RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/two-state-delusion

Everyone knows what to do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Arrange the “two-state solution.” That has been a commonplace for decades, going back to the Oslo Accords, all the international conferences, the “Roadmap,” and the efforts by a series of American presidents and their staffs of ardent peace processors.

In the West, the call for a “two-state solution” is mostly a magical incantation these days. Diplomats and politicians want the Gaza war to stop. They want a way out that seems fair and just to voters and makes for good speeches. But they are not even beginning to grapple with the issues that negotiating a “two-state solution” raises, and they are not seriously asking what kind of state “Palestine” would be. Instead they simply imagine a peaceful, well-ordered place called “Palestine” and assure everyone that it is just around the corner. By doing so they avoid asking the most important question: Would not an autocratic, revanchist Palestinian state be a threat to peace?

No matter: The belief in the “two-state solution” is as fervent today as ever. The German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said it’s the “only solution” and Britain’s defense minister chimed in that “I don’t think we get to a solution unless we have a two-state solution.” Not to be outdone, U.N. Secretary General Guterres said, “The refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people, are unacceptable.” The EU’s Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said recently, “I don’t think we should talk about the Middle East peace process anymore. We should start talking specifically about the two-state-solution implementation process.” What if Israel does not agree, and views a Palestinian state as an unacceptable security threat? Borrell’s answer was that “One thing is clear—Israel cannot have the veto right to the self-determination of the Palestinian people. The United Nations recognizes and has recognized many times the self-determination right of the Palestinian people. Nobody can veto it.”

In the United States, 49 Senate Democrats (out of 51) just joined to support a resolution that, according to Sen. Brian Schatz, is “a message to the world that the only path forward is a two-state solution.” Biden administration officials have been a bit more circumspect in public. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, Secretary of State Blinken told his interviewer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, that regional integration “has to include a pathway to a Palestinian state.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called for “a two-state solution with Israel’s security guaranteed.” And President Biden meandered around an important security point: “there are a number of types of two-state solutions. There’s a number of countries that are members of the U.N. that … don’t have their own military; a number of states that have limitations, and so I think there’s ways in which this can work.”

What if ‘what the Palestinian people want’ is mostly to destroy Israel?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-is-a-prisoner-of-the-progressives-war-on-israel/

In a pathetic sop to his political base in an election year when his approval ratings are dismal, President Biden slapped sanctions on dozens of Israeli settlers in Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. the West Bank), blocking travel and financial transactions.

As even the Biden fans and Palestinian sympathizers at the New York Times acknowledge, the move is “a gesture” to appeal to “American voters who are furious with the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.” (The Times ends the sentence there; I would have continued it with “that erupted when Iran-backed Hamas murdered over 1,100 Israelis, raping, wounding, and/or taking hostage hundreds of others in its October 7 sneak attack.”)

The sanctions will have negligible effect. Israel is currently at war on several fronts, including the West Bank, where it eliminated three Hamas terrorists in a raid on a Palestinian hospital on Tuesday. The capacity of a relative handful of people to engage in U.S. travel or finance is of little moment in the scheme of things.

Whether the president’s ploy will have the desired political effect of mollifying Biden’s base is similarly doubtful. The fringe to whom Biden is virtue-signaling (yes, this is their idea of virtue) will not be satisfied with a gesture; they want real action, you know, from the river to the sea. More importantly, they are mostly younger people who are not reliable voters; older voters, whom Biden will need in November, tend to support Israel.

How characteristic of Biden to cut off lawful visas for Israelis while he lawlessly issues hundreds of thousands of faux Biden visas to illegal aliens to usher them into the United States — heedless of the damage it is doing to the education, health-care, law-enforcement, and social-services budgets of American cities and states.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/02/01/gaza-egypt-tunnels-hamas-idf-israel-philadelphi-corridor/

The next phase of the Israel-Gaza war will go beyond clearing the vast tunnel network under Khan Younis, the large city in southern Gaza that forms the final redoubt of Hamas leadership. After Khan Younis, the battle is likely to move to nearby Rafah, just north of the Egyptian border.
 
That move will face powerful diplomatic pushback, certainly from Egypt and probably from the United States. Their opposition is focused on maintaining a 100-meter-wide “demilitarized zone” just inside the Gaza border with Egypt.

