RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20450/independent-terrorist-state

Both US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron reveal their simplistic, and somewhat imperialist, Western approach to a complex Middle Eastern situation, irrespective of the aims and intentions of the two parties chiefly involved: the radical Islamists of Gaza and the West Bank, and the State of Israel itself.

“They [Hamas] told us in all of their statements that their charter is to destroy Israel and exterminate the Jews. Other countries have said the same thing. It’s also in the Houthis’ charter. It’s in Iran’s direct messaging. I think that when they tell you they want to kill you, you should believe that. I think that’s the lesson.” — Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, ynetnews.com, February 24, 2024.

Realistically, the Palestinian claim to Gaza is based on tenuous grounds. Gaza is not the traditional homeland of the so-called Palestinian people. They are simply a collection of nomadic Arabs who forged that identity for political expediency. This arrangement was openly stated by the late PLO executive committee member, Zoheir Moshen, in an interview with James Dorsey for the Dutch newspaper Trouw, on March 31, 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak about the existence of a Palestinian people since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”

Even if a political compromise were reached over Gaza, or, the “1949 Armistice Line” as in the revised 2017 Hamas charter, the violent struggle for control over the rest of Israel, particularly the West Bank — the “heart” of Israel — will persist.

Both US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron reveal their simplistic, and somewhat imperialist, Western approach to a complex Middle Eastern situation, irrespective of the aims and intentions of the two parties chiefly involved: the radical Islamists of Gaza and the West Bank, and the State of Israel itself.

The hard truth is that for millennia, the land of Israel, whether occupied by Jacob’s tribes or others, has been the domain of countless generations of Israelites. The vast majority of Israel’s citizens, and many Jews in the diaspora, understand their rights to retain their homeland after escaping 400 years of slavery in Egypt. At its core, the debate over this tiny area of land is founded on three primary factors: spiritual, national, and political. In the result, the conviction of the majority populace is that not one square inch of the current boundaries of Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) can belong to anyone who might harm them again, although people of peace are always graciously allowed to reside among them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20415/us-abandoned-israel

“Israel must again be a safe place for the Jewish people. And I promise you: We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that it will be.” — US President Joe Biden, October 18, 2023.

It did not take long, however, for the Biden administration to completely turn that promise on its head. The reversal began with US demands on Israel to scale down military operations, which were already scaled down….

“Israel implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in history…. Israel’s use of real phone calls to civilians in combat areas (19,734), SMS texts (64,399) and pre-recorded calls (almost 6 million) to provide instructions on evacuations is also unprecedented.” — John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, United States Military Academy West Point, newsweek.com, January 31, 2024

The only relevant country that has apparently not been invited to the “urgent” discussions [to reward terrorists unilaterally with a soon-to-be-militarized Palestinian State] is Israel.

Biden, clearly, seems not that intent on making Israel or the Free World a safe place again. At least not if it might compromise his reelection.

“I come to Israel with a single message: You are not alone,” US President Joe Biden said right after the October 7 massacre by the terrorist organization Hamas of Israelis, Muslims, Americans, Europeans, Filipinos and Thai visitors enjoying a Saturday holiday in southern Israel. “As long as the United States stands — and we will stand forever — we will not let you ever be alone,” Biden continued.

http://bit.ly/3T7N2lM

*FBI Director Christopher A. Wray visited Israel on February 14, 2024, during the Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah wars, meeting with leaders of the Mossad, Israel’s Secret Service, and Israel’s National Police in order to benefit from Israel’s unique urban and tunnel warfare experience and battle tactics in the war against Islamic terrorists, who are advancing the vision of Iran’s Ayatollahs and the Moslem Brotherhood.

*Director Wray considers Israel’s as the most effective battle-tested laboratory of the US armed forces, law enforcement agencies and defense industries.

*Director Wray is aware of the Ayatollahs’ and Hezbollas’ growing entrenchment in Mexico, along the US-Mexico border and throughout Latin America. In fact, since the early 1980s, Iran’s Ayatollahs and Hezbollah have entrenched themselves in Latin America, bolstering collaboration with the drug cartels of Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, all Latin American terror organizations, and each anti-US Latin American government. They supply the drug cartels underground tunnel construction equipment, and train them in the areas of car bombs and Improvised Explosive Devices. In addition, they have leveraged the convoys of illegal aliens from Guatemala to the US-Mexico border, smuggling terrorists and drug traffickers into the US.

*Islamic terrorism has targeted the US since the early 19th century irrespective of US policy and independent of the identity of the US President.  Thus, Islamic terrorism afflicted the US during the presidencies of both Trump and Obama, G.W. Bush and Clinton, Reagan and Carter.

