Friday, February 14, 2025

02/14 Links Pt1: Sagui Dekel-Chen, Alexander Troufanov and Yair Horn to be freed on Saturday; Trump’s Gaza Plan and Its Larger Meaning

From Ian:

Elliott Abrams: ‘Gaza Shall Be Forsaken’
Trump’s plan tacitly understands another reason Gaza has never developed into the Singapore that Shimon Peres dreamed of, and that is the condition of the society that has developed in Gaza in the past two decades of Hamas control. Economic and political development require both sound government and a culture in which the polity can advance. One look at Haiti is a reminder of that obvious point. Trump’s plan accepts that development will not happen in the current Gaza situation, where society is permeated by corruption, brutality, hatred, and terror.

This is a simple fact about life and is not a reflection of prejudice against Palestinians. Gouverneur Morris, one of George Washington’s envoys to France, watched the revolutionaries there play at becoming the next United States of America. He wrote in July 1789, just days before the storming of the Bastille, that “they want an American Constitution, with the exception of a King instead of a President, without reflecting that they have not American citizens to support that constitution.” It is a profound point. Governments and constitutions are what Marx would have called the superstructure, but they must be built on an actual, existing society. The Constitution was not a piece of paper but the product of the free society that had been built by colonists in British America, and by their children and grandchildren.

Gaza does not have Morris’s “American citizens” either, and Trump recognizes that pouring more money into it from Qatar or UNRWA (or the United States) will only reproduce what is there now: more terrorism, more death and destruction, and more misery. So he, in effect, suggests that we rely on Zephaniah’s vision for a while—“there shall be no inhabitant”—perhaps for 10 years, while the physical Gaza is transformed. As Trump put it, “Do a real job, do something different. Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for years.”

Perhaps 10 years of living without Hamas in a variety of countries would transform Gazans, too. Some would stay in the places to which they moved, while others would want to go “back” to the new Gaza—but this time not as UN-certified permanent “refugees” from the naqba of 1948. This time, as people with options for a decent life who chose to live in Gaza because it offered economic opportunity and peace.

It’s fanciful, and very, very unlikely. But it’s a better, truer, understanding of what led to Gaza’s current situation and what could possibly lead out of it than decades of “peace processing” and UN resolutions, which in the end have produced terrorism, war, and misery.

Trump is treating Gaza as a physical place and its people as suffering humans, which is more than has ever been done by any Arab League resolution condemning Israel and calling it a war crime to allow Gazans to move away. “We will not allow the rights of our people… to be infringed on,” declared Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has not permitted an election in 19 years. Trump’s scheme would “undermine the core of the Palestinian national project,” said Algeria, which is true if the core of that project is endless violence aimed at destroying Israel. An Arab League statement said Trump’s proposal would “threaten the region’s stability” which is also true if, by stability, is meant the 77 years of refusal to accept Israel in peace as a Jewish state.

Gaza is, as Trump called it, a “hellhole,” and history suggests it will remain so. Not because of anything the Israelis did. They left it in 2005 with an open possibility for a better future. Not because of Donald Trump, who in his first weeks in office offered a different future and asked Arab governments to think for once about Gazans as people rather than cannon fodder in the struggle against Israel. But it is apparently still easier to dream on about the “two-state solution” and the “right of return,” and far easier to scream about Israeli crimes and Palestinian victims, than to let the Jews live in peace. Until that changes, “Gaza shall be forsaken.”
Seth Mandel: What If Nothing Changes At All in Gaza?
On Feb. 6, the newspaper Maariv reported that three weeks into the cease-fire the campaign was still ongoing: “The terrorist organization began executions and a widespread wave of arrests. Not only those suspected of any collaboration with Israel, but also anyone who rebels against the situation in Gaza, in any form whatsoever, including on social media, is arrested by Hamas members.” Yesterday, Hamas reportedly opened fire on a family near Khan Younis.

Hamas does this after every war. It’s tradition.

Not that Gazans were free of that tradition during the war. But it’s a more focused campaign now that Hamas brigades aren’t afraid to operate out in the open.

Hamas, of course, really does rule with an iron fist. The terrorists of Gaza also kill with reckless folly: Today, an errant rocket aimed at Israel fell inside Gaza and killed a Palestinian teen.

None of this is terribly unusual. But it’s worth pointing out that Hamas remains able to commit horrific crimes against Israeli hostages and Palestinian locals at the same time. Which means that, while Hamas may be far from its pre-war strength, the status quo in Gaza remains.

