RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/it-aint-over-til-its-over/

Marking on Sunday six months since the Oct. 7 massacre, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his weekly Cabinet meeting by listing what he called the “considerable achievements” of the war in Gaza.

“We have eliminated 19 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, including senior commanders,” he said. “We have killed, wounded or captured a large number of Hamas terrorists. We have cleared out Shifa [Hospital in Gaza City] and other terrorist command centers.”

He went on, “We have destroyed rocket factories, command centers and weapons caches. And we are continuing to systematically destroy underground installations.”

Netanyahu punctuated the impressive inventory by stating, “We are a step away from victory.”

Encouraging words, to be sure. Yet, to everyone’s surprise, they were followed by a withdrawal of most of the Israel Defense Forces ground troops from southern Gaza, after four months of fighting in Khan Yunis.

As soon as the IDF announced the pullback, I began receiving frantic calls from abroad and WhatsApp messages at home requesting my take on the move.

“Does it mean that the war is over?” some asked. “Has Israel capitulated to pressure from the White House for a ceasefire with nothing in return?”

Others wanted to know whether Netanyahu and his War Cabinet—despite their repeated assertions—had decided against entering Rafah, where four of the six remaining Hamas battalions are located, along with many of the 133 hostages.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20559/biden-sabotaging-peace-israel-saudi-arabia

Recently, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after meeting with [Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed] bin Salman that there is “good progress” on Saudi Arabia-Israel normalization talks. “I believe we can reach an agreement which would present an historic opportunity… We had a very good discussion about the work that we’ve been doing for many months now on normalization, and that work is moving forward. We’re continuing to make good progress.”

[T]here is good reason to believe that the Saudis will eventually agree to normalize their relations with Israel. In order for that to happen, however, Hamas, which is strongly opposed to any peace with Israel and does not recognize its right to exist, must be defeated and eradicated.

It is no secret that Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries despise Hamas and consider it a threat to their own national security….

There is no doubt that the Saudis, together with the UAE, Bahrain and the even the Palestinian Authority, are quietly praying for Israel to finish the job and get rid of Hamas. These Arabs, understandably, cannot express their views in public lest they be accused of “colluding” with Israel.

Arab states are motivated to sign peace treaties with Israel when they see Israel as a winner.

By pressuring Israel not to invade Rafah, the US administration is sabotaging its own efforts to persuade Saudi Arabia to normalize its ties with Israel…

By demanding that Israel refrain from entering Rafah, the Biden administration is actually asking Israel to forget about recovering the 130 hostages being raped and tortured by Hamas every day — which still include six Americans – and to lose the war. This is something that neither Israel nor Hamas’s Arab enemies — nor even Biden — can afford to accept.

When the Iran-backed Hamas terror group invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, it not only sought to kill and kidnap Israelis. The group and its patrons in Tehran undoubtedly had other goals in mind, such as thwarting US-sponsored efforts to achieve normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, Hamas has so far been unsuccessful in achieving this goal. In addition, Hamas has failed to drive a wedge between Israel and the Arab countries that have peace treaties with it: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. None of these countries has cut off its diplomatic relations with Israel, despite their harsh criticism of Israel over the war in the Gaza Strip and pressure from the Arab street.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/unfriendly-fire/

Last week Israel mistakenly attacked with missiles a humanitarian convoy in Gaza, killing seven aid workers. As they have done for eight decades, Israel’s international enemies and alleged friends across the world immediately started demonizing Israel and accusing the IDF of intentionally targeting the aid workers. Biden also suggested just that when he said, “Even more tragically, this is not a standalone incident,” adding that the war in Gaza “has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed.”

Of course, Biden claims as well that Israel’s alleged callous indifference to the lives and well-being of civilians and aid workers “is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult—because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers.”

Sadly, such unjust reactions and mendacious slurs against Israel have been unexceptional for decades. And only Israel faces incessant criticism over the mistakes and miscalculations that are the tragic, eternal contingencies of war.

