December 2024 ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

12/31 Links Pt2: The Golden Age of American Jewry Hasn’t Ended. It May Have Just Begun; Carter’s Decades of Promoting Hamas and Undermining Israel; Israel's population hits 10 million

From Ian:

Meir Soloveichik: The Golden Age of American Jewry Hasn’t Ended. It May Have Just Begun

Now it is safe to say that Jews are not a major constituency in South Dakota. Thune’s remarks reflect the fact many millions of non-Jewish Americans care deeply about the well-being of Israel, and of Jews around the world. In this, many of them reflect a reverence for the scriptural story of the Jewish people. As Walter Russel Mead put it, Israel’s endurance against its enemies remains, for these Americans, proof that “God exists; he drives history; he performs miracles in real time; [and that] God’s word in the Bible is true.”

Likewise, many of our fellow Americans see the American flags being desecrated at anti-Israel rallies in college quads and city streets. They know these monsters hate America as much as they hate Jews. They know that a defeat of the enemies of the Jews is a defeat of the enemies of America. And they know that victory over the enemies of the Jewish people here and overseas is a victory for America.

What all this means is that the stage is set not for darkness and despair, but for Jewish heroism in America, in alliance with so many who stand with us. We can embrace this calling in the knowledge of the miraculous nature of the Jewish story, the uniqueness of America, and the way one has inspired the other.

Recently I heard the former senator Ben Sasse give a speech in which he cited George Washington’s letter to Newport Jewry. It is not widely known that this was not the first letter that Washington wrote to American Jews. The first was sent to Savannah’s Hebrew Congregation, and its conclusion is even more incredible:
May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation—still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.

Washington was saying, in effect, “Your story inspires our story. Your story of a providential planting in the promised land inspires our own efforts to a create a country in this land.” As Americans prepared to mark their country’s bicentennial on July 4, 1976, they woke up to learn of the incredible IDF raid on Entebbe. But this is fitting, because the miraculous story of the Jewish people has inspired the American story in many ways—the miracle of one inspiring the remarkable nature of the other. Americans, as they marked their 200th year, read news of Jews who, as Washington said, had been planted by Providence in the promised land. As we prepare to mark in 2026 the 250th anniversary of America, we should seize the opportunity to communicate to the next generation the exceptional nature of this country.

In light of everything we have seen over the past months, the lesson is clear. Don’t speak of an age of American Jewish illusions as a golden age that is gone. To paraphrase Churchill, these are sterner days to be sure, but they are clearer days, and they are days when the illusions have evaporated, when the fantasies have failed; these are days when courage truly matters. This is an age when Jewish and American heroism is possible, and we must be grateful for being called, in our several stations, to play our part.

If, utilizing the freedom this glorious country affords us, we truly stand for all that is right, if we create and strengthen Jewish and civic institutions, if we work to defeat the enemies who hate the exceptional nature of America, and therefore hate the Jewish people whose Scripture gave rise to the exceptional way in which America sees itself, if we work courageously in defense of the Jewish people, and on behalf the America that we love, then the present time, not the 1990s, will be remembered as the golden age of American Jewry. Perhaps, one may say that this will be celebrated as our finest hour.

Can You Cancel a Country?

The fans of settler colonialism love hating Israel because Israel is so young. You can’t return America to 1619, say. In America, there are over 325 million settlers and only 7 million Native Americans. Decolonizing the United States is unimaginable. So is decolonizing Israel, really. But it’s more imaginable than the United States.

The defenders of Israel see Israel as the tip of the sword fighting against terrorism and Jihadism. For the those who use the settler colonialism lens, Hamas is the tip of the sword against settler colonialism. If somehow the Palestinians could get control of what was once called Palestine, then anything is possible, isn’t it? Free Palestine? What do you think that means? It means let’s go back to 1947. From the river to the sea? Back to a Palestine of 1947. Never mind that Palestine in 1947 was under the control of actual colonizers, the British. By any means possible? Rape and kidnapping are resistance to settler colonialism. In our lifetime? Believe or at least pretend to believe that soon the land of Palestine can be liberated from the so-called settlers and its indigenous people restored to their homeland.

Some of much of the animus toward Israel is simply Jew-hatred. But settler colonialism gives more than sheep’s clothing to that wolf. It motivates many casual observers against Israel. If I am right, we have been fighting the wrong battles when we explain that many Gazans lived fairly well on October 6 or that Hamas inflates the death toll in Gaza by including the deaths of Hamas fighters. The real intellectual battle is over the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

A stranger recently emailed me about Israel’s right to exist. His son lives in a major European city and while the son is a supporter of Israel, he avoids conversations about Israel because in his circle of highly educated friends, there is a virulent dislike of the Jewish state. My correspondent asks me: what do you say when confronted with the argument that Israel is a settler/colonial nation which stole Palestinian land and never should have been allowed to become a state?

One answer is that for some reason, the sin of settler colonialism is the only sin that negates the legitimate existence of a country. After the murder of 6 million Jews, no one suggests that Germany forfeited its right to exist or that the establishment of Germany in 1870 was a mistake that needs to be made right.