Which is another way of saying that there will be no rebuilding of Gaza in the near future. Hamas remains in control of the enclave, and its behavior is identical to the way it acted during and before the war. There is less for Hamas to break in Gaza, but it intends to break what it can find.

Considering all this, there is something almost silly about the way the discourse on the conflict has become monopolized by the subject of postwar recovery. Even if Palestinian civilians wanted to leave the enclave temporarily to allow their neighborhoods to be rebuilt, Hamas wouldn’t let them go anywhere—and Hamas certainly wouldn’t leave of its own free will.

During active conflict, Hamas is the biggest threat to Gazans: Israel creates safe zones and gives advance notice of attacks in the hot zones, and Hamas’s use of those humanitarian sectors puts civilians in the line of fire. And when there’s not active conflict, Hamas is still the biggest threat to Gazans: It just goes around executing them at will.

Any plan, therefore, that aims to improve life for Palestinians requires a realistic way to rid Gaza of Hamas. Without that, there is no “Riviera on the Med,” no two-state solution, no peace—no change at all.
Seth Mandel: How Netanyahu Fought To Save the Hostage Deal
If Netanyahu wanted to keep the hostage releases going, he now had a problem: The public protests against him reduced some of his leverage against Hamas, because Hamas realized it could hold onto the hostages and if anything happened to them it would be blamed on Netanyahu.

Enter Donald Trump. The president was asked about Hamas’s threat to suspend the cease-fire, and Trump made clear he had run out of patience with Hamas. In fact, his comments strongly suggested he believed the deal was already weighted in Hamas’s favor, since the hostages were being released in “drips and drabs” and Israel was pulling out of all of Gaza except a buffer zone on the border. Trump, whose envoy had negotiated the deal at the president’s direction, was telling Hamas that it had better not try to make a fool of him on the world stage.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Trump said, “if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock—I think it’s an appropriate time—I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out.” Hamas wasn’t the only one who could change the terms of the deal.

In doing so, Trump was taking some of the responsibility off of Netanyahu’s shoulders—if the war was going to restart, it would do so on Trump’s terms. If Netanyahu preferred that option, he could simply do nothing and wait.

But if he wanted to keep the cease-fire deal going, he had a new problem: Trump demanded the release of all the hostages at once. That was unlikely to happen this week.

In order to simply get the existing deal back on track, Netanyahu would have to reduce Trump’s demands without undermining the president’s negotiating authority. So the Israeli government put out a series of statements with vague language to buy it time to strategize with the White House. Then Netanyahu essentially put himself as the mediator between Trump and Hamas so that any reduction in America’s demands was seen as coming from the White House, preserving Trump’s place as the senior partner in the alliance.

In the end, the sides agreed that Hamas would release three hostages as originally planned and Trump gave his blessing without removing the implicit threat of his own impatience with Hamas: “If it was up to me, I’d take a very hard stance. I can’t tell you what Israel is going to do,” Trump told reporters this afternoon. Thus Trump can play off his initial threat as simply what he would do if he were in Israel’s shoes, not what he was planning on doing as U.S. president. Netanyahu looks reasonable but not weak. Hamas is back in compliance with the deal.

Had Netanyahu truly wanted the deal to collapse this week, it would have—because Hamas was the one who suspended the deal and Netanyahu had Trump’s backing to go back to war. The only reason that didn’t happen was because Netanyahu preferred the deal to restarting the war. Hopefully that will earn him some credit with the hostage families who have been suspicious of his motives until now.


Sagui Dekel-Chen, Alexander Troufanov and Yair Horn to be freed on Saturday, says Hamas
Three hostages are set to be released by Gaza-based terrorist groups on Saturday, according to a Hamas official on Friday, in line with terms of the ceasefire with Israel.

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office published their names after it said the list was received from Hamas via mediators Qatar and Egypt. Scheduled for release are Russian-Israeli Alexandre (“Sasha”) Troufanov, 29; American-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36; and Argentinian-Israeli Yair Horn, 46.

The Prime Minister’s Office added that the names were being shared with the consent of their families.

The Hamas official confirmed to Reuters that Dekel-Chen was among those set to be freed. Separately, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group said it would release Troufanov as part of the arrangement.

Israel is expected to release 36 terrorists on Saturday who are serving life sentences and 333 terrorism suspects arrested in the Gaza Strip after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion of the northwestern Negev, according to figures from the Palestinian Authority Prisoners Ministry.

Israel has stated it will resume combat in Gaza if three hostages are not freed on time after Hamas announced it was delaying the releases in response to alleged Israeli ceasefire violations.

Earlier this week, U.S. President Donald Trump called for the ceasefire to be abandoned if Hamas did not release all hostages held in Gaza by noon Saturday.


