RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/the-collapse-of-israels-dream-palace-of-normalcy-and-how-israel-can-still-achieve-a-great-victory/

Every intelligence officer in the United States at one point in his formal training learns about the great Israeli intelligence failure in the 1973 war.  The lesson was clear, and the same one identified by Roberta Wohlstetter about the great failure of surprise in Pearl Harbor in 1941: a set of ideas, or “conception” can so thoroughly dominate elites and the professional strategic and intelligence communities that it overpowers the increasing pace of evidence and information suggesting an approaching tectonic change.  Israel has just been shaken because it suffered in recent days the second great, indeed catastrophic, “failure of conception,” with dramatic human and strategic consequences.  And it will face a grave national challenge going forward beyond the horrific affairs of massive missile barrages from Gaza because its entire understanding of its situation and the defense concepts that flow from it have collapsed.

And yet, Israel also faces a great opportunity.  A proper response could deliver Israel a tremendous victory, perhaps one its greatest, and leave Israel more strengthened and valued in the long run as an appealing potential ally for others struggling to survive in a dangerous region.

The Dream Palace of Illusions

With respect to Iran’s nuclear program and attempts to establish Iran’s power in Syria, Israel has embraced the original strategy of preemption which served it so well in its first years, to deny an avowed genocidal enemy the means to execute its ambition. And yet, other than Iran, for the last several decades, Israel turned in response to its other enemies from preemption to deterrence, and a “quiet for quiet” formula.  It turned to relying on American support rather than enjoying freedom of action to shape their environment into a less dangerous form. It watched massive stockpiling of missiles in Gaza and in Lebanon, but believed its overwhelming force, and the willingness to use it, guaranteed the success of its reliance on deterrence. Israel believed it could absorb constant attacks on border communities as a below-the-threshold simmering that can be tolerated, much to the chagrin of the people living in those communities.  And Israel believed it could pay blood money to a desperate Hamas via the Qataris to keep them quiet.

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-the-end-of-jewish-arab-coexistence/

Jews cower in their homes as Arabs set fire to synagogues and comb the streets for Jewish victims. Failing that, they attempt to break into Jewish homes. They burn cars and whatever else they can lay their hands on.

These events, more reminiscent of the Pale of Settlement, are taking place now, for the last two days, in Israel proper, in the city of Lod, a half hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.

More than one eyewitness has called it a pogrom. The city’s mayor compared it to Kristallnacht.

What makes it different, indeed intolerable, is that it’s taking place in the Jewish State, established to end such horrors.

Lod is a mixed city. Its Jewish population has been shouting for help as they remain trapped in their own homes as Arabs run riot. The government has quite rightly been criticized for its tepid response. Only about 30 rioters have been arrested. Finally, on Tuesday evening, the government ordered 16 Border Police companies to the city and declared a state of emergency.

As pathetic as has been the government and police response, it’s Lod’s Arabs who deserve the most censure. They are Israeli Arabs. They have grown up in Israel, not on the other side of some imaginary line, not in the so-called ‘occupied territories.’ Israel makes enormous effort to help its Arab citizens feel a part of the country, despite propaganda to the contrary. In short, there is no excuse for the savagery of this ungrateful minority.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-tests-israeland-biden-11620772433?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The jihadists of Hamas on Tuesday launched the biggest single-day rocket attack on the Jewish State in memory, with hundreds flying toward Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as well as the usual civilian targets in southern Israel. Israel struck back at 500 targets in Gaza, and this has the potential to become a larger conflict after a relatively long period of Mideast quiet.

The Hamas attacks come after days of Palestinian riots in Jerusalem, some prompted by long-running property disputes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Israeli courts ruled in favor of Jewish owners and against Palestinian leaseholders who claim rights to the property dating to Jordan’s occupation of East Jerusalem after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The case’s Supreme Court hearing was delayed.

