RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/the-choice-was-between-civilisation-or-barbarism-wip06eny?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We are living through a seismic moment in our history, and the Jewish people will never be the same again.

On October 7 — that terrible day — few would have imagined that one year later Israel would still be under attack from an eight-front war of extermination led by Iran.

Even fewer could have imagined that, far from sympathy and understanding over the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust and the targeting of Jews once more for genocide, the west would turn against Israel as the aggressor and war criminal and subject diaspora Jews to an unprecedented tsunami of antisemitism.

The scale and nature of this response indicate that something totally abnormal has been happening.

It’s not just the street mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, and every other university student hurling accusations of genocide at the Israelis for trying to defend themselves against genocide.

It’s not just the wretched media pumping out the Palestinian-scripted narrative of lies aimed at demonising and delegitimising Israel and writing the Jewish people out of its own history in the land.

It’s not just the Biden administration and the Starmer government and the UN and international courts and NGOs and the Church of England all singing from the same Hamas hymn-sheet.

It’s also that, when Israel bombs Hamas terrorists and their weapons in Gaza, the west tells it to stop because it’s killing “too many civilians”, even though it has produced the lowest ratio in modern history of civilians killed in war.

When Israel carries out an unprecedentedly precise attack by exploding thousands of pagers on the person of Hezbollah fighters so that vanishingly few civilians are harmed, the west accuses it of “indiscriminate killing”. When Hezbollah is left reeling still further after Israel wipes out with one missile the entire senior command of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, the USA, France, Britain and other western countries start piling pressure on the Jewish state to cease fire immediately.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/06/israel-is-surrounded-by-genocidal-enemies/

One thing that should now be clear is that Hamas is not the only Islamist group intent on destroying Israel. It is just one of several Iran-backed groups – the self-styled ‘axis of resistance’ or ‘ring of fire’ – determined to erase the Jewish State from the map.

Israel is therefore engaged in a seven-front war, fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and increasingly heavily armed groups in the West Bank. And stranding behind all of them is the significant regional power of Iran.

Almost immediately after last year’s 7 October pogrom, these groups started their own military assaults on Israel. On 8 October, Hezbollah fired mortars at Israeli military positions in the Mount Dov region on the Lebanon border (sometimes called Shebaa Farms). Two days later, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which often works in conjunction with Hezbollah, claimed responsibility for an armed infiltration into Israeli territory from Lebanon.

Things could have been even worse. It has since emerged that 3,000 terrorists – most from Hezbollah but some from PIJ – were poised on the Lebanese border to attack Israel. Their goal was to implement a longstanding plan called ‘conquering the Galilee’ to seize northern Israel. Fortunately, Hezbollah hesitated before trying to execute its attack on the north, giving Israel time to mobilise its reserves and prevent even more carnage. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Hezbollah’s plan to attack Israel’s north was the basis for Hamas’s mass attack on the south.

Israel also soon came under attack from the south and the east. By mid-October, the Houthis in Yemen had attempted to launch an aerial assault. A few weeks later, an Islamist militia from Syria launched a drone attack which hit the Israeli city of Eilat. By November, Islamist militias based in Iraq were also mounting attacks on Israel. At the same time, Iran has been pouring weapons into the West Bank in the hope of opening up another front there.

Indeed, since 7 October, Iran has been open about its backing of these Islamist militias. On 17 October, supreme leader Ali Khamenei reportedly told Iranian television that ‘no one will stop the resistance forces’. He mentioned Hezbollah in the north, pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran, he said, ‘will coordinate the attack’ on Israel using missiles and drones to create a ‘siege from all sides’. In April, Iran went a step further and directly attacked Israel for the first time with a mass aerial bombardment. This month, it launched a potentially even more damaging ballistic missile attack.

https://www.thefp.com/p/can-israel-win-back-what-october

“This was a lesson that Jews learned when they were exiled millennia ago, after which the Land of Israel became a ghostly place in mind and memory—and then learned again, when pioneers like the teenagers at Hanita in 1938 put down physical roots, built a wooden tower, and declared they’d never leave. Right now, as Israeli soldiers advance into Lebanon, and as the evacuees wait in their hotel rooms and temporary apartments, it feels like a lesson being learned again. ”

KIBBUTZ HANITA, Israel — In the late 1930s, when the land that is now Israel was under British rule, a young intelligence officer named Anthony Simonds spent time in Galilee, in remote hills that would eventually become the Israel-Lebanon border. He recorded memories of his time there in a colorful but unpublished memoir now kept in the Imperial War Museum in London. Rereading the officer’s recollections now, a year into the war that has devastated northern Israel and southern Lebanon, is an eerie exercise—a reminder of what Jews created in Israel, then lost last fall, and are now fighting to reclaim.

As I write these lines, Israeli infantrymen are pushing into Lebanon to clear Hezbollah guerrillas from the vicinity of the border while the air force, in strikes throughout southern Lebanon and in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern districts of Beirut, is methodically killing the group’s commanders and destroying the vast arsenal supplied by Iran. A direct Israeli strike against HezboIlah’s patron, the Islamic theocracy in Iran, seems imminent.

None of this would have made sense to Simonds of the Royal Berkshires: When he was a young man in uniform more than 80 years ago, Iran was a distant monarchy ruled by the shah, and there was no Hezbollah and no state of Israel. Lebanon was ruled by France. 

“I have driven my car on rough tracks, sometimes in the Lebanon and sometimes in Palestine,” wrote Simonds. On one page of his typewritten memoir he recalls coming across a new frontier outpost. This kibbutz had been established one night in March 1938, and was inhabited by about 100 young Jews, many of them refugees from Europe, who had erected a wooden tower and stockade in a matter of hours on a plot purchased from Arab landowners by the Zionist movement. After their arrival, the pioneers faced an attack in which two of them were killed by Arab guerrillas. As they dug in and farmed in subsequent months, becoming symbols of Zionist pioneering, eight more of them fell.