RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/moral-clarity-versus-moral-depravity-in-israel-and-gaza-opinion/ar-BB1gI5Rz

Nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager has often observed that if the Israelis were to lay down their guns, Israel would be destroyed tomorrow, but if the Palestinians were to lay down their guns, there would be peace tomorrow. It has always been thus.

The latest flare-up of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is no different. The proximate causes are a thorny combination of an abstruse housing dispute in northeastern Jerusalem, deceitful Palestinian slander about an ostensible threat to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the destabilizing nature of Israel’s current domestic political morass and the contemporaneous American appeasement in Vienna of the Palestinians’ preeminent jihad bankroller, the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the immediate aggressors, as per usual, are clear: Hamas, the internationally recognized Gaza-based terrorist outfit whose founding charter calls for the murder of every Jew worldwide, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, ruled in profoundly corrupt fashion by serial jihad-inciter Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denialist now in the 16th year of his four-year term.

The result has been the worst bout of bloodshed since the last full-scale Israel-Hamas war in 2014. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets into the Jewish state, seeking—and, tragically, occasionally succeeding—to inflict maximal harm upon Israel’s civilian population. Hamas’ rockets do not discriminate on the basis of age, race or religion: Victims include an Israel Defense Forces soldier, a 6-year-old boy in the oft-targeted Gaza border town of Sderot and a 32-year-old Indian national in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. One would be waiting in vain for Black Lives Matter, or other leading institutional wokesters and intersectional shakedown artists, to reconcile such calamities with their professed principles.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/anti-israel-forces-encouraged-biden%E2%80%99s-weakness-185215

Four years of relative peace in the Middle East have been shattered by a conflict between Hamas and Israel, which began when Hamas bombarded Jerusalem. The Iranian-backed force that rules Gaza then expanded its target list to other Israeli cities.

Why now? The Middle East and particularly the Levant had been on the mend since then-President Donald Trump took the handcuffs off U.S.-led forces in 2017 and allowed them to all but obliterate ISIS. Trump also knocked off balance the terrorism-exporting Iranian regime by curtailing its finances and confronting it with an aggressive military posture in the Arabian Gulf.

The biggest Trump breakthrough came with the Abraham Accords, which achieved a historic breakthrough between Israelis and Arabs, with the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Unfortunately, the new Biden administration refused simply to accept this new and beneficial status quo upon entering office. Biden officials set about immediately to let Iran out of the doghouse. The administration is set on resurrecting the 2015 nuclear deal that showered Tehran with money and still allowed it to keep the key parts of a nuclear program it today is using to enrich uranium far beyond what is necessary for peaceful purposes.

Biden officials also put the Palestinians, and therefore Hamas (aka, the Muslim Brotherhood), back on the payroll with $235 million in payments. Trump had cut them off in 2018, realizing they funded terrorism. In restoring the funds, the administration said it “wanted to restore credible engagement” between the Palestinians and Israelis. Certainly, it did: nothing is more credible than a rocket attack targeting civilians in one’s capital.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/gaza-hamas-israel.html

As of this writing, terrorists in Gaza — the word “terrorist” fits people who take indiscriminate aim at civilians to achieve political goals — have fired some 1,750 rockets at Israel since Monday.

That’s a number worth pausing over, and not just because it has had the effect of overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense. Gaza is often said to be sealed off and utterly destitute. Yet Hamas, which rules Gaza, seems not to have had too much trouble amassing this kind of arsenal, or too many qualms employing it in a way it knew was sure to incur a heavy Israeli response.

The usual rule in life is that if you throw the first punch you can’t complain if you’re counterpunched. The test of Western policy and public opinion is whether they will let Hamas break this rule.

That’s a test the Biden administration has so far passed: Both the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have issued statements stressing that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Good. It’s more than can be said for progressives such as Bernie Sanders, who blamed “the irresponsible actions of government-allied right-wing extremists in Jerusalem” for the fighting without adding a word of condemnation for Hamas.

Now let’s hope the administration’s attitude lasts. The tactics of Hamas are to house its arsenals in schools and mosques, set up headquarters in the basement of hospitals and fire its missiles from sites next to crowded apartment buildings and hotels housing foreign journalists.

