RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/11/we-will-defend-ourselves/

PUBLISHED IN AUSTRALIA

We did not think we would ever see such sights in Israel. Helpless Jews—women, children, the elderly—tormented, raped, torched alive, beheaded, and mutilated. There is much that has not yet been made public, and may only reach few, because the gore is not just incomprehensible, but actually traumatising. In some of the worst footage the victims are recognisable, and so they have to be kept away from the public eye lest the victims’ families witness their loved ones tortured and killed. We are faced with Nazi-scale atrocities—inhuman barbarism.

It goes without saying that any civilised person would be deeply shocked. But that does not even begin to describe how this horror played on the collective Israeli psyche, indeed the Jewish psyche in general.

For two millennia, Jews have been helpless. When anti-Semitism swelled and rose around them, they could only try to flee or beg for mercy. They rarely had the chance or the means to organise and resist. Jewish history since the fall of the Second Temple reads like a string of expulsions and pogroms culminating with the Holocaust. The promise of Zionism, the promise of Israel, was therefore Never Again.

By Never Again, Zionism did not mean that Jews would be spared hate, or wars, or even violent death. Rather Zionism meant that we will defend ourselves or die trying. This is so deeply ingrained in the spirit of anyone who grew up under the influence of Zionism that it is an instinct, an existential orientation towards life and death, more than it is a thought or an ideology.

The late Hebrew University professor of history Zeev Sternhell was a child in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland. From a hiding place, in a hole in the ground, he saw Jews hunted like animals in the streets, men and women fleeing and shot in the back, shot children falling from treetops where they tried to hide. He survived, migrated to Israel and later served in the Israel Defense Forces. In an interview he gave to journalist Ari Shavit in 2008 in Haaretz he said that when he saw friends and men under his command die in battle, he thought that:

at least they died like human beings. They didn’t die being hunted on the streets. For me the state of Israel is not a political affair. It is something far more fundamental. Far more basic. It is a return to being human. A return to living like a human being. Because there, in the ghetto, there was a loss … of your human identity. You ceased to be a person altogether.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-nellie-bowles-useful-idiots?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPTS

 War escalating: Rockets have started flying from Yemen toward Israel, as Iran-backed Houthi rebels (who control the country’s capital) enter the fray. Rockets are also being launched toward Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon. China’s Baidu (basically Google but more so) removed Israel from its maps. And TikTok’s 150 million users in the U.S. were held like foie gras geese and fed pro-Hamas propaganda through their eye holes. Never before has a foreign adversary had a direct line to feed agitprop into the youth of their enemy, and that’s what China has with TikTok, the viral video app managed by (call me crazy) the Chinese Communist Party.

It seems fitting that all our national defense—the world’s greatest army!—was outsmarted by an app shimmying into our lives with fun viral dance videos, makeup tutorials, and instructional videos on how to have dissociative identity disorder. There’s a great new essay by tech entrepreneur and investor Sam Lessin: “TikTok needs to go.” 

Hamas’s useful idiots: There are a lot of hardened antisemites in this world, but there are also a lot of sweet dumb people who like to go along with things, and that brings us, this week, to a Senate hearing. A group of protesters from CODEPINK, no doubt among whom are some very nice people, directed by some savvy activists, painted their hands red and sat in a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting calling for Israel to declare a cease-fire. They were told to raise their hands up high and they did. Perhaps what they didn’t realize is that the image mirrored a very famous moment. . . of celebrating murder. After a mob in Ramallah lynched two Israeli soldiers, one of the Palestinian men involved raised his hands to show the Jewish blood to a cheering crowd. Do I think the Senate protesters had any idea? No. Or at least, I hope not. But wow: imagine being a Hamas leader right now in some plush Qatar hotel looking at these Americans mimicking that celebration. It’s incredible! And college kids chanting for jihad and praising the martyrs. Could Hamas have ever imagined how successful October 7 would be for them? 
 

Or watch these peaceful protesters try to lead a group in London cheering: “Khaybar ya yahud.” Which means: “Jews remember Khaybar,” where Muslims defeated a Jewish community. Repeat after me, guys! 5, 6, 7, 8!

