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ISRAEL

Niall Ferguson: My Journey From a Jerusalem of Ghosts to the Living Jerusalem To make sense of this bloody year, I had to go back to Lithuania. By Niall Ferguson

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-my-journey-between-jerusalems?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

To make proper sense of the bloody events of the past 12 months in the Middle East, I had to go to Vilnius. 

That may strike you as bizarre, as Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania and roughly 1,600 miles from Tel Aviv. But Vilnius was once “the Jerusalem of the North”—that’s what Napoleon called it when he passed through in 1812.

It is a pretty city today, with all kinds of charming eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, many of them creatively renovated since Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet Vilnius is a city of ghosts. That so much of its baroque architecture survived the brutalities of first Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet occupation is remarkable. The Jewish inhabitants were not so fortunate.

To understand Israel today, you must first understand what befell the Jews of Europe. It is the story of what can happen to a people without a nation state. It is the story of a people without an army of their own. And it is a story of what could happen again if the enemies of the Jewish people are given a chance, once more, to fulfill their fantasies.

What today is Vilnius was once Vilna, a part of the Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist empire, and then, between 1918 and 1939, Wilno in the Republic of Poland. The condition of much of the Jewish population was impoverished and insecure. A British member of Parliament who toured the Pale of Settlement in 1903 was appalled by Vilna’s “pestilent” cellars. 

Yet the city was also the most important Jewish cultural hub in Eastern Europe—a center of Jewish learning and culture from the 1560s until the 1930s. The greatest Talmudic scholar of the eighteenth century, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, was known as the Vilna Gaon. The man who pioneered the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, studied in Vilna. That cultural vitality did not abate after the city’s incorporation into the Polish republic. YIVO, the center for Jewish studies that is now based in New York, was originally founded in Wilno in 1925.

In 1939, when Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the city was handed over to Lithuania. This seemed providential. For Jews fleeing Nazi and Soviet rule, Vilnius looked like a sanctuary. Indeed, many of the city’s Jews celebrated the end of Polish rule. 

But the celebration was premature. In June 1940, along with neighboring Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union. A year later, the regime changed once again—this time fatally. 

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the fate of the Jews of Vilnius was sealed. Between 190,000 and 196,000—more than 90 percent—of Lithuanian Jews were murdered: a higher share than in any other country the Nazis occupied. Their destruction was swift: Most Lithuanian Jews perished before the end of 1941. 

One year after 10/7: Israel’s alliance with a weakened America brings dangerous consequences David Goldman

https://www.theblaze.com/return/one-year-after-10-7-israels-alliance-with-a-weakened-america-brings-dangerous-consequences

Betrayed by the United States, Israel will have to maneuver as best it can in a world of diminishing American influence.

“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal,” said the late Henry Kissinger to William F. Buckley. Israel’s alliance with the United States hasn’t proved fatal — and probably won’t — but it has left Israel with difficult choices and an enduringly dangerous security situation.

Zoom out from the battlefields in Gaza, about the size of Brooklyn and Queens, or the 18 miles from the Israeli-Lebanon border to the Litani River and consider the mess that the Biden administration has made of the world. Israel’s biggest problem is that U.S. influence is imploding around the world and to be an American ally means to wear a target on one’s back. Israel’s second-biggest problem is that its American ally has sandbagged it at every turn.

Instead of peace through strength, Biden has offered promulgation from weakness. That has grave implications for Israel’s position.

October 7, 2023, was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, with 1,200 dead and many raped and tortured as well as 250 kidnapped. Relative to Israel’s Jewish population of 7.2 million, that’s the equivalent of 55,000 Americans, or roughly 20 times the death toll on 9/11.

America’s Global War on Terror caused 900,000 civilian casualties, according to a Brown University estimate. Taking the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS during 2016-2017 killed anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians. Israel’s campaign to extirpate Hamas from Gaza has been measured by comparison.

