RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20104/hamas-ruse

Hamas worked out a scheme to make Israelis focus on the West Bank and Lebanon as the two most immediate sources of threat while portraying Gaza as relatively calm.

Iran may have helped sell that narrative in a number of ways.

It is, perhaps, too early to have a full picture of what led to the recent Hamas attack on Israeli villages close to Gaza.

One thing, however, is certain: the attack came when and where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet least expected.

But why? One answer adopted by Netanyahu’s team is “a failure of intelligence services”.

However, that answer, even if it contains a grain of truth, could not divert attention from a bigger failure: the Israeli leaders’ inability to correctly analyze the intelligence at their disposal and, and having bought into what looks like a ruse by Hamas, to imagine a worst-case scenario.

It now seems probable that Hamas carefully prepared a scheme to lull the Israelis into slumber as far as a threat from Gaza was concerned.

Iran’s Major-General Yahya Safavi, who wears the lofty title of “senior military advisor” to “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, says Hamas planned the attack over two years with a view to divert Israeli attention from Gaza and make a surprise attack possible. He does not say whether Iranians were involved in the planning but drops hints that they knew about the plot.

“The most important element was surprise,” he says.

https://www.thefp.com/p/six-myths-about-hamas

Alan Johnson gave this speech in 2014, after the 50-day military conflict between Israel and Hamas. We’re publishing it today, lightly edited for clarity, because we believe the myths are still with us and are still poisonous, radically misshaping the Western understanding of Hamas, Israel, and the history of the conflict, especially on the liberal left.

The horror of the 50-day conflict between Israel and Hamas is known to everyone here. You didn’t just watch it on TV. You had anguished conversations with your family and friends at home and in Israel.

You knew it was a legitimate act of self-defense by Israel against the rockets and the tunnels and the antisemitic hate of Hamas.

You knew Israel had offered Hamas “quiet for quiet” day after day in early July, holding back as the Hamas rockets rained down on Israeli civilians.

You knew that no one in Israel wanted this war. You knew Israel accepted an Egyptian cease-fire proposal seven days into the conflict while Hamas rejected it, fired more rockets, and used the terror tunnels to try and murder Israelis.

But on TV, we were presented with something quite different: a motiveless assault by a cruel IDF on Palestinian children. For a week or so, Israel’s right to self-defense was acknowledged. But then, as the number of casualties rose, Israel’s actions were called “disproportionate,” then “unjustifiable.” Then Israel was accused of “deliberately targeting civilians,” and a “slaughter of the innocents.” Before the conflict was over, the terms child killers and war criminals could be heard.

Make no mistake. Israel took a blow to the solar plexus when it came to global public opinion.

We saw several large demonstrations in London: criticism of Hamas was nowhere, but the demonization of Israel was everywhere.

We saw the National Union of Students vote to boycott Israel.

We saw the Labour Party abandon its balanced position. Ed Miliband “differentiated” the Labour Party from the Conservatives, condemning Israel’s necessary ground operation to deal with Hamas’s terror tunnels as “unacceptable and unjustifiable.” He attacked David Cameron day after day “for not condemning Israel’s unacceptable and unjustified killing of civilians in Gaza.” One of his MPs, Grahame Morris, asked the Prime Minister why returning lone IDF soldiers were not being treated in the same way as returning ISIS jihadis.

The low point was perhaps when Labour’s John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister of this country for many years, used his Daily Mirror column, twice, to say Gaza was akin to a “concentration camp” and Israel was akin to the guards.

We saw “Holocaust inversion” everywhere. You know the kind of thing—Bibi morphs into Hitler, the IDF into the SS, and so on.

And we had Vince Cable calling for a review of arms exports to Israel if. . . Israel responded one more time to those Hamas rocket attacks.

The point is this: we mostly lost the war to interpret the war.

Why?

I want to suggest that one important reason was that six myths about Hamas and Gaza took hold. These myths gave people a framework of understanding that hurt Israel, badly. Many people could not see Israel plainly. They could only see the evil caricature constructed by the six myths.

First Myth: The Israeli Blockade of Gaza Is Motiveless and Cruel, and It Is the Cause of the Hamas Rockets.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/antonio-guterres-united-nations-israel-palestine-hamas-gaza-c4adf77a?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

In the ever-expanding hall of shame for propagators of global disorder, prepare a special pedestal for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. His disgraceful remarks Tuesday to the Security Council are an example of why the U.N. can’t be counted on to keep the peace anywhere.

Mr. Guterres’s comments amount to nothing less than an apologia for Hamas terrorists, despite a few thin caveats. “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he said of the Iran-backed terror group’s Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel, which claimed more than 1,400 lives.

Lest anyone miss his point: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”

Although he allowed that these “grievances” don’t justify the “appalling attacks by Hamas,” he warned that “those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” We quote Mr. Guterres at length in case readers assume someone in his position couldn’t really have delivered a speech of this sort. He did.

Mr. Guterres seems to know little about the institution he leads. A U.N. resolution passed in 1947 recommended the partition plan for Palestine that led to the creation of Israel the following year, as our friends at the New York Sun note in a sharp editorial.

