurred around the same time the Mujahideen Brigades announced the death of Mahmoud Abu Nar, a senior commander in charge of the group’s Central Camps Brigade and a member of the group’s military council. He was reportedly killed in an Israeli Air Force strike in central Gaza.

The Mujahideen Brigades is one of approximately 12 factions operating jointly with Hamas in Gaza. The group, which split from Fatah two decades ago and whose members were previously associated with Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, has been referred to by Israel as a “rogue organization” in the years preceding the current conflict, primarily due to its history of launching rocket attacks into southern Israel.

The Mujahideen Brigades adheres to a fundamentalist Salafist ideology, with the stated aim of establishing an Islamic Caliphate. The group has acknowledged suffering significant losses during the ongoing war, including hundreds of terrorists, field commanders and senior members, but claims to be actively recruiting new operatives, similar to Hamas.

Before the death of Abu Nar, other senior figures in the Mujahideen Brigades had been eliminated, including Mohammed Hassan Awad, the head of its intelligence apparatus, on April 4, and another senior intelligence official, known as Abu Ashraf later that same month.

More: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-856668

ABOUT NEW FORMS OF ORGANISATION

 

Thang Long Industrial Park

Hung Yen Province (33 km east of central Hanoi, approximately 60 minutes by car)

Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2024 

The point of my email (which I failed to adequately convey) is that government at all levels are based on  wrong organisational models.

They fail to take into account that the focus of everyone’s life is actually the economy.

That is to say: the production of goods and services.

If one looks around one would hard pressed to say that our infrastructure is organised toward an economic end.

In contrast, industrial parks are specifically organised toward an economic end.

 

At all government levels, we are using organisational models that are geared toward satisfying the electorate’s personal emotional needs.

Satisfying personal needs varies considerably between election cycles.

So, in fact, we effectively end up with no consistent or effective organisation models

Furthermore, the current societal objective of “social justice” (embraced by liberals and socialists which constitute 2/3 of the electorate) cannot even be defined.

 

What I see in various societies around the world that have had their cultures collapse is that they are concentrating their efforts on forming new towns and cities on the industrial park model.

They seem to come in two models: Eco-parks and Gated parks.

The Eco-parks are completely self contained with their own energy and waste disposal systems and, sometimes housing.

The Gated parks have their own security systems added.

 

What these two styles of parks share is economic output.

Further, everyone within the system has be productive.

Obvious exceptions duly noted.

Social behavior is what you would expect of anyone in a conventional workplace.

If you do not work or if you misbehave you are out.

Cultural differences are subsumed by effective economic production models.

Societal advancement is based on economic effectiveness.

 

I fear we will not even begin to modify our organisational models until we go broke.

 

The enclosed picture from the previous email shows that an industrial park model need not be a visual blight but, in fact, can be aesthetically pleasing as well.

 

love,

Dad

 

Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2024

It is unfortunate the state in which we find the world today.  And its equally unfortunate that government(s) are typically the route of our problems rather than a source of our solution.

 

Love C.

 Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2024

Hi Guys

 

Lately, I have been doing some deep dives on the ways that various societies organise themselves.

 

Among the various models of civic governance it is obvious (to me, at least) that the western model of liberal democracy is not working very well. 

In fact, it is failing.

 

One only has to look at San Francisco and, increasingly, Vancouver to see that there are no liberal-democratic solutions to western urban decay.

 

For those who can afford it, there are gated communities but I feel that these are only stop gap measures.

 

But the idea of gated communities is still appealing but needs to be more comprehensively thought through.

 

For the last few months I have been visiting various industrial parks in the lower mainland.

 

Call me lowbrow but the architecture and overall aesthetic (not to mention the orderliness and cleanliness) I found very appealing.

 

The park just north of Westminster and 6th has some very stately landscaping plus it even has its own daycare centre.

 

Recently I have placed the photo below on my desktop. 

It is an industrial park in Vietnam built by the Sumitomo Corp of Japan. (I have attached a file so that you can view it full screen).