Biden to Jews: ‘No’ to Defending against Iran’s Nuclear Weapons by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20997/no-defending-against-iran-nuclear-weapons

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” — United Nations Charter, Article 51.

On October 1, 2024, Iran directly attacked Israel for the second time in six months, launching at least 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli towns cities and towns and sending millions of Israelis into bomb shelters. Iran simply did what it has been doing for decades: trying to obliterate Israel.

Iran, both alone and through its proxies, has attacked Israel — a country smaller than New Jersey – for the past year, non-stop, on seven fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran itself. Lately, Iran has been eyeing an eighth front from which to fire on Israel: Sudan.

If a country is in danger of being attacked by nuclear weapons, within “one or two weeks,” as it is, according to the US Department of State, a request for “proportionality” is nonsensical.

What Israel’s leadership needs to do is ensure that Iran will not be able to attack the Jewish state ever again, either with conventional weapons or nuclear ones. This obligation, elementary for any country, means that Israel needs to incapacitate Iran’s nuclear sites and arguably put an end to Iran’s theocratic regime. There is no point in having an “accommodation” with Iran. To have peace in the Middle East, the West will need to defeat Iran.

Iran, cordially loathed by many of own its trapped citizens, already controls four countries in addition to its own: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. The regime has made no secret of its commitment to exporting its Islamic revolution globally — including to Sudan, the rest of Africa, the Western Hemisphere and the world. As the founder of the 1979 Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, said: “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.”

“Islam says,” he also noted: “Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword!”

Yet the Biden-Harris administration, together with the other G7 countries, who represent almost the entire West, apparently cannot agree that the world would be better off if “the leading state sponsor of global terrorism” — on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons — were stopped in its tracks.

The UN resolution also showed those countries’ disregard for Western civilization – a civilization which Israel, with no thanks from anyone, is paying the highest price imaginable to protect from tyranny and barbarism.

All this, however, concerns more than “just the Jews.” If Western countries actively enable autocracy, terrorism and savagery not just by standing passively by but by disabling a country that is fighting these onslaughts — where does that leave the West when those forces move on to their next targets?

The choice is between civilisation and barbarism The West has not chosen to defend civilisation. But iron has entered the Israeli soul Melanie Phillips

https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/the-choice-was-between-civilisation-or-barbarism-wip06eny?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We are living through a seismic moment in our history, and the Jewish people will never be the same again.

On October 7 — that terrible day — few would have imagined that one year later Israel would still be under attack from an eight-front war of extermination led by Iran.

Even fewer could have imagined that, far from sympathy and understanding over the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust and the targeting of Jews once more for genocide, the west would turn against Israel as the aggressor and war criminal and subject diaspora Jews to an unprecedented tsunami of antisemitism.

The scale and nature of this response indicate that something totally abnormal has been happening.

It’s not just the street mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, and every other university student hurling accusations of genocide at the Israelis for trying to defend themselves against genocide.

It’s not just the wretched media pumping out the Palestinian-scripted narrative of lies aimed at demonising and delegitimising Israel and writing the Jewish people out of its own history in the land.

It’s not just the Biden administration and the Starmer government and the UN and international courts and NGOs and the Church of England all singing from the same Hamas hymn-sheet.

It’s also that, when Israel bombs Hamas terrorists and their weapons in Gaza, the west tells it to stop because it’s killing “too many civilians”, even though it has produced the lowest ratio in modern history of civilians killed in war.

When Israel carries out an unprecedentedly precise attack by exploding thousands of pagers on the person of Hezbollah fighters so that vanishingly few civilians are harmed, the west accuses it of “indiscriminate killing”. When Hezbollah is left reeling still further after Israel wipes out with one missile the entire senior command of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, the USA, France, Britain and other western countries start piling pressure on the Jewish state to cease fire immediately.