Mahmoud Abbas, who runs the Palestinian West Bank region adjacent to Jerusalem, has been held up as a moderate negotiating partner for Israel. Yet his party fomented the Jerusalem violence, broadcasting that it “calls on everyone to raise the level of confrontation in the coming days and hours in the Palestinian lands,” according to Palestinian Media Watch.

The 85-year-old Mr. Abbas, who has headed the Palestinian Authority since 2005 without standing for re-election, may want to turn up the temperature to compensate for falling public confidence in his rule. He’s in competition with Hamas and even more extreme groups, which he shut out of power in the West Bank last month by postponing elections yet again. Hamas, which promises the destruction of Israel, one-upped Mr. Abbas’s riots by reigniting its military confrontation.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/dark-face-palestinian-terror-joseph-klein/

The “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is spinning out of control toward another possible all-out war. Blame should, of course, fall on the Palestinian terrorists operating from Gaza, who have once again fired hundreds of rockets inside Israel against civilian targets. This time, the terrorists deliberately escalated what began as a local fracas over the possible eviction of Palestinians from homes they have been occupying in an area of East Jerusalem known as Sheikh Jarrah. Israeli Jews claim that this land belongs to them. After a barrage of rocket attacks, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck back. The Palestinians are complaining. Here we go again.

The pattern is very familiar by now. Palestinians use a pretext to start a riot. The Israeli police and security forces respond proportionately. The Palestinians up the ante, prompting a further Israeli response. Then Palestinian terrorists in Gaza use the territory they control to launch rocket attacks into Israel against civilian targets. Israel warns the terrorists to stop the rocket fire, which the terrorists ignore. After the Israeli military retaliates proportionately in an effort to target the terrorists responsible for the rocket attacks and their facilities, Palestinian government leaders cry foul. They point to unintended Palestinian civilian casualties, which are often caused by the Palestinian terrorists putting the civilians, including women and children, in harm’s way. Then, with their usual crocodile tears, Palestinian diplomats run to the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other globalist forums to reprise their false narrative of victimhood at the hands of the “oppressor,” “murderous,” “apartheid” Israeli regime. The Palestinians can count on leftist support for their cause in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.

In short, Palestinian militants provoke violence to which Israel responds. Palestinian terrorists target innocent civilians deliberately. Israel targets the terrorists and their facilities, with policies and practices in place to minimize civilian casualties. And like the youth who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy because he’s an orphan, the Palestinians ask the so-called “international community” to rally around them.

The Israeli Supreme Court had not even ruled yet on the Sheikh Jarrah dispute before Palestinian agitators exploited the situation. They used the dispute, together with a peaceful Jerusalem Day parade celebrating Israel’s reunification of Jerusalem following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as an excuse to riot. Israeli police responded, leading to an outbreak of violence in and around the Temple Mount.

Then Hamas and Islamic Jihad entered the fray by firing hundreds of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel and several rockets into the Jerusalem area. Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said it had launched “a rocket strike against the enemy in the occupied Jerusalem in response to their crimes and aggression against the holy city and its aggression against our people in Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa mosque.” This was the first time since the 2014 Gaza War that Hamas has aimed its rockets at Jerusalem.

While Israel’s Iron Dome defense system managed to intercept some of the rockets, others got through and killed at least two Israeli civilians, injured scores of other Israelis, and destroyed homes.

On Tuesday evening, as reported by the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian terrorists launched rockets reaching the Tel Aviv region. One of the rockets hit a bus, causing several injuries, including to a 5-year-old girl.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-is-twitter-letting-irans-ayatollah-khamenei-incite-rocket-attacks-on-israeli-civilians/?utm_source=

As the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians intensified on Tuesday night, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who helps fund and direct Hamas’s actions, tweeted out the following:

Khamenei.ir

·Palestinians are awake and determined. They must continue this path. One can only talk with the language of power with these criminals. They must increase their strength, stand strong, confront the enemy, and force them to stop their crimes. #FreePalestine

Within minutes, the IDF reported sirens were sounding in Tel Aviv as one of its largest cities came under a barrage of rocket fire.

