Elon Musk made a fact-finding trip to Israel this weekend after taking criticism for a tweet response that critics called anti-Semitic, and ended up discovering the obvious. After touring some of the areas attacked on October 7, the self-professed Chief Twit had a one-on-one with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the implications of the massacres in southern Israel.

They agreed on the clear lesson — there is no chance for peace or security as long as Hamas exists:

Netanyahu and Elon Musk discuss the war. Netanyahu: “Hamas must be destroyed”. Musk; “There’s no choice”.
pic.twitter.com/vPp3Pdbx10

— Joseph Gelman (@ifofgot) November 27, 2023

Elon Musk says during a live chat on X (formerly Twitter) with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there is “no choice” other than to destroy the Hamas terror group in order to bring about a better future for Gaza, and agrees with Netanyahu that the terror organization has genocidal intentions toward the Jewish people.

US billionaire Musk, the owner of X and head of SpaceX, says though that he would like to help rebuild Gaza after the current war, and asserts that rehabilitating the territory is an important step to preventing future war.

“If you want security, peace and a better life for Gazans, then you need to destroy Hamas. You first have to get rid of the poisonous regime as was done in Germany and Japan,” says Netanyahu, to which Musk responds: “There’s no choice.”

Prior to the X/Twitter chat, Musk joined Netanyahu for a tour of the Kfar Aza kibbutz, one of many scenes of horror on October 7. The IDF gave both men and the reporters following along a guided tour and explanation of the terror attacks that took place:

If Musk meant his tweet response as a criticism of Jews — and that’s pretty questionable — this trip alone suggests that he’s willing to learn. Clearly Netanyahu thinks so, or he probably wouldn’t have cooperated in the interview, especially if he saw it as merely a rehabilitative effort for Musk’s public reputation.

However, Netanyahu goes much farther than that in the clip above of the X/Spaces/Live Chat event; Netanyahu thinks the Gazans can be rehabilitated from their insane levels of Jew-hatred as well. He credits the governments involved in the Abraham Accords for deep cultural changes that allow for old hatreds to be suppressed and eventually ended. Netanyahu foresees their assistance in helping to transform Gaza, especially its mosques and schools, similar to what took place in Germany and Japan after World War II.

Of course, that required an utter defeat of both nations — and a strong, implacable occupation. Those were absolutely necessary for the destruction of the Nazis and Japan’s Bushido cult after 1945. Netanyahu attests to the first and hints at the second, but an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza is not going to be popular anywhere, least of all Israel, and certainly not for the years it would take to transform the Gazans from Hamas supporters to the kind of cosmopolitan Muslims found in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or Indonesia, for example.

In the end, though, Israel may not have much choice. Hamas didn’t just choose southern Israel as a target of opportunity, and Thai agricultural workers didn’t just get unlucky. One often overlooked aspect of the October 7 massacres is the strategic interest taken in the kibbutzes of the region. Israel’s ability to feed itself independently may have died on October 7, as CNN alludes in a report yesterday:

Among the more than 1,200 victims of the Hamas attacks, Thais make up the largest group of foreign nationals. Most were workers on agricultural sites close to the perimeter fence that separates Israel from Gaza. Hamas freed a group of 10 Thais taken hostage on Friday but others remain captive.

The violence has set off an exodus of foreign workers from Israel, with some 10,000 farmworkers estimated to have left since October 7, according to the Israeli government.

For Israel’s dairy and agricultural farms, that has posed an almost existential problem. Dairy cows need milking several times a day by specially trained staff, while the past weeks have been the harvest window for many crops.

Without hands to work on the farms, crops and animals would have been left to die. Volunteers from across Israel have stepped in to prop them up, but much-needed foreign workers are still yet to return, and farmers fear that without guarantees of security, the future of Israeli farming near Gaza is impossible.

Hence Ghazi Hamad’s declaration that Hamas will conduct more such massacres out of Gaza until Israel is destroyed. People scoffed at that claim, as “only” 1400 Israelis got killed out of a population of over 9 million. However, Hamas understands that the southern agricultural center is key to Israel’s survival and especially its independence, and that foreign workers are critical to success. If Israel has to rely on food imports, then it will live even more at the mercy of the international community — which has shown its hostility to Israel over the last two months, perhaps more than ever. If Hamas can make farming untenable in the south, the Israelis are at a much higher risk of either collapse or surrender of their Jewish state under pressure from its food suppliers.

Israel has to get its agricultural sector back to work. The only way to do that in the short run is to get Israelis back to the kibbutzes and enough foreign workers to get the work done, and that won’t happen unless Israel can guarantee the safety of those farms. As long as Hamas exists in Gaza — or anywhere, really — the Israeli food supply will get choked off as few operators and workers will return, especially after 10/7. Israel has no choice but to see this war through all the way to the end now.

As this post gets written, Hamas and Israel have apparently ironed out the issues surrounding the lists for the fourth exchange of hostages. Israel will come under a lot of pressure to keep the truce in place for more exchanges, and with it a kind of operational and political inertia that will complicate a return to hostilities. One has to wonder how long Israel will comply with this pressure, and when the need to eat in peace will become more paramount.

Update: There will be two more days of ‘pause,’ Qatar announced just now:

Qatar has successfully negotiated an agreement between Israel and Hamas to extend the four-day truce between them by an additional two days, Doha’s foreign ministry spokesperson tweets.

This means at least ten more Israeli hostages will be released on Tuesday and that another ten will be released on Wednesday, with 30 Palestinian prisoners to be freed by Israel on each day as well.

Israel is still insisting that they will finish destroying Hamas, but it’s impossible to see this as anything other than what Jim Geraghty calls “Hamas chess.” This is precisely what we warned would happen if we kept incentivizing hostaging by Hamas, and Iran before that.