The Forever Hate Even on the anniversary of the 10/7 pogrom, the media can’t bring itself to honor dead Jews. by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-forever-hate/

We are at the first anniversary now of one of the most grotesque episodes of ancient savagery wreaked upon the modern world: the October 7 attacks in Israel which left over 1200 innocents dead and many more wounded and/or taken hostage by the subhuman terror organization Hamas. But instead of solemn, worldwide commemoration of this ongoing nightmare, with unified sympathy and support for the Israeli victims and survivors, we are treated to the Left-wing counter-narrative of pro-Hamas, anti-Zionist protests and opinion pieces in the news media demonizing the Jewish state and drowning out the echoing cries of the Israeli dead.

Over the course of the last year, details and evidence of the massacre unfolded in eyewitness accounts, documentaries, and even video and testimony provided by the gleefully sadistic terrorists themselves. Decent people everywhere who dared to look found themselves staring into the bottomless abyss of Evil.

But the Left-dominated news media are not decent people. They burn with a forever hate for Jews and the Jewish state, and cannot bring themselves to see the terrorism of Hamas as anything less honorable than “resistance” against an oppressor state – a white oppressor, of course, because that’s how the reductive lie of identity politics works: Jews are perceived as oppressors and the so-called Palestinians are perceived as the oppressed, so Jews must be aligned with “white” or “bad” and the Palestinians with “black” or “good.” History, facts, truth, nuance – all of that must be cast aside so as not to undercut the simplistic, neo-Marxist power dynamics through which the woke view the world.

Israel is surrounded by genocidal enemies For the past year, Islamists have been menacing the Jewish State. Daniel Ben Ami

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/06/israel-is-surrounded-by-genocidal-enemies/

One thing that should now be clear is that Hamas is not the only Islamist group intent on destroying Israel. It is just one of several Iran-backed groups – the self-styled ‘axis of resistance’ or ‘ring of fire’ – determined to erase the Jewish State from the map.

Israel is therefore engaged in a seven-front war, fighting against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and increasingly heavily armed groups in the West Bank. And stranding behind all of them is the significant regional power of Iran.

Almost immediately after last year’s 7 October pogrom, these groups started their own military assaults on Israel. On 8 October, Hezbollah fired mortars at Israeli military positions in the Mount Dov region on the Lebanon border (sometimes called Shebaa Farms). Two days later, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which often works in conjunction with Hezbollah, claimed responsibility for an armed infiltration into Israeli territory from Lebanon.

Things could have been even worse. It has since emerged that 3,000 terrorists – most from Hezbollah but some from PIJ – were poised on the Lebanese border to attack Israel. Their goal was to implement a longstanding plan called ‘conquering the Galilee’ to seize northern Israel. Fortunately, Hezbollah hesitated before trying to execute its attack on the north, giving Israel time to mobilise its reserves and prevent even more carnage. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Hezbollah’s plan to attack Israel’s north was the basis for Hamas’s mass attack on the south.

Israel also soon came under attack from the south and the east. By mid-October, the Houthis in Yemen had attempted to launch an aerial assault. A few weeks later, an Islamist militia from Syria launched a drone attack which hit the Israeli city of Eilat. By November, Islamist militias based in Iraq were also mounting attacks on Israel. At the same time, Iran has been pouring weapons into the West Bank in the hope of opening up another front there.

Indeed, since 7 October, Iran has been open about its backing of these Islamist militias. On 17 October, supreme leader Ali Khamenei reportedly told Iranian television that ‘no one will stop the resistance forces’. He mentioned Hezbollah in the north, pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran, he said, ‘will coordinate the attack’ on Israel using missiles and drones to create a ‘siege from all sides’. In April, Iran went a step further and directly attacked Israel for the first time with a mass aerial bombardment. This month, it launched a potentially even more damaging ballistic missile attack.

