John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, introduces a welcome sanity into the discussions of the Gaza War. It’s a sanity lacking from the latest pronouncements of the Administration and its collaborators, after the false dawn of the president’s initial sane response to Hamas’ criminal invasion.

For while the Jews are often the first victims of history’s worst regimes, they are rarely if ever the last.

I was introduced to John Spencer by Caroline Glick’s podcast. Glick has been a Churchillian voice in the wilderness for years regarding Israel. Politicians and the publics they try to lead have indulged in nearly endless fantasy about the nature of the threat to peace in the Middle East. The results have been predictable. October 7 woke up a huge majority of Israelis to the true nature of the threat they face and shattered many hopeful fantasies. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: New York and California Are Destroying Trust)

But the Administration and its collaborators are still selling those fantasies and are getting shrill and threatening to those who no longer play along. How restoring it is to hear someone from the heart of our military speaking plainly and without fear about the reality of what is going on.

Spencer’s forte is urban warfare. He has been in the thick of it as an officer in Iraq and he has made it his study. He knows its history and he knows its realities.

Urban warfare provides ideal ground for defenders. To overcome an enemy in an urban battleground, an attacker must either grind the entire area into dust, with huge civilian casualties, or spend weeks or months in grinding house-to-house battle and spilling the blood of their own soldiers.

All this applies when the defenders of the city are insurgents, who usually have not controlled the area for long, are not well-funded, and have not established a working government for any period of time or have organized their forces into a disciplined military. Even fighting such opponents, urban warfare is daunting. The example from Iraq was the battle for Mosul, which, during nine months took the lives of many Iraqi soldiers who were fighting with American help against the ISIS insurgents. Its civilian death toll was estimated by most sources at around 10,000 dead but some estimates ran up to 40,000, with a great deal of uncertainty — the rule when there is destruction on such a massive scale over months.

But Hamas is a different and more formidable enemy that ISIS. Spencer points out that Hamas has been the government, and is in effect if not by legal right, a state player, as they have governed Gaza for more than a decade and received immense amounts of aid to be distributed under their governance. This resulted in an organized military that is not a band of insurgents but an army, 30,000 strong before the war began, organized in battalions and under effective control and coordination. Add to this a system of military tunnels over 400 miles in total length and set at depths and reinforced to be invulnerable to bombardment, and used to keep safe the military and armaments, including tens of thousands of rockets meant for terror attacks on Israeli civilians, not to keep safe the civilians of Gaza.

This is by strategic choice. For the defensive strategy of Hamas and its Iranian backers is basically two-fold — to make any war against them by necessity painful, slow, destructive, and deadly to its civilians.

For they have learned the lessons of modern asymmetrical warfare — aggressive political propaganda is counted upon to win what the military cannot. Their plan has always been to maximize deliberately the civilian casualties and the photo-op scenes of destruction, amplify the death tolls by an endless stream of false statistics and portray the intended victims of their own exterminationist ends as the ones perpetrating genocide. (READ MORE: Antony Blinken Declares Israeli Settlements Illegal)

It’s worked for Hamas after each of its previous deadly attacks on Israeli civilians — even in Israel. Israel’s strikes against those who opened war on their population have always been stopped before a decisive defeat could be inflicted on Hamas. And many Israelis, desperately wanting peace, have been willing to go along, and just imagine peace, hoping that that will work.

But in the wake of an organized invasion by state forces, used to inflict Einsatzgruppen-style massacres on an unlimited scale, and adding their improvement on the Nazis with organized rape and sexual torture on a massive level, and taking hundreds of hostages for good measure — very few are left in Israel who entertain fantasies. They see the truth: Hamas and most of the Arab population in Gaza and in the West Bank supported the attacks, according to an Arab-run poll taken after October 7.  They want the Jews of Israel dead and gone, from the river to the sea, and that is what they will do if not forcibly stopped.

Spencer points all this out clearly. He can speak less clearly about the politics of it, as he is an employee of the Army and rules apply to which he agreed. But he paints the picture clearly enough to let us know that the insistence of the Administration on a cease-fire without surrender of the hostages and of the perpetrators of the organized military massacre and rape of 1,400 Israelis will be a strategic victory for Hamas. Its popularity will be immense, imitators will spring up and emulate its strategies, and it will be clear to every terrorist in the world that all they need to do to win is to take hostages, use their own civilians as shields, deliberately allow them to be killed, and then use their deaths for political cover for their military weakness.

The Administration and its collaborators are collaborating in this strategy. There is little parallel in our own history for such cynicism in pursuit of power. For while the Jews are often the first victims of history’s worst regimes, they are rarely if ever the last. The regimes that persecute Jews are not friendly to the freedoms that should define America, and they tend to bring destruction in their wake. We already see our government’s lack of care about the myriad existential threats to our own country and its ordinary people, at the border, facing China, and in its suicidal cultural trends, all of which it deliberately amplifies for fleeting political gain. (READ MORE: Mr. Biden, Why Do You Hide Your True Self?)

Strengthen yourself with a dose of John Spencer. Face the difficult realities directly and refuse victimhood, the hallowed virtue of woke culture. Realize that the battles of life and death are going to be won or lost in our national politics and the kind of culture and values we are willing to stand for. Above all, like John Spencer, stand up for truth in this age of deception, and fight for it with honor.