 

So the short story  is that, combining your own gated cottage model and the industrial park model shown below with schools and water treatment, etc. could provide a different governance model (i.e corporate governance) 

from our present political models of city, town, village democratic governance.

 

The problem with democracy is that 50% of the voters (as a simple matter of fact are of below average intelligence) and that fact is reflected in who they elect.

 

Add to that the number of clever grifters and you can see the problem. The grifters bribe the rubes with their own money while skimming the public treasury through various schemes.

Together, this unholy alliance gained access to the public treasury and have looted the country. Now the whole democratic edifice is beginning to crumble.

 

The problems with the downtown east side are just the tip of the iceberg.

 

The You Tube link below is a short vid by Sumitomo. Note that most of their business in in south east Asia.

 

And it has not escaped my attention that almost all of the furniture I have purchased these past few years is made in Viet Nam.

 

love

Dad

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvUmZd7rM0E

REFLECTIONS ON A FEBRUARY MORNING

Stripped of Christianity, indeed stripped of any religion, the US Constitution is not only unworkable but has no spiritual significance.

Without any religious underpinning it is merely an unenforceable administrative document.

In the current political climate, being an American is a fact without meaning.

Increasingly its people wander the political landscape, yearning.

They seek but they do not find.

 

The number of people who are undisciplined and cannot exercise any self control are finding a home in the Democrat Party.

An unholy collection of malcontents.

They fancy themselves as revolutionaries.

They are only unified by their desire to cause intellectual and spiritual chaos.

If they can’t be happy then no one is going to be happy.

 

Without religion there is only politics but politics is just war by other means.

And war requires an enemy.

The Republicans are handy targets and will do just fine.

They are political submissives who will do anything, submit to any degradation, as long as they think they are getting love in return.

 

And what do the Republicans say or do that is repugnant?

It does not matter.

And what does the Democrat Party stand for?

It does not matter.

 

They are rebels without a cause.

GAZAN ARAB DEPRAVITY PART 2

 

The death cult of lies

The Palestine cause has knocked the west off its moral compass altogether

Melanie Phillips Feb 25

The grotesque Hamas circus surrounding the release of Israeli hostages has shocked many around the world.

Israeli forensic tests on the bodies of the youngest of the murdered Israeli hostages, 10-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel Bibas, revealed that their captors had murdered these children with their bare hands and then mutilated the bodies to support the false claim that they’d been killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Their mother, Shiri, whose body was returned one day later after Hamas had tried to pass off a different body as hers, had been murdered at the same time.

The coffins were paraded through wildly cheering crowds exulting in the murder of Jews.

What kind of people would want to murder a baby and a toddler? What kind of people would exult over their coffins, hurling taunts as they cheered in a grisly open-air carnival of murderous hatred?

To anyone who has been paying attention to the nearly century-old war against the Jewish homeland, none of this should be at all surprising.

On October 7, Israeli children were murdered in front of their parents. Among all the women, children and men slaughtered that day, a number were tortured, raped, beheaded and burned alive.

Such behavior is not confined to Hamas. Palestinian Arabs in general have systematically targeted Jewish children and adults for barbaric and sadistic slaughter and mutilation.

In 2000, two Israeli soldiers took a wrong turn and drove into Ramallah in the so-called West Bank. They were dragged from their car into a police station, where they were murdered. One of the bodies was then thrown out the window to the lynch mob that had gathered outside and which tore the body to shreds.

In 2004, Arab terrorists opened fire on the Hatuel family’s car near their home in Gaza when Jews still lived there. They shot and murdered at close range Tali Hatuel, who was eight months pregnant, and her four daughters, ages 11, 9, 7 and 2.

In 2011, five members of the Israeli Fogel family, including 11- and 4-year-old boys and a 3-month-old baby, were massacred in their beds by two terrorists from a neighboring Arab village. The baby’s head was almost severed from her body.

This pattern of depravity goes back almost a century. In 1929, Arab mobs massacred more than 70 Jews in Hebron. In The Wandering Jew Has Arrived, Albert Londres provided this account of how these mobs behaved toward some 50 of those Jews who tried to find refuge inside a bank.

