RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-releasing-palestinian-prisoners-hamas-gaza-4d21a9b4?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Hamas continued to release hostages on Wednesday, for a total of more than 100 so far, a bit more than a third of the estimated 240 civilians seized on Oct. 7. In return Israel has freed more than 200 Palestinian prisoners, but nobody should think these prisoners are at all morally comparable.

Hamas is releasing Israeli and foreign women and children abducted in illegal acts of war targeting civilians in their homes. The recently released include grandmothers in their 70s and 80s, Thai guest workers, and more than 20 children under age 12—including preschoolers and a toddler.

By contrast, the Palestinians Israel is releasing were in prison because they were arrested and awaiting trial, or were convicted of violent crimes. Of the 39 Palestinians released Saturday night, Haaretz reports that eight were convicted of attempted murder. Let us introduce you to a couple of them.

There’s Israa Jaabis, a Palestinian woman who in 2015—during a wave of other attacks in Jerusalem—attempted a car bomb that wounded an Israeli police officer. According to the Shin Bet security service, Jaabis yelled “Allahu Akbar” as the officer approached and detonated an explosive device.

Israel also released Maysoon Musa Al-Jabali, who was convicted of attempted murder for her 2015 stabbing of a female Israel soldier; Shorouq Dwayyat, who was convicted of attempted murder after she wrote on Facebook in 2015 of her desire to become a martyr and stabbed an Israeli man multiple times; and Aisha Afghani, who was convicted after an attempted 2016 stabbing attack on Israelis in Jerusalem.

All were adults when they committed their attacks, and all were released this week well before the end of their sentences. Most of the children Israel has released are teenage boys—age 14 and older—arrested or charged in recent years for making explosives or throwing stones or petrol bombs at Israelis.

https://vinnews.com/2023/11/29/thai-hostage-hamas-tortured-captive-jews-with-electric-cables/

A Thai hostage who was released by Hamas told Israel’s Channel 12 that the Jewish hostages with him were beaten with electric cables, and that all the hostages were denied adequate food.

Channel 12 also quoted the Thai hostage as saying that Jewish hostages were kept in worse conditions than others.

As reported by the Times of Israel:

“He says there was little to eat for the hostages — a pita a day, sometimes a tin of tuna to share between four, and sometimes a piece of cheese. Held for more than seven weeks, he says they were allowed to shower once.

“We were with Israelis, and they were guarded all the time,” he is quoted saying. “The Jews who were held with me were treated very harshly, sometimes they were beaten with electric cables.”

In addition, it has been reported that Hamas tortured children by forcing them at gunpoint to watch films of atrocities against Israeli civilians during the attack. It also kept some children alone for weeks, and denied hostages sufficient food, water, and sunlight.

Many hostages lost weight, and not unexpectedly, many of the children have shown signs of psychological trauma.

The Red Cross has not been allowed to visit the hostages, nor has it transferred medicines and other needed items to them. In fact, there is no evidence that the Red Cross, which has immense leverage, has made any serious effort to pressure Hamas to allow them in.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/the-aborted-war-in-israel/

Even if it were politically and psychologically possible to resume a war under the circumstances, how could Israel realistically win?
“I ask the question to remind us that, unless and until Israel’s enemies are decisively defeated, the thrum of eliminationist war and the periodic surges of jihadist terror will continue.”

I wish I could be optimistic about Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas in the aborted war, but I am more pessimistic than ever.

I’ve been a pessimist from the start. As Rich Lowry and I have discussed on the podcast, that’s because I’ve never believed Israel’s stated war aims were either politically feasible or reflective of on-the-ground reality — which is much worse than Israel or the Biden administration is willing to acknowledge.

Israel’s principal stated objective is to destroy Hamas. It has analogized this to the Trump-era American objective of destroying ISIS. There is something to this comparison. Contrary to his extravagant rhetoric, Trump did not actually destroy ISIS — it still exists and is a menace wherever it rears its head. Trump did, however, eviscerate ISIS’s capacity to hold territory as a de facto sovereign. This was a significant achievement. (Whether it was accomplished constitutionally is an interesting question.) Yet we shouldn’t overstate the achievement, because (a) terrorist organizations are more effective in pursuing their core competencies of insurgency and sneak attacks than in trying to govern territory, and (b) ISIS is a rebel sect broken off from al-Qaeda, which remains a major challenge, so ISIS would inevitably either fold back into al-Qaeda or rebrand as some new terrorist group — since what catalyzes jihad is the regional predominance of sharia-supremacist ideology, not any particular, transient organization.

