RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-mourns-and-prepares-for-war-hamas-terrorism-gaza-9dbb21bf?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Kfar Aza, Israel

By the time I enter this community adjacent to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army has removed most of the bodies. I am with a unit of the rescue organization Zaka, whose job is to retrieve parts missing from the bodies of the dead so that they can be made whole and given a proper Jewish burial.

The unit consists of civilians and military personnel, secular and Orthodox Jews. On a coffee break, they sit in a circle on plastic chairs on the patio of a sacked farm that serves as the unit’s headquarters. Some complain about their government’s negligence. One counters that no government can stop the madness of a mob.

The atmosphere of brotherhood contrasts with the recent months of civil struggle. Now, the only thing that counts is the holy task of combing through houses to recover a piece of blackened flesh, an intact foot still in its shoe, a trace of DNA, a bloodstain.

We freeze suddenly when someone finds the body of a jihadist that we fear may be booby-trapped. Then comes a moment of panic because it seems two terrorists might have just entered through a new breach in the security fence nearby, or the old one but now enlarged—no one knows.

We spot a drone in the sky, like a sparrow hawk. Mingling with its wasp-like buzzing are the sounds of dull explosions. A combat unit in assault gear emerges and takes its position. Some soldiers kneel; others climb to the roofs; still others move to the severed security barrier, from which appears a shower of sparks.

I am led into a house with shattered windows. Its inhabitants were murdered, their hands tied behind their backs, shot and in some cases finished off with a knife. I remain for two hours with nothing to do but listen to a surviving neighbor recount the attack. Over and over, he leads me through the rooms of this theater of torture.

The plaster ceilings chipped by shooting. The bullet-riddled walls. The beige sofa that an explosion raised off the ground and sent flying into the broken bay window. The parents’ room, with its unmade bed, hair curlers, worn slippers. The children’s room, with an open coloring book and a battery-powered cat meowing periodically. In the kitchen, an intact bowl of hot chocolate, a toaster, a bottle of cough syrup, a plush toy, an overturned laundry basket. And, at the end of a right-angled hallway, the safe room that the attackers opened by blowing it up with a grenade, leaving nothing but chunks of concrete, bloodied iron reinforcing and empty hinges opening and closing on nothing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-iran-and-the-awful-arithmetic/

In response to the savage mayhem wrought by Hamas on Israeli citizens, Israel has called up 300,000 reserves and begun punitive operations in Gaza. Their mission is to make good on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grim statement, “Every Hamas terrorist is a dead man,” and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s pledge “we will wipe them off the face of the Earth.”

Leftist activists in the U.S. and Europe, of course, have been trying to undermine the resolve of Israel and its allies. The functionally anti-Semitic UN has declared that Israel’s attempt to save Gazans’ lives by evacuating them is illegal under international law. Meanwhile  Israel’s enemies deploy duplicitous clichés like “disproportionate response” and “war crimes,” and call for “restraint,” while displaying a concern for the aggressor’s civilian casualties and misery brought on by Hamas’ depredations—a concern seldom shown for the Israeli dead, except when making the equally despicable claims of moral equivalence between the victims with their murderers, thus ignoring the question of who is responsible for the conflict.

Expect these rhetorical attacks on Israel’s morale to become more frequent and strident as the operation continues and gets more violent. In this age of hypersensitive “snowflakes,” incontinent “virtue-signalers,” and “safe spaces,” such efforts can bear fruit that poisons resolve. That’s why the West needs to stiffen its realist spine, and accept the tragic “awful arithmetic” necessary in war.

This phrase is attributed to Abraham Lincoln in 1862 during a string of victories by smaller Confederate forces. Lincoln believed that Union generals were too protective of their men and too risk-averse. He needed a general who understood the “awful arithmetic”: given the North’s big advantage in manpower, it could lose a third more men than the Confederates and still prevail over a passionate enemy that would not surrender easily. Lincoln found that general in Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1864 relentlessly marched to Richmond and victory, all the way fighting grisly and costly battles like Cold Harbor, which cost 1844 Union dead to the South’s 83.

In World War II, the “awful arithmetic” was even more tragic, as it included whole cities filled with women and children who were killed in the area bombings of Germany and Japan––between 700,000 and 1.2 million. Today many historians argue that such slaughter was unnecessary, just as no doubt many Northerners believed was the waste of their sons’, husbands’, and fathers’ lives by the “butcher” Grant.

