RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/gaza-hostage-crisis-is-an-american-crisis

This piece was first published on Tablet. 

The hundreds of Hamas fighters who carried out a murderous rampage inside Israel over the weekend returned to the Gaza Strip with an invaluable new strategic asset. On Sunday, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, told journalists that the Islamist group had captured “dozens” of hostages with American citizenship. If this number is even remotely accurate, the assault would be the largest mass abduction of Americans since the Tehran embassy crisis of 1979.

Hamas has likely divided those hostages across unmapped underground sites throughout Gaza, foreclosing the possibility of a single, swift rescue operation. The hostage issue threatens to inject a future source of divergence into Israeli and American objectives during the crisis.

In a speech at the White House Tuesday, Joe Biden said that he had “no higher priority than the safety of Americans being held hostage around the world.” Outgoing House speaker Kevin McCarthy listed “rescue all American hostages” as the U.S.’s top priority in the unfolding war. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that, as of Tuesday, the exact number of American hostages remains unknown.

Israel must now weigh the survival of American hostages against neutralizing active threats against other groups of civilians, and also against the country’s stated war aim of disarming Hamas, which would likely require a massive ground operation in which most, if not all, of the hostages would be killed. Hamas, meanwhile, can parade American corpses through downtown Gaza and claim that they are victims of the Israeli assault.

“Hamas will use the hostages in two ways: as human shields and as a source of leverage over Washington,” explained Michael Doran, director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute and a former senior director on the National Security Council. “As human shields, they will prevent Israel from destroying critical infrastructure. As a source of leverage, Hamas will convince Washington to compel Israel to make concessions—on the terms of a cease-fire, the release of prisoners, relaxing economic restrictions on Gaza, delivering payments from abroad, etc. Hamas will parade American hostages before the cameras to beg Washington to bring a halt to Israeli military operations so that the hostages can gain their freedom.”

The ways in which American hostages complicate the conflict hardly ends there. The tiny Gulf emirate of Qatar served as the laundering mechanism for $6 billion in unfrozen Iranian oil money that the U.S. used to purchase the freedom of five American citizens or green-card holders that the Islamic Republic had imprisoned, a transaction announced only last month. Doha also happens to be where much of Hamas’s exiled high command lives. Qatar, Washington’s chosen middleman for hostage diplomacy with Iran—which is Hamas’s leading state sponsor—can claim it runs an existing and effective channel for negotiating the hostages’ freedom. Any apparent progress on this diplomatic track could provide the Americans with an incentive to restrain any Israeli operation in Gaza.

https://lawliberty.org/israels-darkest-day/

Israel’s Darkest Day

More than 1,000 Israelis died at the hands of Hamas terrorists on October 7, by far the worst day in Israeli history, roughly triple the death count on the bloodiest day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Israeli military and civil society were taken unawares, and responded slowly and ineffectively. The Hamas attack uncovered deep flaws in Israel’s tactical capabilities as well as its strategic outlook. Israel’s existence depends on speedy correction of these flaws.

The term “intelligence failure” became an overnight cliché. Hamas employed drone attacks in emulation of tactics employed successfully by both sides in the Ukraine war for nearly two years, destroying Israeli observation posts and at least one Israeli Merkava IV main battle tank by dropping grenades from cheap drones. Israel introduced drones into warfare in the Syrian theater in 1983 during the so-called Beqaa Valley turkey shoot, and its failure to adopt electronic countermeasures widely deployed in Ukraine implies a failing technical edge. Despite warnings about the vulnerability of the Gaza barrier from some Israeli military intelligence analysts, Hamas fighters drove a bulldozer through the Gaza fence and hundreds of Hamas killers—the number still is unknown—entered Israel on motorized vehicles. We know this from videos released by Hamas itself; we do not know whether the terrorist organization used more sophisticated communications security measures to evade Israeli detection.