Depending on how you count, there are about 195 countries in the world. Over half of those countries are younger than Israel— 109 of them were created after Israel’s independence in May of 1948. Jordan and Syria were created in 1946. Nobody marches or protests the Syrian state. The people who live within Syria’s borders haven’t exactly had the opportunity to flourish since 1946. Or the people of Jordan or dozens of other countries where people are oppressed. But Israel is different. Settler colonialism is the sin that makes Israel unique.

ISGAP cancels mission to Poland over threat to arrest Netanyahu

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) has announced the cancelation of its Holocaust Memorial Mission of leading academics to Poland, which was set to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The ISGAP said that its decision comes in response to the Polish government’s reported threat to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he were to attend the commemoration event at the concentration camp, citing the contentious International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant.

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski reportedly said earlier this month that the country is “obliged to respect the provisions of the International Criminal Court,” signaling that an arrest would be imminent should Netanyahu enter Polish territory.

“For a Polish government official to threaten the arrest of the leader of the Jewish State at Auschwitz, the symbol of the Jewish people’s and humanity’s greatest tragedy, desecrates the sanctity of this solemn commemoration,” said ISGAP executive director Dr. Charles Asher Small.

“This move is politicized and provocative, and an insult to the memory of six million Jews murdered during the Shoah. This decision sends a dangerous message at a time when antisemitism is on the rise globally,” he added.

Netanyahu’s office told JNS last week that the premier never planned to attend the anniversary ceremony.

Education Minister Yoav Kisch is expected to represent Israel at the Jan. 27 ceremony on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is slated to be attended by scores of leaders and heads of state, including Britain’s King Charles.

Warsaw is set to take over the rotating presidency of the European Union next month.

12/31 Links Pt1: The Gaza hospital blood libel; Hamas said willing to free only 22 of 34 living hostages demanded by Israel

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: When Anything Can Go Wrong, But Everything Goes Right

The story starts with the Second Lebanon War in 2006, which was seen as a debacle in Israel because it ended in stalemate. But Israeli military leaders acknowledged their intelligence gaps and began filling in the blanks. By the end of 2012, Israel had the ability to map out the locations of Hezbollah leaders, bunkers, and missile silos.

That didn’t make getting to their targets easy, though. In 2014, the manufacturer of a popular line of walkie-talkies stopped making them. Israeli intelligence learned that Hezbollah military vests were designed with a pocket specifically for these radios, and Israel joined the global race to produce a replacement. The Israeli walkie-talkies, outfitted with explosives, began arriving in Lebanon in 2015.

The pager plot was hatched by a female Mossad agent in 2018, but there was nowhere to go with it yet: Hezbollah operatives weren’t using pagers in large enough numbers. That began to change as Israel got better at hacking and tracking the terror group’s cellphones. Then Israel decided to give history a nudge: “Israeli officers from Unit 8200 helped fuel the fear, using bots on social media to push Arabic-language news reports on Israel’s ability to hack into phones, according to two officers in the agency.”

It worked: “Worried about smartphones being compromised, Hezbollah’s leadership decided to expand its use of pagers.” Israel began secretly manufacturing and testing and marketing their own to sell to Hezbollah, which they rigged with explosives.

All was not smooth sailing. Israeli intelligence discovered a Hezbollah technician who was becoming increasingly suspicious of the new devices. So Israel, according to the Times, eliminated him in an airstrike.

That suspicion eventually caught on, however. “On Sept. 11, intelligence showed that Hezbollah was sending some of the pagers to Iran for examination, and Israeli officials knew it was only a matter of time before the covert operation would be blown.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to decide whether to give up on that operation or trigger the devices and the inevitable military response from Iran and Hezbollah.

As for Nasrallah, Israel faced a similar dilemma when word got back to Jerusalem that the Hezbollah leader was contemplating moving his secret location. At the moment, Israel knew where his hideout was and had a way to get to him. Neither would necessarily be true again. According to the Times, Nasrallah’s advisers urged him to change locations on the day of his assassination.

It’s tempting to look at momentous events in history as inevitable. It’s also common for the public to see the Mossad as some kind of all-knowing force playing God. But all of these missions had multiple hinge points over which Israel had no control. And even as Israeli leaders showed decisiveness at key moments, the consequences of those decisions would only be known once they happened. In the real world, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.

Melanie Phillips: The Gaza hospital blood libel

On Friday and Saturday, the Israeli Defence Forces conducted a raid on the Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza. The IDF said it was being used as a Hamas command and control centre.

At the hospital they arrested no fewer than 240 terrorists, 15 of whom, they said, had participated in the October 7 massacre in Israel. Inside the hospital, they found weapons including grenades, guns, and military equipment. The IDF killed 19 terrorists there; 700 civilians were evacuated and none was killed. Some of the terror operatives, said the IDF, posed as medical staff and patients. Some tried to leave on stretchers and in ambulances; of a first group of 21 patients leaving the hospital, 13 turned out to be terrorist suspects.

The IDF also said that before the raid, 350 patients as well as caregivers and medical personnel were evacuated to other hospitals. The Israelis delivered thousands of litres of fuel, food, and medical supplies for the essential functioning of the hospital. Once operations began 95 patients, caregivers, and medical personnel were evacuated to Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital, to which the IDF delivered 5,000 litres of fuel, two generators and medical equipment. Additionally, hundreds of civilians were able to move away from the area for their own safety via defined evacuation routes.

In video footage taken by Hamas itself and released by the IDF, Hamas operatives were filmed planting explosives about 45 metres away from the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, to where patients from Kamal Adwan were moved.