The situation with Hamas is similar, and in some ways more vexing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/former-us-diplomat-tries-to-rescue-hamas/

Former U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross has a plan to rescue Hamas from destruction, and he unveiled it on MSNBC just as announcements were being made that Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

Appearing on “Watch the Beat with Ari Melber,” on November 21, Ross said that “the way to end the war in Gaza” would be for Israel to allow the Hamas leadership to leave the territory in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages. Ross said he hopes the Biden Administration will promote such a proposal.

Ross cited a precedent: Israel’s decision in 1982, under U.S. pressure, to allow Yasser Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership to leave besieged Beirut.

Ross forgot to mention what happened after Arafat left Lebanon. He didn’t ride off into the sunset of some quiet retirement. He sailed to nearby Tunis, set up PLO terrorist headquarters there, and embarked on twenty more years of terrorism. Shootings and stabbings. Bus bombings and intifadas. Thousands of Israelis murdered or maimed.

And now Ross wants Israel to repeat that tragic mistake. Once again, he wants to see terrorist leaders rescued, which would leave them free to orchestrate more October 7-style massacres.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/glazov-gang-the-land-that-israel-never-stole/

Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield exposes one of the greatest slanders against the Jewish state.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/parchment-barriers-wont-keep-israel-safe/

Last week during a pause in hostilities Israel started exchanging Palestinian Arab prisoners for Hamas’s Israeli hostages. Obviously, the “international community” has been pressuring Israel to make this concession, one that most Israelis know is dangerous, given the moral hazard of rewarding Hamas’ war-crimes, the certainty that any stop in the fighting will allow Hamas to regroup and rearm, and the Palestinian Arabs’ sorry track-record of serially violating every “agreement” it’s made with Israel, as well as transnational covenants like the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, Hamas is already violating the provision of the agreement that forbids evacuated Gazans from returning to the north.

The broader issue, however, is the continuing fealty that Western nations have to the “rules-based international order,” one predicated on dubious, if not empirically falsified assumptions about state behavior and human motivation; and on a questionable faith in “diplomatic engagement” and treaties to deter aggression and keep the peace. No global conflict illustrates this truth more than the war between Palestinian Arabs and Israel, one that has been going on for at least 75 years.

The failure of the postwar “new world order” and its most consequential institution, the UN, was obvious a few years after its creation, and Israel bore the brunt of that failure. After the Arabs rejected UN Resolution 181 in November 1947, and Israel declared itself a state six months later, five Arab states, four of whom were signatories to the United Nations Charter, invaded Israel.

This resort to violence was a blatant repudiation of the “rules-based international order” and its fundamental principle that no nation should use force to seize territory from another nation. Yet the challenge of this bedrock principle by four UN members was shrugged off, and offenders were not sanctioned or punished.

Several weaknesses of the “new world order” also were exposed, the most serious being the absence of any reliable or consistent provisions for enforcing the UN’s resolutions. Member states’ national interests and passions, no matter how illiberal or totalitarian or destructive, took priority over principle. The UN had begun its transformation into what Churchill feared in his 1946 Fulton, Missouri speech: “a cockpit in the Tower of Babel.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-n-women-retracts-statement-condemning-hamas-attacks-on-israel/?utm_source=recirc

After weeks of silence on Hamas’s October 7 crimes against women and children, United Nations Women issued a definitive statement on Friday that condemned “the brutal attacks by Hamas.”

Then, the organization deleted its statement.

In a post on Instagram, U.N. Women initially denounced Hamas’s attacks and said that it would “continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.” U.N. Women deleted the statement soon after it was posted and replaced it with another that omitted condemnation of Hamas.