We’ll never know if the fanatical, murderous regimes in Germany and Japan could have been neutralized any other way, or if the Allied soldiers and citizens who had to fight the sadistic racist enemy would have been willing to sacrifice many more thousands of their own people’s lives in order to spare the enemies’ non-combatants. What we do know is that Germany and Japan were utterly defeated, and have been good, peaceful global citizens for the last 75 years.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20067/hamas-hypocrisy-arab-muslim-leaders

Notably, some of the Arab and Muslim states and their leaders who are pointing the finger of blame at Israel have not hesitated to take punitive measures against Hamas when they themselves felt threatened… In the eyes of these rulers, it is fine for Arabs to punish Hamas, but it is not fine for Israel to respond to the worst atrocity ever committed against its citizens.

The Palestinian Authority (PA)… appears to have forgotten about the violent and bloody coup Hamas carried out in the summer of 2007. Then, Hamas killed and injured hundreds of PA loyalists, some of whom were tossed from rooftops of buildings throughout the Gaza Strip.

This is the same Abbas who is now afraid, or unwilling, to hold Hamas responsible for the outbreak of the war…. Abbas has good reason to avoid overt criticism of Hamas. He is aware of the pro-Hamas demonstrations in the West Bank… where demonstrators chanted slogans calling for toppling the Palestinian Authority leadership.

The Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians, who are now condemning Israel for targeting Hamas, have not hesitated to confront Hamas when it threatened their national security.

In 2014, an Egyptian court declared Hamas, an off-shoot of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood organization, a “terrorist organization.”

In 1999, Jordan, whose leaders have also refrained from denouncing Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis, expelled the terror group’s political leaders from the country.

These rulers now find it awkward to come out against the same terrorists with whom they have been meeting.

None of these rulers has ever taken a single step to help the Palestinians get relief from Hamas’s human rights violations against the people living under their brutal rule in the Gaza Strip….. When these rulers were unhappy with Hamas, they expelled its leaders, shut their offices and outlawed its armed wing.

Now that Hamas has brought down hell on two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, perhaps these Arab and Muslim rulers will finally decide whose side are they on. Will they continue to embrace the very Hamas they have targeted for threatening them and their regimes, or will stand with those who — on their behalf as well — are defending themselves against Iran and its proxies?

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-my-phone-says-2023?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

My smartphone says it’s October 2023, but in Israel it feels like 1948. 

That was the year this country was established as 600,000 Jews fought the combined might of the Arab world three years after the genocide in Europe. You can still feel that war in the air and underbrush of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek in northern Israel, where I traveled this week, passing trucks carrying tanks and armored bulldozers south toward the battle zone around Gaza.  

For Israelis, the name Mishmar Ha’emek evokes 1948—an equivalent of Valley Forge, perhaps, or Gettysburg. The kibbutz is famous for holding out against the superior forces of the Arab Liberation Army in April 1948, helping create the fighting ethos of Israel’s military and the Zionist principle that Jews will never again abandon their homes. On one edge of the kibbutz is a historic site commemorating the Palmach, the militia that helped decide the battle. Amid the trees and bushes of the peaceful cemetery here are graves of people like Moshe Formansky, 41, and Rafael Altberg, 21, killed 75 years ago in the war that created a Jewish state, and then never really ended.  

I’d come here not to revisit history, but to speak to members of another kibbutz, Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border a few hours’ drive to the south—those members, that is, who weren’t killed or kidnapped by Hamas in the massacre of October 7. The evacuees have relocated here, and the locals are doing their best to house and entertain them. When I arrived, the children of Nahal Oz were indoors, squealing at a snake show arranged by volunteers. Outside, their hollow-eyed parents walked the paths. Across a lawn, a few dozen people sat shiva for a friend, Ilan Fiorentino, killed in the assault. 

At first I thought the historical reference for the current horror in Israel would be the Yom Kippur War, which began 50 years earlier almost to the day, on October 6, 1973. In that war Israel was surprised by Egypt and Syria on a Jewish holiday, as was the case last week. But the year that keeps cropping up is 1948.

The slaughter and arson in Nahal Oz and elsewhere, one evacuee told me, was an attempt to “do to us what they think we did to them in 1948”—a reference to the flight of Palestinian refugees from territories that became our state. Amir Tibon, a colleague from the newspaper Haaretz, who was trapped with his wife and children in their home as Hamas soldiers tried to break in and kill them, wrote that the initial defense of the kibbutz by a handful of Border Police troops facing dozens of Hamas fighters was “the few against the many, like 1948.”

https://thespectator.com/topic/lie-halfway-world-gaza-hospital-israel/

The charge damning Israel with bombing a hospital in Gaza has circled the globe at lightning speed, time and again. But slowly the truth is getting its pants on.

