RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20323/biden-threatens-netanyahu-drive

The Israeli premier has also reiterated his long-standing opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state, which he insists would become a launching pad for attacks on Israel.

Israel’s efforts to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, though, are at serious risk of being undermined by the Biden administration’s growing hostility towards Netanyahu’s government.

There are credible indications, moreover, that the Biden administration’s hostility towards Netanyahu has led it to work with senior figures within Israel’s security establishment, which is known to have a difficult relationship with the Israeli premier, to remove his government from power.

[T]he Palestinian leadership has always been just as deeply and outspokenly committed to the destruction of Israel as Hamas is.

Instead of trying to overthrow the Netanyahu government, the Biden administration would be better advised to grasp the vital strategic consideration that defeating Hamas is as much in the interests of the US as it is for Israel.

The deepening antipathy of the Biden administration toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening to derail Israel’s military offensive to destroy Hamas.

With every day that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) maintain their military effort to end the threat to Israeli security posed by Hamas’s presence in Gaza, more details emerge of the staggering underground terrorist infrastructure the Iranian-backed group has constructed in Gaza.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/383932

Most (if not all) countries go to war to win; Israel, however, is different. First, neither Israel nor the PLO conceives of the conflict as a war, since they have mutual ongoing political, security, and economic interests; terrorism, therefore, is seen as part of an ongoing relationship.

Until Oct 7, Israeli leaders assumed that this was also true for Hamas.

This leads to the second reason: Before October 7, Israel was not fighting Hamas to destroy terrorism, but to prevent attacks, neutralize or arrest terrorists, and then, temporarily, return to a “status quo.” That’s why warnings about what Hamas was doing were ignored by Israel’s political, military and security leaders; they duped themselves.

Hope-doped, drugged by self-assurance, and seeking to appease the Obama/Biden administrations, the EU, the UN and the international community, some of them accepted “the two-state-solution” (2SS) . They failed to understand that the conflict is not over territory, but is – as Hamas proclaims – a religious war to eliminate Israel. That explains why Palestinian Arab leaders consistently reject offers of statehood in return for recognizing Israel’s right to exist, and why they continue to launch terrorist attacks against Jews. They are engaged in a “holy war” against Jews and Zionists as “invaders” and “occupiers of Palestine” – all of it.

That is a call for genocide.

Attempts to reduce, or “manage the conflict” by making concessions, therefore, failed because of an unwillingness to understand what the PLO, Hamas and other terrorist organizations want. Despite ongoing terrorism during the 1990’s, Israeli, European, and American leaders promoted a “peace process,” the Oslo Accords.

As Yasser Arafat admitted, it was only a step towards his goal of destroying Israel.

Although the Abraham Accords were a sign of hope, they had no effect on the terrorist war against Israel. Meanwhile, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and other Muslim countries poured billions into Hamas’ war efforts. Distracted, Israeli leaders ignored what was going on in Gaza. Self-assured, they refused to accept reality

https://www.timesofisrael.com/maj-jamal-abbas-23-grandson-of-prominent-druze-officer/?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=290654609&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

Maj. Jamal Abbas, 23, a company commander in the 101st Battalion of the Paratroopers Brigade, was killed in combat in Sheikh Ijlin, in the southern Gaza Strip on November 18.

Abbas was born into a family of high-ranking military officers from the Druze village of Peki’in. His grandfather, retired Col. Gideon Abbas, is among the first Druze soldiers to attain the rank of brigade commander in the IDF.

Jamal’s father, Col. Anan Abbas, followed suit and rose to the rank of colonel while serving in the Northern Command.

“I grew up with the state and I was beaten even before the establishment of the state by the legion stationed here in the area. They suspected me of passing on information. I still felt the pain in my body from back in 1948,” Gideon Abbas said.

Abbas still, however, became an active member of the Druze Scouts Association in Israel and decided to join the army in 1960, at the age of 22. He raised his children with the army, taking them to military training and occasionally the Lebanese border during his service.

“I raised them this way, that they should be fighters and officers… I always believed in their abilities and believed that they should serve the country like everyone else,” he said.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/01/why-the-cause-of-israel-is-that-of-all-the-west/

There are a number of important features about Israel’s actions in Gaza against Hamas which have not been made in public commentary but need to be pointed out. If one thinks that Israel’s drastic actions against Hamas in response to the horrifying atrocities of October 7 are unjustified, consider this: if the Cuban government launched thousands of rockets and missiles at targets in Florida, and then followed this up by landing hundreds of trained terrorists in the United States, where they murdered 240 Americans at a music festival, and then invaded a nearby American town, where they killed or kidnapped everyone there, beheading American babies or burning them alive, what do you think the reaction of the president of the United States would be—any president, from either party? The response is not hard to predict: within a week or so, Havana would be a heap of smoking rubble, resembling Berlin or Dresden in 1945, destruction enthusiastically supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans. The response of the Israeli government, supported by the vast majority of its citizens, is hardly surprising.

