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ISRAEL

When Neutrality is Immoral: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Moral Equivalence by André Villeneuve

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20154/neutrality-immoral-israel-hamas

While many the world over had the integrity to condemn “the hideous crime, naming its perpetrators and acknowledging Israel’s basic right to defend itself against the atrocity,” the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches were unable to muster up such moral clarity.

While the IDF goes out of its way to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups do their utmost to maximize them — not only by indiscriminately murdering Israelis, but also by hiding among their own civilian population and using them as human shields, resulting in disproportionately high numbers of Palestinian casualties, caused — deliberately — by Hamas.

If there is an “occupation” problem in Gaza, the occupier is Hamas, not Israel.

In this war, Christians — and all of us — have a moral responsibility to support a civilized nation’s fight against barbarism. Israel must eradicate a terrorist group, Hamas, just as we confronted ISIS. Then all of us need to contain the real mastermind behind such groups, the genocidal regime of Iran. Unfortunately, there is no other viable solution if we wish to preserve the West.

October 7, 2023: Another day that will live in infamy: Israel’s Pearl Harbor. Israel’s 9/11. The quiet Shabbat morning of Simchat Torah, concluding the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, suddenly turned into a bloodbath. Under the cover of heavy rocket fire, thousands of Hamas terrorists attacked Israel’s southern communities and left behind them a path of carnage and devastation, ambushing army bases and motorists, murdering some 364 people at a music festival, slaughtering families in their beds, raping women, executing children and Holocaust survivors, burning civilians alive, and kidnapping 244 people in Israel to Gaza. With at least 1,200 people murdered, it was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The barbarity of the Hamas attack was so unprecedented that even the world was brutally — if briefly — jolted out of its usual apathy and left reeling in horror.

The outrage, however, was short-lived. As soon as Israel began its military response to Hamas’s act of war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations erupted across the world, many of them quickly turning into anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate fests. Some even denied that the October 7 slaughter had taken place, despite the many eyewitness stories of survivors.

Don’t look to the Palestinian Authority for good governance by Gabriel Diamond

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4311098-dont-look-to-the-palestinian-authority-for-good-governance/

The Oct. 7 terrorist massacre in southern Israel made it all too clear that Hamas must go. But after it is gone, who will take the helm in Gaza? 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken commented that Gaza’s administration “must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.” Secretary Blinken and the Biden administration should think again.

Over the course of 11 days from May into June 2023, I spent hours in conversation with Palestinian Authority leaders. I had been selected to join a group of 30 undergraduates from Yale and West Point on a trip to Israel and the West Bank, part of the schools’ joint Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative. Trips like these offer Palestinian leaders an opportunity to court impressionable, young American students. The presentations from Palestinian Authority officials were as revealing as the living conditions we saw throughout the West Bank. The Palestinian people are being used as pawns by the Palestinian Authority. The U.S. must proceed with caution or risk substituting one corrupt authority with another.

Many Palestinians live in appalling conditions. In Bethlehem, I watched a little girl weave through moving cars to get to school — no crosswalks or traffic lights in sight. Even in areas that seem economically secure, infrastructure is severely lacking. Walking down an alley in Ramallah, I saw plastic tubing cracking along the side of an apartment building, causing precious water to gush onto the dusty road. 

I pressed the political leaders with whom we met to understand how this could be the reality for many Palestinians. The authorities who acted as our hosts emphasized the misfortunes of their people, but they took no responsibility themselves. In fact, the extent of their seeming indifference is astonishing. 

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that between 1994 and 2020, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has received more than $40 billion in international aid. The Biden administration dedicated $316 million just last year to supporting Palestinians. When I asked a Palestinian Authority official in Ramallah where American funding for the PA goes, he responded by saying that the U.S. does not provide any support at all. Algeria, he claimed, is the only country that offers financial aid. 

Drawing the Line Between Terrorist and Journalist Observers . . . or willing participants? by Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/drawing-the-line-between-terrorist-and-journalist/

A U.S.-based media watchdog group issued a report last week exposing a half-dozen Arab photo-journalists who accompanied Hamas terrorists in the early hours of October 7 on their killing spree in Israel, documenting their atrocities.

All six of the photo-journalists whose work Honest Reporting examined were employed by major media organizations, including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and the Associated Press. Reuters heralded one photo, showing a lynch mob brutalizing an Israeli soldier they had dragged out of a tank, as its “image of the day.”

An AP photographer took a video of himself in front of the burning Israeli tank, glorifying that he was seeing it with “my own eyes.” He was wearing nothing to identify himself as a member of the press, and appeared to be part of a celebratory crowd.

