https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP-CRXROorw
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-persistent-two-state-delusion?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The simmering tensions between Israel and the Biden administration over the plan for post-war Gaza have now come to the boil.
The US is doubling down on its insistence that Gaza must be run by a revamped Palestinian Authority. The Americans are still obsessed with a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
This week, US President Joe Biden told a White House Chanukah reception that there had to be a Palestinian state in the future and that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed to make an effort to strengthen, change and “move” the PA.
Netanyahu riposted that Israel would permit neither Hamas nor the PA to rule Gaza. Israel, he said, would not repeat the “mistake of Oslo,” a reference to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organisation under which control of Gaza and parts of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria were handed over to the newly-created PA.
The previous day, Netanyahu had caused outrage by stating that the Oslo Accords caused as many deaths as the October 7 Hamas massacre, “though over a longer period”.
His enemies immediately claimed that the comparison was invidious, that he was seeking to shrug off any blame for Israel’s vulnerability to the Hamas pogrom and that he was already campaigning to win the general election that many assume will follow the war.
https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2023/12/14/heres-the-real-reason-why-so-many-american-university-students-hate-israel-n4924761
It’s simple, really. Why do so many college and university students hate Israel? Because they know nothing about it, and have bought into the propaganda they’ve been fed.
In the midst of the recent and nationwide demonstrators featuring students (and many others) denouncing Israel for its alleged crimes, Algemeiner reported that “students who care strongly about the ‘Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories’ do not have knowledge of basic facts surrounding the subject, and do not share similar concerns about other geopolitical conflicts.”
This wholly unstartling bit of information was gleaned from a survey of 230 undergraduates at University of California, Berkeley. Ron Hassner, who has the unenviable position of being Berkeley’s Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies, conducted the survey, which began by presenting students with 18 issues and asking them to rate how interested they were in them.
These issues, according to Hassner, included “US-Iran relations, the civil war in Yemen, drone warfare, etc., on a five point scale, ranging from ‘I’m not that interested’ (1 point out of 5) to ‘I care deeply’ (5 points out of 5).” The survey went on from there to ask the respondents a “series of open-ended questions ‘on history, geography, and current affairs.’”F
Forty-three percent of the students were most interested in Israel’s alleged “control of Palestinian territories,” while expressing much less interest in “other Middle East occupations, such as the Kurdish struggle for independence, the occupation of Western Sahara, or the occupation of Northern Cyprus.”
That’s understandable. These indoctrinated bots aren’t inundated daily with self-righteous leftist rubbish about the massive, outrageous, world-historical injustice of the occupation of Western Sahara or Northern Cyprus. In all likelihood, they haven’t even heard of either one.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-israel-palestinian-authority-hamas-benjamin-netanyahu-4628ede4?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
President Biden made headlines by declaring on Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has to change.” As is typical with the President, his subsequent remarks were hard to follow, but many heard them as a call for a new Israeli government coalition willing to jump-start a two-state solution.
It isn’t Mr. Biden’s place to pick Israel’s leaders. Instead, he could try listening to Israelis about the risks of empowering a Palestinian Authority (PA) that has refused to condemn the Hamas massacre. Or he could listen to Palestinians, 72% of whom believe Hamas was right to launch its Oct. 7 attack, according to a new poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. That figure rises to 82% among West Bank Palestinians, who are ruled by the PA, not Hamas.
Mohammad Shtayyeh, the prime minister of the PA, said Sunday that “Hamas is an integral part of the Palestinian mosaic.” The problem is that this is true. That’s why no one in his right mind in Israel thinks of creating a Palestinian state today. Hamas doesn’t want a two-state solution; it wants the final solution.
Israelis are focused on defeating Hamas, a goal the U.S. shares. Mr. Biden was right to say Tuesday that “nobody on God’s green Earth can justify what Hamas did. They’re a brutal, ugly, inhumane people, and they have to be eliminated.” He was also right to stand up for Israel at the United Nations, where the international herd demands a cease-fire.
Israel fights on because it has no other choice if it wants to survive as a state. But many nations see these U.N. votes as consequence-free gestures for peace or solidarity. That a cease-fire now would mean a Hamas victory and the death of Israeli deterrence, bringing on the next massacre and the next war, doesn’t concern them.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/crossing_the_jordan_the_new_antisemitism_and_how_it_will_destroy_the_west.html
As Israel deals with a multi-pronged Hamas-led invasion from the Gaza Strip amidst unwarranted international pressure, Canadian writer David Solway’s scholarly collection of essays, Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam and the West, comes as a timely reminder of how multiplicity in self-identification is undermining Jewish unity. The book, to be released today, December 12, also addresses the idiosyncratic position of Israel among the nations of the world, the threat to liberal Judeo-Christian values posed by Islam, and the Left’s catalysis of the subsuming of Western culture.