Meanwhile, for decades the U.N., under the auspices of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) refugee agency exclusively for Palestinians, has discouraged permanent resettlement by refugees and runs schools that teach children Israeli territory belongs to them.

November 2006  Outpost – Monthly Publication of Americans for a Safe Israel.During the summer of 2005, cheered by both left and right, Israel would leave Gaza. Many saw the
area as a drain on Israeli military forces and not crucial for Israel’s long-term security. And doubters relied on Ariel Sharon: if he proposed it, then it must be right. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice gushed: “This is an historic moment for both sides, and the commitment of both sides to a successful disengagement process has been impressive.”

American philanthropists, buoyed by the possibility that Gaza’s Arabs would continue the prosperous agricultural businesses created by Jews (a major source of export income) purchased existing farms, greenhouses and agricultural equipment from Jewish residents to give them to the Arabs.

This would give the Arabs, who were ostensibly ready to get down to the business of disciplined self-rule, a big economic boost. Inspired by this notion, Mortimer Zuckerman, a staunch supporter of Israel,
persuaded other moguls, not proven friends of Israel, to ante up $14,000,000 for this noble enterprise.

Just think, …the world would see how generous the Jews were…how flexible…..how devoted to
peace. Global warming was just around the corner. Right? Well, not exactly. In short order the Arabs of
Gaza ransacked, looted and destroyed the homes and farms. They turned their energies to more congenial enterprises, like digging tunnels for smuggling weapons and showering the village of Sderot with missiles.

They elected the unapologetically terrorist Hamas oneof whose leaders declared “The jihad and the resistance are the only ways to liberate our homeland, not negotiations and agreements.”

Nonetheless, the media quickly put out the spin that Hamas won because of its “humanitarian”
work in providing food, shelter, band-aids and bubblegum to the Palestinian Arabs.
And while the administration tirelessly avers that the peaceful “Palestinian people” yearn only to
live in a democratic state beside Israel, Ehud Yaari (Jerusalem Report, October 16) offers this sober assessment of the facts on the ground in Gaza. (Yaari, author of Toward Israeli-Palestinian Disengagement is currently an associate of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, hardly a right-wing group.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20090/eu-rewards-terrorism

Israel had not even buried its dead from the horrifying jihadist pogrom that Hamas terrorists unleashed on Israeli civilians in south Israel — beheading babies, burning them alive, torturing, raping, kidnapping, murdering — before the European Union decided to reward the terrorists by tripling its assistance to Gaza.

“The Commission will immediately increase the current humanitarian aid envelope foreseen for Gaza by 50 million euros,” European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen said. “This will bring the total to over 75 million euros. We will continue our close cooperation with the UN and its agencies to ensure that this aid reaches those in need in the Gaza strip.”

Oh really? How? The terrorist group Hamas, a proxy of Iran, the “worst state sponsor of terrorism,” is wholly in control of Gaza and will take what shows up and dribble it out slowly to a chosen few, mainly in their military. The idea that any of it will reach the million displaced souls who were urged by the Israelis to flee to southern Gaza to save their lives is charming, but woefully starry-eyed. Food and water — if that is really what is in the uninspected trucks, rather than weapons — will go to the Hamas foot soldiers to make sure they stay fit and loyal.

“Hamas are trying to prevent people leaving northern Gaza. And that is the point… Of course we want to minimize Palestinian casualties. We want to minimize Israeli casualties. We want everybody to respect civilians. But the real clear distinction is Israel are trying to get civilians out of danger; Hamas are trying to put civilians into danger, and that is a fundamental difference between the two.” — UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, October 15, 2023.

Sadly, massive injustices were done by the international media which, without checking, wrongly blamed Israel for firing at a hospital in Gaza, supposedly killing hundreds. Video evidence and a voice recording revealed that the real cause of the explosion at the hospital was a rocket, launched toward Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that landed in the hospital parking lot. The media, it seems, could not wait to stick it to the Jews.

http://www.acpr.org.il/english-nativ/09-issue/sharon-9.htm

The second Lebanon War (the “Three Weeks of Mourning War”) of the summer of 2006 has not yet come to an end. As this is being written, one round of the war has concluded in an intermission. It is only an introduction to the prologue. Even now our enemies are aligning for another war and another one after that, for many years to come. Over the last decade and a half, ever since the foolishness of the Oslo Accords, everything has been done to erode the nation’s resolve, its strength, and its belief in the justness of its path.

Contributing to this phenomenon has been a media mobilized to the insane idea of “peace” and a “new Middle East,” various intellectuals who depicted peace as being just around the corner and prevented by the “occupation,” which, if it were only to end, the End of Days would arrive immediately and Islam would lovingly accept the Jewish state.

Orientalists and Islamists swept under the rug all of the truths crying out to them from every document that they researched, from the pages of every Arab newspaper that they read. They told the nation just how peace-loving the Syrians and the Palestinians were, how their only desire was that the occupation cease and a small state be established alongside Israel; things which do not appear in any authorized or semi-authorized Arab-Islamic document.

