Displaying posts categorized under

ISRAEL

AMERICANS FOR PEACE NOW BROKE ITS PROMISES By Moshe Phillips

https://jewishwebsite.com/opinion/americans-for-peace-now-broke-its-promises/98703/

The decision by Americans for Peace Now to publicly endorse suspending U.S. military aid to Israel directly violates the promises it made in order to gain admittance to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. It’s time for the Conference to reconsider Peace Now’s status.

When Americans for Peace Now (APN) applied for membership in the Conference of Presidents in 1993, some Jewish organizations were wary. They wondered whether the controversial group would be loyal to the pro-Israel consensus that the Conference represents.

Every member-organization in the Conference is entitled to its own opinions, on Israel and everything else. At the same time, the Conference stands for certain bedrock principles that all its members must support. 

 

That’s why extreme anti-Israel groups have never been admitted. J Street’s application was rejected. The anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace would never be welcomed. Neither would the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta.

Three of the Conference’s core principles are rejection of all Arab violence against Israel; support for an undivided Jerusalem under Israel’s sole control; and complete, unequivocal support for U.S. aid to Israel.

In their appeals to be admitted to the Conference, APN spokespeople repeatedly pledged that they would adhere to those positions.

 

“We are revolted by terrorism,” APN executive committee chair Shifra Bronznick insisted in a widely-circulated op-ed in March 1993. 

Watch: “Israel Undiplomatic” on JNS-TV, with Ruthie Blum and Mark Regev

PREMIERE: Are the hostages in Gaza doomed after Rafah? – JNS.org

Episode 2: https://www.jns.org/is-israel-being-prevented-from-winning-the-war/

Secretary Blinken Throws a Tantrum Over Israel Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/05/13/secretary-blinken-to-israel-get-out-of-gaza-n2639025

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday delivered one of the Biden administration’s strongest public rebukes of Israel, amid its war with Hamas in Gaza. 

During a pair of TV interviews, Blinken said the United States wants Israeli forces to “get out of Gaza” amid what he described as “a horrible loss of life of innocent civilians.” He also said Israel’s tactics in the war have failed to neutralize Hamas and could create a power “vacuum” in the Palestinian territory. 

[…] 

“As we look at Rafah, they may go in and have some initial success, but potentially at an incredibly high cost to civilians, but one that is not durable, one that’s not sustainable. And they will be left holding the bag on an enduring insurgency because a lot of armed Hamas will be left, no matter what they do in Rafah, or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do. Then you’re going to have a vacuum and a vacuum that’s likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy, and ultimately by Hamas again.” 

[…] 

…Blinken praised President Biden’s support for Israel — saying “no one has done more than Biden” — despite the apparent shift in tone. 

“No one has done more to defend Israel when it mattered than President Biden,” the Secretary of State said. “He was there in the days after October 7th, the first president to go to Israel in the midst of a conflict when Iran mounted an unprecedented attack on Israel. Some weeks ago, 300 projectiles, including ballistic missiles, launched in Israel. The United States, for the first time ever, participated in its act of defense, and President Biden brought together a coalition of countries that helped defend Israel.”

Didn’t Biden also tell Iran that its ballistic missile salvo should be within “certain limits?”  

The United Nations and even Hamas have revised their death toll figures downward. Shocker: a terror group inflated the number killed. As Spencer wrote yesterday, the UN reduced civilian deaths by 50 percent. Biden has been wrong about every major foreign policy venture for the past 40 years, and we’re going to trust him advising Israel on how to execute their war. Israel has defended itself from annihilation three times. Speaking of civilians, I can’t help but notice, along with others, that the Biden administration no longer cares about the American hostages. 

Jews cannot afford to be divided over Israel Solidarity with the Jewish State has never been more necessary. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/14/jews-cannot-afford-to-be-divided-over-israel/

Jews, like elephants, tend to have long memories. We see in the past warnings of the future. As Israel marks its 76th birthday on 14 May, perhaps the most relevant and terrifying precedent comes from the days of the Roman Empire.

After the First Jewish-Roman War ended in 74 AD, the Jews lost control of Palestine. Their temple was destroyed. Following a second rebellion, they were largely expelled from their promised land. They would not return in force for almost two millennia.

