Hamas committed a despicable crime against Jews on October 7. And Israel has now killed over 35,000 people in Gaza. How did we get to this place?

    For want of a nail the shoe was lost,

    for want of a shoe the horse was lost;

    and for want of a horse the rider was lost;

    being overtaken and slain by the enemy,

    all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.

—Benjamin Franklin

The Way to Wealth (1758)

CNN is reporting that Israel is brutalizing Palestinian prisoners in secret prisons in the desert as the Israeli army begins another campaign that will probably add more thousands to the 35,000 already killed. This isn’t an attack on Israel, or a defense of Palestinians. There is a lot to be said about that, but other people are saying it. There is no need for me to add to that. And there is plenty of blame to go around. Hamas is as guilty as the IDF … just in their own, unique way.

As I think about what’s happening in Gaza and in the world, I have a different question.

How did we get to this place?

The real beginning was probably back when Homo sapiens lived in caves … or earlier. But I’m starting at the War to End War, now called World War I since it didn’t do much to end war. And I’m focusing in on how we got to Gaza, not “man’s inhumanity to man” in any general way. There is a historical chain of events that leads from 1914 straight to Gaza that tells a story about what’s happening. I’ve always believed that understanding history is the first step in understanding life.

The name “World War I” is accurate. Nearly all of the world’s powers got involved. Even the Asian powers China (Boxer Rebellion 1899 -1901) and Japan (Russo-Japan War 1904-1905) were in warm-up wars that set the stage for the big one.

First, understand that World War I was a mistake from beginning to end. Hundreds of books have been written about how every nation involved didn’t actually intend to go to war. But once they got started, they just couldn’t stop. Germany and it’s allies lost because they simply ran out of men and material to fight any more.

So, after over 9,000,000 people died for a vast mistake, the leaders of the two sides met in a railroad car just as winter was closing in on Europe in the Forest of Compiègne in northern France. The French and British allies, after having suffered from the most destructive war in their history, wreaked vengeance on the Germans with a treaty that was designed to make Germany suffer. It did the job. That is where the chain of revenge started.

As the exhausted nations of Europe struggled to recover, each blamed the others for their own suffering. We haven’t seen victimhood like this until Trump started using it. In Germany, a widely believed story called the “Stab-in-the-back myth” (there’s a Wikipedia page about it) blamed Jews, socialists and the German leaders who formed a democratic government shortly after the War. It was just what Hitler needed to seize power in 1933. The German people suffered more than they did during the war, but the Jews suffered much more than that. Six million Jews died. It was three million less than the casualties of World War I, but the cruelty was far greater and focused on just one people. A deep-seated sense of victimhood became a central part of the culture of the Jews. The chain of revenge added more links.

Leveraging the collective guilt of the world, Zionist Jews accomplished a goal they had since Jews returned from Babylon over 2,500 years ago. They received the world’s support in 1947, two years after World War II ended, from the only international government of the time, the United Nations, to establish a new nation in their ancestral home. The only problem was that in 2,500 years, other people – Palestinians – had established the same land as their home. Every Arab nation voted against it. Zionist terrorists brushed aside any opposition with their own sense of victimhood and took the land from the Palestinians with violent force. Five million Palestinians are officially registered as refugees because they, or their parents, lost their homes to Zionists who believed, in the words of the song from the movie Exodus, “This land is mine. God gave this land to me.” They have been waiting to return to their homes since 1948. More links were added to the chain of revenge.

The latest links in the chain, added just in the months since October 7, are strong enough to last until the end of the world … which may not be that far into the future now. The chain is long enough and strong enough now to drag the entire world into Hell.

And the Hell of it is, everybody in this story is a victim but everybody is guilty.