U.N. Women has faced mounting pressure from Jewish women’s organizations, who say that the organization’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks has been skewed at best. In October, U.N. Women waited days to publicly comment on the attack. When the organization did comment on the “situation in Israel,” it called for increased humanitarian aid and fuel for Gaza, began to advocate for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, and said nothing of the violence that Hamas committed against Israeli women and children.

The U.N.’s leading women’s body is now spearheading its annual 16-day campaign to bring attention to gender-based violence. Its 16-day campaign might be to blame for the media mix-up that caused U.N. Women to post its Friday statement, a representative told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

https://victorhanson.com/what-were-the-hamas-monsters-thinking/

We know the multifaceted strategy of the monstrous Hamas operation of October 7.

In precivilizational fashion it wished to kill and mutilate the most vulnerable of all Israeli civilians and thus to shock the world that it was capable of—and proud about— anything, from decapitation to necrophilia. Such animalistic savagery, in the reckoning of Western therapeutic society, was supposedly to be seen as forced upon Hamas murderers by the “occupation.”

The killers felt they would shock the Israelis into concessions given their eagerness to commit the unspeakable. They took captives for tripartite reasons: to barter children and the elderly for their kindred terrorist murderers in Israeli jails; to use captives to force the Israelis to grant cease-fires and pauses in their retaliation; and to bank them as shields to protect Hamas kingpins from retaliation.

Hamas invaded during a holiday in the early hours, in a time of peace, and on the iconic 50th-annivesary of the Yom Kippur surprise Arab attack. Their aim was to prove that  Israeli soil was for the first time porous and 2,000 killers could enter sacred Israeli ground with impunity and kill in one day more Jews civilians than at any day since the Holocaust.

The terrorists shot thousands of rockets into Israel to overwhelm Iron Dome and terrify the entire civilian population.

All these tactics was aimed at long-term strategic goals: stop the Abraham Accords; obey the directives of Hamas’s Iranian terrorist masters as payment for their arms; discredit the radical Palestine Authority and Arab moderate nations as anemic in their opposition to the supposedly shared hated Zionist entity; and prompt an Israeli response that by necessity would involve collateral damage to human shields, and schools, mosques, and hospitals atop subterranean Hamas headquarters.

Yet if we know their despicable methods, aims, and strategies, why did they think the civilized world would support their barbarity or at least excuse it?

One, Hamas assumed anti-Semitism was prevalent throughout the West and was canonical in the Middle East. Palestinian authorities count on the fact that being an enemy of the Jews of Israel wins them empathy of the world and creating their own unique rules of passive-aggressive victimhood.

So Palestinians demand to be the only “refugees” in the world—not Greek Cypriots, Eastern European Germans, and Prussians, Kurds, Armenians, and certainly not a million Jews cleansed from the Arab Middle East.

Israelis are to be “settlers,” not millions of Middle Easterners who surge and settle into the West, form resistance communities, sneer at integration and assimilation, and use Western liberality to protect and project their own illiberality.

https://www.jns.org/the-israeli-people-demand-victory/

Israel is currently focused on the sequential release of groups of our hostages held by Hamas. According to reports, some 52 hostages will be released over a four-day period as part of a temporary truce deal between Israel and the terror group. Three-quarters of them have already been released.

The question is: What follows? This is where things get not only murky, but potentially frightening.

Hamas is clearly hoping that we will become addicted to a daily schedule of releases, which will require a prolonged ceasefire. This scenario makes Hamas the puppet-master. It will be in full control of events and their timing. Moreover, as ceasefires are extended, Israeli leverage, born of battlefield success, will diminish. And it will embolden those who want Israel to stand down and end its military operations.

American and European leaders will proclaim: You’ll get all your people back, you inflicted heavy damage on Hamas, you killed a lot of Gazans—that sounds like enough. There is also the enormous economic cost of keeping hundreds of thousands of IDF reservists in the field.

Taken together, this could mean that the drumbeat for winding things down will become increasingly, even irresistibly loud.

This is a formula for disaster.

Israel is not fighting a war to recover hostages. We are fighting for the ground we stand on. Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 massacre taught us that we can no longer tolerate its existence on our border. Not if we want to have a southern Israel.