RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-infernal-choice-behind-the-hostage?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

As if Israelis weren’t traumatised enough by the depraved Hamas pogrom on October 7, the hostage deal concluded this week cruelly deepened their agony.

On Wednesday morning, the terms of the deal between Israel and Hamas were announced. Of the hostages, 30 children, eight of their mothers and 12 other women were to be released in exchange for a four-day “pause” in Israel’s ground and air military operations, more aid deliveries to Gaza and the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. In addition, for every further 10 hostages released by Hamas, Israel would continue the ceasefire for another day.

Late on Wednesday night, Israel’s National Security Council director, Tzachi Hanegbi, announced a delay. The hostages wouldn’t be released until Friday at the earliest.

Late on Thursday, Qatar said the deal would go into effect at 7 a.m. on Friday. Various reports said that, at the last minute, Hamas had imposed further conditions on the handover or ramped up its demands that Israel further curtail its military activities.

Who can be surprised by any of that? For Israel is no longer in control of events. At a stroke, it has yielded control of the war to Gaza’s Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar.

The pressure from the hostages’ families for a deal has been enormous. No-one in Israel can fail to share their anguish.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2023/11/the-irrelevance-of-proportionality/

Voted into power by the Palestinian people of Gaza during 2006, and with extensive support in the West Bank (Samaria and Judea), but designated a terror group by Western nations, Hamas is a jihadist Islamist mob of fanatics determined to create a Sharia law-based Caliphate free of non-believers. Specific animosity is directed at followers of the monotheist faiths of Judaism and Christianity which compete with radical Islamist ideology over critical ideals of identity, land, religion, and divine promise.

The actualization of Hamas’ intended utopia depends upon fulfilment of an apocalyptic event which would lead to a grand finale at the end of time. This would be the period of redemption and blessing of all faithful devotees of Allah and his prophet, Mohammed. Together with certain passages in the Quran which mention violence against non-Muslims, jihadists embrace authoritative scriptures known as the Hadith. This collection of Islamic writings in Arabic, attributed to Mohammed, contain an overriding prescription pertinent to apocalyptic destiny:

The time will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, until the        Jew hides behind the stones and the trees and the stones or the trees say, ‘O Muslim, O Servant         of God, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.’

The excerpt describes genocidal intent against which Israel and its people are forced to defend their right to exist. To justify this agenda, Islamism propounds a dichotomous ethical construction for humankind: a glorious destiny for Muslim faithful but with death and destruction for all non-believers. Religious convictions enable radical actors to ignore Western laws regarding ethical war behaviour. Yet, Israel as a democratic nation is bound by the just-war theory and is carefully monitored by Western powers, which compromises their ability to respond as necessary in a permanently hostile environment. In the world’s eyes, it is becoming increasingly difficult for Israel to hold the high moral ground due to unintended civilian casualties in Gaza however much the Israeli military machine, the IDF, complies with traditional rules of war and humanitarian concerns. To the contrary, Hamas eschews any limiting rules of war or considerations of human decency. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2023/11/how-do-i-hate-thee-let-me-count-the-ways/

“Abhorrence of Israel is now near universal and few apart from politicians with Jews in their electorates make any pretence at distinguishing between the race and the nation. But why the concentrated hate? Why the coordinated mobs worldwide, why is there not even a vestige of sympathy for butchered victims whose only offence was to have been Israelis? Why is it the Israelis whose “war crimes” are condemned in our federal parliament, with the sinister Adam Bandt, showing all the compassion of a judge in a Moscow show trial, parroting Hamas about “illegal occupation of  Palestinian territories”? Doesn’t he know Israel no longer “occupies” Gaza? Doesn’t he know that the “ceasefire” he and the rest of the Left harp on about would leave Hamas unopposed in its crusade to destroy a state and its population? Leftists are always going about the evils of genocide. Ah, but this would be an acceptable genocide, the triumph of justice, evil “occupiers” and “colonialists” getting their just deserts – you wouldn’t put it past some on the Left to want to try the same thing here.”

Councillors in what was known until recently as the Victorian city of Moreland in Melbourne’s inner north feel that their municipal talents should not be limited to such tiresome tasks as collecting rubbish and filling in potholes. They ought to have a voice, they think – even as they reel from the blow of the ignominious collapse of their other cherished “Voice”– a voice this time that ‘racists’ and rednecks can’t torpedo, that will carry beyond their dreary municipality of jerry-built apartment blocks and unenticing cafés, one that will be heard in the counsels of the world. So they sign up to the idiocy that currently reigns supreme in the West (they’ve long been on board with the earlier idiocies of race and sex) and pass a resolution that goes beyond the usual wishy-washy requests for a ceasefire in Israel’s war of self-defence against Hamas but actually condemns Israeli military action in Gaza full stop. They mutter about “war crimes”, though not those committed by the terrorists of Hamas, and they wouldn’t mind a boycott too.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-hostage-deal-gaza-51e141eb?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The hostage deal that Israel and Hamas reached Tuesday will spare the lives of some 50 Israelis, and that is a great relief to the innocents and their families. The cost is a short-term cease-fire that Hamas will exploit, and three-quarters of the 236 hostages will remain in terrorist hands.