He wrote: “They cut off hands, they cut off fingers, they held heads over a stove, they gouged out eyes. … They mutilated the men. They shoved 13-year-old girls, mothers, and grandmothers into the blood and raped them in unison.”

The same kind of utterly depraved behavior is regularly exhibited by the Islamists of ISIS, al Qaeda and other such groups.

In June 2016 in Mosul, Iraq, 19 Yazidi women who refused to become sex slaves were burned alive inside iron cages by ISIS terrorists.

Earlier this month, more than 70 bodies of Christians, including women, children and the elderly who had been taken hostage by Islamists, were found tied up and beheaded inside a church.

These similarities are no coincidence. From the early years of the 20th century, when Hitler’s ally the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini falsely accused the Jews of aiming to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque — a claim repeated even today by al Husseini’s explicit fanboy, the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — the attempt to suppress and then destroy the Jewish homeland has been a feature of Islamic holy war.

The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national home. Palestinian identity is a fabrication that was cooked up in the 1960s by the Egyptian-born “Palestinian” terrorist leader Yasser Arafat — who was radicalized by al Husseini — and the Soviet Union, in order to steal from the Jews their ancestral home and their own history in those lands.

Yet Palestinianism is the default cause of western progressives, who believe the lie that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land who have been exiled and oppressed by the Israelis — and are mostly merely wretched and poor and have nothing to do with terrorism.

But behind the Hamas storm troopers who led the October 7 attack, Gaza civilians poured across the shattered border to rape, murder and kidnap Jews and others.

“Ordinary” Gaza civilians paraded and abused those who were dragged back into Gaza and desecrated the bodies of those who had already been murdered.

The Arabs of Gaza not only elected Hamas, but the vast majority have said repeatedly that they support the murder of Jews and want Israel destroyed.

Polling shows even greater majorities for this agenda among the Arabs of the “West Bank.” Officials of Fatah — the main party in the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority — have openly celebrated the October 7 atrocities and declared their intention to repeat them.

For months, the Israelis have been struggling to keep the lid on dozens of terrorist plots emanating from the Arabs of the “West Bank,” against a backdrop of threats to perpetrate an October 7-style invasion of Israeli towns in central Israel.

A few days ago, an enormous plot to detonate bombs on rush-hour buses in central Israel was foiled only when a number of these devices exploded in empty buses the previous evening — because when priming the bombs, the terrorist had confused 9 a.m. with 9 p.m.

Support for the Palestinians has knocked the west off its moral compass altogether. It’s not just that it’s signed up to a cause that’s profoundly anti-Jew. It’s because the west has come to believe that an evil cause represents conscience itself.

Islamism is a death cult. So is its “Palestinian” offshoot. But the west is unable to acknowledge this because it’s in the grip of a death cult of its own.

As I write in my new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It, the west has had a cultural death wish for decades. Undermining its core values, it no longer believes in objective truth. Everything is a matter of opinion. Feelings trump facts and evidence.

Inverting truth and lies, victim and aggressor, the west is unable to see the Palestinian cause for the evil that it is. And consumed by the belief that western civilization is fundamentally bad, it refuses to acknowledge the Islamist threat not only to Israel but also to itself.

So as the west’s cultural elites undermine and hollow out their own civilization, the Islamist death cult is moving in for the kill — with the Palestinian Arabs creating the Trojan Horse of the Middle East.

It’s high time the west woke up to the bitter reality of the entire Palestinian cause, and to the way its own agenda of cultural self-loathing has softened it up for the triumph of its enemies.

ULTIMATELY THERE ARE ONLY THREE ETHICAL SYSTEMS

One is that of Buddhism and Christianity, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil by doing good, identifies virtue with love, and is inclined in politics to unlimited democracy.

Another is the ethic of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy.

A third considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, depending on circumstances, when love should rule or when power should. By identifying virtue the intelligent mind knows when to advocate for aristocracy or for democracy in government.