Another AP reporter snapped close-ups of Hamas terrorists dragging a terrified and bleeding Israeli civilian to a vehicle for transport as a hostage to Gaza.

Others captured the initial breaching of the Israeli border fence, the torching of Israeli homes, and the capture of female hostages.

The report earned cringing excuses from all four news organizations, ranging from the expected “just doing their job,” to embarrassed denials that they had embedded their reporters with Hamas.

Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding that the Department of Justice open a national security investigation into the four media outlets “to determine whether they or their leadership committed federal crimes by supporting Hamas terrorists.”

The six photo-journalists “almost certainly knew about the attack in advance, and even participated by accompanying Hamas terrorists during the attack and filming the heinous acts,” he wrote.

As someone who has reported frequently from Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan, and with Palestinian guerrilla fighters in the Bekaa Valley, I can tell you: the Palestinians control information tightly, just like any other totalitarian. They want to control the “narrative.”

I write about several instances where I succeeded in evading Palestinian attempts at control in my latest book, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies. It was always a challenge; often, it was dangerous. The Palestinians a long history of punishing journalists who do not comply with their demands.

But these six “photo-journalists” were not seeking to get around the Hamas narrative to report independently. They sought to glorify Hamas and its atrocities.

On the Moral Rehabilitation of Gaza Moral lessons from World War II. by Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-the-moral-rehabilitation-of-gaza/

As the war between Israel and Gaza rages on, some inevitable questions must be raised. If Hamas, an indisputable rogue organization that governs a region which exists more like a plot of land in a state of nature than as a civilized geographic entity, is not totally obliterated (which, with sentimental calls for ceasefires and daily pauses in aerial bombings and ground incursions on Israel’s part, seems unlikely), then can Hamas be politically rehabilitated? What would such rehabilitation look like? Or should we be thinking of more robust and radical solutions such as global incarceration whereby a country is evicted from the community of nations and radically contained militarily?

The most draconian form of global incarceration of a state or region is the permanent disbandment of a state into regional disembodiments, sedimentary fragments chiseled into the mortar bodies of larger states with no chance of it ever recovering its political solvency. It is the absolute disappearance of a state without necessarily terminating the lives of its former citizens. It includes but is not limited to the deracination of its political culture, the destruction of its political institutions and its mores, customs, and norms. Radical assimilation and/or extreme containment are the political concomitants and the direct corollaries of this mandate. Global incarceration of a state or region is the death of its political life and its capacity to generate and regenerate life as it was once capable of doing. An incarcerated state or region is not just a neutralized state – it is a neutered state.

On the slim chance that a heavily compromised, Hamas-governed Gaza exists, what might it look like, and how would it come about?

Here it might be helpful to look to history for political and moral guidance. Japan and Germany in World War II were countries that went through political rehabilitation and, with the aid of the United States, had their entire identities reconstituted. In the case of Japan, a heavily influenced U.S Constitution was foisted on it with great success, albeit via warfare. Sometimes rehabilitation requires war. Sometimes it requires firm diplomacy, or economic sanctions, or military intervention, or absolute regime change. What is essential about rehabilitation in the political sense is that there is adaptation to a code of normative behavior to which the rogue state must adhere. The rogue entity adapts to the norms of a civilizational order.

The Hamas Big Fish Who Got Away Israel had an opportunity to kill Mohammed Deif in 2003, and Yahya Sinwar was in prison until 2011

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hamas-big-fish-who-got-away-79184d1a?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden warned Israel not to be “consumed by rage,” even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” against Hamas. But revenge isn’t the only anger at play, or even the most corrosive. The fury that’s eating Israel’s war cabinet is regret. No matter how the military responds, there’s a sense that it’s too late.

“We blew it,” Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant, now Israel’s defense minister, told me following a Sept. 6, 2003, airstrike on Hamas leadership. (I was a Washington Post reporter.) Eight senior Hamas commanders, including bomb makers and developers of Qassam rockets, had met for lunch on the ground floor of a Gaza home. It was a rare daylight appearance of Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s shadowy military leader.

“The terrorist dream team” is how Avi Dichter, then head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, described the guest list at the time. Mr. Dichter, Gen. Gallant and other Israeli security officials in the 2003 war room plunged into hours of debate about what size bomb to drop in Gaza, weighing the risks of civilian casualties.

Palestinian children were playing outside the home. It was “a tragic dilemma,” one general said, a lose-lose decision of the sort they had argued and anguished over many times before. Mr. Dichter advocated for an all-out assault. The defense minister at the time called it “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” In the long run, several argued, it would save Israeli and Palestinian lives.