Solway is a man of many parts – poet, scholar, teacher, chess enthusiast, education theorist, and literary critic. Born Jewish but not particularly religious or identity-conscious, he underwent a transformation post 9/11. He began to question his rejection of Jewish kinship and asked himself difficult questions that rid him of his Leftist inclinations. Among other things, the book speaks of his epiphanic recognition that the fate of Israel is the fate of every Jew, regardless of nationality or political view. In the light of the October 7 attack – Israel’s 9/11 (equivalent proportionately to seven 9/11s) – this exploration of personal change along with the impersonal twists of history makes for poignant reading.
Why, Solway asks, is Israel the only nation whose right to exist is questioned and threatened? Why is it labeled an occupier and a colonizer when Eretz Yisrael and Judah predate any Arab presence in the Holy Land by more than a thousand years? Why is it the only country that has been pressured to return captured territory after winning wars started by Muslim neighbors who have vowed to eradicate it? Why are its defeated enemies allowed to dictate terms of peace?
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/israels-invisible-victims?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The sickening reaction of so much of the western public to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza doesn’t just reveal a frightening degree of bigotry, double standards and moral bankruptcy. It doesn’t just involve a staggering absence of knowledge about the Middle East, the history of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland and the fact that the forces Israel is fighting are also waging a war against the west itself. It also displays a brutalised callousness based on profound ignorance of Israeli society.
The hostility towards Israel’s military action is based on understandable revulsion at the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza whose homes have been flattened by the Israel Defence Forces. Through relentless, disproportionate and often deeply distorted media coverage, this has eclipsed the brief window of sympathy that opened towards Israeli suffering from the depraved Hamas atrocities of October 7 in which more than 1200 Israeli women, men, children and infants were slaughtered, raped, tortured, decapitated and burned alive by Palestinian Arabs.
In the war that has followed to destroy Hamas, Israel has been portrayed as attacker rather than victim. In fact, the toll of Israel’s victims is steadily mounting. Yet to the west, these victims are invisible.
At time of writing, 433 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, with 104 IDF soldiers killed during ground combat in Gaza so far.
This toll is not just a tragedy for the families of the fallen. Every one of these losses is also experienced as a knife to Israel’s heart. For these young men and women are felt to be the sons and daughters of all of us here in Israel.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oct-7-attack-made-israel-stronger-hamas-palestinians-jewish-state-herzl-4b628804?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Tel Aviv
The Jewish state, and the Zionist movement that sustains it, is emerging from this crisis stronger than before. That’s my conclusion after a week in Israel, traveling to the combat zones in the north and south, touring the Gaza-area kibbutzim that were occupied by Hamas, and meeting with Israelis ranging from senior government officials to survivors of the Oct. 7 attacks struggling to put their lives back together. Israel is more united, its citizens are more determined to fight for their state, and Jews around the world have renewed their commitment to the Zionist cause.
I spoke to Israelis across the political spectrum. From leaders of the pre-Oct. 7 protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to senior officials in the war cabinet, I heard only commitment to supporting the government through the war. Politics isn’t dead in Israel. Protests demanding Mr. Netanyahu’s resignation have resumed, and profound disagreements bubble below the surface. But none of this affects the country’s determination to prosecute the war. Israelis from all political camps are determined to put national security first when the war ends.
Israeli military experts, including critics of the government, think the war is going reasonably well. Casualties are significant, and there is hard slogging ahead, but Israel is on course to inflict defeat on the deranged and misguided Hamas movement. It also is headed toward deeper integration into the Middle East. Arab leaders, who are moving the Arab and Islamic worlds into a brighter future than the fanatics can imagine, appreciate as never before the value of a strong Israel to their own security and prosperity.
Much can still go awry. Iran and its proxies have a vote in what happens next. America’s Middle East policy remains muddled, and the global struggle of revisionist powers against the American-led world system can intersect explosively with Middle East politics. But for now, Israel has rallied from the shock of Oct. 7 and is on track to re-establish deterrence.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/arab-enslavement-black-africans
The Oct. 7 massacre which killed at least 1,200 Jews in Israel is being compared to the mass murders of the Holocaust. But, unlike the Nazis, who hid their crimes and perfected impersonal and mechanized slaughter, Hamas jihadists affixed GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could broadcast themselves exulting in their gory murder of Jewish families, some of whom they decapitated and burned alive.
