RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-oct-7-war-one-year-later/

On Oct 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. Their mission was to wipe out the Jewish population in the nearby towns, secure them and use them as forward operating bases for the next phase of the war. While the atrocities they committed in that initial assault, entire families burned alive in their homes, women raped and kidnapped, and babies killed, made it look like a terrorist attack on a large scale, Oct 7 had not been meant as a hit and run operation.

Hamas had risked too much and put too many men in the field for it to be anything other than an invasion. Its plans to continue advancing into Israel appear unrealistic only out of context.

The thousands of terrorists from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah had been meant as the tip of a larger spear. Thousands of Hezbollah and allied terrorists had been in position on Oct 7. Had Hamas been able to hang on to Israeli territory, they would have invaded the Galilee, but after the initial shock and long delays throughout that first day, the Israeli military regrouped.

The Hezbollah invasion was postponed until it was briefly revived by the Islamic terror group around the time of the pager attacks and then shut down by targeted Israeli strikes.

Oct 7 had been Hezbollah’s plan before it was executed by Hamas. Hezbollah had even spent years boasting about using its network of tunnels to invade and conquer the Galilee, but the funding and plans had come out of Tehran. Yet when push came to shove, Hezbollah hesitated.

Iran had planned for an Oct 7 that would have dealt a catastrophic blow to Israel. The original plot would have seen coordinated Hamas and Hezbollah invasions backed by heavy rocket campaigns not only by Hezbollah, but by the Houthis in Yemen and Iran’s militias in Iraq targeting Israeli bases, military assets and infrastructure. Terror groups in the West Bank would have launched their own assaults creating a multi-front guerrilla war deep inside Israel. Even if Israel had beaten back the attacks, many of the Jewish communities would have been in ashes.

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/let-israel-decide-how-to-respond-to-irans-missile-attack/

President Biden pushes Israel not to respond to Iran’s ballistic missile attack by targeting its nuclear or oil sites, while former President Trump blasts Biden and suggests that, in fact, Israel should hit Iran’s nuclear sites.

Their public disagreement over Israel’s proper course reminds us that, notwithstanding Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s dictum of the early Cold War years that politics should stop “at the water’s edge,” it rarely has.

Presidents have long shaped their foreign policy with domestic politics in mind. FDR promised the nation just days before his re-election in 1940 that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” though he knew that America’s entry into World War II was both necessary and inevitable. JFK planned to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam but not until his second term, fearing an earlier withdrawal would ignite a “who lost Vietnam” backlash that threatened his re-election in 1964.

Now, a month before our Election Day, Israel is battling Iran and its terror proxies on multiple fronts, civilian lives are at risk in multiple nations, global leaders are pushing for ceasefires and “de-escalation,” and Vice President Kamala Harris is battling Trump for Jewish and Muslim votes in a razor-close contest.

But, however understandable in political terms, Biden and Trump’s comments are nevertheless badly misguided in geopolitical terms because they undercut our closest regional ally at an ominous moment.

Consider, by way of historical example, the absurdity of such public counsel to any nation under siege.

“We shall carry the attack against the enemy,” FDR told Congress a month after Pearl Harbor, with nearly 2,500 service members and civilians dead and the United States now at war with both Japan and Germany. “We shall hit him and hit him again wherever and whenever we can reach him.”

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.

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.

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.

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.