RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

Democrats are driven by delusion: Guns cause crime. Republicans are to blame for the border fiasco. Electric vehicles are the wave of the future. The polar ice caps are melting.

The ultimate fantasy is that a two-state solution will bring peace to the Middle East.

On Jan. 29, 49 Senate Democrats — all except Joe Manchin III and John Fetterman, who abstained on technicalities — co-sponsored an amendment to the Israel aid bill affirming U.S. support for the two-state delusion. All six Democratic senators who are Jewish joined their colleagues. They should return their bar-mitzvah presents forthwith.

Coincidentally, this was the day after Israel buried 24 of its soldiers who died fighting the future leaders of a Palestinian state.

The amendment affirms that the U.S. supports negotiations “resulting in two states with Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace, security, dignity and mutual recognition.” They have no idea how dumb they sound.

For a cold dash of reality, consider a Nov. 14 Arab World for Research and Development poll that showed 75% of Palestinians approved of the Oct. 7 massacre. They approved of the gang rape and genital mutilation of Israeli women, the beheading of babies and the burning of captives alive.

The same percentage said they supported a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.” Kiss Israel goodbye.

https://www.jns.org/indigenous-embassy-in-jerusalem-opens-in-unconventional-ceremony/

(February 5, 2024) Wearing colorful traditional costumes, native peoples from around the globe made speeches, sang, danced, beat drums and, in one case, sounded a giant ram’s horn on Thursday to celebrate the inauguration of the Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem.

The embassy will serve as a much-needed antidote to the false claims by the Palestinians that there is no evidence of any Jewish life in Israel prior to 1948, when Jews ostensibly arrived as colonialist invaders.

The embassy is in part due to the efforts of the Indigenous Coalition for Israel (ICFI), a New Zealand-based group founded by native Maori to counter the false narrative about the Israel-Palestinian conflict that has “taken hold amongst indigenous peoples” and “has often bled into antisemitism,” its website says.

“We recognize that Jews are the indigenous people of this land, and we stand with you and your struggle,” ICFI co-founder Sheree Trotter told the 200-plus audience, noting that the Land of Israel is the place where the Jewish “nation was forged, its language and sacred literature developed, the beliefs, customs and traditions began. It is the most sacred place in the world to Jews. … This deep connection to a particular land and its ancestors are defining features of indigeneity.”

Trotter expressed her hope that the embassy would become an information hub and welcoming space for indigenous peoples visiting Israel, and act as a center to “galvanize” global indigenous support. The embassy will develop a digital production department to counter misinformation about Israel prevalent on social media and “to tell the story of our indigenous friendship.”

The embassy will also host academic symposia and become a tourist attraction. “We plan in time to have an NGO presence at the United Nations,” she added.

While not an embassy in the ordinary sense—it will not represent governments of the indigenous peoples’ host nations or the indigenous peoples themselves—it has been recognized as an embassy by the State of Israel. The audience cheered when they learned from Gil Haskell, Chief of State Protocol for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, that the Indigenous Embassy was the 100th embassy to be opened in the Jewish state.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20366/biden-two-state-solution

The declared policy… of the US and Britain since the 1993-95 Oslo Accords has been that a two-state solution should come as part of a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

If the Oslo Accords are so cavalierly abrogated, what do any international agreements mean, and why would any country sign one in the future?

The assumption that normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia in return for the establishment of another failed and corrupt Arab state would bring peace, security and stability to the Middle East is a deadly fantasy.

The Americans and British are evidently no longer demanding that the Palestinians halt their homicidal incitement against Israel and Jews or stop paying financial rewards to Palestinian terrorists who murder Jews.

The Americans and the British are also ignoring the fact that most Palestinians are opposed to the idea of a two-state solution because they want a Palestinian state to replace Israel, not have a state next to it.

Those who are promoting the idea of creating a Palestinian terror state next to Israel — again capitulating to terrorists and rewarding terrorism — are paving the way for more October 7-like massacres. They are essentially asking Israel to commit suicide at a time when its soldiers are fighting to eradicate Hamas and ensure that the Gaza Strip will no longer serve Hamas, or its terror master Iran, as a base for murdering Jews, Americans or anyone else in the West.

In the span of two days, both the US administration and the British government came out with similar statements that they are considering recognizing a Palestinian state. The statements send a message to the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group and other Palestinians that the Americans and British want to give them a prize for the October 7 attack on Israel in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered, decapitated, raped, tortured and burned alive.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20365/least-deadly-war
The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis in WWII did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the American Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths, and neither is any other.

A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war: only one of the two sides was engaged in a total war of extermination.

On October 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.

Morality is defined by intent, not statistics.

The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II”.

The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”

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