GAZAN ARAB DEPRAVITY

 

Civilisation weeps

The terrible fate of the Bibas family, and all the victims of Gazan Arab depravity, symbolises the moral sickness of the west

Melanie Phillips Feb 21

The murdered Israeli hostages Oded Lifshitz, Ariel and Kfir Bibas and an unidentified body arrive in Israel

After the heartbreak comes a profound anger. The return from Gaza of the bodies of the murdered Israeli hostages, nine month-old Kfir and four year-old Ariel Bibas— after a grotesque Hamas propaganda stunt displaying their coffins and with the subsequent discovery that what was assumed to be the body of the children’s mother, Shiri, was in fact an unidentified corpse — has triggered in the already deeply traumatised Israeli people a bottomless grief and a demand for justice at long last.

Shiri’s parents, Yossi and Margit Silberman, were also murdered on October 7 2023. The suffering of her husband Yarden, who was released from Hamas captivity only three weeks ago, is unconscionable.

Oded Lifshitz, aged 83, whose body was returned with the Bibas children and who had made it part of his routine living near the Gaza border to drive countless Arabs from Gaza to hospital appointments in Israel, had his kindness repaid when they burned down his home, took him and his wife hostage and then murdered him.

The fate of all the other individuals slaughtered, raped, tortured, beheaded, burned alive and kidnapped into Gaza in the October 7 atrocities is no less shattering.

But the terrified face of Shiri Bibas cradling her children as they were dragged into Gaza will haunt many of us forever. The Bibas family will remain a symbol of the unspeakable evil visited upon Israel on that black day and which it continues to confront.

It’s also a symbol of the west’s descent into inhumanity and its tacit endorsement of barbarism. In city after city, people whose faces were contorted with hatred and rage tore down posters of baby Kfir and other hostages from public places.

What kind of people feel such hatred and rage at pictures of babies, children, women and men who have been kidnapped by barbaric savages?

This was a mass outbreak of a collective pathology. It has illustrated the extent of the west’s crisis of civilisation. And at the heart of that crisis lies the attitude to Israel and the Jewish people.

The hostage posters were torn down because, for supporters of the Palestine cause, nothing can be allowed to challenge their narrative of hapless Palestinians and Israeli colonisers who drove them out of their ancient homeland and have oppressed them ever since.

Every part of that narrative is, of course, a lie. The Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel — the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom. Palestinian identity is a fiction cooked up in the 1960s between the Egyptian-born “Palestinian” terrorist leader Yasser Arafat and the Soviet Union.

It was created not only to steal the homeland of the Jews from them but also to steal their own ancient history in the land, an essential element of Jewish national identity. Whatever supporters of this cause tell themselves, it’s therefore an attack on Judaism itself.

At the heart of this cause is the demonisation of the Jews as Jews, an evil with which generations of “Palestinian” Arabs have been indoctrinated.

Hamas led the onslaught on October 7, but Gaza’s civilians made up the majority of the barbarians who invaded Israel that day to slaughter and kidnap Jews. Yet western liberals have howled for the past 16 months that these are innocent people being subjected to collective punishment.

The “Palestinian” cause, so thoroughly embedded in liberal western culture, has knocked the west off its moral compass. The Palestinian narrative matters so much to those who tore the hostage posters down because this evil cause defines the “progressive” conscience.

This is the moral sickness of the west. As I write in my book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It, this is the outcome of a culture whose intellectual elites have taken a hammer to its core values for decades, abolishing truth, conscience and reason itself.

US President Donald Trump is fighting back against some of this with his multitudinous directives taking a blowtorch to the embedded orthodoxies of intersectionality, victim culture and national self-loathing

[ED: This where I completely separate myself from Philips. Russia may have fired the literal 'first shot' but it did so under extreme provocation. The invasion of Ukraine was pre-emptive in nature and only done after many warnings to the NATO/ Ukranian alliance to BACK-OFF.]

However, his shocking and absurd claim that Ukraine started the war with Russia has caused consternation even among many of those prepared to cut him slack precisely because he is taking on the cultural nihilists of the left.

That’s because his remarks suggest that the monstrous reversal of aggressor and victim — an inversion at the heart of the Palestinian big lie — is not confined to the fantasy universe inhabited by the left. His embrace of the conspiracy-theorising of former Fox News TV anchor Tucker Carlson that sanitises Russian aggression is deeply alarming.