Nicole Lampert: Freed hostages say my fiancé is alive – but chained up, starving and under the impression I’m dead
Ziv Abud’s eyes are red raw from exhaustion and tears. Happy tears and sad tears. For 16 months she has travelled around the world meeting prime ministers, journalists and anyone who would listen, in an effort to get her boyfriend returned home from Gaza, without even knowing if he was still alive.

Earlier this week she heard the news she had long been dreaming of: her beloved Eliya Cohen is alive. This week marks eight years since they became a couple. Since Cohen’s abduction by Hamas, his mother has told Abud that he was planning to propose on their next holiday to Thailand, and she calls Cohen her fiancé.

But, along with the new knowledge that Cohen is alive, Abud says in an interview over Zoom, came the horror of learning that he is being starved and tortured and has been shackled in an airless tunnel, injured, for almost his entire time in captivity.

Cohen, 27, an events organiser, was mainly kept in captivity with Eli Sharabi and Or Levy, two of the hostages whose emaciated appearances shocked the world when they were released alongside Ohad Ben Ami last Saturday.

A family liaison officer at the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) updated Abud the following day on what they had been told by the released men about Cohen. Families of the hostages have also been passing information between themselves on an unofficial basis, having become close since October 7. “I was grateful and happy but also worried and fearful all at the same time,” says Abud, of the IDF update.

That evening she wrote a long letter to him on Instagram explaining her feelings. It said: “I know that what happened and is happening to you in captivity is unimaginable and what you are going through is one of the most difficult things. And it is so hard to be here without an option to make things easier for you, without the ability to hug you.”

Sharabi came out to learn that his British wife Lianne and their two daughters had been murdered on October 7 2023 at their home in Kibbutz Be’eri. Levy also learned that his wife Einav was murdered running away from Hamas terrorists at the Nova Festival.

The two men were separated from Cohen a few days before their release. It is believed that he is being kept with Alon Ohel, a pianist who, like Cohen, was taken from the Nova Festival.

“It breaks my heart to learn what he is going through from the people who were in the tunnels with him,” says Abud, 27, a marketing executive who was with Cohen at Nova. “We have heard that he is wounded and hasn’t had medical care, that his leg has been chained the entire time, that he has been tortured, not seen any sunlight, has been starved – eating maybe just one piece of pita bread a day – and that he is disconnected from the world. He doesn’t know that I am alive – in fact he thinks I am dead. He doesn’t know how hard we have been fighting for him.”


Freed Hamas Hostage Praises Trump, Calls for Him To Bring All Hostages Home
An American citizen held hostage by Hamas since October 7, 2023, thanked President Donald Trump in a video on Friday, saying that Trump is "the reason I am home alive."

"Since February 1, I am a newly released Hamas hostage. I'm a survivor. I was held for 484 days in unimaginable conditions. Every single day felt like it could be my last," 65-year-old Keith Siegel said. "President Trump, you are the reason I am home alive. You are the reason I was reunited with my beloved wife, four children, and five grandchildren."

Siegel is the first American released since the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal took effect on January 19. The deal came just days after Trump reiterated his warning that "all hell will break out" if the hostages held in Gaza were not freed by the time he took office on January 20. The Biden administration had failed to secure a lasting ceasefire deal.

The ceasefire appeared fragile this week after Hamas said on Monday that it would stop releasing hostages. On Thursday, however, it announced that it "reaffirms its commitment to implementing the agreement as signed, including the exchange of prisoners." The terrorist group has released 21 hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, with 73 hostages, including American citizen Edan Alexander, remaining in Gaza.


IDF chief apologizes to freed surveillance soldiers for failing them on and before Oct. 7
In a meeting on Friday morning, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi apologized to four recently released hostage soldiers for their warnings not being treated seriously before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, as well as for their long captivity.

Halevi met with Agam Berger, Liri Albag, Naama Levy and Karina Ariev, who were released from Hamas captivity after some 15 months. The fifth surveillance soldier released from Hamas captivity, Daniella Gilboa, was not present at the meeting.

“It was wrong to have not taken you seriously, you were amazing soldiers, I apologize for what you experienced in captivity,” Halevi said to the soldiers, according to leaked remarks.

For months before Hamas’s onslaught, female surveillance soldiers reported signs of suspicious activity along the Gaza border, situated less than a mile from them. No action was taken by the more senior officers who received the reports, and the information was disregarded as unimportant by intelligence officials.

