That the Democratic Party has stooped to calling J.D. Vance and other Republicans “weird” is a milestone in the descent of Jefferson’s party toward rock bottom. It is nothing but name-calling worthy of children, and they do this because they have nothing of substance and intelligence to challenge the Republicans’ policies, led by Donald Trump.

However, for sheer weirdness, nothing beats the Israelis, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had a sense of this. Following the satanic horrors of October 7, he said, “Any other people would have flattened the Strip.”

Consider a recent Israeli headline: “A 37-year-old man wounded when Gaza terrorists fired a rocket barrage of 15 projectiles…the military’s aerial defense array intercepted several projectiles, with several others hitting near kibbutzim…”

Image: Israel’s Iron Dome system from an IDF press release. CC BY-SA 3.0.

What is weird is the Israeli decision to invent this aerial defense array called Iron Dome. They’re very proud of it and have sold to other nations, but in truth, it has been a complete failure. Here’s why:

What’s being launched at Israel are terror rockets, terror being a human sensation of great fear. In terms of material damage, given the number of rockets fired, these small rockets have caused insignificant harm to property and individuals.

But as terror rockets, they have been completely successful because the terror begins with the launch that triggers air sirens in Israel. During the night, hundreds of thousands of Jews startle awake and, in their pajamas, must flee into a home bomb shelter or an apartment house stairwell. Of course, those terrified at 3 a.m. include the children too.

The rockets out of Gaza started some 23 years ago. The IDF has discovered that today’s 18-year-old recruits who grew up in Sderot and adjacent communities show signs of PTSD.

Israelis are weird for having invented the Iron Dome because the normal response to these missiles manufactured and fired off in the Gaza Strip was not a wildly expensive hi-tech invention. The Marxists Rabin and Peres let the Fatah terrorists take over the Gaza Strip in 1994, a so-called Peace Process that produced some 235 murdered Jews over the next 7 years before it collapsed altogether in the second intifada. That began in 2000 and saw Hamas kill some 1,500 Jews, wounding and maiming thousands more. It took five years to put down.

In 2001, during this second intifada, Gaza fired its first homemade rocket at Sderot, and the rest is history. Gazans have fired scores of thousands of rockets since then. They continue to do so because the Israeli response was the Iron Dome system.

A different nation, a more normal people, would have responded with its own rockets, saying to the Muslims, “Oh, you want to get into an artillery duel with us? Be my guest.” That first rocket should have been answered by Israel randomly firing twelve rockets in honor of the 12 Tribes of Israel, all carrying far more explosives than the primitive Arab rocket. And if Israel’s random rockets did more damage to objects and people than the Arab missiles, Israel would not have to apologize for its superiority in weaponry and ordnance.

Inevitably, the anti-Jewish world would have howled at Israel, “That’s a war crime!” If Israel were a normal nation, it would have responded, “We are doing exactly what they are doing: firing rockets at random into residential areas. And the next time they fire a rocket at Israel, we will respond with 12 times 12 rockets, and so on, exponentially increasing the response each time until the Muslims beg for mercy and stop.”

This writer has reason to think that after Ariel Sharon ordered and completed the eviction of all Jews from the Gaza Strip in 2005, he had a similar plan in mind: surround the Strip with artillery batteries. Then, every time a Muslim rocket was fired at Israeli territory, the response would be a barrage of rockets.

However, the IDF’s legal department, staffed by post-religious lefties, told Sharon that would be a war crime, and Sharon’s error was listening to them. His plan would have been a far cheaper response than the Iron Dome system that costs zillions. Every time the enemy fires a rocket at Israel and the system decides to destroy it, the Iron Dome fires two rockets, each one costing $50,000.

Israelis are also weird because a different nation in Israel’s situation would think nothing of doing what RFK Jr. spoke of, namely, going through the Strip from north to south and driving all the people there out of the Strip, even to the water’s edge. At that point, they’d summon Arab and Muslim states to send ships to evacuate them, after which Israel would keep the Strip as the spoils of war.

Now, that is a drastic fantasy. But what happened in the real world was truly bizarre. Despite twenty years during which Gaza fired tens of thousands of rockets and incendiary balloons at Gaza was to supply Hamas—for free—with electricity, which Hamas then used to manufacture those rockets.

Israel also sent daily caravans of semi-trailers meant to sustain life in Gaza, 700 of them every day, leaving the strip packed with all kinds of consumer goods. Call this Jewish psychopathology.

When in the annals of mankind has there been such a relationship? One people launches lethal rockets at its adjacent neighbors, and those same neighbors supply the aggressors with all that is necessary for them to manufacture and fire the rockets.

Official Israel has also never attacked its enemy’s ideology of “Palestinian Nationalism.” What Israel needs is a verbal weapon equal to the Iron Dome that shoots down the enemy’s propaganda, which has as its principal war cry the claim, “The Zionists stole Palestine from the Palestinians!” To that, Israel must reply, “There is nothing Palestinian about these people claiming to be Palestinians, and we Zionists stole nothing.”

No less really weird are Israelis who never speak through the government to remind the world that, in 1922, the League of Nations produced the Palestine Mandate that not only awarded all the land “from the Jordan River to the Sea” to the Zionists, but it also “recognized the historical connection to the Jewish people with Palestine,” saying nothing of any “Palestinians.”

That Mandate was later incorporated into the Charter of the new United Nations in 1945. Under international law, the Gaza Strip belongs to the Jewish people. As the legitimate landlord, Israel has the right to evict problem squatters, such as the 70% of the Arabs in the Strip on the UNRWA dole. UNRWA is not only the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas in disguise, but it is also a mainstay of the antisemitic fantasy that UNRWA’s welfare recipients are “Palestine refugees” when (to repeat) there is nothing Palestinian about them, and none of them are refugees.

Israel has the right to set course on a policy that peacefully transfers this same 70% from Israeli territory to be resettled in the 21 officially Arab Muslim states and/or the 35 officially Muslim states. It is about time they were taken care of by their Arab brethren and co-religionists and not the UN.

The Arab nations have benefitted from the UN long enough. They pushed for UNRWA’s creation in 1948 as part of their drive to kill all the Jews who had “made the desert bloom” and steal all the wealth the Jews had created. Before the Zionists came to Israel, that Muslim-controlled land, as Herman Melville said in 1857, was a “caked, depopulated Hell.”

Israel needs to shamelessly tell the world all the land “from the River to the Sea” belongs to the Jewish people and only the Jewish people. The “Palestinian people” is nothing but a verbal hologram, something that looks like it is there but really is not.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.