Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
This week marks the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis, civilians, some people in the [Israel Defense Forces], and foreign residents. … Women, men, children, young adults, some of them attending a rock concert.
Remember the facts. Without warning, over 4,000 terrorists from Hamas stormed in over the fence, I can’t call it a wall, it looks to me more like a fence, stormed in and waged a surprise attack against Israel. They were accompanied by 200 civilians that tagged along on the expectation that the terrorists would be killing, wounding, torturing, taking hostages, and the civilians could rape, mutilate, and steal, and bring loot, and all of that was accomplished.
We also forget that there was another thousand terrorists who, in support of this invasion, had launched 4,300 rockets into civilian centers. In fact, that would be the first salvo, which in the next few days would account for a total of 13,000 rockets. Remember, 13,000 rockets all fired at Israeli civilian centers. They attacked 23 different little hamlets. Almost 1,200 died. They took 251 hostages. They got in 14 miles, 14 miles inside 1948 Israel.
So, what are the facts about why did they do this?
Well, we can ask that question because there had not been an Israeli inside Gaza since 2006, for almost, at the time of the assault, 17, 18 years. Israel was supplying the majority of the water, fuel, and power for Gaza even though they had left and turned it over to them.
Gaza had staged one election, in the words of the great Muslim scholar Bernard Lewis, “One election, one time.” They had killed off many of the architects of the opposition. They had thrown Palestinian Authority activists off buildings. They had eliminated them. They never held another election. They tortured or killed internal dissidents.
In this period in which Hamas had complete autonomy over Gaza, they received somewhere between $45 and $50 billion in aid, roughly from 2006 to the present day. Forty to 50 billion. That would have allowed this choice piece of Mediterranean real estate to build luxury hotels, to bring in European and Gulf advisers, and in other words, to create a Qatar or an Oman or a Dubai.
They didn’t want to do that. They diverted about $1 billion to $2 billion and built the largest labyrinth of tunnels probably in the world, not subways, but I mean military tunnels, about 500 miles. It cost them 6,000 tons of cement, 2,000 tons of metal. The entries and the exits were placed under schools, mosques, and hospitals, forcing the Israelis to attack those exits and entries and then incur collateral damage.
Remember one other thing: They were prepared to send more terrorists and more soldiers deeper into Israel if the IDF had not responded belatedly, though they did. They did respond and stop them. They confiscated over 10,000 weapons. Where those weapons came from, you can imagine, but most of them were from Iran or China.
I want to leave you with a couple of questions. Number one, would there have been this cry of genocide, this hatred of Israel? It was always there, but would there have been an American action, all of the things about Iran, had they just not attacked on Oct. 7?
What if Hamas had said the following: “We have a peace deal with Israel. We’re going to create our own nation here. We have twenty thousand workers inside Israel at competitive wages worldwide. We’re going to use that revenue and that expertise that they’re going to gain by working with Israelis to create a successful autonomous nation. We’re gonna show the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank that we can be preeminent in the Middle East.”
They didn’t do that. Instead, they wanted to slaughter Jews, men, women, children, mutilate, behead, rape, torture, take hostages.
I have another second question. What was Israel supposed to do after this had happened, given that they had an overwhelming military that could dominate almost any country? I shouldn’t say almost every country in the Middle East. With this enormous military power and this egregious assault on Israel, it was really one of the few assaults ever conducted inside 1948 Israel.
What were they supposed to do? Were they supposed to say to the Hamas leadership that was gloating in the global media, “Would you please turn over the architects who planned this, the forty or fifty people?” They did. Did they say, “We would like all the perpetrators as well”? They did. Did they say, “We would like you to return all 251 hostages”? They did. Did they say, “We would like you to stop sending rockets, especially the rockets, all of them, intended to kill our own civilians”? They did.
And what was the Hamas reaction? Jubilation. Jubilation. This was the high point of Iranian subsidies. They were getting billions of dollars from international relief organizations, and the Biden administration had refunded them through the U.N. They were getting weapons from China. They had help and solidarity from Hezbollah and the Houthis. They were at a crescendo of pride and arrogance.
What did Israel do? They waited three weeks before invading. And what was the reaction to that patience and that demand that this could be resolved peaceably if they would turn over all the perpetrators and release the hostages? It was absolute hatred and contempt.
I saw it when I walked across my home campus where I work. On Oct. 8, 9, and 10, I saw students yelling, “From the river to the sea.” They were not objecting to Israeli entrance in Gaza. They weren’t objecting, I should say they were celebrating that they thought Oct. 7 was the entree, the beginning, the alpha of a larger multipronged assault whose ultimate aim was to kill as many Jews as possible.
So, why do people react that way given the circumstances? Why don’t they, the world, condemn these killers, these mutilators, these beheaders? And why do they keep saying that Israel is a genocidal enemy when they waited and waited and waited before going in?
Well, Israel is not the Israel of the 1950s and ’60s, a small, poor nation that is a victim of repeated assaults. It’s a powerful 10-million-person, 10-and-a-half-million-person nation that has high tech, an overwhelmingly strong economy, an attraction of science and technology in the Middle East.
In other words, in the words of DEI, they are a victimizer or oppressor just because of their, quote, “privilege.”
DEI played a lot of it. In the world that’s gone mad, in Europe, the United States, Israel, Israelis were white and Palestinians were nonwhite and therefore victims. Doesn’t matter what the reality was. That was the binary.
Antisemitism played a role. We have half of our people for some reason going to colleges where they’re all indoctrinated. We have immigration now where we’re letting in 5 million people from the Middle East in the first and second generations from what we can tell by Hasan Piker or Zohran Mamdani or Ilhan Omar or Abdul El-Sayed, is that they have very little affection for their host.
They despise Israel, and they want Israel destroyed, and they work and act and fund to that purpose.
Add it all up on this commemorative week of Oct. 7, and to sane and sober people, it makes no sense. But sane and sober people, unfortunately, in the West today are in a minority.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.