Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, November 05, 2024

The Washington Post map that proves Israel is targeting Hezbollah targets, not Lebanese buildings

Last week, the Washington Post published this map showing different municipalities in southern Lebanon near the border with Israel and what percentage of buildings in each town have been destroyed.

Right smack in the middle of the most heavily damaged towns is a section that is untouched - and unlabeled.

That is the town of Rmeish (Rmaych, Rmeich.) It is one of the few Christian towns in southern Lebanon.

Occupying a mountain ridge, Rmeish is the perfect place from which to launch rockets and Kornet anti-tank missiles at Israeli targets.

And for the past year (and longer), it has resisted allowing Hezbollah to infiltrate to fire at Israel from there, let alone use it as a staging area for an invasion.

Spiegel International reported

As long as Hezbollah doesn’t try to station their artillery and rocket launching ramps in Rmaych, Israel’s army doesn’t fire on the town. Even if its location directly across from Israeli positions makes it a tragically perfect spot for Hezbollah to shoot from.

To prevent them from doing exactly that, patrols made up of Rmaych residents head out at nighttime. They report every car not from the village, every movement. At the same time, though, the town and the church try to avoid being seen as sympathetic to Israel.

In March, residents saw a car of Hezbollah members who, they say, were going to fire rockets into Israel from there. After an altercation the Hezbollah members were chased out.

In 2022, Hezbollah tried to set up one of its fake NGO "Green Without Borders" outposts on Rmeish land, and again the residents made a stink and got the outpost to be dismantled.

To be fair, Israel has asked the residents of Rmeish to evacuate, probably because it is a strategic location that Israel cannot allow to fall into Hezbollah hands. It it in a semicircular section of the border that can view (and fire upon) Israel on three sides.

The residents are refusing to leave, and Israel has not forced them to.

So why are there so few stories about Rmeish in Western media? It seems tailor made for audiences - a heroic minority standing up to two major powers and staying in their homes.

It isn't like the reporters don't know about it. On the contrary, they station themselves in the main hotel there because they know it is the safest part of southern Lebanon!

. But that doesn't stop the reporters from engaging in their own theatrics.

Only Abu Jad, owner of the Mountain Gate Hotel, has been doing well financially – not despite the crisis, but because of it. His vast terrace with a swimming pool offers a panoramic view of the neighboring village of Ayta ash-Shab to the west, which is now being targeted by the Israelis on an almost daily basis. All 11 rooms are occupied and booked out for the next several weeks by international television crews, who leave their tripods in place as they wait for the next dramatic detonations. Every hour or two, a reporter dons a helmet and protective vest before standing in front of the camera to deliver an update on the situation. The shorts and sandals are off screen, of course.

The Washington Post and all other media know very well that Israel is attacking Hezbollah and Hezbollah only. They don't want to report it because they are wedded to the narrative that Israel is wantonly destroying buildings for no reason.

Rmeish proves their narrative wrong.

(h/t antisemitismtoday on Instagram)

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Iranian warmongering against Israel hits new levels. I don't see how a war can be avoided. Israel may have no choice but a massive pre-emptive attack.

Iran's state-owned Arabic news media site Al Alam wrote on Monday that Iran's supreme leader Khamenei has promised to attack Israel.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said most of the political and military leaders in Iran, headed by the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei have decided: The decision to respond has been made, and it is only a matter of time, and there is no doubt about that.

...The next response, which will come under the title “ True Promise 3,” will be shocking, devastating and beyond the enemy’s imagination. It should think a thousand times before firing even a single bullet towards the Iranian desert.

...The response will be many times stronger than the response that the world witnessed in “True Promise 2”, without any concern for the date of the American elections. The response may come on election night, election day, or after the elections.

Iran reportedly told Arab nations to prepare for a major attack that will pass over their skies, using drones, missiles and other weapons, with higher payloads than they have used to far - analysts say as large as 1,500 kilograms.

The Al Alam channel has recently published graphics of missiles that Iran says it might use to target Israel.

On October 31, the graphic was for the "Khaybar buster," the perennial reference to Mohammed's defeat and ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Gulf.

The one that was published this week is called the Hajj Qasem, which Iran says was specifically designed to target Israel.

In the first days after Israel's Operation Days of Repentance, it looked like Iran would shrug it off, deny any damage and pretend it won. But now - seemingly because the Israeli attack killed members of the Iranian conventional armed forces (Artesh) - Iran is signaling a major response.

Once again, it is necessary to look at this through an honor/shame prism. Just as with Lebanon, there was little chance of avoiding a war as long as Hezbollah kept the mindset of maintaining its "honor," so does Iran. Each retaliation must be calibrated to appear bigger than the previous one.

That same "honor" ensures that Iran is not bluffing. Calling the operation True Promise 3 means that it must attack; if it doesn't it looks not only weak but like a liar.

As we saw with the previous Iranian attacks, while Israel (and the US) anti-missile defenses are pretty good, at least several missiles made it through. They aren't close to 100% coverage for ballistic missiles. All it will take is for one missile, purposeful or errant, to inflict mass casualties. I'm no expert but I believe that it a one ton payload would destroy a moderate size apartment building and heavily damage those buildings surrounding it. If that happens, God forbid, there will be a war - a strange long distance war that hops over countries that don't want to be involved but are powerless to stop it.

There was a theoretical, honorable way for Hezbollah to climb down from the tree that was leading to war, but I cannot see any such way for Iran to stop its aggression and ever-increasing set of attacks and counter-attacks. Israel has a far superior air force but that is not enough to protect Israelis when Iran decides to directly attack Haifa or Tel Aviv with rockets that have payloads of half a ton or more.

Once Iran promises to attack, and puts its own honor on the line, there is no chance that diplomacy or threats will deter them.

The only way I can see to minimize Israeli casualties is a pre-emptive attack by Israel that destroys large parts of Iran's missile inventory before they can be fired. This is pretty much what Israel has been doing with Hezbollah. There are reports that Israel is considering such a scenario.