The Gaza-Egypt Border, called the Philadelphi Corridor 

That zone, known as the “Philadelphi Corridor,” was established in the 1979 Egypt-Israeli treaty.

In Article III:2, Egypt promised to prevent “acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence” in that zone. It tried to do so in 2013-14, shortly after the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted by the Egyptian military. The new regime degraded the tunnels beneath the border and tightened the checkpoints above ground. Since then, however, Egypt has done very little, falling well short of blocking the transit of terrorists, their war materials, and foreign advisers.

The Security Problem for Israel: The Border is Porous

Israel officials are well aware of the problem and united in their belief that the porous Philadelphi Corridor poses a lethal threat. That’s how Hamas receives much of its small arms, missiles, ammunition, money, materials to build still more tunnels and missiles, as well as foreign military advisers and trainers. Most come from Iran. Egypt has failed to stop what Daniel Pipes calls “massive smuggling of armaments to Gaza via tunnels.”
 
As the supplies, money, and personnel have flowed in, the Egyptian government has largely averted its eyes. They are not alone. The United States, the rich countries that fund Gaza, and the UN agencies that operate there have all done the same.

El-Sisi’s Goal: Preserve His Regime, Not Support Hamas

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20360/palestinian-hospitals

In light of the aversion of the Palestinian Authority (PA), its ministry of health, and its security forces to expelling the three terrorists from the Jenin hospital, the US administration’s plan for bringing the PA back to the Gaza Strip to replace Hamas and create a Palestinian state seems more than foolhardy.

In addition, a Palestinian state without Israel’s consent would be a massive violation of the Oslo Accords. The nonstop actions, or rather inactions, of the PA serve as further evidence that, contrary to what the US administration believes, the PA cannot be “revitalized.”

The PA indisputably has no intention of changing its policy of glorifying and financially rewarding terrorists. PA leaders continue to praise terrorists as “heroes” and refuse to halt their policy of paying monthly stipends to Palestinians who murder Jews.

The incident in Jenin is further proof – more is hardly needed – that the PA cannot be trusted to enforce law and order or rein in terrorists in the Gaza Strip, were there to be a state. The PA, in its current location in the West Bank, does nothing to stop Hamas and other terrorists from pursuing their activities to murder Jews and obliterate Israel. There is no evidence to assume that it would behave any differently in Gaza. There is much evidence to assume that it would.

The Ibn Sina Specialized Hospital is one of several medical facilities in the West Bank city of Jenin, which is under the exclusive control of the Palestinian Authority (PA). As such, the hospital operates in accordance with a license from the PA’s Ministry of Health.

On January 30, Israeli security forces found and killed three Palestinian terrorists who were hiding inside the hospital. A statement issued by the Iran-backed Hamas group identified the three terrorists as Mohammed Walid Jalamneh and brothers Mohammed and Basel al-Ghazawi. Al-Jalamneh was described as a commander of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izaddin al-Qassam Brigades, while the two brothers were labeled by Palestinians as mujahideen (holy warriors) belonging to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist proxy group.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gazans-chant-the-people-want-to-topple-hamas/

While the IDF continues to provide safe corridors for civilians fleeing from Khan Yunis, Hamas operatives try to hold them back, for they are the human shields Hamas relies on to discourage IDF attacks. Now Gazans are openly expressing their anger with Hamas, which wants to keep them imperiled, and also has been appropriating much of the humanitarian aid that has been trucked into the Strip. More on this public display of anger directed at Hamas can be found here: “Gazans call for overthrow of Hamas as they flee through IDF humanitarian corridor,” by Gadi Zaig, Jerusalem Post, January 27, 2024:

The IDF has established a humanitarian corridor in recent days for Palestinian residents of western Khan Yunis to move from combat areas to the town of Al-Mawasi in southwestern Gaza, IDF Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee announced on Saturday.

Adraee said that Gazan residents would be safe in Al-Mawasi and that the corridor has been opened to evacuate civilians every day so that the IDF can focus on fighting the Hamas terrorist organization and deepening its incursion into Khan Yunis without the risk of civilians being injured in the process.

Tens of thousands of Gazans have already passed through this corridor safely, according to the spokesperson.