The evidence is increasingly clear that Israeli Defense Forces did not bomb a hospital in Gaza, either deliberately or inadvertently. A video, now publicly available, shows the rocket coming from inside Gaza, not from outside or from a plane. CNN has had experts confirm that analysis. The US has confirmed that point with sensitive (and still secret) signals-intelligence. So has Israeli intelligence, independent of the US. There is also at least one captured phone call among jihadists acknowledging that the rocket was fired from inside Gaza. That, too, is publicly available. We also know that almost one third of the rockets launched from Gaza, either by Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad, misfire and explode within their own territory. (Israel says this rocket was fired by Islamic Jihad.) So, the evidence is strong and mounting that Israel was not responsible for this deadly attack on civilians.

Still, it’s crucial to nail down all the facts before reaching a firm conclusion. Anyone who remembers secretary of state Colin Powell telling the United Nations that Saddam Hussein definitely, absolutely, certainly had weapons of mass destruction can be excused for waiting until all the evidence is in, the conclusions confirmed, the objections refuted by sources without an ax to grind.

Currently, the best judgment by intelligence professionals is that the deadly rocket was fired by a terrorist group from inside Gaza. They are confident in that conclusion and the evidence on which they base it. (Of course, the source of the rockets doesn’t lessen the human tragedy. Innocent people were killed.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20065/hamas-israel-inside-job

There have been two kinds of conspiracy theories circulated by ‘truthers’ after the Hamas massacre of Israelis.

The first kind essentially denies there was an attack or nitpicks the details. Those arguments are made in obvious bad faith by people who simply hate Israel and side with the terrorists. Any evidence presented to them is dismissed as fake.

The second kind of conspiracy theory is of the “inside job” variety most often involving a “stand down” order that allowed Hamas to massacre over 1,000 people without any military intervention. Some of the people pushing this stuff are the usual suspects, alt-righters and anti-semites, some of it’s coming from anti-war leftists and libertarians who treat every war as a vast conspiracy, and some from fringe figures in Israel.

The idea that Prime Minister Netanyahu or top generals would have issued a “stand down” (apart from being horrifying) makes no sense. Before this attack, he was the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history. Now he’s been forced to join a unity government and polls show that most Israelis want him to resign. His political career may be over. Likewise that of the top generals. In Israel, they transition into politics. That is a whole lot less likely to happen now.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War disaster tanked Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan despite their heroic stature. There’s no political gain to letting the enemy murder over a thousand of your people in a preventable attack.

Finally, Israel is a small country. A whole lot of people know each other and are related or friends with each other. This conspiracy theory requires you to believe that military personnel who had friends and family living in these communities decided to ignore calls for help and sit around playing cards while they were being butchered. Not to mention ignore attacks on their own bases and allow their fellow military personnel to be murdered, tortured, and taken hostage.

https://thespectator.com/topic/palestinians-plo-yasser-arafat-soviets/

It’s so cute when politicians like AOC and Rashida Tlaib, to say nothing of hysteric undergraduates and ill-informed lefties across the country, complain that Israel is an “apartheid state” that is illegitimately “occupying” the land West of the Jordan River from the Golan Heights down to the border of the Sinai Peninsula. 

Responding to the murderous attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, AOC decried “the occupation of Palestine” while Tlaib urged “ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system” that can “lead to resistance.”

Hermeneuts of the world, unite! What does Tlaib mean by “resistance” here? Slaughtering innocent partygoers? Incinerating and beheading babies? Indiscriminately raping then murdering hostages? And what is the force of “lead to”? Is it meant to suggest that Israel is somehow to blame for such acts of “resistance” because — because why? Because the Jewish people occupy the place that was 1) their ancestral homeland and 2) with which they were reinvested by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, by the victorious Brits after World War One and and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, explicitly to provide a “national home for the Jewish people,” and 3) by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948?

What group of people do they think belongs there?  

“Palestinians” is the usual answer.  But who or what are the “Palestinians”?“People from Palestine,” you say.  But what is Palestine?