IDF female surveillance soldiers, referred to in Hebrew as tatzpitaniyot, belong to the Combat Intelligence Collection Array under the Border Defense Corps and operate along the country’s borders, as well as throughout the West Bank.
'Donkey food, poor hygiene and fear of the IDF': Parents of released IDF lookouts talk about their daughters' suffering
Weeks after returning to Israel following 477 days in captivity, a stark contrast remains between the relative openness of the released IDF lookouts about their time in Gaza and their silence regarding the events of October 7.

While they have spoken in detail to their families about their conditions in captivity — the constant life-threatening danger, their captors' treatment, hunger and poor hygiene — they avoid discussing what happened in the shelter at the Nahal Oz base that Saturday.

During those hours, they waited in vain for help, were beaten by terrorists and watched their comrades killed before their eyes.

"She just doesn’t talk about it," said Albert Ariev, father of Karina Ariev. "What happened in that shelter was horrific. It makes her rehabilitation even harder — I can see it. Something terrible happened to my daughter on October 7. The captivity wasn't easy but the nightmare is split into two parts."

Why is what happened in the shelter off-limits, while she discusses more than a year in captivity?
"She says she saw and experienced terrible things there. She was severely wounded and told us that she wanted to die on that day. She wished for an airstrike to end her suffering. They abused and beat her endlessly. That’s it — she won’t go further. She just says, 'I went through hell that day and wished to die.' It was the worst day of her entire period in captivity."


Berlin Film Festival: Actors & Fest Head Tricia Tuttle Hold Photos Of Israeli Hostage & Actor David Cunio On Opening-Night Red Carpet
The opening night of the Berlin Film Festival is only just getting underway and political and humanitarian sentiment is already to the fore with multiple demonstrations on the red carpet and nearby.

Multiple German actors were accompanied on the red carpet by festival head Tricia Tuttle in holding up a photo of Israeli actor David Cunio, who is among hostages being held by Hamas. Among the actors holding the photo were Christian Berkel, Andrea Sawatzki and Ulrich Matthes.

Cunio is the subject of Tom Shoval’s Berlin Film Festival feature A Letter to David. There was a separate rally earlier in the day in festival venue Potsdamer Platz in support of Cunio and his brother Ariel, who is also being held captive.


Jonathan Schanzer: Trump’s Gaza Plan and Its Larger Meaning
Trump has opened the negotiations by suddenly advocating a plan that looked outrageous to the eyes of the Arabs, including the mass evacuation of Gaza and the rebuilding of the coastal enclave—which, Trump says, they should actually pay for. Whether the Arabs know it or not, Trump ripped a page right out of his own book, The Art of the Deal. His offer is something that the other side could never accept. But now, the onus is on the Arabs to counter if they don’t like it. Should things continue in this vein, maybe then and only then will the terms of a feasible agreement come into focus.

Whether he knew it or not, Trump also took a page out of the Netanyahu playbook. In 2020, the Israeli prime minister threatened to annex significant chunks of the disputed territories in the West Bank—places that the Palestinians saw as vital to their national project. It was Bibi’s threat of annexation of what Israelis call Judea and Samaria that ultimately prompted the Emiratis to offer normalization in exchange for a four-year halt to Netanyahu’s plans. This ultimately yielded the Abraham Accords, which have held up remarkably well, even as war rocked the region.

Prior to the Hamas invasion and slaughter of Israeli innocents, the unofficial policy of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and others was “benign neglect.” These are not my words but the words of officials I met in the region in 2022. The overriding sense in the Middle East was that Palestinian obstinacy was the primary reason for continued war and misery. This was not wrong. And the Arab leaders I met rightly saw Israel as a country that could bring positive change to the region. After the war erupted in 2023, however, those perspectives appeared to shift. Images of death and destruction in Gaza shocked even the most hardened realists in the Arab world. It may take time for the raw emotions associated with the war to subside.

But even during the war, with nationalist fervor riding high, the contacts continued between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Normalization is a process, not an event. And while normalization did lose some momentum, the process was never arrested.

For Donald Trump, who has unfinished business on the brain, the question is how to harness that process and push it in the right direction. His reelection prompted a pause in Iran’s multifront war. This was cheered by the region. His re-initiation of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran also inspires the confidence of the Arab states that fear Iranian aggression. The president has yet to announce his support of the people of Iran, who will be instrumental in toppling their reviled regime. A successful attack on the Iranian nuclear program, should Trump decide to take such a risk, would be a game-changer in this regard, given Arab hostility toward the regime. Indeed, the president has a wide array of options at his disposal as he looks to get back to the business of deal-making in the Middle East—and that’s before trade and other transactional deals come into the picture.

