RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-817022

For fifty years, many world leaders and politicians have been promoting the idea that “there’s no alternative to a Palestinian state, the ‘two-state-solution’” (2SS) – despite on-going terrorism and the fact that such a state will be run by terrorists who are committed to Israel’s destruction.

Supporters of the 2SS argue that Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and support terrorism are entitled to a state, “self-determination,” and “ending the occupation,” which includes Judea, Shomron, Gaza and east Jerusalem – the “West Bank,” areas conquered by the IDF in the 1967 Six Day War. In other words, they advocate for Israel to withdraw to the cease-fire/armistice lines of 1949, arguing that this is required according to International Humanitarian Law, regardless of the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to end terrorism.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-brink-civil-war

Tens of thousands of protesters were swarming the streets of Tel Aviv on Sunday, calling on all restaurants, bars, and shops to shutter in solidarity. Many did. Highway 4, the major coastal route that runs from the Lebanese border down to the cusp of Gaza, was blocked in several locations by protestors setting tires on fire and confronting the police. The Histadrut, the country’s largest labor union, declared a general strike, which meant closing schools, businesses, and other essential institutions. Outraged, a slew of municipalities declared the strike illegitimate, with mayors threatening to take action against anyone who doesn’t show up for work. Although Histadrut abided by the Labor Court’s order to end the strike by Monday afternoon, the battle lines were drawn: town against town, brother against brother.

What are Israelis fighting about?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20915/eu-should-condemn-iran-not-israel

[T]he fact that the EU’s foreign policy chief [Josep Borrell] has even suggested imposing punitive measures against Israel, a country smaller than the state of New Jersey, when it is involved in a desperate fight defending itself against the world’s largest sponsor of state terrorism, Iran, and its proxy terrorist groups — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iraqi militias, as well as Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — on at least seven fronts, shows a woeful lack of understanding of the conflict.

Borrell’s constant articulation of anti-Israeli views also raises questions about his suitability to continue holding such an important position in the EU. Earlier this year, he launched a blistering attack against the “Israeli occupation authorities” for imposing punitive measures against an openly genocidal Palestinian Authority (PA).

Even so, Borrell’s stance reflects the deep anti-Israel sentiment that exists within the EU bureaucracy… After Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 Israelis, rather than receiving support for her gesture of solidarity by visiting Israel, during which [European Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen went to the Kfar Aza kibbutz (where at least 52 of 700 residents were murdered), she faced a barrage of criticism from EU insiders, with 800 EU staffers writing an official letter of complaint criticising her “uncontrolled” support of Israel.

[UN Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres’s willingness to focus his criticism on Israel, and not the Iranian-backed terrorists, is yet another example of the UN’s institutional anti-Israel bias. If the UN has any genuine interest in taking a balanced approach to the violence in the West Bank, then, instead of focusing its criticism exclusively on Israel, it would call on Iran to cease backing the network of terrorist groups it backs in the region, whose main goal is the destruction of Israel on the way to destroying the United States — the main representative of the West.

The failure of international bodies such as the EU and the UN to demonstrate any pretence of balance when intervening on vital international security issues such as the Iranian-sponsored conflicts taking place in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon not only makes a mockery of their claim to be independent arbiters on the issue. It also runs the risk of making them utterly irrelevant, to the extent that they suffer the same fate as the League of Nations in the 1930s, whose inability to confront fascism condemned it to abject failure.

The European Union’s dangerous bias on the Gaza conflict, where it constantly backs Iranian-backed terrorist groups at the expense of a democracy, Israel, has been exposed yet again by the latest anti-Israel stance adopted by Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign minister.

https://pjmedia.com/benshapiro/2024/09/04/the-evil-of-cowardice-n4932220

On Saturday night, the Israeli military made a macabre and horrifying discovery: the slain bodies of six hostages taken by Hamas, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. All six hostages had been shot point-blank in the head some 48-72 hours prior, presumably upon the approach of IDF soldiers; Hamas terrorists chose to murder the hostages they had held in terror tunnels for over 300 days rather than risk their liberation.

The discovery sent the entire nation of Israel into mourning. On Oct. 7, Israelis were forced to remember that the enemy they face is not merely violent, but purely evil. In subsequent months, with the extraordinary progress of the IDF in Gaza over the protestations of the Biden administration, Hamas’ evils were relegated once more to the realm of military conflict. But the very thought of these victims — Goldberg-Polin, 23; Eden Yerushalmi, 24; Ori Danino, 25; Alex Lobanov, 32; Carmel Gat, 40; and Almog Sarusi, 27 — suffering without sunlight, food or water for nearly a year, all to be shot to death within hours of their possible freedom, reopened all the wounds of Oct. 7.

It turned out that all the diplomatic overtures made by America — overtures largely accepted by the supposedly intransigent administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — meant nothing. As Netanyahu pointed out, “whoever murders hostages does not want a deal.” That was predictable enough, given the fact that Hamas’ chief goal is its own survival — a goal directly at odds with Israel’s necessary goal of extirpating Hamas. That is why Hamas has consistently declared for months that there would be no hostage release without a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, along with the discharge of hundreds of convicted terrorists and murderers. Anything less than survival for Hamas is a loss. Dead Palestinians help Hamas achieve its goal of pressuring Israel; dead hostages help Hamas achieve its goal of pressuring Israel.

https://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

“Israel has a right to defend itself,” Kamala told CNN. And then insisted that the “war must end.”