From time immemorial, Jews occupied the spot history knows as “Judaea.” What happened to that? Gibbon said that Hadrian, who ruled from AD 117 to 138, was one of the “five good emperors.”  Maybe so, but there is a reason that the Jews proverbially accompanied any mention of Hadrian with the imprecation, “May God crush his bones.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gaza-aid-unrwa-united-nations-hamas-israel-45bfbfe?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

On Tuesday a blast at a hospital in Gaza City reportedly killed hundreds of people. Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike. The Israel Defense Forces said it was a failed missile from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a local proxy of Iran. About a quarter of Hamas and PIJ rockets fired in previous wars have fallen short and landed in Gaza. More details will come, but blowing up a hospital isn’t in Israel’s interest.

Hamas courts Palestinian casualties, knowing that it can blame Israel whenever the aftermath of its misfired rockets or human shields ends up on the news. Hamas shows such little concern for Gazans that it has long stolen their humanitarian aid. It’s another way the terrorist group uses Palestinian civilians, playing on Western sympathy to advance its jihadist brutality.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as Unrwa, took to Twitter on Monday: “@UNRWA received reports that yesterday a group of people with trucks purporting to be from the Ministry of Health of the de facto authorities in #Gaza, removed fuel and medical equipment from the Agency’s compound in #GazaCity.”

But hours later something strange happened: Unrwa deleted its tweet and said nothing was amiss. “With regards to reports on social media of looting of an UNRWA warehouse,” it wrote, leaving out that the reports had been its own, “UNRWA would like to confirm that no looting has taken place.” The agency didn’t reply to requests for comment.

Unrwa can pretend it never said what it said, but U.N. sources told Israel’s Walla News that the aid was stolen, and Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians reports that 24,000 liters of fuel and medical supplies went to Hamas, whose underground bases use diesel generators.

Washington covers that tab. Since President Biden restored aid that was blocked by President Trump, the U.S. has been Unrwa’s largest donor, at $344 million in 2022.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/all-options-grim

On October 7, thousands of Hamas terrorists together murdered over 1,300 Israelis in villages near the border of the Gaza Strip. Most of their victims were civilians. Among their infamies, the terrorists torched the homes of families hiding in in-home bomb shelters, burning the families to death; they killed 260 partygoers at a music festival and raped many of the young women in attendance; and they took some 200 Israelis into captivity in Gaza, including toddlers and grandmothers. All told, Hamas was responsible for the largest and most horrific attack on Jews since the Holocaust ended in 1945.

Two days after Hamas’s murderous raids, Israel announced that it was shutting off the Gaza Strip’s water, gas, and electricity supplies. World leaders soon warned that the Israelis were creating an “untenable” humanitarian crisis in Gaza, while a European Union official condemned Israel’s “indiscriminate attack on civilians.” In response to American and international pressure, Israel partially restored the strip’s water supply.

What does the civilized world want Israel to do? Since the attack, Israel has launched thousands of air raids on Gaza, destroying key elements of Hamas military infrastructure. Meanwhile, Hamas showers the Israeli populace (that is, random civilian targets) with its own rocket attacks. Israel’s air power is far superior to Hamas’s, but Israel does not desire, and would not benefit from, a protracted rocket war. Israel left Gaza in 2005, and Hamas took over the strip from the Palestinian Authority through a violent coup in 2007. In the years since, Hamas has instigated conflicts with Israel in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, launching intermittent rocket strikes to terrorize Israeli citizens in-between. The Jewish state’s response should be that of any normal country: to end its enemy’s ability to threaten it.

Israel has urged civilians to leave the northern region of the Gaza Strip, providing safety corridors to southern Gaza. Hamas leaders, however, have urged and sometimes forced Palestinians to stay in the danger zone, placing large obstacles on the evacuation roads; the IDF claims that Hamas explosives killed 70 fleeing refugees. These actions are in keeping with Hamas’s long-standing tactic of embedding its fighters within crowded civilian neighborhoods, resulting in the inevitable deaths of many noncombatants.

Regional actors such as Egypt (which refuses to open its borders to Gazan refugees) and superpowers like China have argued that Israel’s approach has shifted from one of self-defense to one of “collective punishment.” Human Rights Watch claims Israel’s response, and the sheer number of resulting Gazan casualties, will likely by itself constitute a war crime. Even the United States, whose government has been supportive of its ally, has cautioned Israel that it can’t tolerate excessive civilian casualties.

The Biden administration’s warning highlights the Jewish state’s precarious position. Absent a popular Gazan uprising against Hamas, Israel won’t be able to uproot the threat against it without incurring significant civilian casualties.