Using a hospital for military purposes is a war crime. It turns such a hospital from a protected space into a legitimate military target under international law. In Britain and America, however, the media did not report the hijack of Kamal Adwan hospital as a war crime. There was no outcry over the gross abuse of medical facilities that had turned a place of healing into an active war front and put patients at risk. Instead, media outlets faithfully parroted Hamas propaganda and accused Israel of burning the hospital down.

Kassy Akiva: Suspected Hamas Operative Hailed As A Humanitarian After Arrest

A Gaza doctor who has been published twice by The New York Times and profiled by CNN is actively detained and being interrogated by Israel, which believes he is a terrorist operative. But despite evidence suggesting close ties to Hamas, international organizations are hailing him as a humanitarian.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, was arrested on Friday along with 240 others during a raid on the hospital, Reuters reported.

In the wake of his arrest, organizations including the World Health Organization, Amnesty International, and the Council on America-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have called for his release. But as the global campaign to free Abu Safiya from Israeli detention takes off, revelations have come to light about his alleged dual role as a Hamas colonel.

In a statement, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) reported that the hospital was being used as a terrorist command, where they recovered grenades, guns, ammunition, and other military equipment. Patients and medical staff were reportedly relocated to the Indonesian Hospital, with additional fuel and medical supplies provided. About 15 of those arrested are believed to have infiltrated Israel on the October 7 attack.

The statement adds that Abu Safiya was taken for questioning due to being suspected of being a Hamas terrorist operative. The IDF confirmed to The Daily Wire that Abu Safiya is still currently detained and being interrogated.

Media outlets including CNN have profiled Abu Safiya without investigating his ties to Hamas. The New York Times published two op-eds authored by Abu Safiya where he begged for help for his hospital. Abu Safiya’s family issued a statement demanding his release and urging the media to apply pressure for his freedom.

Abu Safiya, a pediatrician who has cultivated an image as a defender of human rights to mask his terrorist ties, was exposed first by Israeli activist Eitan Fischberger. In multiple Arab media reports or social media posts, Abu Safiya is referred to as a Colonel.

In five Arabic news articles, from four different articles, spanning from 2017 to 2021, Abu Safiya was referred to with his Hamas terrorist military rank of Colonel. These articles are published in Quds Net News Agency, Alray, Pal Times, and twice in Al Watan.

Chanukah music video night 7: We Remember (JoDavi Music)

Here's an interesting concept:

"Several years ago, I had a thought: some of the most popular Christmas music were written by Jewish composers. From that thought, I had an idea to make an album of original Hanukkah music written by non-Jewish composers like myself."

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The IDF raided the Kamal Adwan hospital and found - terrorists:

The IDF said that, of 940 Palestinians who passed through an army checkpoint outside the hospital, 240 were detained for being alleged members of terror groups. In all, some 600 civilians and another 95 patients, caregivers, and medical personnel were evacuated from Kamal Adwan.

Of the 240 terror operatives, the IDF said that at least 15 participated in the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which started the ongoing war. Several others are considered to be prominent commanders in the Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror groups, the military said.

Several operatives who carried out a deadly attack on troops in Jabalia earlier this month were also nabbed, the IDF added.

The IDF said some of the terror operatives posed as medical staff and patients, and some tried to leave on stretchers and in ambulances. Of a first group of 21 patients leaving the hospital, the military said that 13 turned out to be suspected terror operatives.

How did the IDF identify terrorists among the patients and staff? With artificial intelligence face recognition. You know the very technology that the world is aghast when Israel uses it.

John Spencer, the world's top expert on urban warfare, spoke to Maariv about this:

According to Spencer, the IDF has developed two main tactics to deal with this challenge: "The IDF will usually surround the hospital and call the terrorists out, while at the same time using advanced facial recognition technology that allows it to identify Hamas operatives who are 'infiltrating' among the civilians." In an interview, he says that "an officer told me that Hamas operatives will usually try to look extremely poor, in wheelchairs and on crutches, or walking around holding a sick baby."

"I think the tactics here are unique," Spencer emphasizes in an interview. "The way the IDF protected innocents, without losing any of the terrorists who escaped, shows an impressive improvement in reducing the ratio between harming innocents and harming and arresting Hamas members. Gathering intelligence and taking action so quickly is quite amazing."

Spencer emphasizes that the world media ignores all the IDF materials showing that the terrorists are embedded in the hospitals, therefor contributing to the lie that Israel attacks hospitals against international law. Worse than that is that since the media doesn't do its job, this sends a message to terrorists worldwide that hospitals are safe havens for them, and encourages more misuse of medical facilities.

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EoZ's most popular cartoons and memes of 2024

Here are my ten most "Liked" memes and cartoons for 2024 on X. If you like these, you'll love my book of cartoons!

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The same people who redefine "genocide" also redefine "hospital destroyed" as many Gaza hospitals miraculously treat patients after destruction

We've seen how Israel haters change the definition of terms like "genocide" and "apartheid" just to be able to accuse Israel of those crimes.

Another one is "hospital destroyed."

It seems obvious that when a hospital is destroyed, it can no longer function without being rebuilt. No construction materials are being brought into Gaza.

Yet hospitals that Hamas, the media and NGOs report as "destroyed" by Israel somehow keep treating patients.