The details of the tactical intelligence failure, though, matter less than Israeli self-deception. The Netanyahu government thought that it had all strategic bases covered, and that it could bribe Hamas to remain on the sidelines as it negotiated diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. It lulled itself into a complacent haze that obscured the recalcitrant elements of the ancient world that opposed the modernizing impulse of the Abraham Accords.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/there-is-no-both-sides-between-israel-and-hamas/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

One of the most common accusations I receive from readers on the left — for example, when discussing why a certain segment of voters likes Donald Trump, or why people are alarmed about Joe Biden’s potential corruption and concerned about his accelerating senility — is of “both-sidesism.” For those unfamiliar, this is a common term for the purported moral error of news analysis that makes the mistake of trying to “balance” something obviously good against something transparently evil. (“Adorable Kittens vs. Crushing Adorable Kittens: The Debate Continues.”) If the concept has any merit at all, it’s wholly inapplicable to all but the most extreme situations in American politics, and America, despite its numerous miseries over the years, is not subject to occasional wars of attempted annihilation.

So why do these same people retreat immediately into the very “both-sidesism” they otherwise criticize disgustedly, when the matter turns to Israel? Why were the first words out of so many people’s mouths this past weekend a pro forma condemnation of Hamas’s sneak attack used as prelude to the more important issue of how Israel brought this upon itself and should not defend itself against what is clearly an ongoing and rapidly developing threat? No, this isn’t Israel’s 9/11, this isn’t even quite analogous to the Yom Kippur War of 1973; it is far worse. The number of dead will likely turn out to be over a thousand — imagine if America had lost 30,000 mostly civilian lives on 9/11 instead of 3,000, with a further 2,000 carried away by al Qaeda to a nightmarish fate.

Moral equivocation in Israel’s war with Hamas and its backers is senseless. Strategic concerns remain as valid as always — nobody wants World War III — but yes, people are going to die in Israel’s war, some of them civilians. This is precisely what Hamas seeks. They will put innocent civilians in the way of the Israel Defense Forces for the same reason they captured (and apparently are now set to execute, on videotape) hundreds of Israeli men, women and children: Lacking all morality themselves, they are well aware that they can use their enemy’s scruples against them. I must insist upon this. This is not “the morality of the powerless.” This is a choice.

https://www.thefp.com/p/this-is-what-decolonization-looks

On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” 

So far, Sharif’s post has been liked 100,000 times and reposted nearly 23,000 times—by, among others, The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah. 

The point was: Don’t be squeamish. Never mind the Jewish girl being pulled by her hair with blood streaming between her legs. Never mind the women being raped beside the corpses of their friends at a music festival. Never mind the children and babies snatched from their parents.

If you can’t handle it, if you condemn it without a preamble or equivocation, you’re an apologist for the Zionist colonizers. 

All this is a good reminder that when people say something, they often mean it, and we should believe them, or at least take them seriously. Fancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds. 

Here is how Quillette editor Claire Lehmann put it on X, formerly Twitter: “For the past decade I’ve been told that jokes, words & scholarly debates need to be suppressed because they may cause ‘harm’ to vulnerable minorities. Yet when a global minority is butchered, tortured & maimed, those who suppress words shrug as if war crimes are no big deal.”

Real decolonization is a physical process. It is about removing bodies from a place. 

The meaning of Sharif’s post—a very tidy, very millennial encapsulation of the old Bolshevik spirit—is: the ends shall justify the means, and if that bothers you, well, you’ve probably been infected by some bourgeois, liberal fungus. 

Nor was she alone.

“And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” a speaker at a Democratic Socialists of America rally in New York proclaimed to whoops and laughter. (DSA members include representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.) 

“Decolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories,” Jairo Fúnez-Florez, an assistant professor at Texas Tech, posted. “It’s about a Free Palestine. It’s about liberation and self-determination. It’s about living with dignity.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/hamas-war-on-israel-everything-you-need-to-know?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

This piece is being co-published with Tablet. 

