Highlighting: “If It Takes a Thousand Years” by Jesse Petrilla. Bombardier Books. 2024. 208 pages. ISBN-13: 979-8888456125.

Highlighting: “Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil” by Monty Noam Penkower. Touro University Press. 2025. 294 pages. ISBN-13: 979-8887197777.

In the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” the captain utters the famous line, “Some men, you just can’t reach.” When it comes to the Middle East and Israel, for most people, you simply can’t reach them. They don’t get it. From the United Nations to the U.S. State Department, misinformation and prejudice preclude them from understanding the situation.

Two people who genuinely understand the situation are former U.S. Army Captain Jesse Petrilla and Dr. Monty Naom Penkower. Petrilla, an army veteran, has come face to face with Islamic terrorists, spoken with them, and engaged with them. Penkower is a distinguished scholar operating from the pristine environs of the academic world.

Both authors, coming from different perspectives, astutely articulate what is going on in relation to radical Islamic terrorism.

Often attributed to Albert Einstein, the observation that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” is undoubtedly true. A very recent example is former President Joe Biden, who erroneously felt that a ceasefire with Hamas would bring a permanent end to war. Biden, like most of those in the Department of State, does not truly understand Israel’s enemies.

In 1972, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the Paris riots of May 1968. He replied, “Too early to say.” It was widely reported that the question was about the French Revolution of 1789, which had occurred nearly 200 years before. But over the last half-century, his reply to a question that was not asked took on a life of its own.

The fact is that China does take a long view of history. Their approach to the future is not in four-year election cycles but rather hundreds of years in the future. That was articulately detailed in “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower” by Michael Pillsbury. He writes how China has a formal and detailed strategy to usurp the United States as a global superpower by 2050.

Jihadists take a long view of history. In “If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them,” Jesse Petrilla has written a fascinating, albeit horrifying, exposition of how jihadists operate and their long-term game plan.

The title of the book comes from an interrogation of a terrorist by the author in Afghanistan. He asked him how long the jihadists intended to fight. The Taliban commander replied, “If it takes a thousand years.”

Petrilla has a deep and broad understanding of how Islamic terror operates. He’s a former U.S. Army captain, and the book includes insights from interviews he conducted with captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.

While he knows quite well how the jihadists think, that has not been the case with those in the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense, which have long approached terrorist groups with a Western mindset.

The words “thousand years” in the title are not hyperbole. As Petrilla makes it eminently clear, jihadis live in a very different world of time than those in the West.

That is one of the misconceptions that cause U.S. leaders to misunderstand their enemies completely—to the tune of trillions of dollars spent on losing battles with tens of thousands of lives lost. Those misunderstandings, which Petrilla articulates, have devastating effects on those who have to live with the results of jihadi terror.

After spending several horrifying chapters laying out the jihadi threat, Petrilla provides many suggestions on how the U.S. can go about countering the threat. Part of the problem is that the enemies of the U.S., who feel that democracy is an anathema to their worldview, use democratic tools to further their goals.

Many of his suggestions require bold steps, which the Biden, Obama, and other administrations were incapable of taking. Not only was the Biden administration ineffective against the threat, but it also supported many enemies of the U.S.

This book is a wake-up call for those who think that groups such as Hamas in Gaza and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in Syria can be negotiated with. Petrilla writes not from the ivory towers of academia but as someone who has spent significant time face-to-face with these terrorists.

This is a unique, eye-opening book from a writer who truly and intimately understands the subject. The future is not so bright unless books like this are on the Department of State’s reading list. And while the jihadis are willing to wait a thousand years, they may also be significantly overstating the time it takes for them to reach their goals.

Monty Noam Penkower is a professor emeritus of modern Jewish history at the Machon Lander Graduate School of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. In “Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War Against Israel and the Jews,” he provides a daily account of the war that started with the Hamas attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Here, he focuses on the first six months of that war and details in brutal depth the trauma that the attack and the required war have brought to our nation.

Some men, you just can’t reach—and one of them is former U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. As he was forcing a one-sided ceasefire on Israel, Penkower perceptively asks if Blinken had heard any Palestinian leader saying they were willing to live in peace with a Jewish state.

Even deep into the fighting, when the extent of the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 was known, officials of the Fatah party, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, continued to refer to the slaughter as “the heroic operation”—a point Blinken and everyone in the State Department were oblivious to.

This is a tough yet required book, with death and carnage on every page. One can read a few pages at a time and then must take a break. Here, Penkower captures the trauma that Israelis are going through. Sadly, this continues after an agonizing 18 months.

For those who want to truly understand the origins of the Oct. 7 catastrophe, these two books provide unique insights by two people who genuinely get it.

Ben Rothke lives in New Jersey and works in the information security field. He reviews books on religion, technology, philosophy, and science. Follow him on Twitter at @benrothke.