The Kamal Adwan Hospital that Israel is now falsely being accused of "burning" was called "destroyed" a year ago. And the source was none other than the respected World Health Organization.

AFP reported it had been reduced to "rubble."

Yet it was functioning earlier this month. Perhaps between the pieces of rubble.

Don't forget that the Al Ahli hospital was "destroyed" by Israel in October 2023 before it was discovered not to even have been attacked.

Al Jazeera also reported in November 2023 that Indonesian Hospital was in "ruins."

That hospital was also the "only functioning hospital in northern Gaza" over the summer according to the same Al Jazeera. It's a miracle!

In March, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society announced that the Al Amal Hospital was "destroyed." In April, it was seeing patients.

In the new vernacular, the words "damaged" and "closed" have been replaced with "destroyed." This redefinition is happening consistently and deliberately. So when Hamas terrorists hide in hospitals, fire at Israeli troops from hospitals, and the IDF fires back at those specific locations from which they were attacked, the media and UN and NGOs are quick to describe the entire hospitals as "destroyed."

"Destroyed" hospitals cannot function. Damaged hospitals can. And the reason for damage is that terrorists use them as their base for operations.

Israel (and others) have provided lots of documented evidence that these hospitals are being used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad - yet the same media and NGOs never mention that, only blaming Israel for the damage to the hospitals and claiming that Israel has no valid reason to attack.

Words themselves are being weaponized against Israel.

(h/t Irene)

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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In "Greater Israel," Arabs would outnumber Jews 20 to 1. Why exactly would Jews want all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates again?

Antisemites are convinced that Israel plans to expand its borders from the Nile to the Euphrates.

There are various maps that purport to show this "Greater Israel" that Israel has been planning. Here is one of the more popular ones.

I wondered how many Arabs live within those boundaries. Because either Israel would have to expel them all or keep them as slaves, or stateless people, or something.

Since everything is on the Internet, I looked for and found a site that lets you draw a polygon on a map and have the app respond with the population in that defined area.

There are about 140 million arabs in that area, and seven million Jews - meaning 20 Arabs for every Jew.

Why, exactly, would Israel want to rule over 140,000,000 Arabs? And if they plan to expel them - where could they go?

It is just one of the questions the Jew haters leave unanswered. Knowing that the Jews are evil is all they need to know.

The total area of "Greater Israel" (including water) is about 1.4 million square kilometers. So if the Jews kick out the Arabs, they would have a population density of five people per square kilometer. That's about the density in the Australian outback.

It would be tough for Jews to get a minyan when they are that spread out.

Jew haters are obviously idiots, but the deeper you analyze their beliefs the dumber they get.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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12/30 Links Pt2: The Gray Lady’s latest anti-Israel hit job; Ireland has a serious case of ‘keffiyeh brain’; 2024 Dishonest Reporter of the Year Awards

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: The Gray Lady’s latest anti-Israel hit job

The Times hastened to explain what it referred to as a change in IDF rules of engagement by citing a “senior military officer” saying that the army “believed that Israel faced an existential threat.”

Believed. Lucky the authors found a nameless, faceless source to confirm the IDF’s “belief” that the country was in particular danger on that Black Sabbath nearly 15 months ago.

Not to hold this against the journalists, however, who assured us that they’d reviewed “dozens of military records,” and interviewed “more than 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 people who helped vet, approve or strike targets.”

That most of said interviewees weren’t at liberty to reveal their identities wasn’t the fault of the NYT; it was due to the “sensitivity” of the subject.

This delicacy didn’t prevent the Times from declaring its findings: “that Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior U.S. military officials about these failings.”

Never mind that this list could have been written by Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry and honed by the United Nations for the purpose of depicting Israel as the culprit in the ongoing, multi-front effort to wipe the Jewish state off the map. It also happens to be false, as a multitude of IDF soldiers and officers can and do testify—at least those who are still alive to tell the tales of what they’ve been enduring on the battlefield.

Ditto for many military experts from abroad. Take Col. Richard Kemp, for instance.

Criticizing what he called the “slanted” nature of the NYT piece, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan told Israel National News, “In my experience of observing the IDF in action, they scrupulously stick to the laws of war in their targeting policies and actions. Of course, errors will be made and lessons learnt and procedures modified accordingly, … and I know that no other army has had such sophisticated or effective means of mitigating harm to civilians.”

John Spencer, chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, has repeatedly made similar points. As he reiterated at a recent Zionist Federation of Australia event in Melbourne, “There’s never been a war in the history of war … where any nation has been asked, ‘But what’s your civilian-to-combat ratio?’ Because that’s not how war works—just not how the law of war works.”

Meanwhile, lest the Times be accused of basing its entire screed on nameless individuals, it made sure to include a quote from—you guessed it—a Gazan.

“Blood was splattered all over the neighbor’s wall—as though some sheep had just been slaughtered,” said the brother of Shaldan al-Najjar, “a senior commander in a militia allied with Hamas that joined the Oct. 7 attacks,” whose family members “were among the first casualties of Israel’s loosened standards.”

To explain why anyone should care, let alone be appalled, the story clarified, “When the military struck his home in a war nine years earlier, it took several precautions to avoid civilian harm—and no one was killed, including Mr. al-Najjar. When it targeted him in this war, it killed not just him but also 20 members of his extended family, including a 2-month-old baby. … Some relatives were blown from the building. His niece’s severed hand was found in the rubble.”