Israeli leaders believe the trade is worth it, and it’s not our place to second-guess their judgment. In exchange for returning Israeli children and women, 12 or 13 a day, Hamas is set to receive a four-day pause in Israeli military operations and the release of about 150 of its under-18 and female operatives from Israeli prisons.

During the cease-fire, Israel will allow more fuel and aid into Gaza. The pause might also extend longer if Hamas gives up more hostages, 10 for each additional day.

The deal again shows the moral gulf between the two sides. Hamas kidnapped Israeli children as young as nine months to use as hostages and spring its jihadists who have been arrested or convicted in a fair trial for their crimes. Israel takes military risks to save its citizens. Hamas risks Palestinian civilians to save itself.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hamas-close-to-reaching-deal-with-israel-to-release-hostages-terror-group-chief-says/

The Israeli government approved the transfer of roughly 50 civilian hostages currently held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday night.

While precise aspects of the deal have yet to be officially publicized, it is expected that at least a dozen Israeli hostages will be released over four days. In exchange, Israel has agreed to release Palestinian women and minors currently held in prison, and figures range from more than 400 to as low as 150. The Jewish state further agreed to accept a four-day cease-fire and to allow considerably more humanitarian aid, including fuel, into the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The vote came after tense internal negotiations within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration. “Do you trust [Yahya] Sinwar more than us?” Israeli minister Benny Gantz reportedly pointedly asked finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, an opponent of the hostage swap, referring to the Hamas mastermind allegedly behind the October 7 attacks.

“We are not united,” national-security minister Itamar Ben Gvir pushed back on one Likud cabinet member pleading for consensus. “This is a decision with generational damage that will come back to hurt us badly.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Hamas leaders acknowledged they were “close to reaching a truce agreement” with Israel, the Palestinian terrorist group’s chief Ismail Haniyeh said in a statement provided to Reuters. The agreement is in its “final stages,” and a deal is “closer than it has ever been,” a source familiar with the negotiations told the wire service.

As part of the deal, Hamas would release at least 50 women and children who were kidnapped during the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7. In exchange, Israel would pause its fighting in the Gaza Strip for four or five days and release three Palestinian prisoners for every Israeli civilian released, according to multiple news outlets.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20155/palestinians-support-hamas

A public opinion poll published on November 14 showed that 75% of Palestinians support Hamas’s murder spree, including rape and beheadings, as opposed to only 13% who disapprove.

Surprisingly, the poll found that support for Hamas and its “military operation” is even higher in the West Bank, where Abbas’s Palestinian Authority is based, than in the Gaza Strip.

If such a large number of Palestinians in the West Bank support the murder of Israelis and Hamas, it is safe to assume that a new “Palestinian state” would be controlled by Hamas or another genocidal, antisemitic terror group.

Another, but less-surprising, result of the poll is that 80% of the Palestinians reject both the “one-state” and “two-state” solutions, and instead demand all the territory, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – in short, the entire State of Israel within any borders.

That a majority of Palestinians want to replace Israel with an Iran-backed terror state also shows that the Biden administration and most European governments are engaging in extreme self-deception when they talk about the need to promote the concept of a “two-state solution.”

How can any rational person talk about a “two-state solution” when a majority of Palestinians believe there is nothing wrong with burning, beheading and raping Jews, or baking a Jewish baby to death in an oven?

The results of the poll confirm what most Arabs and Muslims already know: that the only solution most Palestinians are willing to accept is one that leads to the murder of all Jews and the destruction of Israel. It remains to be seen whether the latest Palestinian slaughter of Jews serves to awaken the Biden administration and the Europeans to this inconvenient, uncomfortable fact.

One of the reasons why Palestinian leaders refuse to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis is because they know that many Palestinians support the atrocities committed by the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group.

Unlike the Biden administration and many Europeans, these leaders, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, are fully aware of the widespread support among their people for any group whose goal is to murder Israelis and destroy Israel. The Palestinian leaders, in addition, are also aware that a majority of the Palestinians are opposed to the deluded Western fantasy of a “two-state solution.”