D.C. March Proves How Broad the Pro-Israel Consensus Is in America By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/d-c-march-proves-how-broad-the-pro-israel-consensus-is-in-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

On the menu today: I hope you had a chance to see at least a little bit of yesterday’s D.C. rally in support of Israel and the American Jewish community on the National Mall. The news was not that figures such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, or Iowa GOP senator Joni Ernst gave rousing speeches denouncing antisemitism and pledging to remain steadfast in support of Israel. That’s always good to hear, but we expect that sort of response from them. No, the pleasant surprise was listening to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declare, “Israel has an absolute right to defend itself against Hamas terror,” and actress Debra Messing declare, “We will pray for the success of the IDF in a war Israel did not start, and did not want, but a war Israel will win, because we must.” Some days, the news will leave you feeling like Americans are hopelessly divided about every issue under the sun. But there is a big and broad bipartisan consensus in support of Israel in this country. I just hope that President Biden and his administration realize how fringe the anti-Israel perspectives are.

The Headline I Never Thought I’d Write: Way to Go, Jeffries and Messing!

Right now, it’s easy for a Republican or conservative to say, “Stand with Israel.” Sure, you can find exceptions such as Candace Owens idiotically claiming that Israel restricts Muslims to the “Muslim Quarter” in Jerusalem, Tucker Carlson griping that Speaker Mike Johnson prioritizes Israel too highly, and Vivek Ramaswamy arguing that the GOP’s concern for Israel is driven by “financial and corrupting influences.”

But by and large, folks on the right see a fight between Israel and Hamas and choose to root for Israel, with no hesitations, qualifications, or caveats. Notice the article in the New York Times, November 3: “Jewish viewers find a refuge in Fox News.”

And it is not, as the occasional celebrity progressive activist insists, primarily driven by some esoteric evangelical belief about the rapture or Israel’s role in the apocalypse. It’s because Israel is a free country and most of the people who claim to be fighting on behalf of the Palestinians are barbaric terrorists — so this isn’t a difficult judgment to make. (With that said, I do suspect a decent number of American Christians have traveled to Israel at some point in their lives to see and follow the paths where Jesus walked, and that they likely came away from those trips with an even more positive attitude toward the Israelis.)

When Has War Even Been ‘Proportional?’ Israel’s conventional disproportionality is proving more effective than the terrorist disproportionality of Hamas By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/16/when-has-war-even-been-proportional/

Proportionality in war is a synonym for lethal stalemate, if not defeat.

When two sides go at it with roughly equal forces, weapons, and strategies, the result is often a horrific deadlock—like the four years of toxic trench warfare on the Western Front of World War I that resulted in 12 million fatalities.

The purpose of war is to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible with the least number of causalities—and thereby achieve political ends.

So, every side aims to find superior strategies, tactics, weapons, and manpower to ensure as great a disproportionate advantage as possible.

Hamas is no exception.

Its savage precivilizational strategy to defeat Israel hinged on doing disproportionate things Israel either cannot or will not do.

First, Hamas spent a year planning a preemptive butchery spree inside Israel. Its ruthless murdering focused on “soft targets” like unarmed elderly, women, children, and infants, mostly asleep at a time of peace and holiday.

Second, it sought to collectively shock Israel into paralysis by the sheer horror of decapitating civilians, burning babies, mass raping, and mutilating bodies.

Another apparent aim of such premodern barbarity was to blame Israel’s “occupation” for turning Gazans into veritable monsters, with hopes of derailing the renewed Abraham Accords.

Third, the gunmen took more than 240 hostages back with them to Gaza.

Again, that was a disproportionate tactic designed to meter out the release of captives in exchange for “pauses” and “cease-fires” to save Hamas.

Additionally, Hamas made implicit threats of gruesome executions of captives unless Israel ceased their retaliation for October 7.

Fourth, all the while Hamas shot rockets into Israel, more than 7,000 in total, and all aimed at civilians.

Not one launch was preceded by dropping leaflets or sending text messages to Israeli civilians to vacate the intended target areas—a protocol often used by the Israel Defense Forces.

The unapologetic aim was to kill thousands of Israelis at random and disproportionately.

In fact, in just the last few four weeks, Hamas has launched more than twice as many rockets into Israel as Nazi Germany managed to launch V-2s into Britain in five months.