The piece ended with an abrupt indictment.

“The military said that a panel appointed by the military chief of staff was investigating the circumstances of hundreds of strikes,” it concluded. “No one has been charged.”

It’s a wonder that the Times hasn’t been charged with changing its banner to depict the drivel in its pages as “All the news that’s unfit to print.”

Institute that studies antisemitism hosts another Israel-basher

One of Great Britain’s most prominent institutes for the study of antisemitism is quickly turning into a home for extreme Israel-bashers.

When the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism was created at the University of London in 2010, there was great hope that it would live up to its declared mission of promoting research and teaching to combat “antisemitism, racialization and religious intolerance.” The public had no reason to doubt the institute, which was originally named after its founder, the Pears Foundation, would live up to its mission “to promote genuine advances in the understanding of complex issues.”

Instead, sadly, speakers who have been featured at Birkbeck in recent months—and one who is slated to talk in January—have fostered misunderstanding and worse by promoting anti-Israel libels.

On Jan. 14, Birkbeck will host professor Omer Bartov of Brown University. Bartov has become infamous in recent months for claiming that Israel is committing “genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. His announcement for the Bartov lecture says he will speak about how Zionism has become “an ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and domination of Palestinians.”

Let’s be clear: Bartov’s problem is not what is happening in Gaza. His problem is Israel’s very existence. He has been bashing Israel long before the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7. Back in August 2023—more than two months before Israeli troops even entered Gaza—he was one of the organizers of a protest letter accusing Israel of conspiring to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” The letter was featured by anti-Israel publications throughout the world. And he has a long record of similar pronouncements.

Another recent speaker at the Birkbeck Institute was Harvard professor Derek Penslar. In an interview with the London Jewish Chronicle on March 14, 2013, Penslar asserted: “What happened to the Palestinians [in 1948] wasn’t genocide. It was ethnic cleansing.” Writing in Fathom in April 2021, Penslar accused Israel of “perpetuat[ing] oppression, resistance, and hatred.”

Ireland has a serious case of ‘keffiyeh brain’

It is, of course, understandable to lament the destruction in Gaza. But affiliating with figures like Abbas, just a week after Israel withdrew its embassy from Dublin over Ireland’s extreme ‘anti-Israel’ stance, crossed another line. Uncritically repeating Hamas death tolls, as Harris did on Monday, further cemented Dublin’s status as an anti-Israel mouthpiece.

So, what was achieved by the call? Admirable as it sounds, Dublin’s bid to set the world’s agenda didn’t move the dial: the war rages on, undaunted by Harris’s proclamation.

Indeed, global events are exposing the limits of this kind of fluffy diplomacy. It wasn’t solemn words from Dublin but two events – both abhorred by the Irish government – that have brought peace closer than ever. First, Israel pummelled Hamas and Hezbollah into the rubble, despite Dublin’s protests. Second, Donald Trump was re-elected. Soon after, he warned Hamas – and reiterated last week – that if the hostages aren’t returned when he assumes office, ‘all hell is going to break out.’

This is language Hamas and their Tehran backers understand. Counting on global outrage, amplified by countries such as Ireland, to erode US support for Israel, they pressed on, believing there was light at the end of the tunnel. Instead, Trump’s silhouette now greets them, and they’re scrambling to cut deals.

For all their controversies, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu instinctively grasp that some forces yield only to hard power. Both leaders have shouldered life-and-death decisions, making them more realistic operators in this increasingly perilous world than politicians in Ireland, which relies on the RAF to guard its skies. Perched safely on the edge of western Europe, it remains insulated from the dangers baked into Israeli life.

From this position of comfort – much like that of elite western university campuses – what we might call ‘keffiyeh brain’ sets in. It’s easy to play the radical, cry ‘justice’ from the soapbox, and admonish those grappling with real-world problems. But this isn’t diplomacy; it’s performance art, unbecoming of a serious country.

12/30 Links Pt1: Gaza, Land of Make-Believe; NYTs’ Muddled View of Law of Armed Conflict; Hamas gathered intel for 7 years before Oct. 7; Jimmy Carter: A Jewish tragedy

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Gaza, Land of Make-Believe

In September, the Emmys awarded a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine activist for her “coverage” of the war, despite her work with the designated terrorist organization being well-known by then. The media have already mourned as fallen journalists a Hamas tank operative, a deputy Hamas commander in its Khan Younis Battalion, a Hamas drone operator, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket specialist, an engineer in Hamas’s Gaza City Brigade and the like, as noted here.

As for Kamal Adwan itself, when Hamas operatives returned to the area in the fall, they did their best to draw the IDF to buildings around the hospital itself, hoping to protect the higher-level Hamas officials stationed in the hospital (along with weapons). When it finally cleared the way to the hospital complex, the IDF evacuated the premises, moving hundreds of patients and actual medical personnel to other facilities. Two Hamas cells tried to escape and were eliminated via drone. Medical equipment was then transferred to the nearest hospital, as were the patients. There is so far no evidence of civilian deaths at the complex.

