The ongoing Israel/Gaza conflict just passed the six month mark, an astonishing development that almost no one would have imagined at the time it first began.

The length of the fighting is without precedent across the last seventy-five years of Israeli military history. In 1956, Israel allied itself with Britain and France and suddenly attacked Egypt, conquering the Sinai in a war that lasted little more than a week. Israel’s 1967 surprise attack against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan achieved complete military victory in just six days. Then Egypt and Syria returned the favor in 1973 and came close to overrunning Israel until an unprecedented American military resupply airlift allowed Israel to turn the tide and win a decisive military victory in less than three weeks. The main fighting in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon only took a couple of weeks, while its 2006 invasion of that same country lasted about a month and its 2008 assault on Gaza was even shorter. Most of these previous half-dozen campaigns were fought against heavily-equipped conventional armies but their combined length totaled considerably less than the time Israel has now spent trying to defeat Gaza’s lightly-armed Hamas militants.

Furthermore, Israel’s lack of battlefield success against the entrenched Hamas fighters has become rather obvious. Few if any of the Israelis captured in the October 7th raid have been successfully freed and none of Hamas’ top commanders have been killed or captured. The extent of Hamas’ battlefield losses is unclear, but since the group consists entirely of adult males and the demographic profile of the Gazans reported killed seems very close to that of Gaza’s general civilian population, it seems likely that only a small fraction of Hamas’ 30,000 combat troops have fallen. Indeed, Israel’s failure to capture almost any Hamas members has led to grotesque incidents in which the Israelis seized and stripped male Gazan civilians and falsely paraded them around as captured Hamas militants for a propaganda video.

For decades, the Israelis had boastfully proclaimed their army to be one of best in the world, but the huge humiliation they suffered on October 7th punctured that illusion, and six months of fighting in Gaza has hardly restored it. Although the IDF is lavishly equipped with top-quality weaponry, its discipline appears rather poor and its troops and their commanders seem extremely risk-averse perhaps even cowardly. As a consequence, Israel has apparently avoided taking the battle to Hamas in the latter’s network of defensive tunnels and instead concentrated on punishing Gaza’s population of two million defenseless civilians with relentless bombardment and starvation, seeking to drive them out into Egypt’s Sinai desert, thereby allowing the Israelis to annex their land and create a Greater Israel.

As part of that process, Israel has annihilated most of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. More than a hundred thousand residential buildings have been destroyed, including most of the mosques and churches, along with all of the local hospitals, schools, and universities, constituting the greatest series of public war crimes in living memory. Tens of thousands of Gazans have died in what is certainly the worst televised massacre of helpless civilians in the history of the world. That enormous death toll together with a multitude of explicitly genocidal public statements by top Israeli political and military leaders led to a series of near-unanimous rulings by the International Court of Justice declaring that the Palestinians were at serious risk of suffering a “genocide” at Israel’s hands, an almost unprecedented international legal verdict, let alone one directed against the once sacrosanct Jewish State.

So although Israel’s brutal and indiscriminate methods have minimized its military losses, they have also failed to defeat or destroy its determined opponent, amounting to some tactical Israeli successes but a potentially strategic victory for Hamas’s far weaker forces. Indeed, the front-page lead story in the print edition of Friday’s Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Israel Wins Battles But Risks War Loss.” A day earlier, a leading columnist in Israel’s most influential newspaper had even more boldly declared that Israel had lost the war, suffering “a total defeat.”

However, I think even these negative appraisals of Israel’s strategic situation ignore the broader consequences of this six month conflict. Therefore, they severely underestimate the potentially dire outcome for Israel, perhaps extremely damaging or even fatal to the survival of the Jewish State.

A central theme of my numerous American Pravda articles has been the enormous power of media in world affairs. By shaping the thoughts and beliefs of the individuals who control armies and nuclear arsenals, media influence is far more powerful than those merely physical weapons. And I believe that the greatest strategic impact of the Israel-Gaza conflict of the last six months has been in that realm.