Trump has floated a controversial idea that the Arab states don’t like. But it almost doesn’t matter what he offered. He got their attention. He has re-initiated a wider conversation about the future of the Middle East. Negotiations over the expansion of the Abraham Accords are now underway.
Saudi Arabia spearheads Arab scramble for alternative to Trump's Gaza plan
Saudi Arabia is spearheading urgent Arab efforts to develop a plan for Gaza's future as a counter to US President Donald Trump's ambition for a Middle East Riviera cleared of its Palestinian inhabitants, 10 sources said.

Draft ideas will be discussed at a meeting in Riyadh this month of countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Proposals may involve a Gulf-led reconstruction fund and a deal to sideline Hamas, five of the people said.

Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies were aghast at Trump's plan to "clean out" Palestinians from Gaza and resettle most of them in Jordan and Egypt, an idea immediately rejected by Cairo and Amman and seen in most of the region as deeply destabilizing.

The dismay in Saudi Arabia was aggravated, sources said, because the plan would nix the kingdom's demand for a clear path to Palestinian statehood as a condition to normalize ties with Israel - something that would also pave the way for an ambitious military pact between Riyadh and Washington, shoring up the kingdom's defenses against Iran.

Reuters spoke to 15 sources in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to build a picture of the hurried efforts by Arab states to pull together existing proposals into a new plan they can sell to the US president - even potentially calling it a "Trump plan" to win his approval.

All the sources declined to be identified because the issue involves international or domestic sensitivities and they were not authorized to speak in public.

One Arab government source said at least four proposals had already been drafted for Gaza's future, but an Egyptian proposal was now emerging as central to the Arab push for an alternative to Trump's idea.
Jonathan Tobin: Jewish foes of Trump’s Gaza plan remain Hamas’s ‘useful idiots’
It turns out there are some people who still believe in the symbolism and power of full-page advertisements in The New York Times. Among them are a great many Jewish celebrities and rabbis who believe the institution that remains the most important forum for left-wing journalism is the right place to feature their views about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs and President Donald Trump’s policies.

So it was to the print edition of the Times that these quintessential “as a Jew” types turned to vent their anger about Trump’s proposal to send Palestinian Arabs out of Gaza. To them, the idea of taking a population primarily composed of people who claim to be refugees out of an area that has been devastated by war and giving them an opportunity for a new and better existence represents “ethnic cleansing.”

It was signed by a variety of “a,” “b” and “c” list actors and celebrities, as well as a few hundred liberal rabbis. You’ve heard of some of them: actors Joaquin Phoenix, Wallace Shawn and Debra Winger and playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner. The names of others, like Jonathan Glazer, who got his 15 minutes of fame by denouncing Israel at last year’s Oscars ceremony when accepting an award for a movie about the Holocaust, may also ring a bell. Still others have attained a degree of notoriety by being inveterate Israel-bashers and anti-Zionists like writers Peter Beinart, Judith Butler and Naomi Klein.

The rabbis are a mixed lot. Some are still trying to maintain a line between what we used to call “liberal Zionism” and the intellectually fashionable stance of those who are explicit about favoring the destruction of Israel. Some of them gave up that pretense and are among those who seek to give a dubious religious endorsement to a position opposing the defense of the one Jewish state on the planet against genocidal terrorists.

But wherever they fall on that spectrum, they are the contemporary public face of those who seem to think that the essence of Jewish identity is to be found in that disreputable stance.

They are the “as a Jew” Jews.

Full-page ads in the Times may still cost a lot of money, even in an era when the overwhelming majority of those who read news outlets do so digitally rather than in print or only on social-media platforms. But the choice to go that route is more about serving notice to the left-wing political ecosphere that many prominent Jews take the side of those who oppose Israel’s existence and against those, like Trump, who have made it clear that they wish to eradicate Hamas terrorists rather than the Jewish state.
Call me Back Podcast: FORMER DEFENSE MINISTER YOAV GALLANT: Part 1 - Four Days In October
In the 16 months since October 7th, the leader who knows more than almost anyone about the inner workings of this war has barely been heard from – until now.

In this episode of ”Call Me Back”, we hear the behind the scenes story of the war with Hamas and Hezbollah from Yoav Gallant, who served as Israel’s Defense Minister for the first 13 months of this 16-month war.

In his first English-language interview since the war began, the former Defense Minister offers an intimate account of the war’s initial hours and days, with an emphasis on one date that could have changed it all: October 11th, 2023.

This episode is the first in a series of interviews we will be posting with General Gallant, chronicling the historic and unprecedented events of the last 16 months.