That leaves a very different impression from the one pushed by media. But it’s easy to see through the mainstream press’s smokescreen if you try: The medical staff and patients who aren’t medical staff or patients trying to flee the hospital that isn’t a hospital; the journalists who aren’t journalists getting caught in the field of battle rather than at a newsroom working the phones; the teachers who aren’t teachers gathering at schools that aren’t schools.

And the aid workers that aren’t aid workers—who are these folks even trying to fool? When Israel’s Channel 12 was finally given access to the Palestinian side of one of the crossings, their cameras surveyed a staggering amount of aid just sitting there, expiring by the day. This is all aid that Israel has approved to be distributed, so it’s waiting for these humanitarian relief organizations to live up to their names. Instead, they mostly complain.

So on top of everything we can add humanitarian organizations that aren’t humanitarian organizations.

In Gaza, under the umbrella of Hamas, nothing it what it seems. It’s always much more sinister.

How the West could actually help prevent the next Gaza war

History’s most successful nation-rebuilding projects occurred in Germany and Japan after World War II. Both were transformed from aggressive nations bent on domination to thriving democracies.

For that to happen, the people of Germany and Japan needed to internalise that they and their supremacist ideologies were totally defeated. There could be no fantasy of a resurrected German Reich or Imperial Japan.

Similarly, the international community must declare the state of Palestine concept dead. The October 7 massacre buried that idea. Israel will never risk the creation of a state dedicated to its destruction on its border.

The Palestinian Arabs have wasted the past century trying to destroy the Jewish homeland while Israel has gone from strength to strength. To prevent the next 100 years of war, they must understand the Jewish state is not going anywhere. They must internalise that terrorism and massacres will not be rewarded.

The West must stop infantilising the Palestinian Arabs and shielding them from the consequences of their actions. There should be no rebuilding of Gaza until the society there commits to peaceful coexistence.

The Palestinian Arabs are the globe’s largest per capita aid recipients. The West has turned them into the world’s perpetual welfare junkies. Western aid often has served as a money-making scheme, filling Swiss bank accounts for decades.

Many have grown incredibly wealthy, including in Europe the widow of former Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat and the surviving Hamas leadership in Qatar. Lucrative aid contracts have created a culture of nepotism, not innovation.

A chief contributor to prolonging the conflict is the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. No other people have a dedicated UN refugee agency and no UN agency has failed as badly in its mission. Every other refugee crisis from the 1940s has long been resolved. UNRWA textbooks have educated generations of Arab children to hate and imbued them with a false promise that they will return to Israel, a place most have never set foot in.

UNRWA should be disbanded. There are moves in Israel and the US to make sure it is. After revelations that numerous UNRWA employees took part in atrocities on October 7, 2023, Australia suspended funding.

Foolishly the Albanese government resumed funding, pledging tens of millions in taxpayer funds. Just last week Foreign Minister Penny Wong promised increased aid for Gaza.

The greatest contribution Australia could make to resolving the Middle East conflict would be to make it clear that we won’t keep rebuilding Gaza after every failed war they launch.

Such a stance would save lives in Gaza and Israel. It also would save money in the budget, freeing funds to help alleviate the cost-of-living crisis for Australians.

Israel Shouldn’t Wait to Attack Iran

While Israel has already done significant damage to the Houthis’ military assets, and the civilian infrastructure that undergirds their power, it is not clear that continued attacks of this kind will deter these Iran-backed jihadists from firing missiles at Israeli cities or at ships passing through the Red Sea. The only option that remains, then, would be to take the fight directly to Iran. Something similar can be said about Hizballah’s attempts to rebuild in Lebanon. Now that Syria has fallen, Seth Cropsey argues that Jerusalem shouldn’t wait to strike the Islamic Republic:

The Assad regime was crucial to Iran’s strategy. Transit of Syrian territory enabled Iran to sustain Hizballah in Lebanon, threaten Israel from two axes in the north, pressure Jordan through cross-border drug smuggling, and transfer arms to Iran’s partners in the West Bank. Critically, Iran could also forward-deploy several air-defense and early-warning radars in Syria. . . . Without Syrian-provided early warning, a strike against targets in Iran becomes much more practical.

If Israel could pull off a strike on the Iranian nuclear program in the coming weeks—or against other critical targets in Iran from arms factories to intelligence and security institutions—then the Iranian state may well face a broader domestic and regional backlash, with each actor it has contained sensing weakness.

Israel may be tempted to wait until Trump’s inauguration to move against Iran. This is a mistake. . . . [T]he U.S. needs a new strategy to apply pressure on Tehran, one that incorporates sanctions, threats and action against proxies, and intelligence operations to degrade what remains of Iran’s Axis of Resistance.

Creating this strategy will take time. An Israeli attack on Iran directly, whether against the nuclear program or other critical targets in the country, will help set the parameters for U.S. policy towards Iran, and open other possibilities for American action to end the radical clerics’ rule.

Ex-UK defense chief: 'We've all gained from Israel's experience

The British government's decision last September to suspend 30 of 350 arms export licenses to Israel raised a troubling question: had we lost British support? Did Israel, in the current climate, let relations with a vital ally slip through its fingers?

But feelings are one thing. Numbers are another: according to a report by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) organization, defense exports to Israel approved by the UK government in 2023 totaled £17 million ($23 million).

The basis of cooperation between the two countries is not the arms trade but the coordination between their militaries in training exercises and in moments of truth. Such a moment came when the Iranians carried out their threat and attacked Israel directly in April and October. British forces assisted Israel in intercepting the missiles. The cooperation proved itself once more.