A secondary question is whether a pre-emptive Israeli attack to hobble Iran's missiles and drones on the ground is legal under international law. Iran's promise to attack is not enough on its own, and since it is open-ended as far as timing, it makes the critical criterion of "imminence" to pre-emptively attack difficult to prove. Nevertheless, a combination of Iranian threats, reported Iranian informing its neighbors of an attack, intelligence showing Iran moving its missiles to more advantageous positions, breakdown of diplomatic attempts to forestall an attack, and similar evidence should be enough to prove that a pre-emptive action is self defense. Obviously, most of the world will call Israel the aggressor no matter what it does, but it still must have good documentation of strong evidence that an Iranian attack is imminent to support such a decision in the media and, possibly, in a courtroom.

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11/04 Links Pt2: Israeli anxiety, America and the ayatollahs; Who made antisemitism a partisan issue? Chuck Schumer; Pro-Palestinians seek to undermine US from within

From Ian:

Not two sides of the same coin

Modern political Zionism is unique in that its values are ancient. The axiom that the Jewish people deserve to live in and govern the Land of Israel comes from the Jewish people’s 4,000-year connection to the land. For the last 3,000 years, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Land of Israel.

This is in contrast to the Palestinians whose ancestors, the Arab people, arrived in the Land of Israel, then renamed by the Romans as Palestine, 1,300 years ago. The largest influx of Arabs into the Land of Israel actually occurred after Jewish Zionists began their return to the land in the late 1800s. Zionist investment and infrastructure improvements encouraged poor Arabs from surrounding lands to immigrate to Palestine. So, while Zionism is the modern fight for an ancient longing, Palestinian nationalism only began recently and arguably only as a response to Zionism.

Another significant difference between the two is that Zionism’s foundation is based on democratic values, peace and sharing the land with others. Juxtapose Zionist values with the values of the Palestinian nationalist movement, which is based on exclusivity to the land and the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, and the contrast is obvious. Even when Palestinians have spoken of agreeing to an Israeli state, they don’t acknowledge it as a Jewish state, arousing suspicion that their true intention isn’t to allow for a Zionist and Jewish state, but a democratic state they can win over through demographically challenging the Jewish nature of the State of Israel.

Zionism began as a peaceful movement that reached out to its opponents and enemies. Israel’s declaration of independence calls for peace with Arabs inside and outside of Israel’s borders. Palestinian nationalism has proven to be an intolerant movement set on a violent culture. While calling Zionists peaceful and Palestinians violent is a gross generalization, there are outliers on both sides.

Palestinian nationalism didn’t have to be inherently anti-Jewish and anti-Israel. It can stand for the self-determination of its people on its own land without expressing hate for the Jewish people. Zionism did exactly that, expressing its hope for a Jewish state on the Jewish people’s historic homeland without hate towards the Arabs living on the land.

For peace to overtake battle, there must be a meeting of the two nationalist movements to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For that to happen, the first thing that must change is the hateful nature of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Until it begins to transform into a more Zionist-like movement that inspires tolerance and acceptance, there will never be peace between the two peoples, and Palestinian nationalists will never achieve their goal of an independent state.

'Hamas doesn't want peace': Bill Clinton defends Israel, discusses peace work at rally in Michigan

Clinton then addresses his own work to bring peace in the Middle East, saying, "Look, I worked on this hard."

"The only time Yasser Arafat didn't tell me the truth was when he told me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out."

He reiterated that his deal would have created peace and that the terms were favorable to the Palestinians.

"It would have given the Palestinian a state in 96% of the West Bank and the remaining 4% from Israel, and they got to choose where that 4% in Israel was."

"They would have a capital in east Jerusalem and two of the four quadrants of the Old City of Jerusalem. They would have equal access, all day, every day, to the security towers that Israel maintains all through the West Bank."

Clinton said that Ehud Barak and his cabinet had approved this deal, "and the Palestinians said no."

Clinton said that he believed part of the reason for this rejection was that Hamas didn't actually want a Palestinian state but wanted to kill Israelis.

"Well, I've got news for them. They were there before their faith existed."

Referring to Israeli political infighting, he said, "The whole fight that you have seen play out was present in the beginning."

"Two parties, Likud and Labor. Likud says we want the whole West Bank because we had it in the time of David, and to heck with whoever came later. Labor said we will take what the United Nations has offered us and we will make a garden in the desert and we will have friends and we will work through it. They're still fighting this fight."

"Here's what I'm gonna do everything I can to convince people that they cannot murder their way out of this, neither side. You can't kill your way out of this."

He then addressed the issue of protest voting, saying that not voting because the Biden administration has upheld the US's historic commitment to prevent the destruction of Israel would be a mistake.

He said that he didn't think Donald Trump's ideas would help Israel, saying, "We have to find a way to share the future; we cannot kill our way out of conflicts. But we do have to fight our way to safety."

He said that Iran and its coalition of proxy groups were not good for the Palestinian people.

Clinton recalled a meeting between Arafat and Barak where Arafat said that Barak "cares much more about Palestinian children than the Arabs do. They only care about us when their people are upset, and they need to blame the US and Israel."

"This [conflict] is far more complicated than you know, and all I ask you to do is keep an open mind," he said finishing off the speech.

Ruthie Blum: Israeli anxiety, America and the ayatollahs

Tensions are high in Israel as the United States enters the last lap of its presidential election. Given the level of public concern surrounding the race and the amount of space devoted to it by local analysts, an alien observing from Mars might mistakenly assume that the vote is taking place between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, not across the Atlantic Ocean.

It’s already been established, through surveys and punditocracy consensus—including among those more predisposed politically to Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats in general than to former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party—that most Israelis are praying for the latter to emerge victorious.

Polls showing that the candidates are basically tied, with daily fluctuations in swing-state percentages, is causing a lot of nail-biting, and not exclusively in U.S. capitals or Jerusalem. No, it’s safe to say that the entire world is watching and waiting with bated breath for the outcome.

Though Joe Biden will remain at the helm in the White House until the beginning of 2025 regardless of the results at the ballot box, nobody thinks he’s running the show in any respect, nor has he been for at least two years. It’s assumed in Israel, however, that the figures behind him could engage in serious lame-duck sabotage in the weeks leading up to the inauguration of his successor.

After all, during a similar period at the end of 2016, outgoing President Barack Obama and his sidekick, Secretary of State John Kerry, pulled a few stunts that made Israel’s enemies proud. Key among these moves was the abstention on U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted on Dec. 23.