For those in the Christian world who know about the decades long mass slaughter and enslavement of Black Christians in Sudan, which they call the “hidden Holocaust,” the scenes out of Israel were shockingly familiar. As part of a self-declared jihad which lasted from 1983 to 2005, northern Sudanese Arabs sought to subjugate and enslave the Black Sudanese of the mostly Christian south. The onslaught cost the lives of perhaps 2.5 million Black Sudanese, and the freedom of an estimated 200,000 more. The Arab Muslim government’s jihad utilized kidnapping as its terror weapon of choice, not to mention casual gang rape and mutilation.
One little known but highly detailed report of an Arab Muslim pogrom against Black tribesmen and Christians in Africa during that period shows how eerily similar the anti-Black African jihad raids are to Hamas’ pogrom against Jews. According to the report, just after dawn on March 28, 1987, Arabs from the Rizeigat tribe set upon their Black neighbors in the town of El-Daein, storming their village with axes, gasoline, guns, knives, spears, sticks, and swords, looking to murder people who sought whatever shelter they could. The night before, the raiders had attacked Black members of the Dinka tribe at the local church. Many of the hunted took refuge near the local police station.
Why are these horrors of real-world slavery, with women raped and men kept in chains, based on the color of their skin or their religion, not better understood and publicized in the West?
https://www.newsweek.com/merry-christmas-hanukkah-canceled-opinion-1850487
Anyone still clinging to the belief that there is a difference between hating Jews and wanting Israel to disappear now needs to explain away another inconvenient truth. Scheduled Hanukkah celebrations across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere have been scrapped. The reason cited over and over is that hosting such holiday events would imply support for Israel in its war against the Gaza-based Hamas terrorist organization.
A Hanukkah candle lighting that was due to take place at a music and arts festival in Williamsburg, Virginia, was canceled by the festival’s founder because the lighting of a menorah ‘seemed very inappropriate’ given current events in Israel and Gaza.
Let us conduct a quick thought experiment. Even supposing that holding Jewish people everywhere accountable for Israel’s actions since the Oct. 7 massacre was somehow valid, at what point did a country’s right—obligation—to defend itself against a group that invaded its territory, murdered 1,200 people, kidnapped over 200 men, women, and children, and drove over 200,000 citizens from their homes become ‘inappropriate’?
Moreover, this fear of being seen as siding with Israel over Hamas has not extended to Muslim-themed events and ceremonies in the United States and Canada, which continue to be held. When it comes to Muslim communities residing in these countries, there is a clear line being drawn between Hamas in Gaza and law-abiding citizens in Los Angeles, New York, Virginia, and Toronto exercising their right to worship and assemble as they see fit.
Despite this discrepancy between how two minority groups are being treated, Washington has repeatedly equated the plight of American Jews to that of Muslims living in the United States. Responding to a question about soaring rates of antisemitism and the wave of cancelled Hanukkah celebrations, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre said this week, “We have seen an uptick in hate, just more broadly, in different communities—obviously, also in the Muslim community. And so, we will do everything that we can to make sure that these communities feel safe.”
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/leftist-lunacy-fuels-hamas-atrocity/
Israel’s descent into tragedy at the hands of Hamas reveals America’s descent into idiocy at the hands of the Left. Every anti-Semitic outrage, all the Hamas apologists, each excuse for terrorism — together they reveal that we are not confronting just terrorism alone but an absolutist ideology. The left has prepared the ground in which Hamas and its supporters have sown their hate, and America is witnessing its flowering.
As the aftermath of October 7th continues unfolding, we see mounting examples of leftist arguments defending it. The latest lunacy occurred on Nov. 23 when Sky News’ Kay Burley interviewed Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy about the exchange of 150 Hamas prisoners for 50 Israeli hostages. Burley stated: “I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning…. and he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?”
Shocked temporarily speechless, Levy recovered: “It is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offenses, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don’t care about Palestinian lives? Really, that’s a disgusting accusation.”
Assuredly “disgusting,” the accusation is also disturbing in its revelation of the shallowness to which the left has spiraled this discussion’s descent. Deconstructing the accusation shows that there is no debate — and cannot be one — with the left.
First, it was Hamas that created this vile market for the exchanging of human beings. Hamas abducted 240 innocent Israeli civilians and did so for the clear purpose of doing what it is doing now: obtaining the release of its captured terrorists. And without captured terrorists, there would be no one to exchange Hamas’ hostages for. So, Hamas created both sides of this transaction.