The shocking attack in southern Israel this weekend was the most deadly killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The death toll is worse than the worst day of the Yom Kippur War. It is a massacre that will transform Israel and the Middle East.

What happened? How did the most sophisticated military power in the Middle East get brought to its knees? And what will this mean for the Jewish state moving forward? The answer to those questions will be the reckoning of our lifetimes. 

But there are more basic questions that so many are asking. What follows are some answers that explain how we got here and where we might be going.

What is the extent of the attacks? Why are people calling this “Israel’s 9/11”?

More than 700 Israelis have been killed and more than 2,100 wounded in a series of coordinated surprise attacks that occurred inside Israel. The attacks began on the morning of Saturday, October 7. That’s when, according to an IDF spokesman, some 1,000 Hamas terrorists crossed the internationally recognized border between Gaza and Israel and began massacring civilians in at least 14 Israeli towns and communities, entering homes and apartments and killing men, women, and children—including nearly 300 young people who were attending a rave in the desert. 

The scenes of horror and bloodshed that resulted, including the murders of entire families, the kidnapping of small children, and rapes of young women, were seemingly intended to cause maximum anger and shock inside Israel. More than 150 people were seized by the terrorists and taken back into Gaza, where they are being held hostage. They include women, very young children, and the elderly.

To give a sense of the scale of these attacks, 700 dead in a country of 9.3 million people (where everyone knows someone’s cousin) is the equivalent of a terror attack on America in which over 25,000 people were brutally murdered. And not in a single catastrophe: imagine 25,000 Americans killed in various murder sprees across the country. 

https://www.thefp.com/p/delusion-in-the-white-house

As Hamas gunmen were in the initial stages of a raid that has left more than 700 dead, 2,408 wounded, and at least 100 held hostage in Gaza, the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem weighed in on the unfolding horror.

“We unequivocally condemn the attack of Hamas terrorists and the loss of life that has incurred,” the official X account for the office posted. “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”

Observers of America’s policy in the Middle East will recognize the telltale talking points: the urging of restraint in the face of terror; the implied cycle of violence. The peace process has been dead for years, but the mindset behind it survives.

Let’s be clear. The timing of these diplomatic platitudes was grotesque. Here was the official bureau of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which deals with the Palestinian Authority, calling on Israel to refrain from responding to the worst slaughter of innocent Jews since the Holocaust. 

The original post was soon erased. Subsequent statements from President Biden and his senior advisers have dropped the both-sidesism and focused instead on Israel’s right to defend herself.

Nevertheless, this administration has a serious problem. While the official rhetorical response to the attack has been strong, there is a wide chasm between the president’s words and his administration’s actions.

Since taking office, the Biden administration has taken numerous steps to relieve pressure on Hamas and its international patrons as a means of restoring U.S. foreign policy to the way it was under Barack Obama, complete with a resurrected Iran nuclear deal. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-sets-a-global-test-for-biden-attack-israel-gaza-iran-dfe8b26c?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Gaza is burning as Israeli forces methodically proceed to dismantle its structures of terror. The coming retribution will be terrible, but it is necessary and just. Hamas has lost the right to rule Gaza. It must be dismantled and disarmed, and neither Israel nor its neighbors can permit the group to return to power. Despite the best efforts of the Israel Defense Forces, innocent civilians will suffer, and too many will die. Urban warfare against a brutal enemy that doesn’t scruple to use civilians as shields can have no other result, but what is coming to Gaza is not the fault of the IDF.

What will follow the fighting can’t be foreseen. The establishment of a new Palestinian governing authority for the territory, linked to Fatah, closely guarded by Israel and Egypt, and funded by the Gulf states would be perhaps the best outcome for all concerned, but the war must be won before peace can be built.

At best, Gaza’s future seems bleak. More than two million people are crowded into a barren wasteland with few natural resources and little hope. A rational Palestinian leadership would understand that, so situated, the only hope for the people of Gaza lies in close collaboration with Egypt and Israel. It would then settle down to the hard but necessary task of creating an economy that can support its people with dignity and security.