The most thorough account of those times was written by Josephus Flavius, a well-born Jewish priest who first joined the insurrection against Rome, but later embraced the imperial cause. The Israel Josephus describes sounds oddly familiar: a small country with a large diaspora, deeply divided about whether to accommodate the dominant Roman Empire or embrace various strains of zealotry. Many of these zealots spent at least as much time attacking each other as they did the Roman legions. He describes them as ‘falling upon the people as upon a flock of profane animals and cutting their throats’.

Josephus noted that such divisions made the Jews sore losers. When another, even less successful Jewish rebellion against the Romans broke out six decades later, the Jews were left largely exiled from Israel. They were often unpopular, in part due to their monotheistic beliefs, and they sometimes fought with other communities from Rome and Alexandria to Antioch. As the Greek Sibylline oracle proclaimed: ‘Every sea and land is full of you and everyone hates you because of your ways.’

The comparisons are chilling. The modern version of the Jewish State is similarly increasingly isolated. Even in the traditional liberal nations of the diaspora, including the UK, Jewish communities face renewed threats to their prosperity and even their existence. Anti-Semitic hate crimes in Britain, notes one survey, are now 10 times what they were just a few years ago. In the US, they are far more prevalent than the much-ballyhooed threat of Islamophobia.

‘I am as my people are’-Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/i-am-as-my-people-are/

One lesson Israelis should have internalized by now is that things can always get worse. As we moved on Monday night from mourning to celebration—when Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism abruptly transitioned into Independence Day—we’d have done well to remember what we were complaining about last year at this time.

In the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre, it’s impossible to believe that Israelis of all walks of life were treating judicial reform like a matter of life and death. Though it’s an issue that warrants serious debate under normal circumstances (whatever that means in the ever-besieged Jewish state), retrospect has a way of rendering previous concerns ridiculous. 

While duking it out over the selection of judges and the power of the Supreme Court, Hamas was deep in the throes of the genocidal plan it would carry out a mere few months later. Breaking down the border fence, the Iranian-backed terrorists, joined by gleeful Gazan civilians, committed atrocities impossible for any human being with half a soul to fathom.

Initially, the shock and horror of the that Black Sabbath—families snuffed out; babies burned; women and girls raped; young men beheaded; bodies left mutilated beyond recognition; and 250 people of all ages violently abducted to tunnel dungeons in Gaza—brought the nation together in grief and anger.

How, we asked, could the authorities have allowed this to happen? Where was the attention of the security services and government while Hamas was carefully plotting and training for its mass assault? Why did it take the Israel Defense Forces hours upon hours to come to the rescue of the victims, so many of whom perished while waiting?

Why the White House turned on Israel The rift is all about the U.S. State Department’s desire to reassert control. David Wurmser

https://www.jns.org/why-the-white-house-turned-on-israel/

The chattering class in Israel is struggling to understand American behavior. They ask: How did the United States go from supporting Israel in the first days of the war with Hamas in Gaza to essentially shielding the terror organization? The Israeli right asks: What happened to the Americans? The left asks: What has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu done to destroy U.S.-Israel relations?

I believe I have some insight into this. I held a senior policy position at the U.S. State Department for several years. Afterwards, I was a senior advisor to the vice president from 2001 to 2007 and then to the Trump administration’s National Security Advisor John Bolton. I also served a decade in the Pentagon as a senior intelligence officer. I have learned a great deal about the mentality of these bureaucracies.

It is important to understand that the U.S. State Department is not a foreign ministry. It is a super-bureaucracy with domestic as well as foreign functions. Its power over foreign policy far outstrips that of other countries’ foreign ministries.

The Biden administration’s National Security Council is ultimately a political body, but it is not opposed to State Department policy, which is increasingly pushed by younger staffers and senior figures aligned with progressive ideology. There are also the professional foreign service officers who have invested their entire careers advancing foreign policy paradigms that are now collapsing.

The NSC lacks a vast bureaucracy of its own. So, it outsources the drafting of policy to relevant bureaus. On foreign policy, this is almost always the State Department. As in any large organization, the person tasked with drafting the policy defines the policy. Everything that follows is a reactive revision, not a reset.

Intelligence agencies control and distribute information, including the information made available to the president. Thus, they also exercise significant power. But ever since the tenure of George Tenet as CIA director, the intelligence agencies have become active in the implementation of policy as well.

A UN Vote That Will Live in Infamy Peter O’Brien

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2024/05/a-un-vote-that-will-live-in-infamy/

On the 7th of October last year, the terrorist group Hamas, which rules in Gaza and purports to represent the state of “Palestine”, committed the most foul attack upon Jewish people since the Holocaust.  Within days, that atrocity was celebrated all over the world, including in Australia.  Polls have shown the majority of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank supported that action by Hamas, which is still the nominal government in Gaza. Hamas has vowed to repeat the actions of October 7 as often as is necessary to achieve their aim of eliminating Israel. Does anyone believe that if an election were held in Gaza today, even under, say, UN supervision, Hamas would not win?

Israel is in the middle of defending itself against this future. Australia has now voted in favour of granting Palestine, that non-existent nation, UN membership. In God’s name, what could have convinced the Albanese government that this is the right time to muddy the waters on this vexed question and signal that our support for Israel’s right to exist is less than 100 per cent?  To signal to Hamas that they are winning the propaganda war? To signal Hamas to hang in there, we’ve got your back?

Oh wait, I’m guessing Jason Clare and Tony Burke, inter alia, might have something to do with this appalling decision. The mealy-mouthed defence of this move, i.e., that it is in furtherance of a two-state solution, totally ignores the fact that Israel has offered a two-state solution, on generous terms, on at least three occasions and been rebuffed. From The Weekend Australian:

Australia’s ambassador to the United Nations James Larsen said Canberra had been “frustrated” by a “lack of progress” and wanted to signal “unwavering support for the two-state solution of Israel and Palestine living side-by-side in peace and security within recognised borders”.

So, in order to boost the chance of a two-state solution, our government has supported granting full UN membership to a non-existent state – an entity that does not possess the pre-requisites for nation status – that, under its current governance, repudiates that very same two-state solution.  Regardless of the status of Palestine, I would have thought a non-negotiable pre-condition would be that all its neighbours unconditionally support Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself to the maximum extent required.  

UN Halves Its Estimate of Women and Children Killed in Gaza

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/05/11/un-halves-its-estimate-of-women-and-children-killed-in-gaza/

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its child fatality figure from the Gaza war sharply downward, reporting more than 14,500 deaths on May 6 but then 7,797 on May 8. OCHA also revised downward its figure for women fatalities from more than 9,500 deaths to 4,959 deaths. The Jerusalem Post first reported the changes on May 11.

The UN attributed its original, higher figures to the Hamas-controlled Government Media Office (GMO) in Gaza, whose figures OCHA has cited continually for the past two months. The UN gave no source for the lower figures in its May 8 update, but the figures precisely match those in a May 2 report from a different Hamas-controlled organization, the Gaza Ministry of Health.

“This change may signal that the UN has finally recognized the lack of evidence behind Hamas’s original claims that more than 14,000 children and 9,000 women have been killed in Gaza. If so, the UN should state clearly that it has lost confidence in sources whose credibility it has affirmed for months. While this change may only reflect the conclusion of one UN office out of the many operating in Gaza, it is a clear step forward.” — David Adesnik, FDD Senior Fellow and Director of Research

Chamberlain and Biden: Appeasement Then and Now Are we going to stand with the heirs of the Nazis, or with an embattled democratic ally? by Shmuel Klatzkin

https://spectator.org/chamberlain-and-biden-appeasement-then-and-now/

Holocaust Day was marked by solemn remembrances in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world. It was marked in the U.S., as has been customary, by a presidential address, where Biden said nothing that would garner more than perfunctory notice.

Turns out that that was by design. For Biden had already approved a decision that gives cheer to the shade of Hitler and all his modern wanna-be-s — embargoing any arms to Israel that would allow them to keep Hamas from surviving intact and reasserting its plan for death to Israel.

What is different between now and 1938 is just this — Israel is not going to slink away to its dismemberment.

Old Joe’s cowardice extends even to speaking plainly to his own people.

Let’s put his cowardice in perspective by looking at what is often held up as the gold standard for foolishness and fecklessness, the betrayal of the cause of freedom in the leadup to World War II by the appeasers.

By 1938, Hitler had already consolidated his control over Germany. This included freeing himself from the bonds of the treaty which had ended the First World War, with all its limitations on German rearmament and it prohibition of militarizing the German territory west of the Rhine River. As the year progressed, his plans progressed further as he raped an Austria whose people seemed — in a huge demonstration in Vienna — to be stimulated to ecstasy by Hitler’s attentions.

The Betrayal of Israel by the US Administration Is Almost Complete by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20636/betrayal-of-israel

The Biden administration does not appear ever to have issued the slightest threat, warning or ultimatum to the authors of the war: Hamas, Iran or Qatar.

US Senator Chuck Schumer, after declaring himself a friend and defender of Israel, suggested overthrowing Israel’s democratically elected prime minister, and — as if Israel, and not America, were within his jurisdiction — called for new elections.

Meanwhile in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where anti-government demonstrations began again, one of their leaders, Ami Dror, revealed on social media that the demonstrations and riots are part of a plan by the Biden administration to bring down the Netanyahu government…. The US State Department has, for more than a year, been providing financial support for protests hostile to the Netanyahu government.

Biden, it seems, is frustrated that Netanyahu is objecting to humanitarian aid — which basically resupplies Hamas. Hamas, Israel’s argument goes, released hostages only after unremitting pressure. Relieving that pressure by backing Hamas makes the probability of seeing any more hostages released less likely. Biden is also reportedly frustrated that Netanyahu, for some inexplicable reason, objects to the creation of a terrorist Palestinian state next door.

One cannot leave aside that the Biden administration, through ignoring sanctions on Iranian oil, has allowed the Iran’s regime to earn up to an estimated $100 billion… Without those funds, the massacre of October 7 would not have been possible, Hezbollah would not have been able to fire so many missiles into Israel from Lebanon, and Iran itself would not have been able to launch more than 300 drones and ballistic missiles at Israel in April, and to attack US troops more than 150 times on, just since October 7, 2023 — evidently in an attempt to drive the US out of the Middle East.

The Biden administration, it seems, does not want a definitive end of the conflict — as with Ukraine as well — especially if the end would entail the defeat of Hamas or Russia. Hamas is a protégé of Qatar and Iran, the world’s two leading state sponsors of terrorism. The Biden administration has been rewarding them — Iran with money and Qatar with renewing its protection by Al-Udeid Air Base, headquarters of America’s CENTCOM, as well as controlling the new terror pier the US has built in Gaza At the same time, the Biden administration is falsely accusing Israel of violating human rights.

The Biden administration may even be complicit in the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other Israeli officials that might be issued by the International Criminal Court – possibly as a way to dispense with him.

The mullahs are, in effect, using their proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and so on — as their “human shields”.

The Biden administration has placed the existence of Israel in danger to protect Biden from the dangerous voters of Michigan.

Worse, with the Biden administration now having come down squarely against Israel and on the side of Iran, Qatar and Hamas, they have to feel no inclination to agree to anything. Why should they? Iran’s mullahs have a new proxy, the United States, backing their terrorism for them.

Even worse, at almost the same time as the US told Israel it was withholding arms shipments that Congress had already approved (a move for which Democrats tried to impeach then President Donald Trump), the Biden administration waived sanctions for arms purchases by Lebanon, Qatar and Iraq — countries that host groups working to destroy Israel.

Worst of all, if you are Ukraine, Taiwan, China, Russia, Japan – just about any US ally or foe — you probably cannot avoid thinking something like: We have watched the supposedly mighty US surrender Afghanistan, its ally of 20 years, to a bunch of terrorists, the Taliban. Now we are watching the US surrender its closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, the only democracy there, to terrorists: to Hezbollah in Lebanon with 150,000 rockets and missiles pointed at Israel, and to Hamas in Gaza by sending “humanitarian aid,” that will used by terrorists.

Where are any prosecutions or sanctions by the UN and international courts for war crimes and human rights violations on countries such as Qatar (here and here), China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Yemen and Sudan?

Currently, the Biden administration appears to want three things: Netanyahu OUT – reportedly to be replaced by a puppet who will do whatever the US tells him; a terrorist Palestinian state IN, and to preserve Iran and Qatar’s client, the terrorist group, Hamas. So far, all the pressure from Washington has been on Israel, none at all on Hamas or on its patrons, Qatar and Iran. The fighting could indeed stop tomorrow if either of them or the US seriously ordered Hamas to stop fighting and immediately return the 132 remaining hostages.

Did the Biden administration even ask?