Saturday, March 08, 2025
From Ian:
Andrew Fox: Lessons from the IDF for the British Army
Andrew Fox: Lessons from the IDF for the British Army
Urban warfare presents the most difficult ethical and strategic dilemmas. The IDF employed extensive measure to minimise civilian casualties: evacuation warnings by text; small warning strikes on buildings known as ‘roof knocks’; and canceling airstrikes when civilians were detected. Still Hamas’s cynical use of human shields has made civilian casualties unavoidable.The Quite Unnecessary Peter Beinart
Planning for civilian protection is essential, both as a moral imperative and as a strategic necessity. The enemy will take advantage of any missteps by Nato operations in Eastern European cities. British forces must incorporate civilian risk mitigation into operational planning, use precision munitions with discipline, and coordinate with humanitarian agencies whenever possible.
Britain must acknowledge that civilian harm in urban warfare is unavoidable, even with precautions. Train troops in ethical decision-making; deploy frontline legal advisors: these will be key to maintaining legitimacy in the information war.
In Gaza, IDF special forces and regular units collaborated closely. Elite commandos cleared Hamas’s tunnel networks, while conventional troops secured the surface above. British forces must similarly remove barriers between special forces and the broader military. The IDF experience also reveals the value of real-time intelligence sharing to enhance joint operations.
Finally, the Gaza war was fought both on the battlefield and in the media. Hamas effectively exploited images of destruction to shape global opinion, often exaggerating or distorting events. The IDF struggled to counter this narrative in real time, facing international criticism despite implementing more civilian protection measures than most modern militaries.
Britain should take note: information warfare is as vital as military operations. The UK must proactively manage the narrative by rapidly releasing factual updates, providing evidence for military actions, and deploying dedicated information warfare teams to counter disinformation. When every smartphone is a battlefield, controlling the story is as crucial as controlling the ground.
Tolstoy described such a book as “nikomu ne nuzhnaya kniga” (not-needed-by-anyone book).Why do citizens of Palestine still have refugee status?
Its most obvious pointlessness is that it is simply boring, a predictable regurgitation of every slander against Israel. We get ethnic cleansing, apartheid, massacres and all the usual stuff. Why bother with Beinart when this is the everyday diet of the media? Beinart jazzes it up with a rant against anyone even vaguely associated with speaking up for Israel in the wake of the October 7 massacre. If that sounds repulsive, it is because it is. Beinart goes through the motions of condemning what happened on October 7 but spends far longer attacking those who have stood up for Israel since then. As he writes at the start, in his “note to my former friend”: “I consider your single-minded focus on Israeli security to be immoral and self-defeating.” Think about that for a second (because that is all it is worth). For Beinart, focusing on the right of Jews to be secure from terrorists is “immoral”.
If you’re worried about the impact on Jews of having to live alongside Palestinians in a single state – if you’re worried, that is, that they would be slaughtered – then don’t be, because Beinart says it worked in South Africa so it will work in the new not-Israel state. And that’s it. That is the entire basis on which he thinks the world should take the leap into deciding that the Jews no longer need a state.
In fact, South Africa is hardly a model to be emulated. Whites in South Africa have increasingly been leaving the country out of concern for their safety. White farmers are being murdered. The black South African leader and millionaire Julius Malema sings in public “Kill the farmer, kill the Boer,” and his other favorite lyrics include “Kill the white man. Kill the white woman. Kill the white children.” And it has been happening. Is that the South Africa that Beinart thinks should serve as a model for that Jewish-Arab state he favors?
Beinart “no longer” believes in Zionism. He has no sympathy for the continued existence of a Jewish state. He believes instead that Israelis should give up the idea of a Jewish state, and live in a single state with people who have just demonstrated in a most convincing way their pleasure in raping, torturing, mutilating, and murdering Jews, who just the other day screamed with delight, while martial music played, at the spectacle of Israeli corpses in coffins that had been placed in front of the crowd. Inside two of those four coffins, as the delirious crowd knew, were the bodies of the Bibas brothers — four-year old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir — who had been killed, according to Israeli forensic experts, by the bare hands of Hamas killers. In other words, they had been strangled or suffocated, like the princes in the Tower.
None of the three resolutions provides any legal authority for UNRWA to operate inside Palestinian territory today.
First, the texts of the resolutions make clear that they apply only to “the” refugees. The use of the definite article “the” before the word “refugees” means the drafters limited the coverage of the resolutions to those who were alive in 1948 and who actually left their homes in that year. Thus, the term “the refugees” does not cover descendants of the original refugees. Once the original refugees pass away, there will be no further legal basis for UNRWA to operate anywhere.
Second, none of the resolutions define the term “refugees.” The term is more logically read to cover those who left Palestine in 1948 for third countries such as Jordan or Lebanon rather than those who simply relocated from one part of Palestine to another.
Third, the wording clearly states that only those wishing to live in peace with their Israeli neighbors would be permitted to return. That formulation places the burden on those wishing to return to prove their intent to live peacefully within Israel. There is, unfortunately, little evidence that any of the so-called refugees could satisfy that burden, given how UNRWA propaganda has promoted hatred of Zionism and Israelis for the past 75 years, and especially since UNRWA recognized the PLO in 1975. Further evidence can be gleaned from a quick stroll through the Al Amari “refugee camp” in Ramallah (which is actually a neighborhood, not a “camp”), where the walls are splattered with posters paying homage to suicide bombers and other terrorists.
Therefore, because Palestinians living in Palestine are not truly “refugees,” UNRWA has no legal authority to operate inside Palestine. This is not simply a technical anomaly. It is a huge waste of US and European taxpayer money, which has funded the lion’s share of the billions of dollars spent on UNRWA’s operations in Palestine for the past nearly eight decades.
Finally, we now know that several Gaza-based UNRWA employees were Hamas members and participated in the October 7, 2023, massacres and hostage-takings. At least one UNRWA employee held one or more hostages as prisoners in his apartment in Gaza. The British-Israeli former hostage Emily Damari was held in an UNRWA facility during her time in captivity.
Moreover, Hamas has used UNRWA schools in Gaza for the past 18 years as bases for launching rockets against Israel and using children as human shields. Hamas even concealed a command-and-control center in a tunnel directly underneath an UNRWA location.
The bottom line is that UNRWA has no lawful basis to operate inside Palestine, serving Palestinians who are not true refugees and providing both implicit and explicit support to Hamas. The time has come to terminate UNRWA’s operations inside Palestine once and for all.
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