RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-oct-7-war-one-year-later/

On Oct 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. Their mission was to wipe out the Jewish population in the nearby towns, secure them and use them as forward operating bases for the next phase of the war. While the atrocities they committed in that initial assault, entire families burned alive in their homes, women raped and kidnapped, and babies killed, made it look like a terrorist attack on a large scale, Oct 7 had not been meant as a hit and run operation.

Hamas had risked too much and put too many men in the field for it to be anything other than an invasion. Its plans to continue advancing into Israel appear unrealistic only out of context.

The thousands of terrorists from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah had been meant as the tip of a larger spear. Thousands of Hezbollah and allied terrorists had been in position on Oct 7. Had Hamas been able to hang on to Israeli territory, they would have invaded the Galilee, but after the initial shock and long delays throughout that first day, the Israeli military regrouped.

The Hezbollah invasion was postponed until it was briefly revived by the Islamic terror group around the time of the pager attacks and then shut down by targeted Israeli strikes.

Oct 7 had been Hezbollah’s plan before it was executed by Hamas. Hezbollah had even spent years boasting about using its network of tunnels to invade and conquer the Galilee, but the funding and plans had come out of Tehran. Yet when push came to shove, Hezbollah hesitated.

Iran had planned for an Oct 7 that would have dealt a catastrophic blow to Israel. The original plot would have seen coordinated Hamas and Hezbollah invasions backed by heavy rocket campaigns not only by Hezbollah, but by the Houthis in Yemen and Iran’s militias in Iraq targeting Israeli bases, military assets and infrastructure. Terror groups in the West Bank would have launched their own assaults creating a multi-front guerrilla war deep inside Israel. Even if Israel had beaten back the attacks, many of the Jewish communities would have been in ashes.

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/let-israel-decide-how-to-respond-to-irans-missile-attack/

President Biden pushes Israel not to respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attack by targeting its nuclear or oil sites, while former President Trump blasts Biden and suggests that, in fact, Israel should hit Iran’s nuclear sites.

Their public disagreement over Israel’s proper course reminds us that, notwithstanding Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s dictum of the early Cold War years that politics should stop “at the water’s edge,” it rarely has.

Presidents have long shaped their foreign policy with domestic politics in mind. FDR promised the nation just days before his re-election in 1940 that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” though he knew that America’s entry into World War II was both necessary and inevitable. JFK planned to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam but not until his second term, fearing an earlier withdrawal would ignite a “who lost Vietnam” backlash that threatened his re-election in 1964.

Now, a month before our Election Day, Israel is battling Iran and its terror proxies on multiple fronts, civilian lives are at risk in multiple nations, global leaders are pushing for ceasefires and “de-escalation,” and Vice President Kamala Harris is battling Trump for Jewish and Muslim votes in a razor-close contest.

But, however understandable in political terms, Biden and Trump’s comments are nevertheless badly misguided in geopolitical terms because they undercut our closest regional ally at an ominous moment.

Consider, by way of historical example, the absurdity of such public counsel to any nation under siege.

“We shall carry the attack against the enemy,” FDR told Congress a month after Pearl Harbor, with nearly 2,500 service members and civilians dead and the United States now at war with both Japan and Germany. “We shall hit him and hit him again wherever and whenever we can reach him.”

https://www.theblaze.com/return/one-year-after-10-7-israels-alliance-with-a-weakened-america-brings-dangerous-consequences

Betrayed by the United States, Israel will have to maneuver as best it can in a world of diminishing American influence.

“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal,” said the late Henry Kissinger to William F. Buckley. Israel’s alliance with the United States hasn’t proved fatal — and probably won’t — but it has left Israel with difficult choices and an enduringly dangerous security situation.

Zoom out from the battlefields in Gaza, about the size of Brooklyn and Queens, or the 18 miles from the Israeli-Lebanon border to the Litani River and consider the mess that the Biden administration has made of the world. Israel’s biggest problem is that U.S. influence is imploding around the world and to be an American ally means to wear a target on one’s back. Israel’s second-biggest problem is that its American ally has sandbagged it at every turn.

Instead of peace through strength, Biden has offered promulgation from weakness. That has grave implications for Israel’s position.

October 7, 2023, was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, with 1,200 dead and many raped and tortured as well as 250 kidnapped. Relative to Israel’s Jewish population of 7.2 million, that’s the equivalent of 55,000 Americans, or roughly 20 times the death toll on 9/11.

America’s Global War on Terror caused 900,000 civilian casualties, according to a Brown University estimate. Taking the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS during 2016-2017 killed anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians. Israel’s campaign to extirpate Hamas from Gaza has been measured by comparison.