*Hamas is a branch of the Moslem Brotherhood – the largest Sunni terror organization with religious, educational and welfare branches – whose charter aims to topple all national Islamic regimes, establish a universal Islamic society, bring the Western “infidel” – and especially the USA – to submission, and establish Islam as the only legitimate and divinely-ordained religion.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20400/hamas-palestinian-civilians-terrorists

When Hamas decided to drag the entire population of the Gaza Strip into another war with Israel on October 7, it did not care what would happen to Palestinian civilians.

If the hostages were indeed held in an apartment of a Palestinian family, this shows that Hamas has no problem placing Palestinian civilians in harm’s way.

Consequently, Hamas has no right to complain about the death of civilians in the war it initiated against Israel while it uses its own people to hold innocent kidnapped Israelis.

Hamas leaders leading lavish lives in Qatar and Lebanon do not care about the two million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, nor do the leaders of the terrorist organization who are hiding in the vast network of sophisticated tunnels in the Gaza Strip. All they care about is their own survival

“The humanitarian aid is being stolen by those who call themselves resistance fighters. They claim they are defending us, but they are stealing all the aid coming into the Gaza Strip and then they sell it to the people for a very high price.” — Palestinian man in Gaza, X (twitter.com), February 16, 2024.

On February 15, sources in the Gaza Strip reported that Hamas terrorists killed Ahmed Abu al-Arja, a Palestinian boy, while he was trying to get food for his family.

[T]he participation of some Palestinian civilians in the October 7 massacre and the kidnapping of Israelis is extremely worrying: it illustrates that a large number of people in the Gaza Strip actually do support Hamas and its terrorism against Israel.

Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, leaders of the Iran-backed terrorist group have been trying to distance themselves from the atrocities by holding Palestinian civilians responsible for some of the crimes, including the murder, beheading, rape, torture, kidnapping, mutilation and burning of hundreds of Israeli men, women, and children.

These are the same civilians that Hamas has long been using as human shields in its Jihad (holy war) to murder Jews and obliterate Israel.

First, Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, then it accuses them of perpetrating atrocities against Israelis.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/netanyahu-declares-that-israel-outright-rejects-possibility-of-palestinian-statehood-after-hamas-war/

In a new declaration, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel “outright rejects” the possibility of Palestinian statehood after the Jewish state’s war with Hamas in Gaza ends.

The prime minister announced the measure at a government meeting on Sunday, as the U.N. and Biden administration continue persuading Israel to accept a two-state solution to the conflict. According to Netanyahu, Israel should resist all foreign efforts to create a Palestinian state.

“In light of the talk recently heard in the international community about an attempt to unilaterally impose a Palestinian state on Israel, I am bringing today a declarative decision on this issue for the approval of the government. I am sure it will be widely accepted,” Netanyahu told his cabinet Sunday morning.

“Israel outright rejects international dictates regarding the permanent settlement with the Palestinians,” the declaration stated. “Such an arrangement will be reached only through direct negotiations between the parties, without preconditions. Israel will continue to oppose the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state. Such a recognition, following the massacre of October 7, will reward the terrorism, a reward like no other, and will prevent any future peace settlement.”

While the U.S. is a close ally of Israel, President Joe Biden and other U.S. officials have repeatedly called for Netanyahu’s government to pursue a two-state solution with the Palestinian people who live in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while visiting Israel and the larger Middle East region earlier this month, proposed the idea again as part of a cease-fire deal with Hamas.

During Blinken’s visit, Hamas proposed a three-phase process in which Israeli troops would withdraw from Gaza, the terrorist group’s remaining 100 hostages would be released in exchange for the freedom of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, and a massive humanitarian and rebuilding effort would be provided to the embattled Palestinian territory. Netanyahu rejected the counterproposal, calling Hamas’s demands “delusional.”

“There is not a commitment – there has to be a negotiation, it’s a process, and at the moment, from what I see from Hamas, it’s not happening,” he said hours after meeting with Blinken. The prime minister added that Israel wants nothing but “complete victory” in Gaza, where he believes the conflict will end in “a matter of months.”

https://benjaminkerstein.substack.com/p/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and

“I used to care,” Bob Dylan once sang, “but things have changed.”

I’m afraid that I’m feeling much the same these days regarding the prospect of Palestinian statehood. Up until Oct. 6, I felt that while a Palestinian state would be problematic in many ways, we still had an obligation to adhere to the same right we demand for ourselves—self-determination. I also believed that demographic issues and the corrosive effect of continuous occupation left Israel no option but the two-state solution.

As a result, I supported the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza because I felt those arguments still held despite multiple Palestinian refusals of peace and their continuing embrace and promotion of terrorism.