We don’t know whether Trump will end up benefiting Russia’s tyrannical president Vladimir Putin or producing peace with justice in Ukraine. But those looking to him to rescue America from the depredations of the left should not be blind to his flawed attitude to monstrous world leaders — his belief that in every conflict lies a potential deal to be negotiated in which he will emerge the victor.

Nevertheless, his exasperation with Europe freeloading off US military protection is on the mark. Europe’s refusal to step up to the plate is itself the outcome of the cultural demoralisation identified by Vice-President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference when he excoriated Europe for retreating from “some of its most fundamental values” and not realizing that the biggest threat it faced was from within itself.

The European Union is constitutionally unable to entertain the need for a serious military capability because it arose from the belief that Europe could never be trusted not to repeat the horrors of Nazi imperialism and world war.

Europe had come to believe that, especially in Germany, it was incurably given to aggression. This profound cultural demoralisation accounts in large measure for its inability to hold the line for its own civilisation against the attempt to destroy it both from within and without.

In other words, Europe’s military disarray in the face of what it itself identifies as intolerable Russian aggression is because Europe is an 80 year-old civilisational basket-case.

To that extent, Vance was absolutely correct. But the crisis is much deeper and wider than the issues he identified of free speech, mass migration or even criminalising Christian “conscience rights “ over abortion or religious “thought crime”.

The United States, no less than Britain and Europe, has become riddled by systematic indoctrination in anti-western propaganda proclaiming its original sins of colonialism, racism and “white privilege,” and where conservatives have been literally and metaphorically strong-armed off campus.

America, no less than Britain and Europe, has for decades helped fund Palestinian indoctrination in murderous hatred of the Jews.

America, no less than Britain and Europe, has for decades perpetrated the illusion of a “two-state solution,” denying the genocidal jihadi nature of the Palestinian cause and bullying Israel into weakening its ability to defend itself— a process that led inexorably to the massacres in southern Israel on October 7.

America, Britain, Europe, Canada and Australia have all hosted rampant and brazen antisemitic attacks, with their mainstream media promulgating murderous lies about Israel week in, week out.

And across the west, its elites continue to deny and excuse Islamist extremism and Muslim Jew-hatred, while denouncing all who call this out as “Islamophobic”.

This crisis has been caused by the west’s retreat from its core values based in Christianity but which ultimately derive from Judaism. The people tearing down the hostage posters were tearing the Jews out of their sight, out of their conscience and out of their world.

This is why the fate of the Israeli hostages is a crisis for the west. Challenged by the October 7 atrocities to defend civilisation against barbarism, it did not defend civilisation.

Enough. The coffins of the Bibas children, coupled with the west’s collusion with the depraved population that willed their extermination along with the extinction of Israel, tell us that the Jewish people must rediscover their historic calling of justice through strength and abandon their attempts to satisfy a west that no longer deserves to survive

THE OBSCENITY OF THE PROGRESSIVE CLASSES

 

What Israel is really up against

It's no exaggeration to see the spectre of Nazism in the Palestinian cause

Melanie Phillips Feb 10

For several days, all anybody could talk about was President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Gaza would be rebuilt as an American “Riviera”, a real-estate honeypot whose erstwhile inhabitants would be resettled in Jordan, Egypt and other countries where apparently they would build happy and productive new lives for themselves away from the shattered landscape of the Gaza war zone.

Everyone was astounded; people were variously ecstatic, appalled, confused. Was Trump a genius or a lunatic? Did he mean it? What exactly did he mean? Would the Gazans be able to return to this prospective Monaco of the Middle East if they wanted to do so, or was Trump proposing to send them all into exile? Should we take what he was saying seriously but not literally? And if he did mean it literally, how would this actually be achieved?

Then the three Israeli hostages, Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy, were brought out of hell. Now the kaleidoscope was shaken once again. And now grief and horror overwhelmed all else.