Resolution 2334, which passed by 14-0, condemned Israeli settlements and called for all construction of them to cease. It also called for further labeling of Israeli goods, not only those made in settlements. In addition, it categorized the Western Wall as “occupied Palestinian territory.”

Naturally, the resolution greatly pleased and was a boon to the BDS movement, Students for Justice in Palestine and other organizations hostile to the Jewish state. The Palestinians lauded it in general and stated outright that it paved the way for divestment, sanctions and lawsuits at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Still, Kerry proceeded to suggest that Jews building apartments in Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem prevent the Palestinians from being able to believe that Israel is acting in good faith, attributing the stalemate in peace talks to Israel’s “extremist” right-wing government (sound familiar?) rather than to the terror masters in Ramallah and Gaza.

Far more outrageous was his nod to the Palestinians’ mourning of the “Nakba,” the “catastrophe” of Israel’s establishment in 1948. In other words, he acknowledged that the problem wasn’t the “occupation” of territories that Arab states lost in the 1967 Six-Day War, but the existence of Jews on any inch of the land, from the “river to the sea” and from Metula to Eilat.

Jonathan Tobin: Who made antisemitism a partisan issue? Chuck Schumer

The committee’s report reveals how the behavior of a number of elite universities was actually worse than it was initially reported in the media. And it makes an ironclad case that their actions were clearly in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which prohibits federally-funded institutions from engaging in discriminatory behavior.

The report is important in its own right. But it begs the question as to why the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, rather than the largely powerless and ineffective Department of Education, isn’t addressing the issue of antisemitism in our education system.

The answer is that the current regime at the DOJ is much more interested in enforcing the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that is primarily responsible for enabling exactly the sort of outrages that are detailed in the House report. What is needed is a change in federal policy that will produce a DOJ that is interested in rolling back the widespread discrimination produced by DEI rather than supporting it.

Schumer’s contemptible denials of his complicity in what happened at Columbia remain unsurprising, but they are compounded by the fact that a new book is expected to be published under his name (though likely ghost-written by a staffer) in February is reportedly devoted to his analysis of contemporary antisemitism. Given Schumer’s inveterate partisanship, it’s likely that the book will talk more about false accusations against former President Donald Trump than it will about the real antisemitism happening within his own party. But after the House report, his publishers would be wise to spare themselves further embarrassment and shelve plans for rolling out the senator’s book.

Antisemitism shouldn’t be a partisan issue. While clearly outnumbered, there are still Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) who provided the country with a profile in courage when it comes to standing up for Israel and against the woke antisemites in Congress. The two parties have largely exchanged identities in the last half century as each changed course on Israel. Whereas once the opposite was true, today, the Democrats are deeply divided when it comes to support for the Jewish state while Republicans have become lockstep in their support. Their attitudes towards antisemitism directly stem from this sea change.

And though they haven’t demonstrated the kind of influence that the radicals of the House “Squad” wield over the Democratic Party, there are Jew-haters on the right, like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who deserve close scrutiny and condemnation.

Schumer’s public and private conduct as Senate Majority Leader made it clear that the Democratic Party establishment would rather be called out for going easy on antisemites than confront the hate within their own ranks. Regardless of the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional elections, that decision demonstrates a trend that is at the heart of the nation’s antisemitism problem.

11/04 Links Pt1: Israel May Have Set Back Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions; In the progressive sacrament, Gaza has no ‘agency’ but UNRWA

From Ian:

The U.S. Should Stop Trying to Solve the Israel-Palestinian Conflict and Focus on Iran

Iran’s nuclear program isn’t just a threat to Israel, but a major concern for the United States, one recognized by the past several presidential administrations. Unless the IDF destroys key nuclear facilities in another attack on the Islamic Republic—which is not an impossibility now that it has taken out Iranian air defenses—it will be a problem the next president will have to reckon with. And regardless of what happens next in the current war, the victor in tomorrow’s election will not be able to ignore the Middle East.

Michael Mandelbaum, reviewing Steven Cook’s recent book The End of Ambition, has some advice on this score:

The country that now threatens American interests is the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is conducting an active campaign to achieve dominance in the region by unseating governments friendly to the United States and evicting American forces from the Middle East. That campaign has met with considerable success. Iran now exercises substantial, indeed sometimes dominant, influence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

If . . . the Islamic Republic should acquire nuclear weapons, as it is actively seeking to do, its capacity to harm America’s friends and American interests would expand dramatically. The most important task for American Middle East policy is, therefore, to prevent that from happening.

Past American Middle Eastern policy has another implication for the future. For decades, successive American administrations pursued a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians living in Gaza and on the West Bank of the Jordan River. These efforts all failed, and for the same reasons that American democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East came to nothing: the political, cultural, and institutional bases for a Palestinian state willing to live peacefully beside Israel have never existed, and the United States cannot create them.

Absent, however, the Palestinians becoming what they have thus far never been—a genuine partner for peace—the American government should waste no more time on what has come, over the years, to be called the peace process. The United States has more urgent Middle Eastern business, business that can, and must, be successfully concluded, with Iran.

Israel May Have Set Back Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions

After Israel’s most recent attack on Iran, this newsletter noted that IDF jets struck not only ballistic-missile facilities but also a site connected to the nuclear program. J.E. Dyer presents a thorough examination of publicly available information, and concludes that this particular structure, known as Taleghan 2, was what experts call a “critical node” in the Iranian quest for atomic weapons:

A “critical node,” in the analysis of an enterprise like developing a nuclear weapon, is a bottleneck: something that previous paths funnel down to, and something that must be passed through successfully to reach the goal of the enterprise. A critical node cannot be bypassed. It must be successfully negotiated. In the case of this target, the critical node in question is developing a “detonatable” weapon.

Taleghan 2 is . . . not just a component; it’s a unique one. If Israel’s strike took out infrastructure inside the building—and I consider it likely that it did—that’s a setback in getting through the critical node of actually weaponizing fissile material to produce a bomb. The infrastructure, if left in place from the work done before 2004, would be hard to replace. . . .

[I]n a limited strike, Israel thought it worthwhile to hit Taleghan 2. The decision to do that was probably not intended as a mere warning to Iran about Israel’s knowledge of Tehran’s nuclear-weapons program. An isolated warning of that kind would be counterproductive, informing Iran of peril but having no practical impact on the overall situation.