Can Israel Win Back What October 7 Took? The choice to clear out an entire part of the country will be remembered as one of the most fateful decisions of this war. Matti Friedman reports from Galilee. By Matti Friedman

https://www.thefp.com/p/can-israel-win-back-what-october

“This was a lesson that Jews learned when they were exiled millennia ago, after which the Land of Israel became a ghostly place in mind and memory—and then learned again, when pioneers like the teenagers at Hanita in 1938 put down physical roots, built a wooden tower, and declared they’d never leave. Right now, as Israeli soldiers advance into Lebanon, and as the evacuees wait in their hotel rooms and temporary apartments, it feels like a lesson being learned again. ”

KIBBUTZ HANITA, Israel — In the late 1930s, when the land that is now Israel was under British rule, a young intelligence officer named Anthony Simonds spent time in Galilee, in remote hills that would eventually become the Israel-Lebanon border. He recorded memories of his time there in a colorful but unpublished memoir now kept in the Imperial War Museum in London. Rereading the officer’s recollections now, a year into the war that has devastated northern Israel and southern Lebanon, is an eerie exercise—a reminder of what Jews created in Israel, then lost last fall, and are now fighting to reclaim.

As I write these lines, Israeli infantrymen are pushing into Lebanon to clear Hezbollah guerrillas from the vicinity of the border while the air force, in strikes throughout southern Lebanon and in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern districts of Beirut, is methodically killing the group’s commanders and destroying the vast arsenal supplied by Iran. A direct Israeli strike against HezboIlah’s patron, the Islamic theocracy in Iran, seems imminent.

None of this would have made sense to Simonds of the Royal Berkshires: When he was a young man in uniform more than 80 years ago, Iran was a distant monarchy ruled by the shah, and there was no Hezbollah and no state of Israel. Lebanon was ruled by France. 

“I have driven my car on rough tracks, sometimes in the Lebanon and sometimes in Palestine,” wrote Simonds. On one page of his typewritten memoir he recalls coming across a new frontier outpost. This kibbutz had been established one night in March 1938, and was inhabited by about 100 young Jews, many of them refugees from Europe, who had erected a wooden tower and stockade in a matter of hours on a plot purchased from Arab landowners by the Zionist movement. After their arrival, the pioneers faced an attack in which two of them were killed by Arab guerrillas. As they dug in and farmed in subsequent months, becoming symbols of Zionist pioneering, eight more of them fell.

We Will Not Let Our Country and Continent Be Destroyed by Geert Wilders

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20992/country-continent-destroyed

We choose the power of reason.
And we will win.
Here in the Netherlands and in Israel.

Am Israel Chai. [Israel will live.]

The hatred of extreme left-wing agitators and parts of the left-liberal elite in politics and the media against our Jewish compatriots and the State of Israel since the barbaric massacre of innocent civilians on October 7, 2023, has directly fueled anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews.

It started immediately after October 7 with inflammatory demonstrations of millions of people with false flags and slogans in many European capitals, including many non-Western immigrants, who thereby demonstrated that they do not share any of our values ​​and do not belong here. Then followed the betrayal at universities and in parts of our media and politics. Both nationally and internationally, from the [Netherlands] House of Representatives to the EU and UN, as well as in newspapers and on TV. Every day again. There are now even police officers who refuse to protect Jewish objects and instead of being fired on the spot, their cowardly police chiefs show understanding.

We are as strong as our weakest link. And there are so many weak links. All of whom will be commemorating the massacres of a year ago on Monday with packs of butter on their heads [Dutch expression for hypocrites].

I will always continue to point out their cowardice. And stand up for our values, culture and traditions. That also distinguishes us from the hostile killing machines of Hamas cum suis and the defenders of all their evil. They love death but we love life. And we defend our way of life with everything we have. And so we resist with sincere and unprecedented strength against the unfortunately growing hatred of Jews and Israel.

Against giving away our country and continent to migrants who do not share our values. Against politicians, journalists and education administrators who shamelessly choose the side of evil and whose moral compass now lies in Gaza.