I must admit that I was wrong. Things have changed. A generational trauma will do that sort of thing. At the moment, “the day after” this war is a matter of complete indifference to me. I do not know what the political future of the Palestinians will be. I also don’t care. I care solely about preventing another Oct. 7 or worse. If that means a Palestinian state must never be established, then so be it.

I believe this for two reasons. The first is a matter of principle, the second is wholly practical in nature

First, though I still believe that all peoples have a right to self-determination, I do not believe that the Palestinians have the right to determine themselves upon the destruction of Israel. Oct. 7 made it clear that this is precisely what they have done and intend to keep doing. Statehood would only further this ambition, and this cannot be morally justified under any circumstances. In fact, to do anything that would further such an ambition would be, by definition, not only immoral but anti-moral.

In practical terms, it is now very clear what the nature of a Palestinian state would be. The Gaza withdrawal was often described at the time as an experiment. On Oct. 7, we received the results. They have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that a Palestinian state would be a genocidal terrorist entity, likely of a theocratic nature, with the ultimate intention of aiding in the establishment of a global Islamic tyranny. The world already has several states of this kind—most notably Hamas’ ally Iran—and certainly does not need another one.

https://www.nysun.com/article/four-months-into-the-war-against-hamas-the-idf-is-far-outperforming-american-expectations-report-says

Did President Biden try in October to throw Israel off a ground operation in Gaza? If so, Israeli pluck and knowhow are — at least so far — carrying the day.

What is for some a slow go and daunting political landmine is for others a bigger success story than has been publicly acknowledged — namely, Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, and the American outlook on it could be about to change. 

It is no secret that the relationship between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu is about as warm as the month of February. What is lost in the miasma of increasingly strained relations between Washington and Jerusalem is that irrespective of attempts by the White House to micromanage the conflict and despite comments by Mr. Biden himself that Israel’s military response has been “over the top,” the truth is that some bumps in the road notwithstanding, it has mostly been spot on. 

For proof of that, one can look at how all of Hamas’s terrorist battalions in the northern Gaza Strip have been decimated or how the Hamas mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, is said to be cowering like a rat in a dark tunnel somewhere underneath Khan Younis. 

One can also look at an underreported meeting that took place in Israel about a week after Hamas attacked on October 7. As journalist Amit Segal reports in this weekend’s edition of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, at that time Mr. Biden dispatched a three-star Marine heavyweight, Lieutenant General James Glynn, to Israel as well as two senior officers with a view to advising Israel on what to do — and what not to do — in  its operation to rout Hamas in the Gaza Strip. 

According to the Yedioth report, the Americans sought, at the president’s behest, to “help the commanders of the IDF think about the difficult questions before them.” That thinking hinged mainly on trying to dissuade Israel’s military leaders from launching a ground operation in Gaza. 

It was done by playing the Jewish guilt card: to wit, by prognosticating 20 daily IDF casualties if Israel went forward with a ground invasion, which by Mr. Glynn’s estimation, Mr. Segal writes, would be “time-consuming and bloody.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/14/david-camerons-patronising-advice-would-doom-israel/

David Cameron has virtually called on Israel to surrender to Hamas as it prepares to destroy the terrorist group in Rafah. For that is surely the meaning of his words on Monday: “What we want is an immediate pause in the fighting and we want that pause to lead to a ceasefire”. That’s also exactly what Hamas want, and has demanded from Israel — an end to the war that it is catastrophically losing. 

Would Cameron have called for a ceasefire as Allied troops were poised to cross the Rhine in March 1945? By that time millions of German civilians had been killed in the fighting and it was a certainty that many more would die as the war proceeded towards unconditional German surrender. 

Of course Israel cannot halt its offensive now any more than the Allies could then, and Cameron must know that – just as Blinken knows it. In reality their words of caution to Israel amount to virtue signalling aimed at the Israel-sceptical elements of their electorates. Like a schoolmaster lecturing a recalcitrant schoolboy, Cameron has told Israel to “stop and think very seriously before it takes any further action”. 

Who does he think he’s talking down to? Does he seriously believe the Israeli war cabinet and general staff have not been working round the clock for months, “thinking seriously” about every action they take in this war? Meanwhile Blinken has told Israel to come up with a plan to minimise civilian casualties before they launch the campaign against Hamas in Rafah. In other words, exactly what they are already doing and have been doing with considerable success since this war began. 

So far the IDF has wreaked devastation on Hamas. It appears the terror army is no longer able to function as a coherent entity, with reports that senior leaders are unable to communicate with their combat units. The IDF says the Hamas fighters that remain in Rafah must now be dealt with, along with the terrorist leadership there.