My bet would be on Israel wanting to have a practical impact: setting Iran’s program back by destroying a facility needed to get through the critical node of weaponization successfully. There’s a real probability Israel achieved just that.

Snapback sanctions on the table as Iran threatens to go nuclear

Snapback sanctions, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal’s fail-safe mechanism, may be back on the West’s agenda after recent threats and aggression by the Islamic Republic.

U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy is prepared to trigger snapback sanctions as Iran gets closer to nuclear breakout, The Telegraph reported over the weekend, citing a Foreign Office official who said that London is “committed to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons using every diplomatic tool available, including the snapback mechanism if necessary.”

The report comes in the immediate aftermath of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s top foreign policy advisor, Kamal Kharrazi, saying that Tehran has “the technical capabilities necessary to produce nuclear weapons” and would do so if facing an existential threat.

In the past year, Iran has twice directly attacked Israel with missiles, in addition to sponsoring Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been at war with Israel for the past year, as well as the Houthis in Yemen, who have sporadically attacked Israel in addition to disrupting global commerce by attacking ships in the Red Sea.

In addition, Iran has sold ballistic missiles and drones to Russia for use in its war against Ukraine, leading the EU and U.K. to impose sanctions last month on Iranian airlines as well as arms procurement and production firms and individuals involved in Iran’s arms industry and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Deployment of the snapback mechanism means that the sanctions regime of the Iran deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), would revert to its original state.

The JCPOA included “sunset clauses,” by which sanctions on Iran would gradually expire; all sanctions would return if snapback is invoked.

A Message for America: A Free Lebanon Is the Only Path to Truly Stopping Hezbollah

Then-Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, who planned to turn his country into a services hub at peace with its neighbors, revolted — along with a coterie of oligarchs. Washington and Paris rushed to their support in 2004, passing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demanded that Assad withdraw and Hezbollah disarm.

Despite threats, Hariri stood his ground and was assassinated in February 2005. The crime backfired: It solidified Lebanon’s national consensus, forcing the Syrian dictator to pull out in April.

To deflect Lebanese pressure, Hezbollah triggered a war with Israel in 2006 that ended with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which not only reaffirmed 1559, but instructed a 10,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, to help keep Lebanon militia-free south of the Litani River.

But Hezbollah sent “villagers” hurling rocks at peacekeepers, and burned tires to stop the UN force from inspecting suspected Hezbollah arms depots. The villagers even killed some UNIFIL personnel.

Hezbollah built massive fortifications, at times tens of yards away from UNIFIL’s observation towers. Those bunkers were to serve as launchpads for invading northern Israel, like Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed 1,200 people.

The 20-year anniversary of Resolution 1559 has come and gone. Iran spent two decades building up Hezbollah’s capabilities and cemented its control of the Lebanese state, driving Lebanon’s economy into the ground in the process. The US, France, and the UN all failed to change this trajectory.

But something has happened over the last few weeks. In response to a year of non-stop attacks on northern Israel, the Israel Defense Forces decimated Hezbollah’s leadership and degraded its capabilities to such an extent that Lebanon has a window to replicate the consensus that ejected Assad.

The White House is now pushing a framework where Israel would halt its military operations in southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese military would oversee Hezbollah’s withdrawal to north of the Litani River. But if the Lebanese state remains politically controlled by Hezbollah, the agreement will end the same way as Resolutions 1559 and 1701: Non-enforcement and Hezbollah’s resurgence.

If the United States wants to find a viable diplomatic path in Lebanon, it needs to work with willing Lebanese leaders to reclaim Lebanon’s sovereignty from Hezbollah and free Beirut from Tehran’s yoke. That starts with the election of a new anti-Hezbollah Lebanese president.

I like to browse Google Books to see what older manuscripts they have, and I came upon this 1552 siddur (Jewish prayer book) written in Hebrew and translated to Spanish, with Ladino instructions.

However, it wasn't published in Spain, where all the Jews were expelled in sixty years earlier in 1492. It was published by Spanish-speaking Jews who were forced to flee Spain and ended up in Venice.

The siddur could easily be used by Jews today; things don't change very much. I happened onto a section that is part of the liturgy that shows that for Jews, there has always been only one home. (I included an English translation.)

People call the years before the Inquisition the "golden age" for Jews in Spain. The Jews who had lived and thrived in Spain for hundreds of years, and who still had living memory of the expulsion, weren't praying to return to Spain. They are praying to return to "our land," the Land of Israel.

This shows the obscenity of those who tell Jews "go back where you came from." The only place Jews ever called their home has always been the Holy Land.

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The UN has lots of agencies dedicated to Palestinians besides UNRWA.

It has so many that it has a webpage to list them - 24 of them.

Some of them are insane. A case in point: UNRoD.

UNRoD's mandate is to serve as a record, in documentary form, of the damage caused to all natural and legal persons concerned as a result of the construction of the Wall by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem. UNRoD is not a compensation commission, claims-resolution facility, judicial or quasi-judicial body.

For 16 years, they have been actively seeking out Palestinians to help them make claims one day against Israel for damage allegedly done by the building of the separation security barrier.

Of course, Israel itself offers compensation for any land it needed to take for the barrier, as JVL notes:

The land used in building the security fence is seized for military purposes, not confiscated, and it remains the property of the owner. Legal procedures are already in place to allow every owner to file an objection to the seizure of their land. Moreover, property owners are offered compensation for the use of their land and for any damage to their trees.

But the UN doesn't want to work with Israel - it wants to work against Israel.

As such, over some 17 years, UnRoD has gathered over 73,785 claims from Palestinians for compensation, and it is still collecting several thousand more every year.

Are they valid? Made up? The UN admits it is many thousands of claims behind in looking at them, but UNRoD doesn't claim to make a determination as to the validity of the claims.

It is merely setting up a situation for some time in the future for bankrupting whatever remains of Israel after a "peace process."

(h/t Irene)

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Last week, Axios reported that Israeli intelligence was bracing for Iran to attack Israel within days using Iraqi groups as proxies, probably using a wave of drones but perhaps more.

We have been hearing about what seem to be sporadic attacks by Iraqi Shiite groups, but the media has not paid much attention to them.

This is a mistake. They are much larger than we have been led to believe, have much higher capabilities and are indistinguishable from Iran itself.