Adraee also quoted a number of Gazan civilians passing through the corridor, who informed IDF soldiers that Hamas was preventing them from leaving combat areas, using threats and violence. Additionally, IDF soldiers were also assisting civilians at the scene, including the elderly and sick.

The humanitarian corridor remains open until 4 p.m. for residents to cross over to Al-Mawasi.

https://www.jewishmediaresources.com/2283/the-return-of-another-bad-idea-the-two-state

Students of American Mideast diplomacy will be quickly be struck by the number of doctrines that have persisted long past their “sell by” dates and after having been refuted by events.

For decades, it was a fundamental tenet of the State Department that the Arab-Israeli conflict lay at the heart of the failure to thrive of virtually every Muslim regime, as if Muslim leaders deliberately kept their countries backward and unfree to spite Israel. And then came the Arab Spring of 2010.

As Jackson Diehl, deputy editor of the Washington Post editorial page, wrote in late March 2011, “A reasonable person might conclude from the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, et al., that the Middle East’s deepest problems have nothing to do with Israel and that the Obama administration’s almost obsessive focus on trying to broker an Israeli-Palestinian settlement in its first two years was misplaced. But Obama isn’t one of those persons.”

Another article of faith of American policymakers was that no Arab country would make peace with Israel absent resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But then came Anwar Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem, followed by the 1978 Camp David Accords. Forty years later came the Abraham Accords between Israel and three Arab states.

And Saudi Arabia was widely seen as likely to join the Abraham Accords prior to October 7, despite the absence of a Palestinian state. Indeed, that prospect is thought by many to have lain behind Hamas’s October 7 attack, orchestrated by Iran.

Yet at the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan confidently asserted that Saudi Arabia would never join the Abraham Accords absent a clear pathway to Palestinian statehood. In that they may be right, but only because their public pronouncements made it impossible for the Saudis to move forward with Israel. Diplomatic relations with Israel, however, would not be an act of largesse by the Saudis toward Israel, but rather a calculated strategic decision that Israel is their best possible ally against Iran and an assessment of the economic advantages of partnering with the more advanced Israeli economy.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2024/01/31/advisers-to-families-of-hostages-held-in-gaza-backed-by-qatari-funding-

Some of the families trying to free their loved ones held hostage by Hamas in Gaza are getting advice from individuals and entities that have received funding from Qatar, Daniel reports — an unusual arrangement given Qatar’s role as one of the chief mediators between Hamas and Israel and that the country is home to Hamas’ political leadership.

— As hostage families work to keep their relatives in the news and urge the Qataris to get Hamas to release them, a consultant working for the Qataris, Jay Footlik, has also met with the families in both Washington and Israel to prep them for their meetings with Qatari officials and also help organize them, according to two people familiar with the matter.

— Footlik’s consulting firm ThirdCircle Inc. has been registered under FARA since 2019 to help arrange trips to Qatar for American elected officials on behalf of the Qatari Embassy, which pays the firm $40,000 per month, according to filings with the Justice Department.

— Footlik, a former special assistant to former President Bill Clinton and liaison to the American Jewish community, told PI his work with the hostage families began because he had a long-standing relationship with Israeli businessperson Eytan Stibbe, who asked for his assistance since Footlik had relationships with Qatar.

— He said that he then contacted Qatari ambassador Meshal Al-Thani and asked if he would meet a relative of several of the Israeli hostages, Avichai Brodutch. Al-Thani immediately agreed and soon asked Footlik to help facilitate direct communication with hostage family members who wanted to meet with Qatari officials, he said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/world-court-advances-south-africas-genocide-case-against-israel/

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) decided in its January 26th provisional ruling to move forward with a peculiar case that South Africa brought against Israel, alleging that Israel has been committing genocide against Palestinians living in Gaza. South Africa claimed that it was simply enforcing rights protected by the international Genocide Convention to which both countries are signatories.

The ICJ is enabling South Africa to weaponize against the Jewish State of Israel the Genocide Convention, which was enacted in 1948 when the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust was still fresh in peoples’ minds. To hurl an accusation of genocide against Israel, where at least one of the nearly 150,000 Holocaust survivors still living in Israel was killed during Hamas’s October 7th attack, is obscene.