Hamas has had other ideas. The misery and poverty of the Palestinian people is the soil, the only soil, in which a movement this perverted can flourish. Hamas has done all it could to keep Gaza wretched while inculcating an ideology of genocidal rage.

Israelis are temporarily setting their differences aside in the face of this hideous shock, as well they should. But there will be a reckoning in Israel too. Those who missed or misread the signs of danger will be driven ingloriously from office if they lack the grace to resign. A national-security establishment that wasted the past year in frenzied political infighting shouldn’t be allowed to escape harsh public scrutiny. From the prime minister to the intelligence chiefs, those at the helm of Israel’s affairs will have to account for their actions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tribe-of-nova-music-festival-massacre-israel-gaza-hamas-war-e21e95ea?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

At dawn Saturday in the Negev desert in southern Israel, a few thousand young revelers were celebrating Simchat Torah, the end of the Jewish holiday season, at the Tribe of Nova music festival. It would soon become the scene of the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

A few revelers noticed what seemed to be parachutes descending from the sky, filming them on their phones. Soon they saw trucks of armed men arrive. Then the shooting began, point blank, as the crowds fled for their lives. Those who tried to reach their cars to escape were slaughtered as the Hamas killers waited at the exits. In one festival tent, bodies of the murdered lay piled together where they’d been shot en masse, like the scenes of Jews shot and dumped into ditches in World War II.

Those who fled across the desert were luckier, at least at first, though the killers soon pursued them too. Some hid behind trees and under bushes, according to the accounts of survivors. Others were shot as they fled, some in the legs so they could be taken captive. Readers have seen the videos of captives, some wounded, being carried off to a dungeon in Gaza as hostages.

Israeli rescue groups report finding some 260 bodies at the festival site. The Tribe of Nova massacre joins other mass murders of the innocent that history should never forget. Stalin’s massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest comes to mind, as does the Nazi execution of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar in 1941.

It’s another reminder that the arc of history may be long but it doesn’t always bend toward justice. It often points toward mayhem and injustice when the baser instincts of human nature and murderous ambition are left unchecked by civilized nations. In a world where might is allowed to determine right, the innocent aren’t spared. Let’s hope hundreds or thousands more won’t have to die before we relearn this ancient lesson.

https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/first-thoughts-on-the-war/

Israel spent the past couple of years in a martial daze in which it did not take full measure of Hamas’s ideas and purposes and intentions and capabilities. That will be the subject of the post-war examination inside Israel of what happened this weekend. That examination is likely to create an entirely new political reality—and may wash away two generations of highly flawed leaders. The years during which those leaders argued to stalemate about almost everything will likely be viewed as the slow-acting poison that made possible the horrors of October 7, 2023—the single day on which more Jews died and were wounded than any other since the Nazi death camps eight decades ago.

Still, people who always want to lay some blame on Israel for the threats against it are leaning rather heavily on the talking point that this is an “intelligence failure”—as though Israel somehow summoned this evil upon itself and therefore what we should talk about is what Israel did wrong. That’s like if the law blamed someone for a massacre committed against their family in their house because of a faulty lock. The victim of the massacre will spend the rest of his life tearing himself apart for not having dealt with the lock, and will suffer greatly as a result. But he is not guilty of the crime. The murderer is the criminal, and we can never forget that.

The task for Israel now is to destroy Hamas. This is not just like how it’s a police department’s job to find the perpetrator of the massacre. This is something much larger and far more fundamental. There can be no lesser a response than the destruction of Hamas by the Jewish state—because this was one of the bloodiest pogroms in human history. Hamas infiltrators took Jews and slaughtered Jews en masse. As I write the death toll from a single morning‘s activities is well above 700, with thousands more injured. There is no difference here, even numerically, from the horrifyingly countless stories of the Nazi forces moving into a town in Poland, rounding up the Jews, making them dig a trench, and then murdering them with gunfire in the trench.