What Kamala was really saying was that Israel has a right to defend itself against an attack, but it doesn’t have a right to win.

Democrats and some Republicans have offered the same formulaic responses since Oct 7.

And long before that.

“Israel has a right to defend itself from rocket attacks,” Obama said in 2014 before calling for a ceasefire. Israel has a right to defend itself, Bush and Clinton used to say before urging a quick end to the fighting in order to make a deal with the terrorists Israel is defending itself against.

Israel has a right to defend itself is the bare minimum allotted to anyone. Everyone has a right to defend themselves when they are attacked. Agreeing to it is not a pro-Israel statement. It is at best a neutral position to which the alternative position is that the Israelis should have allowed themselves to be overrun, destroyed and massacred, men, women and children, on Oct 7.

Anything less than the assertion that Israel has a right to defend itself is a declaration that it deserves to be destroyed. And that is the state of the debate within the Democratic Party.

On one side are the supporters of a two-state solution who want to split Israel between the Jews and the Islamic terrorists. Every time the terrorists invade and kill Jews, the Israeli army would have the right to briefly defend the country before the politicians make a new deal with the terrorists. On the other side are the one-state solution backers who don’t believe Israel has a right to exist and therefore no right to defend itself and support the Islamic terrorists who call themselves ‘Palestinians’ in their quest to destroy it by any means from BDS to genocide.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20917/israel-protests-embolden-hamas

Hamas leaders, who are closely observing the protests, are likely to harden their stance in the hope that the Israeli government will give in to the demonstrators’ demands, including an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has the Israeli public pressuring their government to allow Hamas to “live to fight another day”: to rearm, regroup and continue attacking Israelis – as Hamas official Ghazi Hamad vowed.

Hamas leaders are banking on the Biden administration to compel the Israeli government to give in to the terror group’s demands…. It has long been the dream of Hamas and many Palestinians to see the US turn its back on Israel.

Hamas’s primary goal is to remain in power and return to the pre-October 7 era, when it built a large terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. Hamas knows it will not be able to accomplish its aims without a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and an official end of the war.

That is why Hamas is insisting that Israel withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Israel’s presence there obstructs Hamas’s efforts to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip through cross-border tunnels, as it has been doing for the past two decades.

Hamas is reportedly demanding US and international guarantees that Israel will not target the terror group anytime in the future. Until then, Hamas will continue to hold on to many of the hostages as an “insurance policy.”

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 atrocities, will not release all the hostages at once. He will continue to physically surround himself with many of them to ensure that Israel does not kill him. Sinwar does not care how many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip perish, as long as he is permitted to stay alive.

Even if Hamas were to initially release 10 or 20 hostages as part of any agreement, who could ensure that the remaining captives would be released? Are we supposed to take Hamas’s word for it? Are we supposed to believe that the Americans, Egyptians and Qataris would be able to force Hamas to comply with the terms of any agreement?

Hamas is only interested in a deal that would keep it in power and make Israel lose the war. Hamas does not feel under pressure, at all, to reach any deal. Why should it? If US President Joe Biden were serious about reaching a deal, all he has to do is phone the leader of Qatar and tell him, as he allegedly told Netanyahu a few weeks ago, to “stop bullshitting me!”

The hostages-ceasefire negotiations have broken down because of insufficient pressure from the Biden administration on Hamas’s patrons in Qatar. The failure of the negotiations should be attributed to Qatar’s lack of action against the Hamas leaders who are living in luxury in Doha. Qatar is not doing anything because it is not under any serious pressure from the Biden administration. Has the Biden administration considered using the threat of withdrawing the US Central Command from Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base from to pressure the Gulf state’s rulers into convincing their friends in Hamas to free all the hostages?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/01/the-deaths-of-these-hostages-shames-the-western-conscience/

The discovery of the bodies of six Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Rafah confirms what many of us knew about Hamas – that it is a Jew-killing machine that masquerades as a national-liberation movement. That it has no purpose beyond the persecution and slaughter of the Jewish people. That its aim, for all the crowing of its useful idiots in the West about ‘resistance’ and ‘decolonisation’, is nothing more and nothing less than the fascistic terrorising of the inhabitants of the Jewish State. The ‘brutal murder’ of these six people, their only crime their Jewishness, is the bloodiest proof yet that in Hamas Israel faces not only a military foe, but also a virulently racist, existential threat.

But the discovery of the slain Jews shines a harsh light on other people, too. Not just Hamas, but also us, the West, and especially that portion of it that calls itself ‘progressive’. When I saw the photos of the four men and two women killed by their captors in a dank lair in Rafah, I thought to myself: there are people in my community here in the UK who have defaced posters of these people. There are people on my streets who scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ on their faces. There are people in my profession who described the day they were kidnapped as a ‘day of celebration’. There are people in London – and New York, Berlin, Sydney – who expressed solidarity not with these six seized Jews, but with the racists who seized them.