In every battlefield throughout history, fighters have had to face the “fog of war”–– the chaos, uncertainty, unforeseen consequences, mistaken intel, dubious tactics, mediocre leadership, faulty training and discipline, plus terror, panic, and a “thousand shapes of death,” as the Roman poet Vergil described the brutal sack of Troy. These all lead to inadvertently killing one’s own troops or civilians.

Moreover, these grim constants of armed combat are multiplied and intensified in unconventional guerilla wars, especially in the complex landscape of towns and cities, where terrorists like Hamas shelter, spring ambushes, hide explosives, store armaments, use civilians of every age and sex as human shields, and employ humanitarian aid vehicles and ambulances to transport killers.

But over the last century, these historical realities of war have come to be understood as residues from more primitive and savage times, anomalies that modernity fancies can be corrected and mitigated with international laws, multinational covenants, institutions like the Red Cross, self-defeating “rules of engagement,” diplomatic intervention, and the conversion of illiberal autocracies into liberal democracies that acknowledge universal human rights and humanitarian restraints on war-making.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20560/us-saving-hamas

Had the Biden administration maintained the strong support for the destruction of Hamas that it showed in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7, the fighting might already have subsided and all the hostages been returned. But every time the Biden administration weakens its support for Israel, it strengthens the determination of Hamas to raise its demands and threaten Israel, to the point that Israel cannot possibly agree.

Where are the threats and the pressure on Hamas, Qatar or Iran?

Although Hamas praised — indeed celebrated — the resolution, it has no intention of complying with its demand regarding hostages. Yet, it expects Israel to comply unilaterally with what is demanded of it.

Recent data show that it is not Israel that causing hunger in Gaza, it is Hamas: “Hamas, which has been hoarding food and stealing from Gazans, is the root cause of Gazans’ suffering.”

[Hamas] must be required to surrender and the people of Gaza must be de-radicalized. Any other endgame will only postpone a repetition of October 7. Except this time, with calls this week for “Death to America” from within the United States, just as terrorism came to a theater near Putin, this time it may be coming to a theater near you.

The Biden administration’s drift away from full support for Israel will cost more Palestinian and Israeli lives. It will encourage Hamas to keep fighting and to keep rejecting proposals for the return of hostages in exchange for a humanitarian cease-fire. It will persuade Hamas that it can win its war, weaken Israel and create distance between the US and Israel.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/genocide-is-not-a-vibe/

“If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so,” Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren told an audience at an Islamic Center of Boston event last week.

The “they” in this sentence refers to the International Court of Justice. But because the United States is not party to the charter that created the ICJ, and Israel does not recognize the court’s authority, “they” was not the operative word in Warren’s comments. It wasn’t even “genocide,” which has enough rhetorical force that it dominated the headlines that graced reports about her remarks. Rather, the most important and most revealing word in her statement was “believe.”

In the end, Warren did not have the courage of her own stated convictions. According to her office, the senator was “not sharing her views on whether genocide is occurring in Gaza.” Rather, she was merely commenting dispassionately on the ongoing fact-finding process at The Hague. That’s hard to believe.

For months, Warren has supported the idea of conditioning aid to Israel on terms designed to punish “a right-wing government” in Jerusalem “that’s demonstrated an appalling disregard for Palestinian lives.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has engineered a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip by showing no respect for “civilian life,” she said in a highly publicized Senate speech. In that speech, she maintained that “the Israeli government must stop the bombing in Gaza” regardless of the status of Hamas — presumably because, in her view, Hamas’s survival represents the lesser of two evils. If Warren has convinced herself of that, why wouldn’t she also attribute to Israel the crimes of which Hamas is guilty?

We can only assume that Warren’s staff felt it was necessary to walk back her allegations of “genocide” not because those aren’t her true feelings but because the word has a legal definition and Israel’s conduct doesn’t come close to meeting it.