The bitter struggle between Israelis and Palestinians may have attracted more global media coverage over the last half-year than during all its past decades combined. Many hundreds of millions or even billions of people who had previously paid little attention to the details or had casually taken their understanding from a few skewed MSM stories have now immersed themselves in the sea of gripping images and videos of devastated Gaza and its pitiful inhabitants so easily available on social media platforms such as TikTok and Twitter. These individuals may have developed very strong views about the situation.

Although I don’t use social media myself and I have always carefully followed the Middle East conflict, the same conclusion still applies. It’s quite possible that I have spent more hours on the topic during the last six months than in all the past decades since I was in grade school. I’ve certainly written more about Israel and Palestine since October 7th than in the previous thirty years combined.

I’d always been aware that many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had become refugees in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 establishment, but the details had been vague in my mind. However, Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe’s exhaustive archival research documented the true facts and by reading his historical work late last year I filled in many of those gaps. The true circumstances of the creation of Israel were really quite outrageous, with heavily armed Zionist settlers, most of them relatively recent arrivals, launching a planned campaign of massacres and brutal atrocities to expel some 800,000 native Palestinians from the lands they had inhabited for a thousand or two thousand years. I summarized much of this history in a long article.

Some of the crimes committed by the Zionists to terrorize the Palestinians and drive them from their homes were quite shocking. Whereas the recent story of Hamas militants roasting an Israeli baby in an oven was merely an atrocity-hoax, we have eyewitness testimony that back in 1948, the Zionist militants did indeed throw a young Palestinian boy into an oven and burn him alive, with his father soon following along behind him.

In 1948 during the Nakba, Zionist militias threw a Palestinian boy in the oven. Now Israelis are stealing this story and are trying to fabricate it against Hamas among the other now questionable events of Oct. 7th… pic.twitter.com/6fvq9txLQn

— Mnar Adley (@MnarMuh) October 30, 2023

Israel’s present-day Zionists have certainly continued this pattern of behavior, committing every conceivable war-crime and atrocity, including the massacre of starving Palestinians at a food distribution site and driving over living prisoners with tanks and other military vehicles, as I explained in a later interview.

Although my own writings may sometimes influence opinion-leaders, they have limited general circulation. But similar perspectives have now begun to reach much wider audiences.

For decades, media figures have understood that any sharp criticism of Israel or Jewish behavior represented the deadly “third rail” of their profession, fatal to any career. But six months of Israel’s military failures combined with its horrific atrocities committed against the helpless civilians of Gaza has gradually emboldened some individuals to begin breaking that powerful taboo.

Tucker Carlson certainly ranks as the most influential conservative media figure and his forced departure last year from his top-rated FoxNews show took him to Twitter, where he soon launched a lengthy interview program on Elon Musk’s relatively uncensored platform. In February he interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin for two hours, setting some Internet records for viewership and swamping the audiences of nearly all his broadcast television competitors.

Last week he released an equally bold segment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a 43 minute interview of a Christian Palestinian pastor from the holy city of Bethlehem, who described the severe oppression that he and his Christian flock suffered at the hands of Israel’s extremist Jewish government and the militant settlers it supported. Carlson emphasized how strange it seemed that America’s conservative Christian leadership did absolutely nothing for their Christian brethren in the Middle East but instead wholeheartedly supported Israel’s anti-Christian activities with money and political support.

The Tweet containing that clip has now been viewed some 18 million times and may begin to have an impact upon America’s Christian conservatives and the Republican Party they dominate. The entire segment is quite powerful and I would urge everyone to watch it, either on Twitter or on Youtube:

Ep. 91 How does the government of Israel treat Christians? In the West, Christian leaders don’t seem interested in knowing the answer. They should be. Here’s the view of a pastor from Bethlehem. pic.twitter.com/Gvo116ojnf

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) April 9, 2024

But for those who lack the time, some of the most telling statements have been extracted and distributed in various other Tweets, such as this one, now viewed more than 4 million times: