Chapter 1: What historical events shaped the current state of Israel?
Chapter two, the pride, Jerusalem, Israel. I write these words in Jerusalem, the city of David, the city of Jesus, the city where the West was born.
This is my first visit since the October 7th, 2023 massacre, since Israel's massive response in Gaza, since the opening of a multi-front war by Israel's enemies, Lebanon in the North, the Houthis in Yemen in the South, the Iranian-backed Shia militias of Syria and Iraq, and Iran herself.
Prior to the war, Israel was riven by deep political division, large protests every Saturday night, unhinged language about the possibility of economic collapse or even civil war. And yet now, as we walk through the streets of Machane Yehuda, the bustling and thriving market center of the city, the night air refreshing us, the streets are full. Israel is a late-night country.
People don't go to bed until deep in the evening, and so even children run around the narrow market streets. Men and women in army uniforms armed with M4s stand chatting and smoking outside restaurants. Just an hour's drive away, the brothers, fathers, and husbands of these same soldiers are serving in Gaza, moving house to house in the night, attempting to uncover hostages and kill terrorists.
A few nights ago, the Israel Defense Forces performed one of the most astonishing rescue operations in modern history. Four Israeli captives, Noah Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Amog Meir Yan, and Andrei Kozlov had been kidnapped on October 7th at the Nova Music Festival. The images of Argamani in particular became infamous. She was forced onto a motorcycle while crying and shouting, don't kill me.
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Chapter 2: How did the October 7th massacre impact Israeli society?
The four hostages were held by Gazan civilians. Hamas sympathizers paid for the privilege of holding the kidnapped victims in two separate apartments in Nuserat, a major city in the center of the Gaza Strip. There, they were starved and beaten, deprived of air and sunshine. For months, the IDF searched for them. Then they received information that the hostages were being held in Nuserat.
But they required confirmation. Posing as refugees from another part of the Gaza Strip, members of special forces placed themselves in Nuserat, seeking further intelligence. They finally received confirmation of the location of the hostages. And then they launched a daring raid, freeing the hostages amid a frenzy of enemy fire.
Counterterrorism Unit Commando Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, 36, died during the rescue attempt. He left a wife and two small children. A few weeks earlier, Zamora had written a message for his fellow soldiers. The memory of the friends is still sharp and clear and their actions still resonate and make waves.
Every day, more and more details are revealed about that cursed Saturday and what we had to deal with. That day made me even more aware of how lucky I am.
Chapter 3: What role do political divisions play in Israel's current challenges?
I was privileged to serve by your side. The team stands at the decisive point and I want you to know that I wouldn't ask for anyone else next to me but you. Celebrate our 76 years of independence. It is you who have made it possible and are making it possible. It is you and your families who are sacrificing for all. I want you to know how proud I am and how I love you.
Western civilization is filled with people like Arnon Zamora, people who stand when asked to defend their families and their country, who take all the adversity life can throw at them and keep coming, who ask not what the world can do for them, but what they must do for the world. These are the followers of King David, who told his son Solomon on his deathbed, I go the way of all the earth.
Be you strong, therefore, and show yourself a man. Keep the charge of the Lord your God to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes and his commandments and his judgments and his testimonies, as it is written in the Torah of Moses, that you may prosper in all that you do and wherever you turn yourself.
Chapter 4: How does Israeli culture reflect resilience in times of crisis?
These are the hunters. These are the warriors. These are the weavers. These are the lions. The Hunters Survival relies on those who hunt. Lions hunt. This is a simple reality. It is not unjust, unkind, or indecent. As Kipling writes, the jackal may follow the tiger, but cub, when thy whiskers are grown, remember the wolf is a hunter. Go forth and get food of thine own.
The world is a place of limited resources. This means that in order to survive and to allow the pride to thrive, lions must outperform either physically or mentally. The fastest and strongest lions historically won the race for resources. In ancient societies, the most fearsome warrior generally became the leader.
No wonder the ancient kings declared themselves the chosen of the gods and bragged of their power. The Behistun inscription, dictated by the Persian king Darius the Great around the turn of the 5th century BC, reads both as a promise to allies and a warning to enemies.
I am Darius, the great king, king of kings, the king of Persia, the king of countries, the son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsames the Achaemenid. I restored to the people and the pasture lands and the herds and the dwelling places and the houses, which Gaumata, the Magian, had taken away. I settled the people in their place, the people of Persia and Medea and the other provinces.
Chapter 5: What notable rescue operations have occurred during the conflict?
I restored that which had been taken away, as is was in the day of old. I have ruled according to righteousness. Neither to the weak nor to the powerful did I do wrong. Whosoever helped my house, him I favored. He who was hostile, him I destroyed. There was another model for the provider of ancient times, the gods, who could provide plenty from scarcity.
The Greek god Zeus, according to myth, had to be spirited away from Kronos, the father who would eat him. He was protected by a goat, Amalthea, who nourished him on milk. Zeus, growing powerful, snapped off one of her horns, a horn that then became a wellspring of continual nourishment, the so-called cornucopia. The cornucopia became both a Greek and Roman symbol of plenty.
But there was no true cornucopia in ancient times. Human beings could not stretch beyond the limitations of geographic reach, of primitive technology, of the expansive cost of time. In today's world, however, the cornucopia is real. That is thanks to innovation and innovators.
Pure physical might, the ability to raise a roving band or to amass laborers to work the fields, is no longer the main attribute of the hunter. The hunter no longer wanders the physical savannas in search of sustenance for the pride. Today, hunters are innovators. The ancients would have called innovation magic. innovators have stretched the very nature of our world.
Because we live amid historic plenty, we forget that the natural state of the world is poverty, not wealth. For nearly all of human history, no one was wealthy, at least not by today's standards. In fact, the richest man in human history was poor by today's standards. The richest man in history was likely Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire during the 14th century.