The three released captives were unrecognisable from the men who had been seized on October 7 2023 and dragged into the dungeons of Gaza. They were emaciated, sunken-eyed, walking unsteadily. They had been starved and tortured.

We now learn they were shackled inside a dark tunnel with no air or light; chained and unable to stand so that one of them had to be taught to walk again before being released; suffocated, hung upside down and burned; starved and then forced to eat rotten bread, and forced also to decide who among them would eat.

Trump, who was clearly shaken and appalled by these images, observed that that three men “looked like Holocaust survivors” and said: “I don’t know how much longer we can take that”. He was clearly not just horrified but deeply, profoundly angry.

At long last, this was a morally correct response by a western leader to current Jewish suffering. It was a vitally important response. It was the only decent response.

Because the world has now seen graphic evidence of what Israel is up against.

Trump’s Holocaust comparison is not an exaggeration. The three Israelis were living examples of the nightmarish images that are burned into the collective Jewish memory: the skeletal figures who were liberated from Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps in 1945, victims of monsters who had the same psychopathic aim as Hamas of exterminating the Jews.

While we must always be careful not to downplay and thus misrepresent the unique horror of the Holocaust in both its scale and execution, the treatment of the Israelis is similar to the Nazi programme. It’s not just that the aim is the same. It’s that along with the murder, violence and starvation it also displays the hallmark characteristics of the Nazis — the sadism, the depraved barbarism, the desire to physically and psychologically torture and humiliate these captives just because they were Jews. That’s also what was on such conspicuous display in the pogrom of October 7 2023 when Israelis (and others) were slaughtered, raped, mutilated, tortured, beheaded and burned alive. And other Israeli captives are still being held in those Gaza torture chambers.

Right on cue after Trump made his “Gaza Riviera” remarks, the west’s morally cretinous classes launched a collective cry of “ethnic cleansing” and “collective punishment” of the “ordinary Gaza civilians”. What hooey. The Gaza civilians should be held to account over collective responsibility for the atrocities against the Israelis.

Not only did the “ordinary Gaza civilians” vote genocidal Hamas into power, but they are enthusiasts for the October 7 pogrom and for further atrocities against Israeli Jews. It was “ordinary Gaza civilians” who followed Hamas in pouring across the border fence on October 7 and who rampaged through the Israeli kibbutzim and the Supernova festival site raping, murdering and kidnapping Israelis. It was “ordinary Gaza civilians” who swarmed, taunted, humiliated and abused the Israelis kidnapped into Gaza and who desecrated the bodies of those who had been murdered, treating them as trophies of war.

What’s more, the entire Gaza Strip was turned into a launching pad for genocide with an underground infrastructure composed of hundreds of miles of tunnels to create a parallel world devoted entirely to the mass murder of Jews. If there were any “ordinary Gaza civilians” who objected, they kept a very low profile.

Israeli troops who risked their lives in clearing out Hamas have reported that virtually every house had a terrorist tunnel beneath it, virtually every house possessed a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and virtually every hospital, school and clinic was used as a weapons store or terrorist hub.

The claim of “ethnic cleansing” is even more morally and intellectually bankrupt.

The proposal to displace the people of Gaza has absolutely nothing to do with their ethnic composition. It is because they are an enemy population that not only tried but still intends to destroy another country and murder its citizens.

As the historian Andrew Roberts has written, if people launch aggressive wars and lose them they forfeit by their behaviour all rights to remain in the territory that they have turned into an engine of war.

Post-war population displacements have happened over and over again. After the Second World War, Europe accepted the deportation of some three million Germans from the Sudetenland because of their leader’s complicity with Hitler, and the area was re-populated with ethnic Czechs.

Gaza is not, as the progressive classes claim, “sovereign” territory; it has never been the sovereign territory of anybody. Nor is it the Gazans’ “home”; as Hillel Neuer of UN Watch has so aptly observed, if the Arabs of Gaza are “refugees” — as we have been told ad infinitum — Gaza cannot be their home. QED.

In fact, many if not most Gazans have long been desperate to live elsewhere but have been effectively imprisoned by an Arab world determined to keep them as far away as possible — both to enrage world opinion against the Jews, and because they are known to be trouble personified.