A highly important figure in the strengthening of this military relationship is the former Chief of the Defence Staff, General (Retd.) Sir Nicholas Patrick Carter, who, in December 2020, just months before completing 43 years of service in the British Armed Forces, signed an agreement with then-IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. (Res.) Aviv Kochavi to strengthen defense ties between the countries.

The other week, Carter returned to Israel to participate in the DefenseTech Summit, hosted by the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security at Tel Aviv University in collaboration with the Ministry of Defense's Directorate of Defense Research & Development (DDR&D-MAFAT).

In an exclusive interview with "Globes," Carter addresses the looming alliance between Russia, Iran, and North Korea ("A coalition of hostile powers"), views dialogue with Tehran as a solution to the nuclear threat ("All conflicts end in dialogue"); and states that, for the time being, "the world is at war, but not yet in World War III."

"The change in dynamics in Syria might possibly be beneficial."

Iran's nuclear program is at its most advanced stage ever in uranium enrichment. Data from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) indicate that, since August, Iran has accumulated 17.6 km of 60% enriched uranium, for a total of 182.3 kg. This is the equivalent of four nuclear bombs, with nuclear weapons requiring uranium enriched to about 85% or higher.

Chanukah music video night 6: The Chanukah Song (Stephen Schwartz) - Mississauga Festival Choir

Written by the composer of Wicked (notice a theme this year?)

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Here's how little Israelis care about Haaretz's reporting

Every day I browse through Haaretz's headlines. Its obsessive hate of Netanyahu and most Israelis still surprise me after all these years.

It occurs to me that Haaretz headlines are pretty much clickbait. They are designed to outrage and get you to read the vapid analysis and obsessive hate.

Haaretz's newspaper circulation is tiny in Israel. In 2009, it was at 7.1%, in 2022 it was down to 4.7% exposure rate.

But what about online? Most people get their news from online sources, not physical newspapers - maybe Haaretz has an outsized influence there?

I found an April report on online media usage in Israel from the Israel Democracy Institute. It asked people which Internet site was their primary source of news.

It divided up the results by people who identify as left, center or right:

Nobody on the Right uses Haaretz as their news source. Only about 1% of the center do, and a mere 8% of the Left use Haaretz as their news source.

In recent years, however, the number of Israelis who identify as Left has dwindled as well. It is now only 16%. So according to this poll, only about 1% of Israelis use Haaretz online as their news source.

That is practically nothing.

Haaretz says it has over 100,000 digital subscribers. I would love to know a breakdown of how many are in Hebrew and how many are in English, how many are in Israel and how many outside. My guess is that the bulk of their readership is not even Israeli.

Haaretz is the number one primary source of anti-Israel propaganda. It represents a minuscule number of Israelis.

Haaretz's very existence proves how free the Israeli press is. Its numbers prove how irrelevant it is to the average Israeli.

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Palestinian Media Watch reports:

The Palestinian Authority itself has revealed that Hamas turns hospitals into military interrogation facilities. As proof, on Facebook, the PA posted a summons issued by Hamas to a Gazan to report to Nasser Hospital to be interrogated by Hamas' military intelligence.

The post was made by the former official spokesman of the PA Security Forces, Adnan Al-Damiri. Moreover, Al-Damiri criticized Hamas for continuing to use hospitals for "summonses, interrogations, and extortions":

The summons itself says:

State of Palestine
Ministry of Interior and National Security
Internal Security Force
Summons
To Citizen: Shadi Subhi Al-Suweiti, aka: Abu Subhi
Address: Khan Yunis/Al-Mawasi
Under the law of the State of Palestine and in accordance with our vested authority, you are to report to:
Premises: Nasser Medical Center
Office: Public Relations
On: Wednesday
Date: 16 October 2024
At: 11:30 AM
Attendance is mandatory and legally binding.
Bring your ID card or passport.

This isn't news - unless you get your news from the New York Times or Washington Post, in which case you would have no idea that Hamas still uses hospitals as military offices.

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The Washington Post headline: "Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza."

The phrase "AI factory" implies that the IDF is blindly relying on AI for decisions that then recklessly kill innocents in Gaza that would have been safe if Israel relied only on humans.

When you separate the facts from the bias in the article, you see the opposite: AI is a tool that helps save lives and more accurately target terrorists.

Here's an example of how AI helps identify the terrorists who murdered 1.200 Israelis on October 7 and how the Post spins this as a bad thing:

People familiar with the IDF’s practices, including soldiers who have served in the war, say Israel’s military has significantly expanded the number of acceptable civilian casualties from historic norms. Some argue this shift is enabled by automation, which has made it easier to speedily generate large quantities of targets, including of low-level militants who participated in the Oct. 7 attacks.

The implication is that murderers, kidnappers and rapists shouldn't be targeted because they are merely "low-level."

The WaPo is defending rapists as not being worthy of being targeted in war.

It says what the New York Times said a few days ago, that Israel loosened up the rules for proportionality calculations in the wake of October 7. As I and others have written, this is entirely appropriate - and legal - since the nature of this war is different from the previous limited wars in Gaza that were meant only to dissuade but not destroy Hamas.