Yoav Gallant served as Israel’s Defense Minister from 2022 until 2024. He was fired by Benjamin Netanyahu twice in those two years, first in 2023, when massive protests in Israel led Netanyahu to reverse his decision, then again in November of 2024. Gallant is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party. His military career spans five decades, beginning in 1977 as a naval commando in Shayetet 13, and serving as chief of the IDF’s Southern Command during Operation Cast Lead, an early war with Hamas that lasted from late 2008 to early 2009.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
02:04 Why speak out now, and why on a podcast?
04:40 What kind of approach does Gallant want to take to this conversation?
06:23 Who is Yoav Gallant? What was his experience growing up in Israel?
13:03 Gallant’s experience as a fisherman in Alaska
17:05 Where was Yoav Gallant the morning of October 7th?
23:22 Reaction to the Hostage Dilemma
27:52 What was he doing the night of October 7th?
31:50 Gallant’s Visit to Kibbutz Nir Oz January 10th, 2024
36:50 Defending against Hezbollah
01:00:10 The IDF’s approach to the war and changes in Summer 2024
01:24:02 Did Israel come to the hostage deal from a position of being stronger than ever?


Hugh Hewitt: Dan Senor joined Hugh to discuss his sit down with former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant

Making sense of Trump’s Gaza plan | Think Twice
JNS #Jerusalem bureau chief and CEO Alex Traiman had the privilege of accompanying Prime Minister #Netanyahu last week for a historic meeting with President #Trump. Today, he joins JNS Editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin for a behind-the-scenes discussion of everything that was covered between the two leaders. They’ll go beyond the headlines for a deep dive look at vital issues that will affect the Jewish State for years to come, including: Trump’s Gaza plan; potential landmines between Bibi and Trump; military action in Iran; internal pressure on Netanyahu; the influence of the “woke Right” on President Trump; the future of JNS, and so much more.

Chapters
00:00 US-Israel Relations: A New Era
07:22 Trump's Gaza Plan: A Shift in Strategy
11:42 Navigating Iran: Challenges Ahead
17:29 Domestic Politics: Netanyahu's Balancing Act
29:47 The Future of Leadership in Israel
32:00 Political Landscape in Israel
33:47 Netanyahu's Coalition and Domestic Politics
36:57 Long-term Goals: Abraham Accords and Regional Stability
41:03 The Palestinian Statehood Debate
49:08 The Role of the Haredim in Israeli Society
52:57 Future of JNS and Media Landscape


Seth Frantzman: Israel must seize control of Gaza war, stop taking Hamas demands
This week, the IDF twice had to conduct searches near the border due to concerns over an infiltration or security incident. One incident happened near Yad Mordechai, and then on Wednesday, another happened near Sufa. It’s possible these were incidents that were due to false alarms. It’s also possible Hamas is already beginning to probe Israel’s defenses. Back in June 2024, Hamas sought to infiltrate near Sufa and Holit under the cover of fog. The serious incident led to clashes with the IDF, scrambling a drone, and also the death of a soldier.

Hamas is continually boasting of having won in Gaza. However, Hamas is not the only problem. Hamas also is enflaming the West Bank. This week in Nur Shams camp, the IDF clashed with terrorists and found an illegally smuggled M-16 type rifle. This is one of many illegal weapons that have flowed to the northern West Bank.

The IDF is now engaged in a multi-week campaign to try to root out terrorists in places like Jenin, Tulkarm, Al-Fara camp and the hills around Tubas. This is a serious effort and requires patience and work. However, it is also an example of how Israel is continually responding to growing threats.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, it does not appear that the Lebanese army is keeping up its end of the ceasefire. Hezbollah continues to try to smuggle weapons and cash to Lebanon. Recent reports indicate it is using Beirut International Airport to recoup funding losses through smuggling. Israel has already postponed the ceasefire once to stay in southern Lebanon. Israel may do this again now until the end of February. However, it shows that the ceasefire regime dealing with Hamas and Hezbollah is prone to having to deal with possible crises constantly. This happens as Israel is also trying to get residents to return to northern Israel.

Another challenge that Israel faces is calls within the governing coalition to return to fighting. Israel’s leaders now believe that they have complete backing from the White House to do what they want in Gaza. The narrative here posits that the Biden administration prevented Israel from going all the way and completely defeating Hamas.

The Trump administration has sought to change the narrative, suggesting most Gazans could be re-settled outside of Gaza and suggesting Israel could hand over Gaza to the US. The US would then “cherish” Gaza and get others to rebuild it. This seems a long shot, but it has caused some in Israel to believe that Israel can now go in and finish the job against Hamas.