Ethnic cleansing is what actually happened after 1948 to the Jews of the Middle East, 800,000 of whom were driven out of Arab lands in which Jews had lived for centuries — driven out purely because they were Jews. And ethnic cleansing is what the very same people who are levelling this claim at Trump are themselves demanding when they insist that Jewish residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria should be removed from their homes there in accordance with the Palestinian demand that there should be no Jews in “Palestine”.

For it’s not just Hamas that is the menace to civilisation. It’s the whole Palestinian cause. The Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank mount a never-ending attempt to murder Jews in the disputed territories and in Israel. The depravity of the October 7 pogrom was nothing new: in 2011, Ruth and Udi Fogel and their three children were slaughtered in their beds in their house in Samaria, and their baby was virtually decapitated, by an Arab from the territories of the “West Bank”.

Fatah, the biggest faction in the supposedly ”moderate” Palestinian Authority, has repeatedly extolled the October 7 massacre. PA police officers have been involved in terrorist plots against Israeli Jews. The PA, which pays “salaries” to the families of terrorists who murder Jews, pumps out Nazi-style demonisation of Jews with which it indoctrinates its children to murder Jews and steal their land.

In short, Palestinian society is entirely constructed around a poisonous and murderous hatred of Jews and the desire to remove them from the face of the earth.

The emaciated figures who staggered out of their Gaza hellhole have illuminated the obscenity of the way in which so much of the west has behaved — trying to minimise, sanitise or excuse what the Palestinian Arabs have done to the Israelis; representing them as victims of the Israelis they have so viciously attacked; and demonising the Israelis with murderous falsehoods for the apparent crime of defending themselves against this genocidal onslaught.

Now we can see the monstrosity of the way the Biden administration bullied and blackmailed Israel into allowing Hamas to survive.

Now we can see the moral depravity of all those in the west — including Biden, Sir Keir Starmer and other western politicians, NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and the wretched prelates of the Church of England — who have accused Israel of causing starvation in Gaza. The Gazan mobs who menaced the terrified Israeli hostages as they were released were well fed, plump, even obese; it’s the Israeli hostages who have been deliberately and murderously starved — by the people who have been promoted as victims by the west’s Israel-bashers.

This moral bankruptcy towards Israel is nothing new. It has characterised the so-called civilised world for almost a century. The Arabs of pre-Israel Palestine should have been dispersed after 1948 when their side lost the war of extermination that was mounted to destroy at its rebirth the fledgling State of Israel.

Instead, those Arabs were fashioned into a weapon against Israel’s existence by being turned preposterously into permanent refugees. The entirely spurious claim of a Palestinian national identity was cooked up in the 1960s between the terrorist leader Yassir Arafat and the Soviet Union as a strategy to destroy the Jews’ homeland, steal from them their own history in the land and re-label it “Palestinian” history, and fry the brains of the west in order to undermine it and soften it up for its destruction. That strategy has been carried out to the letter.

And the west, led by Britain from the 1930s onwards, has consistently rewarded and incentivised mass murder against the Jews while upending international law by promising those waging this genocidal war a part of the Jews’ own historic and legally pledged homeland as the route to “peace” in the Middle East.

The only moral course of action, the only way this century-old war to exterminate the Jewish homeland will be brought to an end in a just way, is to say to the Palestinian Arabs that it’s all over. They will never get a state; they don’t deserve a state; they never wanted a state, other than as a springboard to destroy Israel; and if they persist in their aim to destroy Israel and kill Jews, they will be treated henceforth as pariahs.

And so should all who support them be treated. The obscene Palestinian cause is worn as the badge of conscience by the west’s progressive classes. That illustrates instead their repudiation of conscience. The Palestinian cause has destroyed the moral compass of the west.

If Trump’s musings about a “Gaza Riviera” signal an equivalent strategy towards the Palestinian cause as a whole, he won’t just reshape the Middle East in a way that will bring it peace and justice. He will start to haul the west out of the moral abyss into which it has fallen.