Hamas initiated the war with Israel when it invaded Israel on October 7th and went on a genocidal rampage against Israeli civilians. Israel’s military operations in Gaza following that attack are a legitimate exercise of Israel’s inherent right of self-defense, which is recognized in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter when “an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”

The ICJ deferred making a final judgment on the merits of South Africa’s genocide claims, which could take months or even years to decide. However, the ICJ issued provisional orders to take immediate effect, which are prejudicial to Israel’s inherent sovereign right of self-defense. Fortunately, the ICJ has no mechanism to enforce its ruling, although technically it is legally binding. Nevertheless, the ICJ’s decision that South Africa has presented a plausible case of genocide against Israel will put increased pressure on Israel to quickly wind down its military operations in Gaza.

While the ICJ did not order an immediate ceasefire, it did order Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this [Genocide] Convention.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20357/israel-gaza-culpable-ignorance

Sir William Shawcross’s much delayed and now recent report on “Prevent” – the British Government anti-radicalisation programme – which has documented the failure of efforts at integration and the degree of risk residing within Muslim extremism has secured this disturbing knowledge its place on the public record.

In a climate of Israelophobia, where moral compasses go haywire, Hamas is not being held to account. Predictably, the BBC has presented international law as superior to national law and the International Court of Justice as a higher court than any national court. Neither is true. Under the guise of “human interest”, the BBC repeatedly broadcasts prurient details of injuries to individual children in Gaza. Why? It is designed to shock and anger the listener and to demonize Israel; and it leaves those implications unspoken, hence deniable.

Predictably, the BBC has presented international law as superior to national law and the International Court of Justice as a higher court than any national court. Neither is true. The former Director of BBC Television asks, “When do individual errors add up to something more? When do ‘mistakes’ become a clear pattern of institutional bias? These are questions the BBC must answer when it comes to its reporting of Israel’s conflict with the terrorist group Hamas.” He then lists nine other cases of gross error since 7/10 where the bias has been always the same, namely anti-Israel. “…Is the BBC just unlucky that this keeps happening? The answer is no.”

Hamas has nowhere to hide under Geneva 4. Its crimes are war crimes of the highest order. The ICJ’s interim ruling is vexatious and, while unable to make an objective finding, tarnishes that Court by implying that Israel might in the future commit “genocide” when there is neither evidence of intention nor a community which meets the criteria to be victims of genocide. The same day as its ruling, evidence arrived that UNRWA on which in part it had relied had itself now been discredited by evidence of its operatives’ involvement in 7/10. This is the latest form of Holocaust denial.

It is a matter of moral and legal judgment about how a country with high moral standards wages war against a terrorist enemy that has none. The framework for such an assessment has not been satisfactorily spelled out.

Israel’s entire ground force is part of an interactive all-arms cyber/air/sea/land concept of operations optimised for precision targeting to minimise collateral casualties, maximise the extinction of Hamas terrorists and ensure the effectiveness of its own force protection.

Hamas, conversely, has only a homicidal interest in its own Gaza civilian residents. Bluntly, for its purposes, the more that are killed the better because their deaths can then be blamed on the IDF and added to the undifferentiated butcher’s bill in which Western media take figures issued by Hamas uncritically as being all civilian. Hamas repeatedly obstructed Gazans trying to evacuate south of Wadi Gaza, blocking the route — even shooting them — when, before the first phase of ground operations began, the IDF gave civilians notice to move.

The devil’s spreadsheet therefore brings the ethical terms of engagement squarely front and centre. Israel did not bring war on 7th October. It has Just Cause, is fighting by just means, and has clear precedent.

So the relevant ethical compass is all too clear. It is Hamas and by extension its supporters wherever they are – on the world’s streets, even in the BBC it seems – who carry all moral blame for the fate of Gaza and its people.

In the modern trope of woke “intersectionality”, as victims of purported “white, Jewish colonialism”, Arabs are licensed to do freely any depraved act; and by definition Jews can never be victims.

[F]ar from being an agent of indiscriminate warfare, the IDF is probably the most successfully discriminate modern army. Has the comparison with other modern armies been heard or discussed in BBC analyses? The genocide case was just an attempt to smear with loose language… and has no relevance to Israeli conduct, which will not stop attempts to claim that it has.