The umbrella group is called the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI) , comprising at east six separate Shiite militant groups. Its first actions occurred shortly after October 7, 2023, when they began attacking US bases in Iraq and Syria.

These are not small terror cells. The major groups (Kataib Hezbollah, Ahl al Haq and Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba) each have about 10,000 fighters.

Iran has managed to essentially subvert Iraq, as these groups and other Shiite groups have cooperated with the Iraqi army in fighting ISIS. Some of these groups are part of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces which is officially integrated with Iraq's security apparatus. The PMF has between 100,000 and 150,000 fighters.

Much like Hezbollah, Iran controls these groups. They are funded by Iran's Revolutionary Guards and benefit from Iranian training and weapons. Their logos resemble that of Hezbollah.

Iran has been transferring ballistic missiles to these groups for years, but that activity has been increasing in recent weeks.

Reports indicate that Israel has identified targets in Iraq but this is far more complicated than attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon. Not to mention that Iraq is officially an ally of the US.

So we have an Iraqi government that not only cannot control these anti-Israel terror groups but cooperates with them. The groups even claim that they have received US air support in battles against ISIS.

The threat is only growing. The Institute for the Study of War counts 64 separate claimed drone attacks against Israel in October from Iraq, double the September numbers - and the IRI promises to double that number again in November.

While Israel should never say it wouldn't attack these groups in Iraq, it should make clear that the rules have changed in Iran's game of using proxies to attack Israel. If there is a major drone an/or missile attack from Iraq (or Yemen) against Israel, Israel must clearly say it will retaliate against Iran itself. The fiction that these wars are all separate and distinct is a major Iranian propaganda point, but it is obvious that Iran is directing all the actions from Gaza, Lebanon,. Iraq, Yemen and many from the West Bank. Israel needs to explicitly say that it regards all of these groups as Iranian and will respond to the head of the octopus, not only the tentacles.

Right now Iran has no skin in the game, and its dependence on proxies proves that it is frightened of Israel, especially since Israel decimated its air defenses. Only by Israel linking Iran with the actions of its proxies could the attacks stop. No less important is for Israel to establish the direct link between Iran and the proxies and its ultimate responsibility for their actions, because the news media has been avoiding making that linkage and Israel must end the pretense that these groups are supporting Hamas rather than attempting to encircle and destroy Israel.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the ACLU issued a press statement last week about protecting the right of students to peacefully protest:

College and university presidents across the US need to respect and protect the right to protest in support of Palestinian rights the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch said today in an open letter.

For months the organizations have raised concerns about the potential use of unlawful force when university administrators call in law enforcement officers to break up demonstrations on campus. This new letter comes after reports of heavy-handed and excessive force by some campus police and local law enforcement against peaceful protests and encampments across the country.

The groups provide recommendations for colleges and universities to ensure they protect the right to protest on their campuses. The organizations also urge university administrations to refrain from taking any further measures to suppress student protests on campus, including stopping the use of so-called less lethal weapons and ensuring that coercive police power is used only as a last resort, among other recommendations.

The statement did not define "peaceful protests."

Plenty of pro-Palestinian protests last year disrupted classes, intimidated students, broke into buildings, barricaded doors, vandalized campus property, silenced any expression of Jewish pride, threatened and celebrated violence and terror. The human rights groups did not say a word in defense of students, mostly Jews, who have been under siege on campus for a year now. Presumably they consider these actions "peaceful."

Compare Human Rights Watch's silence and implied support of those protests with how they condemned protests at Tunisian universities in 2011 that, based on their description, were virtually identical to those we've seen in 2024:

The Tunisian authorities should protect individual and academic freedoms from acts of violence and other threats by religiously motivated groups acting on university campuses, Human Rights Watch said today. Both the university authorities and the state security forces will need to cooperate to protect the rights to security and education of students and faculty.

One university suspended classes on December 6, 2011, because of security concerns. Demonstrators have caused disruptions on the campuses of at least four universities since October, demanding imposition of their own interpretation of Islam in the curriculum and in campus life and dress. They have interrupted classes, prevented students from taking exams, confined deans in their offices, and intimidated women professors.

“Tunisian authorities should of course protect the right to protest peacefully but should show zero tolerance when groups of protesters disrupt campus learning with threats of violence,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The timing and location of some of these protests suggest that they were planned to cause maximum disruption by interfering with exams, thus depriving thousands of students of their rights.”

The principles of university autonomy and non-intervention on campus should not be used by the government as an excuse to relinquish its obligation to ensure security of students and professors, to deter outsiders from disrupting academic activities, and to see to it that demonstrations do not disproportionately impair the rights of others, Human Rights Watch said.

The Tunisian government should ensure swift intervention of security forces whenever requested by the faculty to prevent third parties from seriously disrupting academic life, Human Rights Watch said. Authorities should also put in place monitoring systems so that physical attacks and threats on schools, teachers, and students are tracked, to identify those responsible and to hold them accountable in conformity with the Tunisian penal code.

While the state has the obligation to ensure the right to peaceful assembly, including of professors and students, and their freedom to peacefully organize and participate in campus protests or other gatherings, it also has the responsibility to secure the safety of students and professors and to ensure that demonstrations do not disproportionately interfere with their right to education and other rights.

That last sentence is common sense. And that common sense has not been stated by any human rights groups over the past year in the US or Europe.

The article includes several examples of what the protesters did in Tunisia. It was practically a duplicate of what we have seen on campus in the US - blocking a dean from entering (and leaving) his office, forming a human chain to block entrance to a building, pushing faculty when they tried to ignore the human chain and go it, and intimidating a female professor who did not wear a hijab and interrupting her class. Very little overt violence was described, but just the thuggish actions and threats were considered unacceptable by HRW in 2011.

Not today. While no analogy is perfect, this one is damn close, and HRW chooses to react to intimidating behavior on campus in opposite ways when the victims are secular leaning Arabs and when they are proud Jews.

The hypocrites at Human Rights Watch do not say a word against those attacking academic freedom today, because they agree with the attackers.

When you pick and choose which human rights to defend depending upon the victim, you are not a defender of human rights.