It’s worth remembering that when Donald Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter while still an office holder, Twitter cited, “the risk of further incitement of violence.”

Yet in this case Ayatollah is using Twitter to directly signal to his terrorist proxy group Hamas that they should continue attacking civilians. Why does that not count as inciting violence?

To be clear, this is not a one off tweet by Ayatollah. He has continually used the account to urge Palestinian terrorists to continue attacks on Israel. Here is a sampling of tweets over just the past few days.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/11/barrage-of-rockets-launched-at-tel-aviv-from-the-gaza-strip/?utm_source=maropost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alert&utm_content=20210511&mpweb=755-9375372-720223421

Tel Aviv came under a barrage of 130 rockets launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, sending residents fleeing for shelter as air raid sirens blared across Israel’s second-largest city.

Israel’s anti-rocket defense systems were activated Tuesday night, with the streaks of multiple interceptor missiles lighting up the skies over the area.

The heavy bombardment came in retaliation for an Israeli strike earlier on Tuesday evening that leveled a high-rise building in Gaza, which housed the offices of several top Hamas officials. That strike had come in ralition for earlier Hamas bombings.

Both sides had been firing at each other almost nonstop throughout the day, in some of the worst fighting between Israel and the terror group since their 2014 war.

As the rockets launched into the skies from Gaza on Tuesday night, mosques blared with chants of “God is great,” “Victory to Islam” and “Resistance.”

One of the rockets appeared to have hit an oil pipeline belonging to an Israeli state-owned energy company, setting a large storage tank on fire. Videos showed flames engulfing the tank in the city of Ashkelon, which reportedly burned for hours.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17364/iran-proxy-war-israel

Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted for the first time that his country was supplying the Palestinian terrorist groups with weapons….”Iran realized Palestinian fighters’ only problem was lack of access to weapons” — Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Reuters, May 22, 2020.

The [earlier] denial exposes the extent of Iran’s scheme to deceive the international community not only regarding its supply of weapons to the Palestinian terrorist groups, but also concerning its plan to acquire a nuclear bomb and bolster its production of nuclear material.

Iran… repeatedly violated the terms of the [2015 JCPOA] nuclear deal, according to the UN’s nuclear monitoring Atomic Energy Agency.

Were it not for Iran’s financial and military aid, the Palestinian terrorist groups would not have been able to attack Israel with thousands of rockets and missiles.

In the past, Iran used its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to attack Israel. Iran is now using its Palestinian proxies to achieve its goal of eliminating Israel and killing Jews. This is a war not only between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist groups. Rather, it is a war waged by Iran against Israel.

The Western powers that are currently negotiating with Iran about the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal are emboldening the mullahs and allowing them to continue their war of “kill[ing] all the Jews.”

The Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) organization announced on May 11 that its members fired a burst of “Badr-3” missiles into Israel, killing two women and injuring dozens others. The announcement was made by PIJ’s military wing, Al-Quds Brigades, after the group and other terror factions in the Gaza Strip, including Hamas, fired hundreds of rockets into Israel within 24 hours.

The “Badr-3” missile is an Iranian-made missile that appeared for the first time on the battlefields of the Middle East in April 2019, when the Iranian-backed Houthi militia used it during the fighting in war-torn Yemen.

The “Badr-3” missile carries an explosive warhead weighing 250 kg, and has a range of more than 160 km, according to Debka, an Israeli website that reports on military issues. “The missile explodes within 20m of target and releases a 1,400-piece shower of shrapnel fragments,” the website reported.

PIJ was the first terrorist organization to use the Iranian missile against Israel in 2019.