However, the challenge here is that Israeli leaders and policymakers have not sketched out what they mean when they discuss defeating Hamas or having a victory over the group. Fifteen months of fighting apparently did not lead to victory. What does victory and winning mean in Gaza? Can Israel really facilitate the re-settling of Gazans? Where would they go? How will they be pried loose from being under Hamas control? Even if Israel does send IDF divisions back into Gaza, will it be willing to remove Hamas from the central camps area where Hamas has never faced real opposition to two almost decades of control?

These are key questions, and Israel appears to continue to let various actors and events lead to Israel always reacting to events rather than seizing the initiative. To move past October 7, Israel will need to stop letting the tail wag the dog and will need to move forward with the policies that Israel wants, rather than reacting most of the time. This requires a strategic vision and long-term plan. Only that will end this constant crisis mode of lurching from one crisis to another on various fronts.
Letting Palestinians Move Is Not "Ethnic Cleansing"
My priorities are ending the war, ensuring the survival of Israel, and accomplishing both those goals in a way that leads to a humane outcome for the Palestinians. I don’t think a Palestinian state is possible, so hoping for that is like hoping for Santa Claus to come solve the conflict, and even if it were I see no reason why humanity should want such a thing. Finding ways for Palestinians to leave as refugees would achieve the best outcome for all involved. The morality of such a policy is therefore open-and-shut to me.

Instead of arguing about the definition of “ethnic cleansing,” it’s better to get beyond word games and address the underlying concerns people have. Many operate based on the assumption that not many Palestinians would leave voluntarily, as Glenn Greenwald recently asserted without evidence. Yet a poll conducted before the war showed that about a quarter of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza wanted to emigrate. Among the under 30 in Gaza, the number was 44%. Since the territory has been leveled, those numbers are surely higher now. If half of young people in Gaza leave, it will be much more difficult for the Palestinian movement to continue putting forth extremist demands, and then those who remain will most likely eventually have to accept the existence of Israel. Even if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn’t improve as a result of the depopulation of Gaza, simply reducing the number of civilians in the area and letting some individuals go abroad would be a humanitarian victory anyway. Anyone who believes that Gaza is an “open air prison camp” must agree that keeping two million people in such a condition is worse than keeping one million.

People tend to want to leave poor nations in large numbers even in the absence of conflict. It’s reasonable to think that even if the war and occupation ended today, a huge portion of Palestinians would still want to flee. They aren’t that different from human beings all around the world. Palestinians are just given fewer possibilities to improve their lives because much of the Muslim world and the international left see them as the tip of the spear in a struggle to destroy Israel.

Given that they never cite polling data, where do Greenwald and others like him get the idea that Palestinians are happy to stay where they are? I think that people on the nationalist right and anti-American left both make a similar mistake in accepting the views of tyrants as legitimately representing the aspirations of those they rule over. A large portion of individual Cubans and North Koreans would like to leave their countries. Their governments want them to stay. When someone says “Cubans want X,” you should ask whether they are actually talking about Cubans or Miguel Díaz-Canel, the guy who replaced the second Castro brother in 2021.

Hamas has political goals. It would be difficult to accomplish those goals if too many Palestinians left to start new lives abroad. Civilians in Gaza can be taxed, bring in aid revenue for the local government, and serve as cannon fodder and human shields in the conflict with the Israelis. It makes sense that, given Hamas’ value system, it would want to keep Palestinians in Gaza. There is no good reason, however, for anyone who actually cares about their well-being or achieving peace to take a similar position.


Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create
Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.


Speech in Berlin by UN envoy accused of antisemitism canceled
The Free University of Berlin succumbed to German-Israeli pressure and canceled a lecture by Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories. The Italian lawyer is a harsh critic of Israel and has been accused of antisemitism. This is the third time in recent weeks that lectures by Albanese have been canceled, after Maximilian Ludwig University in Munich and the Dutch parliament also canceled her lectures.

The university's president, Gunther Ziegler, proposed holding the lecture online, but his proposal was rejected by the Academic Senate. The lecture was scheduled for February 19, under the title "Conditions of Life Calculated to Destroy. Legal and Forensic Perspectives on the Ongoing Gaza Genocide."

Albanese is known for her extreme views against Israel, even among staunch opponents of Israel. She previously claimed that "a Jewish lobby controls the United States" and later apologized. She has also compared the Holocaust to the Nakba, supported claims that Israel is an apartheid state, and spoke at a conference of Hamas and Islamic Jihad via video call. At those conferences, she encouraged attendees to continue their uprising against Israel.