Calling All Jewish Democrats: It’s An Emergency Dire times require dire measures Andrew Pessin

https://andrewpessin.substack.com/p/calling-all-jewish-democrats-its?utm_medium=email

The following piece appeared by an anonymous author at the Elder of Ziyon blog. It’s the most detailed and documented case against Kamala Harris I have seen, arguing that her presidency poses an existential threat not only to Israel but to American Jewry. I think it should at least be read by every Jewish Democrat, so if you know any, please forward it.

Why I have requested anonymity for this piece:

In my place of work there is intense hostility to Israel. If I openly argued what I am about to argue, that anyone who cares about Israel and American Jewry cannot support the Democratic candidate for President, my professional status would be seriously compromised. To borrow the point made by another recent essay, that is why this essay both needs to be published, and to be anonymous. The situation is that dire.

I am a lifelong Democrat.

But I also support Israel and American Jewry.

After October 7 the two are no longer compatible.

There are many issues I care about, for which the Democratic Party has traditionally been the better vehicle; but the current existential emergency for Israel and American-Jewry means that that issue must now take priority. Though it hurts to say it, this lifelong Democrat cannot vote for the current Democratic candidate for President. I am not the first to reach this conclusion. There’s even now a whole organization called “Jexit,” for Jews exiting the Democratic Party. With great regret I realize I must now join them, for the following now strikes me as indisputable:

Harris-Walz will be a disaster for Israel and for American Jewry.

There have been some positive moments. Biden-Harris said the right things immediately after October 7, and allowed the U.S. Navy to be present in the region at a couple of important times, for which an Israel-advocate rightly feels gratitude. But aside from these and their occasional banal remark about believing in Israel’s right to defend itself—doesn’t every country have the right to defend itself?—heaps and mounds of evidence point unambiguously toward that dire conclusion. The mound begins from the fact that every single time Biden-Harris say Israel may defend itself, the next word is invariably a “but”— “how it does so matters,” “too many civilians have died,” etc. Since, as Michael Oren explains so clearly, no one can explain “how an enemy that hides behind and beneath millions of civilians can be fought without causing collateral damage,” then Biden-Harris’s allowing Israel to defend itself only if it doesn’t cause civilian casualties amounts to their not actually giving Israel the right to defend itself. As I write, in September of 2024, it’s hardly surprising that Hamas leader Khaled Meshal is praising Biden-Harris for helping Hamas to remain in power, for always waiting patiently for and listening to Hamas’s demands in negotiations and for pressuring Israel to submit, and for elevating Hamas to the status of a legitimate diplomatic partner. What Meshal is gushing over is not the behavior of an ally of Israel, but of an administration that has largely taken the side of Israel’s enemies.

UNRWA, refugees and terrorists by Asaf Romirowsky and Alex Joffe

https://romirowsky.com/28105/unrwa-refugees-terrorists

There are few constants in American foreign policy. One of them is deference to UNRWA, the internationally funded welfare agency for Palestinians.

This organization is implicated in terrorism. The news that Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, head of UNRWA’s teachers union in Lebanon and Hamas liaison to Hezbollah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, is just the latest example.

As we approach the anniversary of Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 massacre, things have gone from bad to worse. In an official document filed in a U.S. court, the UN — with support from the Department of Justice — has argued that UNRWA employees involved in 10/7 enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution, and the lawsuit should be dismissed.”

The U.S. has long followed the international community in placing UNRWA in a different and higher category, with untouchable funding, unvettable employees, and senior managers who illegally lobby in the U.S. for support. Now it argues that actual murderers should be immune from prosecution.

The U.S. has defined Hamas as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since Oct. 8, 1997. The Department of Justice’s new assertion that UNRWA employees have “absolute immunity” violates common sense and elevates international organizations above American law.

Since the 1960s American lawmakers have focused on UNRWA’s relationship with terrorism. Section 301(c) of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act stated “No contributions by the United States shall be made to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East except on the condition that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency take all possible measures to assure that no part of the United States contribution shall be used to furnish assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army or any other guerrilla type organization or who has engaged in any act of terrorism.”