Here is Ghazi Hamad, of Hamas’s political bureau, on Lebanese TV on October 24: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country. . . . We are not afraid to say this with full force. . . . We must teach Israel a lesson and we will do it again and again. The Al-Aqsa flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth. . . . We are called a nation of martyrs and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” The television interviewer asks: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?” Response from Hamas chief: “Yes of course. The existence of Israel is illogical.” 

https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/11/01/the-blood-money-trail-how-billions-of-dollars-for-hamas-paved-the-way-for-the-massacre-of-october-7/

Sixteen years have elapsed since Hamas took control by force of all the government branches and institutions in the Gaza Strip, and either expelled the Fatah operatives or literally threw them off the rooftops. With the support of international aid organizations, and also to a large extent with the indirect support of Israel, Hamas developed into a governmental terrorist organization.

Various governments in Israel, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the IDF, and Israel’s Security Agency, better known as Shin Bet, saw the blood money trail but were blinded by the conception that Hamas is now an established governmental entity, and as such it has much to lose, and so despite the accumulation of its military capabilities and power – it will avoid the use of them for any murderous purposes. Economic analysts of terrorist organizations with whom we have spoken in recent days have all expressed their deep frustration and anger at this. For years they have been looking at the numbers, and the funding channels, and providing warnings regarding the capital being used to fund Hamas’ militarization. The figures are here for you all to see. In this case, seeing is not believing, but rather “disbelieving”.

The overall annual budget available to the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip amounts to $2-2.5 billion per annum. This is the figure estimated by Yitzhak Gal, an established expert in Middle East economic issues as a whole and the Palestinian economy in particular, who has engaged in comprehensive consulting work regarding the funding of the Hamas regime. This is an enormous amount compared with the size of the economy in the Gaza Strip. It constitutes 65-70 percent of the Gaza Strip’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product = the overall size of the economy). For the sake of comparison, Gal states, the PA’s (Palestinian Authority) budget for Judea and Samaria is slightly over $3 billion, constituting a mere 20 percent of the GDP of that area. And for the sake of further comparison – in Israel, the budget currently accounts for about 25% of the GDP. Following the massacre in the Gaza border communities, in a document published only a week ago by the US Department of the Treasury, the current estimated value of Hamas’ assets is put at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Dr. Udi Levi, a senior analyst at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), an expert in economic warfare and the person who headed the Counter Terrorism and Proliferation Finance Bureau (which was closed down in 2016), explains: “In the Gaza Strip a portion of falafel costs NIS 5-7, the unemployment rate is at 50% – and so it was clear that the colossal budget run by Hamas was diverted for the purpose of paying workers who built the tunnels, for the procurement of weapons, for training and employing its fighters – and certainly not for the benefit of the civilians there. We saw all the trucks bringing in metals to the Gaza Strip over the years, and all this just to buy a little peace and quiet. I was the one who screamed out against this conception of allowing the money to flow into the Gaza Strip, I claimed that Hamas should have been undermined by facilitating its economic collapse – but none of this worked. But it is still not too late. Even now, by adopting a series of measures that will not harm even one soldier, the Israeli government can economically choke Hamas and Hezbollah, but it needs to take immediate action.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-gaza-hamas-pause-antony-blinken-joe-biden-5265b7fd?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden has been stalwart in backing Israel’s right to destroy Hamas after the Oct. 7 massacre. But a political backlash is growing, in the Democratic Party and abroad, to rein in Israel before it can achieve its military objectives. Is the Administration’s support beginning to crack?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to Israel Friday to deliver a mixed message: Defeat Hamas—“there cannot and must not be a return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo”—but pause the fighting and think about a two-state solution for Palestinians “not tomorrow, not after the war, but today.”

He may want to hold off on that last desire. After Hamas used Gaza to carry out massacres, and with some 200,000 Israelis now internally displaced, creating a new Palestinian state near Israel’s big cities sounds reckless even to Israeli doves. Maybe some time down the road.

Mr. Blinken presented “humanitarian pauses” as critical to protecting Gazans, getting them aid and freeing Israeli and U.S. hostages. The “pause” idea was embraced by Mr. Biden Wednesday in response to an anti-Israel protester’s hectoring for a cease-fire. “I think we need a pause,” the President said. “A pause means give time to get the prisoners out.”

On Thursday 13 Senate Democrats echoed that call. Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) even advised Israeli generals to rethink their “current operational approach.”

The President may conciliate some Democrats to his left, but a pause would halt Israel’s advance and momentum in exchange for uncertain gains. Mr. Blinken acknowledged that Israel has raised “legitimate questions” about “how to connect a pause to the release of hostages, how to ensure that Hamas doesn’t use these pauses or arrangements to its own advantage.”