In February 2024, she claimed that the victims of the terrorist attack by Hamas terrorists on October 7 were not murdered because they were Jewish, but in response to Israeli oppression. Following this statement, she was banned from entering Israel. A few months later, Albanese wrote: "This is precisely what I was thinking today" about a post on X that compared Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler.

Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner, a strong supporter of Israel, called for the lecture to be canceled, as did Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to Germany. Albanese is relativizing the Holocaust by drawing "absurd comparisons with Israel," the ambassador wrote, and she is undermining the right of the Jewish state to exist.
UN Watch: “Francesca Albanese, Are You An Antisemite?”
Eight minutes into her deflections, denials, and dissembling, and she never answers the question. It's a simple yes or no answer, ma'am.




travelingisrael.com: Qatar's WAR against Israel (Dominating the media and academia to eliminate Israel)
0:00 - Intro
0:51 - Qatar
3:35 - Using the media against Israel
13:05 - Sponsor
14:00 - Using academia against Israel 19:00 - Summary


How Iran Pimps Princeton (mini-doc)
Iran, a country of enforced Islam, state-sponsored terrorism, and a brutal gender apartheid regime, has found an unusual ally here in America, a place willing to house and promote its propagandists.

That place is Princeton University, which has gladly let its prestige to people who do thinks like: defend Iran's record on women's rights; called the Iranian revolution a glorious moment of utopian possibilities; and claim the country is not, in fact, a dictatorship.

Peer under the prestige and you'll find a place that's so drenched in academic jargon and reflexive anti-Americanism that it's willing to support defenders of a patently evil regime.

Featuring an interview with Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.




Hamas calls for worldwide ‘solidarity marches’ to protest Trump’s Gaza plan
Hamas called for “solidarity marches” on Friday, Saturday and Sunday to protest against U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan to remove the Gazan population from the Strip in order to rebuild it.

“We … call on the masses of our people, our Arab and Islamic nation, and the free people of the world to go out in massive solidarity marches” to denounce “the plans to displace our Palestinian people from their land,” the terrorist group said in a statement on Wednesday.

Trump said the United States will “take over” Gaza, speaking during a press conference at the White House alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 4.

Initially, Trump said Palestinians could return to Gaza, but he reversed himself on Feb. 10, telling Fox News host Bret Baier that Palestinians who leave the Gaza Strip would not return under his plan “because they’re gonna have much better housing” elsewhere.

Trump has suggested that the current population of Gaza would be moved to one large site or various locations. In an unverified report, Israel’s Channel 12 claimed that three areas being considered are Morocco, Somaliland and Puntland, a region in northeast Somalia that declared itself an autonomous state in 1998.

Netanyahu expressed support for the plan and a poll found that most Israeli Jews did so as well.
Former Militant Group Leader, Once a Suspect in an FBI Terror Funding Probe, Now Leads Anti-ICE Protests in LA
The primary organization behind the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests that swept through Los Angeles last week is headed by Carlos Montes, a longtime left-wing radical who cofounded a militant group, has praised terrorists, and has faced several FBI and police investigations.

In the late 1960s, Montes cofounded the Brown Berets, a paramilitary-style organization modeled after the Black Panthers that emerged during the Chicano movement. He was later accused of starting fires at a Los Angeles hotel where then-Gov. Ronald Reagan was speaking and had his home raided as part of a federal investigation seeking potential ties to terrorist organizations. While charges didn’t stick, Montes has been a staunch proponent of radical leftist movements for decades and has pushed pro-Hamas sentiment.

More recently, Centro Community Service Organization (CSO), under Montes’s leadership, has been the primary organizer behind the protests that gripped Los Angeles following President Donald Trump's swearing in, a Washington Free Beacon review of social media posts found.

"Join plans for J20 rally: Legalization for All, No Deportations, Women and Reproductive Rights & Stand with Palestine!" Montes wrote on Facebook advertising an Inauguration Day protest. Several left-wing organizations endorsed the protest, including Unión del Barrio, a radical left-wing militant group offering "self-defense" training to combat ICE raids, the Free Beacon has reported.

Centro CSO organized more intense protests between Jan. 31 to Feb. 9 as Trump's deportations began to take shape. Left-wing activists blocked major roads and highways, engaged in acts of felony vandalism, assaulted police officers, and a teenager was even stabbed.

Such protests are par for the course for Montes. On his personal website, the Centro CSO chief touts his leadership within the Brown Berets, where he served as a minister of information, and boasts about working alongside major figures in the Marxist-Leninist Black Panthers militant group.




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Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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