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11/03 Links: Israel Is Now the Middle East Strong Horse; UNRWA’s existence violates UN charter; Why I, a progressive feminist Democrat, am voting for Donald Trump

From Ian:

Israel Is Now the Middle East Strong Horse

The 14th-century Arab Muslim historian and political theorist Ibn Khaldoun assessed that history is a cycle of violence in which strong horses replace weak horses. After Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre, Israel, by necessity, has become the Middle East's strong horse in its ongoing battle against the Iranian regime and its terror proxies.

The Arab world knows this. They witnessed the IDF's destruction of both Hamas and Hizbullah's command structure and leaderships, and the detonation of much of their weaponry and ammunition stockpiles. They then watched as Israel's air force decimated Iran's anti-aircraft defenses and dominated Iranian air space.

Arab League members widely denounced Israel's counterassault against the Iranian regime, while at the same time, Abraham Accords diplomats from Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE have remained in Tel Aviv, as have ambassadors from Jordan and Egypt, and even assisted Israel during Iranian regime missile and killer drone attacks.

Israel's strong horse status is a key to winning peace and moderation in the Middle East but has been misunderstood in the West. America's mistaken mirroring of Israel as a small version of itself has constrained it from defeating radical enemies.

Victory cannot be achieved against radical Islamic terrorism using Western principles and methods of compromise, ceasefire, diplomacy, and territorial concession. The Middle East does not work that way. Different rules apply.

Compromise signals weakness. A ceasefire is merely a cessation of hostilities to rearm and resupply. Territorial concession is the fate of the vanquished. The unilateral territorial concession of Gaza in 2005 led to five Hamas wars, climaxing in the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7. "Goodwill diplomacy" and territorial compromise opposite jihad, as demanded by the U.S. and Europe, proved to be a strategic disaster and existential threat to Israel.

Israel's evolving self-awareness as an indigenous ethnic minority in a chaotic, unstable, and unforgiving Middle East recognizes that there is no alternative to the strong horse.

Ruthie Blum: Amos Schocken’s lies, Bill Clinton’s truths

Which brings us to the second speech, that also had a jaw-dropping effect, but for the opposite reason. This one was delivered by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

At a rally on Wednesday for Kamala Harris in the swing state of Michigan, Clinton appealed to the voters who’ve come out against the Democratic candidate for her administration’s ostensibly unforgiveable support for Israel. He did this by setting the record straight about the Palestinians’ attitude to the Jewish state.

Though opening with a call for a re-start of the “peace process,” he acknowledged the culprit behind its repeated failure.

“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died,” he began. “But if you lived in one of those kibbutzim in Israel, right next to Gaza, where the people there were the most pro-friendship with Palestine—the most pro-two-state-solution of any of the Israeli communities were the ones right next to Gaza, and Hamas butchered them.”

He continued: “The people who criticize [Israel’s response] are essentially saying, ‘Yeah, but look how many people you’ve killed in retaliation. How many is enough for you to kill to punish them for the terrible things they did?’ That all sounds nice until you realize what you would do if it was your family and you hadn’t done anything but support a homeland for the Palestinians, and one day they come for you and slaughter the people in your village. You would say, ‘You have to forgive me, but I’m not keeping score that way.’ It isn’t how many we’ve had to kill because Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.”

Invoking the authority born of having hosted the 2000 Camp David Summit to forge a treaty that would result in the creation of an independent Palestinian state, Clinton admitted, “Look, I worked on this hard. And the only time [PLO chief] Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth was when he promised me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel—and they got to choose where the 4% of Israel was. So they would have the effect of the same land of all the West Bank. They’d have a capital in east Jerusalem.”

Pausing to express sadness mixed with frustration, he interjected, “I can hardly talk about this.”

He proceeded to spell out the reality of the situation, emphasizing the details.

“They [the Palestinians] would have equal access, all day, every day, to the security towers that Israel maintained all through the West Bank up to the Golan Heights. All this was offered, including—I will say it again—a capital in east Jerusalem and two of the four quadrants of the Old City of Jerusalem, confirmed by the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and his Cabinet. And [the Palestinians] said no. I think part of it is that Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians. They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable.”

Well, he declared, “I’ve got news for them. [The Jews] were there first. Before their faith [Islam] existed, [Jews] were there, in the time of King David, and the southernmost tribes had Judea and Samaria.”

He concluded by explaining why destroying Israel isn’t in the interest of either the Palestinians or of the Americans who support them. Whether his argument persuaded some undecideds remains to be seen. It’s hard to imagine the “From the River to the Sea” crowd accepting his historically accurate account.

Too bad he hasn’t been shouting it from the rooftops throughout the past two and a half decades. The same goes for Barak, who’s been too busy bashing and attempting to topple the Netanyahu government to engage in veracity or soul-searching.

Were he and his subversive bubble of Haaretz-reading followers to get their noses out of the air and hang their heads in humility, if not shame, they might understand why the Israeli peace camp has been evaporating over the years, until basically disappearing on Oct. 7, 2023.

Jake Wallis Simons: Israel is not a ‘settler-colonial state’

Portraying Israel as a colonial imposition on indigenous people, a ‘settler state’ expropriating their land and culture, is a major pillar of Israelophobia. As I explain in Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It, it is rooted in the suggestion that Jews have no place in the Middle East and are alien to the region, a claim that is easily dismissed with even the briefest look at history. Yet the demonisation persists.

Take Akub, a fashionable Palestinian restaurant in London’s Notting Hill. It is more than just a high-end eatery. In an interview with the New York Times in 2022, its French-trained chef and founder, Fadi Kattan, said his mission was to ‘reclaim a cuisine that is part of a broader Arab tradition involving foods like hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, fattoush and shawarma, that he felt was being co-opted by Israeli cooks’. It seems that whereas normal people cook food, in the eyes of Kattan, Israelis ‘co-opt’ it. This position relies on a highly selective view of history. As one reader remarked in the comments section: ‘Jews have also been making these foods for centuries and have appropriated nothing. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for thousands of years. What’s more, many of these foods are not limited to the land of Israel, but common across the former Ottoman Empire.’

People often forget that Judaism is two millennia older than Islam and 1,500 years older than Christianity. Israel was the cradle of Jewish civilisation. At least a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Jerusalem’s most famous Jew, King David, made the city the capital of the Land of Israel. It has been home to greater or lesser numbers of Jews – the very word ‘Jew’ is a shortening of Judea, the ancient kingdom radiating from Jerusalem in the Iron Age – in Jerusalem ever since.