And it made me think: it is not enough today to condemn Hamas. We must also ask how so many in the West came to share in Hamas’s twisted, bigoted hatred for these six human beings. Why so many in the West made excuses for their abduction, vandalised their likenesses and falsely called their persecution ‘resistance’. The barbarism uncovered in Rafah is on Hamas. But the Western conscience is not wholly innocent of this depraved crime.

Let us be clear: the horror in Rafah is what some progressives in the West felt ‘exhilarated’ by, it’s what they ‘celebrated’. This is Hamas, this is its ‘resistance’. All six, according to the IDF, were ‘brutally murdered’ a ‘short time’ before being found. They were: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, an Israeli-American; Alexander Lobanov, a 32-year-old father of two; Carmel Gat, a 40-year-old from Tel Aviv who was visiting her parents in the Be’eri kibbutz on the day of the 7 October pogrom; Almog Sarusi, a 27-year-old who loved ‘travelling around Israel in his white SUV with his guitar’; Eden Yerushalmi, a 24-year-old who was bartending at the Nova music festival; and Ori Danino, 25, who was about to embark on an electrical-engineering course when he was seized.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20916/gaza-ceasefire-hostages

The Biden-Harris administration apparently sees no problem with a Palestinian state being yet another terrorist state, committed to annihilating Israel — as both Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force commander General Esmail Qaani (“Israel is a cancer that must be eliminated”), and senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad have straightforwardly vowed.

A ceasefire might sound as if it is a “good thing” that benefits everyone — understandably if a friend or family member is a hostage. The problem seems to be the Hamas demand that Israel should leave the “Philadelphi corridor” on the border between Gaza and Egypt, so that Hamas, backed by its patrons Qatar and Iran, can resume smuggling weapons and ammunition into Gaza, rearm, rebuild and attack again.

It is probably more convenient, for all those trying to overthrow Netanyahu, to look at him rather than at the real perpetrators: Hamas, Iran and Qatar.

Qatar, “the Trojan Horse in Washington D.C.,” has long been financing Islamic terrorist organizations, as well as bestowing more than $6 billion on US universities to teach American youths whatever Qatar’s leaders decide. Nevertheless, the Biden-Harris administration decided that these qualifications made Qatar perfect to negotiate the Gaza war on America’s behalf, the same way the administration unfathomably decided to have Russia negotiate on America’s behalf with Iran over restarting the nuclear deal.

The Biden-Harris administration seems to want Netanyahu gone to be able to work with “their” prime minister: one who presumably would be delighted not only to have a terrorist Palestinian state on his borders — a state sworn to Israel’s destruction — and who would also be delighted if Iran — also sworn to Israel’s destruction — had nuclear weapons. It is the policy embraced by Obama, so long as Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons “on his watch.” Down the road, however, would be an altogether different story.

What many Israelis seem unwilling or unable to see is, sadly, that even with a ceasefire, the hostages will not be released. Hamas will hold on to as many of them as they can for as long as they can, to keep them in play as a weapon.

With a ceasefire, Israel unfortunately will not get peace and will not get the hostages. The Israelis might see a few hostages at a time dribbled out, the living ones first, they hope, each one exchanged for hundreds, if not more, of convicted Palestinian terrorists released from Israeli prisons, whose first job would be to go right back to terrorizing.

Meanwhile, the negotiations over every hostage would allow plenty of time for Iran and Hamas to bring more weapons in through the unguarded border from Egypt into Gaza, in order to rearm. The current leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, is himself a convicted terrorist who confessed to murdering four people with his own hands. Sinwar was serving four life sentences in an Israeli prison when he was released, among more than 1,000 terrorists, in exchange for one Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit, in 2011.

There is at least one way to get the hostages back quickly…. “Many Americans believe that they owe Qatar for its hosting of the U.S. CENTCOM base. The truth is precisely the opposite: It is Qatar that owes the U.S., for locating this base there. Without this base’s presence in the country, Qatar would disappear within less than a week – its neighbors would eat it up.” — Yigal Carmon, MEMRI, June 10, 2024.

Instead of saying, as the propagandists no doubt like, “Bring them Home,” meant to sound as if Netanyahu is hiding the hostages under the Knesset, Israelis would be better off saying, “Release the Hostages” — directed at Hamas, Qatar and Iran.

A ceasefire deal unfortunately will not bring back the hostages any time soon. Hamas will drag out each negotiation, continue attacking Israel and try to make Israelis miserable enough to give up the fight, as many seem to be doing even now.

The murder of six more Israeli hostages — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Ori Danino — captured by the terrorist group Hamas appears to be leading many Israelis, along with most of their ever-gullible media (remember the Oslo Accords?) to think that if only their government would agree to a ceasefire, they would get their hostages back. Most people, at least in the West, would desperately like that — not just the American ones — all 120 of them, especially before Hamas finishes murdering them. If the Israelis really want their hostages back, however, they had better think again.