As the master of a swath of land ranging from modern-day Niger to the western coastline of Africa, he presided over nearly half the world's known gold at the time. Mansa Musa nearly bankrupted Cairo thanks to his vast stockpile of the precious metal. He visited the city while on his way to visit Mecca and distributed so much gold that he radically inflated the currency for a decade.
He traveled with a retinue of some 60,000 men, including the royal court, and well over 10,000 slaves, all clad in gold. Mansa Musa owned more gold than anybody who has ever lived. And in pure monetary terms, that gold is worth far more today than it was in 1337. But gold isn't wealth. Wealth is better living.
By that standard, Mansa Musa, and everybody else living in 1337, was poor compared to normal citizens today. Mansa Musa died at the age of 57 in 1337. The average citizen of a Western nation can now expect to live at least two decades longer, and in many cases, three. Mansa Musa never sat on a working toilet. Neither did anyone else at the time.
Right around the time of Mansa Musa's death, the Black Death was ripping through Europe, killing one-third of the population. Mansa Musa took two years to travel from his empire to Mecca. Today, one could make the flight in six hours. Mansa Musa would have had to have waited months or years to hear replies to his correspondents.
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Chapter 6: How do historical leaders influence modern societal values?
We probably could have presented our plan better or more cogently. We could have experimented and tried it out before making a big pitch. But that's not the point of the story. The point is that we then took that same plan, found investors, and built The Daily Wire, which became the largest online conservative media company in the world, with hundreds of employees and millions of consumers.
The harshness of failure breeds success for those who keep trying. If we had been placed sympathetically on the government dole, paid not to work, subsidized to abandon our idea, our business never would have been born. Hundreds of employees would never have drawn a salary from us. Now, we could just as easily have failed again, and we would have learned from our failures.
But the lesson is clear. Hunters can only improve themselves and the pride by entering the crucible of risk and reward. A worthy civilization raises hunters. The Warriors The pride cannot survive merely thanks to the innovators. That which is created must be protected. No successful civilization can be built without those willing to stand atop the gates challenging its enemies.
Those who seek to harm the pride must be destroyed or at least credibly threatened with destruction. Lions, therefore, are warriors. Now, all cultures have warriors, and as we'll see, scavengers have their own brand of violence. But the West is characterized by a particular type of warrior, the citizen soldier. The citizen soldier is not a full-time soldier.
He is a man dedicated to the preservation of his civilization, who picks up arms when called upon, only to return to his life as a civilian citizen when a crisis passes. And in battle, the citizen soldier defeats the scavenger on a consistent basis. Western ways of war, as historian Victor Davis Hansen points out, have made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization.
Why precisely should that be the case? Hansen says that the formal and often legal recognition of a person's sovereign sphere of individual action, social, political, and cultural, is a uniquely Western concept. and such individualism gives people a stake in their own futures. That freedom comes with responsibility.
Each man takes his place in the phalanx of his civilization, and he fights until the war is won. This set of ideas, civic militarism, rooted in individualism and its attendant rights, determines whether warriors succeed or fail.
As Hansen says, abstractions like capitalism or civic militarism are hardly abstract at all when it comes to battle, but rather concrete realities that ultimately determine whether at Lepanto 20-year-old Turkish peasants survived or were harpooned in the thousands, whether Athenian cobblers and tanners could return home in safety after doing their butchering at Salamis or were to wash up in chunks on the shores of Attica.
The language of civic militarism rings throughout Western history. It can be found in the words of Pericles, who reminded his soldiers before their 432 BC battle against the Persians, we must resist our enemies in any and every way and try to leave to those who come after us in Athens that is as great as ever.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of innovation in modern survival?
They sweep the floors and pay the taxes and give the charity and visit the sick. They rarely receive full-page obituaries in the major newspapers. But at their funerals, members of the pride testify to their self-sacrifice, their generosity, their goodness. All of us know weavers, those who sew together the sinews of our society.
They appear throughout our lives at different times, almost providentially, spurring us forward and binding us together. My wife is such a person. She is brilliant in her own right, a family physician who earned her medical degree through hard work at UCLA Medical School. She is a pillar of our community.
She involves herself daily in the local school, the synagogue, and a multiplicity of charities. She ensures that our household, indeed our entire lives, run. She comforts our children when they are upset and holds them to account when they misbehave. She brings them to their medical appointments and helps them with their homework and plays with them and tells them bedtime stories.
She takes care of her parents and goes out of her way for her friends. And then, after the kids go to bed, she listens to me growl about my day and the travails of the world. I knew my wife was a weaver from the time I met her. It was built into her character.
The winds of life batter everyone, but the weavers ensure that the sails never tear away and that the ship of family and community can sail on. Certain qualities characterize the weavers. Weavers are prudent. They respect wisdom and apply it to the real world. They are often the people whom others go to for advice.
Because their focus is constantly on maintaining and fixing institutions, the institutions that serve as the foundation for both hunters and warriors, they inherently embody a certain prudence. They are prudent because they know that change is difficult and radical change tears the social fabric no matter how positive the intentions.
This is why religious leaders often find themselves in the role of weaver. They are representatives of ancient wisdom, defenders of a centuries-old legacy. There's a reason Catholics consider prudence the first of the cardinal virtues. As St. Thomas Aquinas writes in Summa Theologica, prudence is right reason applied to action, the application of eternal principles to matters at hand.
As Jesus states in the book of Matthew, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house. Yet it did not fall because it had its foundation on the rock. Weavers protect the rock.
To the weavers, new threads may be added to the tapestry of community, but such an art must be applied with tremendous care. As philosopher Russell Kirk writes, the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation comparable to the church. It may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine to be treated mechanically.
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