And a careful reading of the article shows that Israel uses AI as a tool, not as a replacement of human decision-making. There are checks and balances in the system. Even the people they interviewed anonymously agree:

“The more ability you have to compile pieces of information effectively, the more accurate the process is,” the IDF said in a statement to The Post. “If anything, these tools have minimized collateral damage and raised the accuracy of the human-led process.”

The IDF requires an officer to sign off on any recommendations from its “big data processing” systems, according to an intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Israel does not release division leaders’ names. The Gospel and other AI tools do not make decisions autonomously, the person added.

Reviewing reams of data from intercepted communications, satellite footage, and social networks, the algorithms spit out the coordinates of tunnels, rockets, and other military targets. Recommendations that survive vetting by an intelligence analyst are placed in the target bank by a senior officer.

Using the software’s image recognition, soldiers could unearth subtle patterns, including minuscule changes in years of satellite footage of Gaza suggesting that Hamas had buried a rocket launcher or dug a new tunnel on agricultural land, compressing a week’s worth of work into 30 minutes, a former military leader who worked on the systems said.

Contrary to the impression that the WaPo tries to give, its own details show that the AI systems are far more effective and accurate than humans alone. There is no indication that the AI is doing anything that human analysts wouldn't do if they had infinite processing speed and could hold billions of pieces of information in their heads at once. AI is doing exactly what humans would do given enough resources, and humans check on its work.

Even the specific criticisms of AI that may be valid are minor in comparison with the benefits, and there is no indication that people were mistakenly targeted because of them.

An internal audit found some AI systems for processing the Arabic language had inaccuracies, failing to understand key slang words and phrases, according to the two former senior military leaders.

...For example, Hamas operatives often used the word “batikh,” or watermelon, as code for a bomb, one of the people familiar with the efforts said. But the system wasn’t smart enough to understand the difference between a conversation about an actual watermelon and a coded conversation among terrorists.

“If you pick up a thousand conversations a day, do I really want to hear about every watermelon in Gaza?” the person said.

And wouldn't you want a system that picks up and doers an initial analysis analyzes every mention of "watermelon" to check out which of those may be a plan to murder Israelis?

I had looked at a similar article by +972 in April. It added a detail that the Washington Post chose not to mention: before the IDF increased its reliance on AI to determine targets, it manually checked its results against human analysts and only signed off on the AI system when it achieved 90% reliability. What it didn't mention is whether humans reach that 90% reliability threshold.

In that same vein, the WaPo parrots criticism of AI without comparing how humans would do the job better. An anonymous soldier - not an intelligence analyst - offers his own criticism, someone almost certainly found by the WaPo reaching out to +972 to find disgruntled soldiers for the article:

At one point, the soldier’s unit was ordered to use a software program to estimate civilian casualties for a bombing campaign targeting about 50 buildings in northern Gaza. The unit’s analysts were given a simple formula: divide the number of people in a district by the number of people estimated to live there — deriving the former figure by counting the cellphones connecting to a nearby cell tower.

Using a red-yellow-green traffic light, the system would flash green if a building had an occupancy rate of 25 percent or less — a threshold considered sufficient to pass to a commander to make the call about whether to bomb.

The soldier said he was stunned by what he considered an overly simplified analysis. It took no account of whether a cellphone might be turned off or had run out of power or of children who wouldn’t have a cellphone. Without AI, the military may have called people to see if they were home, the soldier said, a manual effort that would have been more accurate but taken far longer.

And if they called people whose cellphones were off, how exactly would that help the analysis? And does he really think the Ai system assumes all children have cellphones?

The most substantive criticism of how the IDF relies too much on AI comes not from AI being too aggressive but not aggressive enough, missing what humans could find.

The phrase "AI factory" in the headline comes from a quote of someone who says that a culture that relies too much on technological factors is what ended up with dead Jews, not dead Arabs:

Two former senior commanders said they believe the intense focus on AI was a significant reason Israel was caught off-guard that day. The department overemphasized technological findings and made it difficult for analysts to raise warnings to senior commanders.

“This was an AI factory,” said one former military leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe national security topics. “The man was replaced by the machine.”

If that is true, it is clearly a huge mistake by the intelligence community. Obviously, October 7 was an unprecedented intelligence blunder and it will be investigated. But it isn't a mistake made by AI, but a mistake of imagination combined with ignoring internal warnings. If AI had been trained properly to look for evidence of an invasion by Hamas, October 7 could have been avoided. It was humans who didn't think that this was in the realm of possibility and humans who relied on non-AI technology, like cameras and fences, to defend Israel properly.

Again, AI is a tool. It is a tool that makes it possible for humans to make faster, better, more accurate decisions. From the very start, before the world even considered AI as anything but science fiction, Israel has been ensuring that people are the ones who make the ultimate life and death decisions. In the cases that humans themselves treat AI as authoritative and don't bother to do their own checking that is the fault of the person, not AI.

Despite the tone of the article, it says nothing that indicates that Israel is using this tool inappropriately. As with any other tool, over time people learn its limitations and then adjust for them, and the IDF updates its procedures in real time as it gets more information.

Finally, the article shows that the charge of "genocide" is a lie. If Israel is using AI and humans to target terrorists as accurately as possible and minimize collateral damage - which is the entire point of using it - then that proves that Israel is not targeting civilians, it is not firing indiscriminately, and it is adhering to international law.

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