Culturally, Jews have always intertwined their identity with the land of Israel, particularly since they were exiled to Babylon around 598 BC, when their powerful yearning for return took hold. For millennia, Jews in the diaspora have prayed facing towards the Holy City, exclaimed ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at Passover, mourned the destruction of the Temple by breaking a glass at weddings, longed to be buried there, prayed at the remaining walls of the destroyed Temple, and visited on pilgrimage. Many throughout history have taken the step of uprooting their families and returning to their homeland. All these practices continue to this day.

A thread can be traced backwards through Jewish history that shows the ancient roots of the ideal of repatriation. Beginning in 1516, Palestine – as it had been renamed by the Romans – fell under Ottoman rule, which would last for more than 400 years. Less than 50 years after the conquest, Joseph Nasi, the Duke of Naxos, a Portuguese Jewish diplomat favoured by the Ottomans, attempted to return Jews to their homeland without regard for scriptural prophecies about awaiting the coming of the messiah. In a way, he was the first Zionist.

There were rumors in Turkey and Kurdistan that hundreds of IDF soldiers, including one of the female pilots that struck Iranian targets, are Kurds.

A Turkish researcher emphasized that these are not Kurds. They are Kurdish Jews, a whole different category of human being.

Researcher and Author Müfid Yüksel reacted to those who tried to portray Kurds and Israel as close on social media

Yüksel responded to the claim that "There is a Kurdish female pilot in the Israeli air force who hit Iran. There is a team of 800 Kurdish pilots in Israel and they are all IDF commandos and they hit Iran."

Yüksel said, "These are not Kurds. They are Kurdish Jews who immigrated to Israel since the 1950s. Jews who have lived in the Kurdistan region for centuries and immigrated to Israel. Jews from Bosnia, Thessaloniki, Istanbul-Izmir, Manisa, Ankara-Ulucanlar Jewish Neighborhood, Urfa, Başkale, Semdinan-Nehri, Azerbaijan, Isfahan, Mashhad, Bukhara, etc."

Then, to emphasize the point, he said that there are real Kurds in Gaza and elsewhere - people now called Palestinians.

Reminding us that there are more than 30 thousand Muslim Kurds in Palestine, Yüksel wrote, "Palestinian Kurds, whose population exceeds 30,000, still say 'we are Kurds' and use Kurdish/Kurdi surnames and still have 'El-Kurdi' written on their gravestones. There are even associations of Palestinian Kurds in Hebron. There is also a Kurdish Neighborhood in Gaza."

So if 30,000 Palestinians still identify as Kurds, doesn't that mean they aren't indigenous to Palestine?

We can say the same for Palestinians from Egypt, Syria, and especially the Gulf where the ones who came from Arabia are jealously protective of maintaining their heritage as original Muslims.

My latest list of popular Palestinian surnames and their origins can be found here.

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Axios reports:

The Biden administration warned Iran in recent days against launching another attack on Israel and stressed it won't be able to restrain the Israelis, according to a U.S. official and a former Israeli official briefed on the issue.

"We told the Iranians: We won't be able to hold Israel back, and we won't be able to make sure that the next attack will be calibrated and targeted as the previous one," a U.S. official said.

There is a subtext here that shows that the US has been at least as much of a straitjacket for Israel as an ally.

The US is telling Iran, "We've stopped Israel from attacking you for over a decade now, but we might not be able to stop them the next time."

In other words, the US has been defending Iran - Iran's nuclear program, Iran's sending weapons to Hezbollah, Iran's providing expertise and intelligence and money to Hamas and the Houthis and Iraqi terror groups.

If the US considered Israel to be an ally like NATO countries, it would be telling Iran that an attack on Israel is an attack on the US and the response would be the same. That is far from the message here.

Instead, the Biden administration is saying that the Israelis are crazy and cannot be controlled, so watch out. The US is sending a message that they don't want Israel to attack but it is helpless to stop them.

It isn't like Iran hasn't heard that message before, loud and clear. That's why Iran regularly threatens the US along with Israel, because they know the US is not going to do anything except try to restrain Israel.

This is not a message a superpower that says it is an "ironclad" ally of Israel should be sending.

While this "warning" is better than the previous messages the US sent Iran that they will do everything possible to restrain Israel, it is not a message of strength but of weakness. It is only marginally better than the toothless Biden warning to Iran simply saying "Don't" - a warning that had zero consequences when Iran violated it twice, which itself sent a message of US impotence.

The most charitable interpretation is that the US is saying that Israel can take care of itself and doesn't need US help. But even that message tells the world that the US has been the major factor restraining Israeli actions for years - and the October 7 war proves how foolhardy that position was.

There is another troubling subtext here. The warning was against Iran directly attacking Israel, but the US has not warned Iran at all against attacking Israel in the ways it prefers - through proxies. The US is not advising Iran not to attack Israel through, perhaps, a simultaneous wave of Iraqi drones and Houthi missiles. Iran has not been held responsible for the multifront war that it has been directing for over a year, and the US has bought into the fiction that each attack on Israel is independent and should be countered tactically, not strategically against the people who are behind it all.

Beyond that, Iran sent another message to the world last week - that building a nuclear bomb is definitely on the table - and no one has reported any US warning in response to that. In other words, the US position is that Iran's nuclear program, its support for terror, its direct attacks on Israel, its repression of its own people, are all unrelated and must not be considered linked in any way, nor should they be fought in a coordinated manner of toppling the regime itself.

The US should be leading the battle against Iran's malign intentions, not saying it opposes Israel's acts to defend itself from the world's largest enabler of terrorism.

There is no leadership here. There is no strategy. There is no consistency - except that the US will stand aside and let Iran do almost anything it wants.

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Immediately before an Israeli airstrike on a Hezbollah commander on a highway in Lebanon on October 19, the IDF called up the person driving the care behind him and warned her to pull over.

An op-ed in Le Orient Le Jour by Gilles Khoury tells how terrified Lebanese are of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah - while at the same time it unintentionally describes Israel's attempts to avoid civilian casualties as "science fiction."

It was a beautiful day in Lebanon on Saturday, Oct. 19. A perfect sky, whose deep blue magically blended with that of the sea along the bay of Jounieh. Here, on either side of the highway, there were just a handful of cars. ...