Another notable facet of the Gaza conflict is that, as I write this, no Arab or Islamic state, even the most extreme, has given more than lip-service support to Hamas, if that. Indeed, Egypt and Jordan, Israel’s neighbours and military opponents in the 1967 and 1973 wars, have not lifted a finger to help Hamas or any other extremist Islamic group.

However, arguably the most important feature of this conflict and the support and hostility it has engendered is also very clear, but seldom commented on directly. Almost without exception, Israel’s supporters have been conservatives and those on the political Right, its opponents left-wingers and radicals (apart, of course, from Western Muslims, the largest local bloc opposed to Israel’s actions). Moderate centre-Left elements, such as President Biden and most of America’s Democratic Party, have also been strong supporters of Israel—at least so far. But those clearly on the political Left have been, to a man or woman, strongly hostile to Israel, regularly whitewashing the barbaric attacks against Israelis—in Israel itself, not in Gaza—carried out by Hamas terrorists, and totally hostile to Israel’s military response.

In the historical context of attitudes towards Jews during the past 150 years or so, this represents a near-total reversal of support for and antipathy to the Jews, and it is important to analyse the reasons for this reversal. In my opinion, perhaps the most important factor in this great shift has been the existence of the State of Israel, especially the nationalistic, tradition-minded and militarily powerful and successful nation it has become, its military prowess a necessary response to the deadly antipathy of its enemies since its establishment in 1948. The strategies and values embodied by Israel have almost entirely negated the bases of pre-1945 anti-Semitism, in which hostility towards the Jews was largely based in the fact that, almost uniquely, they were an ethno-religious group without either a state or a contiguous and distinct area of residence, but were, to their enemies, always outsiders, regardless of where they lived, and moreover, were seen as continuously engaged in a vast international conspiracy of evil.

https://www.jns.org/israeli-left-pushing-pa-control-of-gaza-and-future-palestinian-state/

While for most Israelis, Oct. 7 was a wake-up call to the dangers of a Palestinian state (a Jan. 10 poll found 74% opposed to the idea), within weeks of the massacre a New Israel Fund (NIF)-supported think tank started working to shape Israeli policy for the “day after.”

In their vision, the “day after” means a two-state solution in which the Palestinian Authority would become the government of the new country.

Mitvim (its full title is The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies) partnered in October with the Berl Katznelson Foundation, another NIF-funded organization, to form a working group composed of “Israel-Palestinian experts from various disciplines, research institutes, academia and civil society organizations.”

Aware that public opinion has soured on a Palestinian state, the Mitvim-Katznelson task force nevertheless argued that it would be missing a “historic” opportunity if matters were to be swept along by public opinion rather than trying to shape them.  

Documents on Mitvim’s website, first brought to light by Israeli news site HaKol HaYehudi, describe the working group’s main goal as the creation of “a stable political-regional order, based on the two-state solution, and on a regional defense alliance, led by the United States with inter-Arab involvement.” This would lead to what Mitvim terms “deep security.”

To achieve this goal, the group will present the Palestinian Authority as the “only alternative” to Hamas. According to the documents, the group will work to create a distinction in the minds of Israelis between Hamas—pro-terrorist and against any kind of settlement with Israel—and the P.A., portrayed as opposing terrorism and in favor of agreement.

http://bit.ly/3HFNQb3

*Irrespective of Israel’s wars against Hamas and Hezbollah, Intel, the semiconductor giant, confirmed a $25 billion investment in Israel, leveraging Israel’s brain power, which has enhanced Intel’s competitiveness in the global market.  Over the last 50 years, Intel has invested over $50 billion in Israel, establishing 4 research and development centers, despite the potential for wars and actual wars and terrorism. Intel will expand its Israeli chip factory, in order to diversify its manufacturing potential amid a chip arms race (New York Times, December 27, 2023).

*Challenged by a unique environment – top heavy on terrorism and war, but low on natural resources and rainfall – Israel has bolstered its do-or-die state of mind, with defiance of odds, risk-taking, frontier, pioneering, optimism, patriotism, can-do and out-of-the-box mentality. This has yielded a robust flow of game-changing commercial, defense and dual-use technologies.

*Israel entered the current wars with positive economic indicators, such as debt-to-GDP ratio in the low ‘60% (compared with 123% in the US) and an all-time high foreign exchange reserves of $200 billion.

*Intel’s $25 billion investment in Israel is driven by the Israel’s unique competitive edge, as detailed in the following October 23, 2023 report by the St. Louis-based Stifel Investment Bank ($390BN asset management):

“We believe that there are several key factors supporting the resilience of the Israeli market in the face of conflict, and the confidence of large multinational companies making large acquisitions in Israel, including during wars.

“Some of those key factors include: