RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/sudan-former-slave-jews-israel

My name is Simon Aban Deng. I am from South Sudan. I am a Shilluk. I am a Christian. I am a former slave.

I will not forget that day when Arab Sudanese government troops came and raided my village. We didn’t know what was going on until we heard gunshots from every direction. I was only 9 years old, but the militiamen were shooting anybody they saw, including children.

Myself, my family, and five of my friends had to run. But the Arabs ran after us: While we were running, they shot two of my friends. We ran wildly, not knowing where we were running. We just wanted to get away from these men, and the bullets, chasing us.

We ran until they disappeared. We then spent the night in the bush, terrified, and wondering if we would see these men again.

A relative of mine who was pregnant had escaped the village with us, but she couldn’t run like the other people. She collapsed from exhaustion as we were running, but we had to leave her, knowing that the Arabs would catch us if we tried to carry her or run at her pace. In the morning, as we returned to our village—wondering if it was still standing—we found that she had been eaten by wild animals during the night.

When we got there, the elders who were able to escape returned to bury the dead and try to save whatever the Arabs had not destroyed. And they had destroyed plenty. The whole village had been burned to the ground with the people inside the houses, including a blind man and an elderly lady we knew.

Seeing our beautiful village reduced to a wasteland of burned grass and rows of bodies, my father made the painful decision to leave. Now refugees, we walked to the town of Malakal, capital of Upper Nile state, where we lived for six months. Our neighbor there was an Arab named Abdullahi. One day, he asked to help him with putting his luggage onto the ferry since we lived so close to the riverbank.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/choose-life-and-fight-for-it?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Already numb with grief over the flower of Israel’s youth falling in the war in Gaza, Israelis have been further shattered by the killing on Monday of no fewer than 21 reservists in one deadly incident and three other soldiers the same day.

Not surprisingly, this has increased calls from the public for an end to the war. Even more understandably, the families of the Israeli hostages are becoming ever more desperate about the captives’ likely horrific fate in the dungeons of Hamas, and are stepping up demonstrations calling for a deal to end the war and secure the hostages’ release.

Would that it were that simple. Israel faces a horrific binary choice: to end the threat from Hamas, or end the ordeal of the hostages. It almost certainly can’t achieve both.

Hamas will not give up all the hostages without a guaranteed end to Israeli hostilities and a pledge not to assassinate the Hamas leaders. If Israel were to agree to that, a revitalised Hamas would remain a mortal threat to Israeli lives, more hostages would be taken in future and more Israelis murdered.  

The residents of Israel’s communities near the border with Gaza would be unable to return safely to their homes; nor would the families that have been evacuated from communities near the border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah’s 150,000 missiles are embedded in the civilian population ready for the signal to strike the entire Jewish state and where Hezbollah’s Radwan force remains poised to invade Israel to order to murder and abduct more Jews.

There is hardly an Israeli family that isn’t personally affected by this war. In such a tiny country, almost everyone has family members on the front lines, has relatives or friends who have been murdered or been abducted into Gaza, or knows people in such situations. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/egyptian-analyst-looks-forward-to-end-of-hamas-the-main-obstacle-to-peace/

Magdi Khalil does not mention a “right of return” for Palestinians. Nor does he mention the Palestinian insistence that its future capital must be in east Jerusalem. He thinks it must be left up to the parties to figure out what kind of modus vivendi will be possible. “Egyptian analyst sanity on Lebanese TV: ‘Hamas is the problem, Arabs have to stop thinking Israel will disappear, Hezbollah hijacked Lebanon,’” Elder of Ziyon, January 11, 2024:

He expressed his optimism that a solution would be reached immediately after the end of the war and after the end of Hamas, the main obstacle to peace, “since serious peace talks will begin to reach a demilitarized Palestinian state under security supervision by Israel for years, but there is not yet a qualified party [on the Palestinian side] to enter into these negotiations.”

Magdi Khalil looks forward to the “end of Hamas,” which he describes as the “main obstacle to peace,” and fully accepts the Israeli demand that any Palestinian state would have to be “demilitarized,” with Israel in charge of security “for years.” He recognizes,too, that Israel does not have a partner for peace; the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is not the “moderate’” political force that the Western world seems to think it is. Abbas on only one occasion, during a phone call with Venezuela’s President Maduro, criticized Hamas for the October 7 attack, and then had that criticism promptly taken down. This shows just how “moderate” this corrupt leader, whom 90% of Palestinians want to resign at once, really is. His quarrel with Hamas is not over morality, but over power and money.