And in the midst of this little life that remained, in a 2000s Honda CRV, was presumably a high-ranking member of Hezbollah’s intelligence services. To his right, in the passenger seat, was his Iranian wife. The motorist driving behind the Honda had no idea. Until she received a call from an unknown number, and a voice on the other end formally urged her—in perfect Lebanese Arabic, no less—to slow down and pull over “immediately” to the side of the highway.

For reasons she didn’t understand, the woman complied with the warning. No sooner had her vehicle parked on the side of the highway than an invisible drone began raining down “little” missiles on the CRV one after the other. From his balcony, a man filmed the scene. The Honda passed through the falling missiles, which left their shrapnel on the pavement.

Like in a video game, the man filming from his window narrated the scene live. “Look, look, they hit the guy’s car from there to... Look, now they’ve suddenly stopped on the side of the road. It’s happening right there, on the Sahel Alma highway. Look, now they’re rushing out of the car towards the bushes. My God, look, the drone just targeted them, and they’re burned, there’s nothing left of them but a pile of dust. My God. Holy Virgin.”

I couldn't find this full video described here. I found one showing the initial airstrike on the car:

And a portion of the video described, showing where the Hezbollah member and his wife try to escape into the bushes, but not their "martyrdom."

It is amazing that the IDF called the people in the car driving behind them to save their lives.

No less incredible that Israel used "tiny missiles" that didn't even leave an impact on the road to avoid unnecessary damage.

The target was Reda Awada, a Hezbollah commander described as an expert in wireless communications. He was so prominent that his son met with Iran's Supreme Leader afterwards.

Khoury puts this attack in context of the other Israeli attacks on Hezbollah targets:

I realize how this war that is raining down on Lebanon has surpassed the realm of the understandable, the graspable, the familiar, if I dare say, to challenge science fiction.

I could have believed I was being told the plot of a dystopian film on Sept. 17 when, at the same second, everywhere in Beirut and Lebanon, pagers placed in pockets, cupped in hands, in bags, on belts around the waists of Hezbollah members exploded in unison. In supermarkets, shopping malls, and bedrooms. And then suddenly, the emergency rooms of hospitals transformed into scenes of an invisible war, filled with severed limbs, missing eyes, exploded genitals, crushed legs, and arms.

I could have thought this same horror film continued the next day when, at the same hour as the day before, walkie-talkies exploded everywhere, at the same time across the country, and that without a sound, the streets, sidewalks, and apartments became in an instant a battlefield with bodies lying on the ground and ghostly enemies. I believe this horror film will never stop when, at any moment of the day, I receive an image of a crushed and burning car, minivan, or scooter, after being targeted by an imperceptible drone, while the motorists around continue their journey, tracing their path without stopping, almost as if this vision has become common, ordinary, banal.

Like science fiction, this diagram representing the high command of Hezbollah that, day after day, for more than a month, evolves with faces of men stamped with “eliminated by Israel.” Like a feeling of dystopia, the day Hassan Nasrallah, the master of the game whom many long believed could turn the table with the strength of his finger, vanished into a 14th basement, under the weight of tons of bombs and buildings reduced to ash. Like science fiction, the idea that we might never see him again, that we will no longer wait for his speeches with knotted stomachs, that we will no longer hang onto each of his words to know where we are going and what awaits us.

I don't blame the Lebanese for being terrified at the prospect of an attack happening at any time on the person next to them. But the unsaid context here is that in each of these cases, the "science fiction" aspect was to avoid and minimize civilian casualties. If it wasn't science fiction - if Israel acted the way wars are traditionally fought - there would be thousands more civilians killed.

Hezbollah members are walking, driving and living amongst innocent Lebanese people and Israel goes to unimaginable lengths to kill them while not killing the innocent. That is indeed akin to science fiction.

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Australian TV network accuses Israel of targeting journalists. Maybe they should practice some actual journalism.

Australia's ABC "Media Watch" host Paul Barry showed clips of a news story about an Israeli airstrike that killed three journalists in Lebanon, and then said this is proof that Israel targets journalists (to silence any criticism.)

The ABC News (US) report starts off with a blatant inaccuracy. Noting that the people killed worked for Al Manar TV and Al Mayadeen, that reporter said that Al Manar was "state channel" in Lebanon while Al Mayadeen has "some kind of link or affiliation with Hezbollah."

In fact, Al Manar is owned by Hezbollah. Its initial webpage (in 2003) said, in English, that its purpose was psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy.

Hezbollah itself has said quite clearly that there is no distinction between its political and military activities. Hassan Nasrallah's successor Naim Qassem has said, "We don't have a military wing and a political one...Every element of Hezbollah, from commanders to members as well as our various capabilities, are in the service of the resistance, and we have nothing but the resistance as a priority." Al Manar's website shows that the station regards its media operations as being military as well.

Al Manar, before it sought respectability as a major Arabic language satellite station, made clear its real purpose was military. Everything else is window dressing.

To be sure, reporters - even for a propaganda outlet - should be presumed to be civilians unless there is specific reason to believe otherwise. ABC Australia certainly doesn't know what intelligence Israel had when it targeted the building. But if they cared, they could have found hints that these journalists were considered Hezbollah first, last and always.

The funerals of the two Al Mayadeen workers show that their caskets were covered with Hezbollah flags.

That sure indicates that they were Hezbollah first, employees of Al Mayadeen second.

Still, to be a legal military target, one has to directly contribute to the military operations. That does not only mean carrying a gun: it includes transporting weapons, being a "spotter" and giving information on troop positions or similar to the enemy, delivering supplies to combatants, helping plan military operations, helping facilitate messages between terror cells, setting up or maintaining communications networks used for military purposes. and even boosting the morale of combatants by broadcasting propaganda to them. In some of these examples, one should still assume civilian status when they are not actively engaging in the activities mentioned, but the calculus may be different when Hezbollah itself considers all its members to be militants.

Also, we don't know if the victims were the ones targeted. There might have been Hezbollah officials or weapons in the building that were the actual targets.

Flatly saying that Israel is targeting journalists is libelous. If ABC Australia cared about the truth, they would have done what I just did, and looked at it from the perspective of international law, not a kneejerk assumption that the IDF is monstrous.

(h/t Martin)

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