The idea is either to keep Israel from returning fire or, if it does, reap the propaganda benefits from televised and tweeted pictures of wrecked buildings and human casualties and “disproportionate” Israeli-Palestinian death counts that obscure the fact that one side is doing what it can to protect civilian lives and the other side is doing what it can to endanger them.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/on-eastern-jerusalem-sheikh-jarrah-and-israel/

CNN ran a news story on May 9 with the headline “Israeli Supreme Court delays hearing on Palestinian evictions from East Jerusalem neighborhood.” This followed an official press statement issued on May 7 by the U.S. State Department that reported “concern” about “evictions in East Jerusalem, settlement activity, home demolitions and acts of terrorism … .”

The catch? The area in the news is not in “East Jerusalem” at all. What’s more, there is not now, nor has there ever been in history a political entity known as “East Jerusalem.”A glance at any map of the city shows that the neighborhood Sheik Jarrah, including the parts also widely known in Hebrew as Shimon HaTzadik for centuries, is not in the capital’s east. It is in the north, about 1.25 miles north of the Western Wall, the Kotel.

In fact, this area is farther west than numerous well-known parts of Jerusalem, such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (construction began in 1918) and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus (construction began in 1934).

The term “East Jerusalem” is an artificial construct that supporters of the Arab cause use in their propaganda in order to make it appear as if that part of the city is an intrinsically Arab area that Jews are illegally entering. In reality, there are Jewish neighborhoods throughout the eastern, western, northern and southern parts of Jerusalem. It’s a pity when American politicians and news outlets play along and use such geographically inaccurate and politically loaded language.

East and West in Israel are not simple geographic terms as they are in the United States, where Northeast Philadelphia, the Upper East Side in Manhattan and East L.A. are used to denote neighborhoods and sections of a city. In Israel, where Judea and Samaria have been labeled as the West Bank, things are different. The term West Bank was created by Arab propagandists to de-emphasize the area’s inherent Jewishness and to disassociate the land from the State of Israel. East Jerusalem was similarly invented.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/almost-nothing-youve-heard-about-evictions-in-jerusalem-is-true-11621019410?

Hamas never needs a special occasion to bombard Israel with rockets. Yet the progressive narrative connects the terrorist group’s current onslaught to eviction proceedings in Israeli courts concerning a few properties in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren claim these are stark human-rights violations by the Israeli government, and illegal under international law. Even the State Department expressed “serious concern.”

The truth about Sheikh Jarrah is the opposite. It is an ordinary property dispute between private parties. The Jewish claimants’ ownership of the few plots of land has been confirmed repeatedly in court, following laws that apply equally regardless of ethnicity. Israeli courts have gone out of their way to avoid evicting the Palestinian residents who haven’t paid rent for half a century.

In the case now before Israel’s Supreme Court, the owner is an Israeli corporation with Jewish owners whose chain of title is documented back to an original purchase in 1875. Until 1948, the neighborhood now known as Sheikh Jarrah was home to both Jewish and Arab communities. Jordan invaded Israel in 1948 and occupied half of Jerusalem, expelling every one of its Jewish inhabitants and seizing their property.

When Israel reunited Jerusalem and ended the Jordanian occupation in 1967, it had to decide what to do with these properties. In the many cases in which Jordan had officially transferred the title of Jewish-owned properties to Palestinians, Israel respected the new titles—and still does—even though they are based on forcible takings in a war of aggression followed by ethnic cleansing against Jews. Where title had never been transferred, however, Israel returned properties to their owners. Critics of Israel claim that Arabs can’t recover property under the same law, but the law is entirely neutral—it is simply the case that Jordan took property from Jews, not Palestinians.

Title to the properties in dispute in Sheikh Jarrah was never given by Jordan to Palestinians, so Israeli law respects the unbroken title of the plaintiffs. This case has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. The only discrimination in the legal treatment of Sheikh Jarrah property is historic, by Jordan, and against Jews to the benefit of Palestinians.

The plaintiff and its predecessors in title have spent four decades in court seeking to recover possession of the properties. In every case, courts have ruled in favor of the owners. In the latest lawsuits, the courts ruled that four of the eight defendants were squatters with no legal rights in the land, and the remaining four were descendants of tenants who had never paid rent.

Nevertheless, Israeli courts have treated the Palestinian squatters and leaseholders alike as “protected tenants,” and would shield them from eviction indefinitely if they paid rent. They have refused to do so.

The laws involved are the same as any landlord would invoke. There is only one objection in this case: the owners are Jews. Western progressives have elevated the desire of some Arabs not to have Jewish neighbors into a human right and a legal entitlement that even the Jewish state must protect.