The Biden Administration’s Dangerous Solutions For Gaza by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20150/biden-gaza-solutions

If Abbas cannot and does not want to fight Hamas in the West Bank, there is no reason to believe that he will do otherwise in the Gaza Strip, where terrorist groups enjoy widespread support…

The assumption that the Palestinian Authority would fight terrorism in the Gaza Strip is completely incorrect and terribly dangerous. As he has already proven in the West Bank, Abbas has no intention of disarming any Palestinian armed group or arresting any terrorist. His preferred policy has always been to try and win over Hamas and other terrorist groups by offering them jobs and handouts as part of a reconciliation agreement that would result in the formation of a Palestinian unity government — in addition to being a perfect reason to ask the international community for money.

If Abbas is allowed to return to the Gaza Strip, he will undoubtedly continue with his policy of appeasement toward Hamas. He is not going to order his security forces to crack down on Hamas: he knows that his people would condemn him to death as a traitor who collaborates with Israel, just as they did with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981.

The Biden administration should think very carefully before floating dangerous ideas. Before talking about the day after the Israel-Hamas war, the administration should first allow Israel to finish the job of eradicating Hamas and other terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian Authority, which pays salaries to terrorists who murder Jews and engages in anti-Israel incitement day-in and day-out, cannot be entrusted with any role in the Gaza Strip.

Biden administration officials believe that the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas, should be brought back to the Gaza Strip after the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group is removed from power.

The officials, including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appear convinced that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank should be unified in the post-Hamas era. On November 9, Blinken was quoted as saying that after the current Israel-Hamas war, the solution must “include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”

Hamas Götterdämmerung Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/11/14/hamas-gotterdammerung-n4923881

They must have felt like gods, the Hamas terrorists who invaded southern Israel on October 7. Indeed, they enjoyed almost godlike powers, first blinding Israel’s remote-control border cameras and then bulldozing through the security fence as though it were hardly there.

All so they could lord their powers over Israeli civilians — raping, torturing, murdering… and not always in that order. The “lucky” Israelis survived long enough to be dragged back to Gaza to be used as human shields and worse.

Hamas even had the ambitions of gods.  A report earlier this week claimed that captured maps and reconnaissance indicated that Hamas had hoped to reach the West Bank, cleaving Israel in two, and sparking a wider war — Armageddon, to borrow a local word with global currency. “If that had occurred, it would have been a huge propaganda win — a symbolic blow not only against Israel but also against the Palestinian Authority,” a U.S. official told the Washington Post.

What a difference a few weeks make because now it’s Israel’s turn.

“Proportionality” is the diplomat’s word for “fair.” “How do we fight this war fairly?” is a question no victor ever asked, and one not being asked by Israel’s government or military. 

IAF jets roam the skies at will, raining death and destruction on the terrorists who briefly fancied themselves as gods. Once thought to be impregnable, Hamas tunnels — dug under hospitals, civilian apartment buildings, and mosques — are now killing grounds for IDF and Hamas alike.

PJ Media’s own Richard Fernandez — or as I like to call him, The Smartest Man in the World™ — tweeted Monday that current reports from Gaza “appear to confirm my earlier estimate that Hamas is collapsing and increasingly focused on individual survival. IDF infantry probably shifting to pursuit and raiding in deeper forays.” 

Israeli Forces Are Reportedly Getting Crucial Intelligence From an Unlikely Source Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/11/13/with-hamas-grip-broken-gaza-civilians-reportedly-providing-israeli-troops-with-valuable-intelligence-n2631087

Israeli forces have cut the Gaza Strip in two, surrounded Gaza City, and are tightening the noose around the reported nerve center of Hamas. Before the ground invasion began on October 28, Israel pounded the strip with artillery and air strikes, killing scores of terrorists and their leaders. Many have hidden in the matrix of tunnels, which has been an operational concern for the IDF. They’re booby-trapped. It’s nearly impossible to see, and some tunnels are 250+ feet underground. So far, Israel has been able to make inroads, but some 30-40,000 Hamas terrorists remain embedded in the strip like ticks. They’ll be uprooted, especially now that re-supply from Iran is now impossible. It will take time. 

Hamas’ grip has loosened enough that scores of civilians have been able to make to make it safety. Terrorists are still shooting at Gazans trying to flee south, but those who have made it to IDF lines have reportedly been providing valuable intelligence on the whereabouts of Hamas hideouts and weapons stashes. The IDF did a leaflet drop, promising financial compensation for any information on the whereabouts of the 200-plus civilians that were taken by Hamas on October 7. Most who replied didn’t want money, just safe passage out of the war zone:

 No doubt there are civilians who hate Hamas.