They did not report about that which was openly stated nor did they relate to what anyone could read on the MEMRI website: That the demand to end the occupation is just a pretext to separate Israel from the few strategic assets still under its control and hold it hostage to the kassams of Hamas and the katyushas of Hizbullah.

They repressed the fact, which they knew better than anyone else, that since 1979, when the 15th century of Islam (according to the Muslim calendar) began, the majority of the Muslim world has been engulfed in the fire of messianic expectations.

From that point on, the molten lava of jihad, shot forth, poured into the Middle East and the world in general, and began to flow through the pathways and tunnels of fanatical Islamic fundamentalism, kindling half-dormant hopes and arousing the fire of hatred for everything non-Muslim everywhere. Over the course of an entire generation it has been boiling and blistering and amassing power daily. In its wake lie the Twin Towers from September 11 along with thousands of dead in Europe, the United States and in the Arab countries themselves, especially in Iraq.

Today it is clear to everyone who is prepared to confront unadorned reality, and they are the majority of people in Israeli society with the wish to live, that we have to take advantage of the short period of time left to us to prepare the army for the inevitable next war. It is already on the way.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-needs-unconditional-surrender-from-hamas-c56d725d?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Israel needs to declare the precise goals of its Gaza campaign—for its own citizens and soldiers, and to establish the credibility of its efforts in the world’s eyes. The “destruction” of Hamas has no meaning in international law and is too vague for Israelis being asked to sacrifice everything.

History provides an example of what Israel should do. At the end of World War II, the Allies’ goal was clear: The German Third Reich must agree to an “unconditional surrender.” The Allies’ demand of Germany should be the model for Israel now. Hamas’s war crimes are equal in depravity to those of the Nazis; their magnitude is far less only because Jews now have a fortified homeland and an Israeli army. Hamas and the Nazis also shared the goal of Jewish genocide. Following the Allies’ example, Israel should announce that it will obtain Hamas’s unconditional surrender.

In 1945, in the presence of representatives of the Allied Powers, German High Command officials signed military surrender documents—the Reims accord in France on May 7 and the Act of Military Surrender in Berlin on May 9. The documents required German soldiers to cease military operations. The Allies’ control of German territory enabled them to enforce that order, which they did.

At the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, the Allies agreed on a complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany, the transfer of land from Germany to Poland and the Soviet Union, and the expulsion of German populations from the countries Germany had attacked. The Allies also provided for “de-Nazification”—removing Nazis from positions of authority, eliminating Nazi political organizations, and the arrest and trial of war criminals.

The Allies pursued the removal of Nazis from positions of authority only halfheartedly; but Nazi political parties and organizations were effectively suppressed, and the highest-ranking Nazi leaders were arrested, tried and punished, including by death.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20089/hamas-represent-palestinians

The Biden administration’s assertion that Hamas is an insignificant group of terrorists that does not enjoy the support of many Palestinians is not only false; it is dangerously so. This assertion contradicts the reality, which proves that Hamas actually does represent a significant portion of the Palestinians.

This inconvenient reality is based on public opinion polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) and the results of elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council and university student councils and professional unions. It is also based on mass demonstrations and rallies in support of Hamas before and after the October 7 carnage in which Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,400 Israelis and wounded more than 4,000.

The most recent PSR poll, published last month, showed that if new presidential elections were held today, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would win 58% of the vote, while Mahmoud Abbas would only receive 37%. Hamas’s “armed struggle” (terrorism) against Israel was supported by 58% of the Palestinian public, the poll showed…

This means that a majority of Palestinians share Hamas’s desire to eliminate Israel as expressed in the terror group’s 1988 charter. The poll also showed that 71% of the Palestinians support the formation of armed groups to murder Israelis.

In the past few months, Hamas-affiliated students won elections at two major Palestinian universities in the West Bank.

“The [university] elections are considered the bellwether of West Bank politics… With no general Palestinian elections on the horizon, student polls are seen as a ‘test for measuring public opinion’…” — Middle East Eye, May 25, 2023.

In 2021, Abbas cancelled elections he had called for the Palestinian Authority presidency and parliament after realizing that his Fatah faction was poised to lose to Hamas, as took place in the 2006 parliamentary election.

If, according to Biden and Blinken, Hamas does not represent the Palestinians, how do they explain the fact that… hundreds of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip joined the Hamas terrorists who attacked the Israeli communities near the border with the Gaza Strip?

The Biden administration is presenting a false claim according to which most Palestinians are opposed to Hamas and that Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which rewards terrorists who murder Jews with monthly stipends, is a “peace partner” for Israel. This is a complete distortion of reality and does not represent the truth.

Recently, Abbas reminded everyone that he is an antisemite and a Holocaust denier.

When will Biden and Blinken grasp that there is no difference between the murderous Hamas leaders and Abbas the antisemite? Surely, Biden and Blinken are aware that Abbas has not condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Abbas’s silence is a rambunctious approval of the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds upon hundreds of Israelis. Let there be no mistake about it: both Hamas and Abbas represent a majority of Palestinians whose goal is to murder Jews and destroy Israel.