Until a few years ago, PIJ, Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups used to receive rockets and other weapons directly from Iran — smuggled in by sea or across the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. For some years now, however, according to Israeli intelligence sources, these terrorist groups have used years of experience with Iranian and other rockets to develop their own versions.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-palestinian-leaders-al-aqsa-hoax-strikes-again/

(May 11, 2021 / JNS) The anti-Israel response to the current Palestinian and eastern Jerusalem Arab violence was to be expected, particularly as it has been on a steady crescendo since the weeks leading up to and during Islam’s holy month of Ramadan. But, contrary to the successful dissemination and perpetuation of propaganda, it has nothing to do with Israeli behavior or its celebration of Jerusalem Day—the anniversary of the unification of the city after the 1967 Six-Day War.
Palestinian Authority leader and his Fatah faction know this full well. Ditto for Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, and the other terrorist groups, such as Islamic Jihad, lurking in the enclave beyond Israel’s southern border.
Ironically, the real struggle taking place at the moment is between Fatah and Hamas, with Israel caught in the crossfire, yet forced to take police action against rioters in Jerusalem and launch military strikes over Gaza.
The timing of this latest round of so-called “clashes” is not coincidental. On the contrary, it was calculated and cultivated by Abbas, who rightly feared a Hamas victory in the legislative and presidential Palestinian elections—the first since 2006—ostensibly slated for the end of May. Before indefinitely postponing the vote, which he had only scheduled in the first place to appease his Western donors, the P.A. chief turned to his comfort zone of incitement against the Jews and Israel to prove to his people that he is just as stalwart and radical an anti-Semite as any of his Hamas rivals.
He is aware that one surefire method of exploiting the gullibility of and riling up young hotheads is to reiterate false claims about Israel trying to “storm” the Al-Aqsa mosque. Never mind that the house of Muslim prayer in question is located on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. In the tradition of his predecessor—arch-terrorist and PLO chief Yasser Arafat—Abbas is a “temple denier” who rejects the Jews’ history in and connection to the city.
That this position runs counter to ancient Islamic texts is irrelevant to Abbas, who always plays fast and loose with facts as a matter of course. Nor does he have a problem simultaneously denying the Holocaust and accusing Israel of emulating the Nazis. So, distorting the reality of the Temple Mount as a tool for spurring death and destruction comes naturally to him.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17361/palestinian-goal-destroy-israel

The Palestinians are upset because Jews are being permitted to tour the Temple Mount. The Palestinians do not want to see Jews visiting their holy site; they do not want to see Jews in Jerusalem, and they do not want to see any Jew at all in the land that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

No one is disputing the Palestinians’ right to protest Israeli policies. Yet when the protests turn into large pro-Hamas demonstrations, with calls for bombing Tel Aviv and killing Jews, they expose the true deadly intention of the protesters.

When thousands of Palestinians chant “We are all Mohammed Deif” they are saying that they see themselves as terrorists ready to attack and destroy Israel. They are saying that Deif is their role model because he managed to murder many Jews and remains at large, despite Israeli attempts to apprehend or kill him.

Hamas owes its growing popularity to the anti-Israel inflammatory campaign waged in the Palestinian media, especially social media platforms, the mosques and public rhetoric of Palestinian leaders. Hamas also owes its popularity to the ongoing corruption and incompetence of the Palestinian Authority and its autocratic president, Mahmoud Abbas.

The demonstrations in favor of Hamas should also sound alarm bells with the Biden administration and serve as an accurate indicator as to Palestinian priorities. The Biden administration is talking about reviving the stalled peace process between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of the “two-state solution.” Hamas and the thousands of Palestinians who chanted slogans in support of Hamas and Deif, however, have a different solution in mind: the annihilation of Israel and the deaths of Jews — the more the merrier.

When former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel in 1991, many Palestinians took to the streets to celebrate the attacks. Many demonstrations took place in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem even while Palestinians were being issued gas masks by the Israeli authorities to protect them against a possible chemical attack by Iraq against Israel.

The Los Angeles Times reported back then that “several Palestinians expressed joy at last week’s [Iraqi] missile assault on Tel Aviv and Haifa.”

When the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group launched rocket attacks on Israel from Lebanon in 2015, Palestinians took to the streets to celebrate, holding Hezbollah flags and handing out sweets to drivers and passersby.