Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

06/19 Links Pt2: Conspiracy Theories About Israel Do Not Come From the Fringes; Learning from Menachem Begin; Eden Golan on Facing the Mob at Eurovision

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Return of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Last month, in an unprecedented show of support to the terrorists responsible for the current bloody conflict, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib gave a surprise speech at a Palestinian conference in Detroit that was endorsed and promoted by the PFLP, and for which the PFLP provided prominent speakers including the keynote. Tlaib’s enthusiastic embrace of a conference connected to a terrorist organization and celebrating the butchers of Hamas who currently hold American hostages turned surreal when she used her address to attack President Biden to the whooping and cheering crowd.

In truth, however, the PFLP’s big comeback was years in the making thanks to the secular canonization of two of its terrorists: Rasmea Odeh and Leila Khaled.

Khaled has become a left-wing icon in the manner of Che Guevara. She was involved in two hijackings, one in 1969 and one in 1970. She was captured carrying out the latter, a coordinated hijacking of four planes to be taken to Jordan, spurring a fellow terrorist to hijack a fifth plane a few days later in order to bargain for her release. The 1970 incident threw a lit match on the tinderbox of Palestinian-Jordanian tensions and led to what became known as Black September, when the Jordanian army was tasked with evicting the Palestine Liberation Organization from its territory. Outside the U.S., Khaled still draws crowds—and the occasional shoutout from progressive anti-Zionist academics like Marc Lamont Hill.

Rasmea Odeh, meanwhile, was still drawing crowds in the U.S. until she was deported in 2017. Odeh was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her participation in a bombing that killed two people. She was released in a PFLP prisoner exchange a decade later and eventually settled in the U.S. before her conviction for immigration fraud. Odeh was embraced by anti-Semitic activists like Linda Sarsour and in progressive and leftist spaces from The Nation to Jacobin to Harvard Law (and yes, of course, Marc Lamont Hill).

The PFLP was largely responsible for the strategic direction of the Palestinian national movement after 1967, when it argued that a long-term guerrilla war was the only way to offset Israel’s technological superiority. The PFLP’s approach, according to Palestinian intellectual Yezid Sayigh, was that “the Arabs should rely on their advantages of human and geographic depth to neutralize [Israel’s] superiority and drain its resources in a lengthy conflict.” That lengthy conflict continues, on American soil, to this day thanks to the progressive organizers, academic institutions, and members of Congress openly aiding the PFLP’s revival.

Eli Lake: Learning from Menachem Begin

Begin’s greatest triumph as prime minister was Operation Opera, the code name for Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. The parallels to Israel’s current efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program are striking. For example, the Mossad had begun to sabotage Iraq’s nuclear program as early as 1979, when it detonated a shipment of reactor equipment in France that was destined for Iraq. In 1980, Israel ordered the assassination of Yahya El Mashad, an Egyptian nuclear scientist who was working with Iraq — much like when Israel assassinated Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in a daring operation in 2020.

Begin knew, however, that such steps would only delay Saddam Hussein’s plans to acquire an atomic bomb. He tasked the air force with a secret mission to destroy Osirak. As today, Israel’s actions led to international censure and isolation. Even the United States, under President Ronald Reagan, voted in favor of a UN Security Council resolution that condemned the Jewish state for its aggression.

History vindicated Begin. After the U.S. military drove Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney presented Israeli Ambassador David Ivri, who at the time of Operation Opera had been the Israeli Air Force chief of staff, with a signed satellite photo of the remains of Osirak. It said, “For General David Ivri, with thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi Nuclear Program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm!”

The genius of Begin is that he understood himself and his country to be links in the chain of Jewish history. Begin was proud of that history. He lived his life by a code that traced back to ancient glory even though he was born into the perils of the European continent between the great wars.

American Jews today have had the good fortune of not knowing the misery of statelessness. We have not seen the same pogroms, blood libels, and dispossession that our forebears knew. This is why the solidarity with Hamas on college campuses, the double standards when it comes to acceptable speech, the stunning rise in antisemitic attacks, and the sudden need for security at every Jewish institution and event come to many of us as a shock.

Begin would not be shocked. He understood the persistence of Jew-hatred, and how to match it with hadar. We should do the same.

Seth Mandel: Stop Pretending This Isn’t Happening

In world affairs, the strategy of “just pretend it isn’t happening” has an extremely poor track record. Nor is it true that, as the chief of medicine on Scrubs once put it, “if you don’t look for a mistake, you can’t find one.”

Now that the world has been forced to admit that there is no famine in Gaza, it has been made clear that Israel is letting plenty of food aid into the strip. Which means it’s time to admit something is happening to that food, and it isn’t Israel’s fault. From the Wall Street Journal:
Officials from the United Nations, the largest distributor of aid in Gaza, say that people are looting trucks when they reach Gaza, making it unsafe for their employees to deliver aid. By midafternoon on Monday, no U.N. trucks arrived to pick up aid from the Kerem Shalom crossing, where on Sunday Israel began a daily pause to fighting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. along a key north-south road used to deliver aid throughout much of Gaza. The Israeli military said 21 other trucks picked up supplies on Sunday.

“We need to keep people safe,” said Scott Anderson, the Gaza-based director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a key group tasked with managing aid distribution in the Strip.

An official with the World Food Program, another U.N. agency that delivers aid to Gaza, also cited looting en route to WFP warehouses as hindering deliveries.

So UN trucks are allowed into Gaza, it’s just that the UN drivers don’t want to go because they fear Palestinian violence.

There are two possibilities here regarding who is committing that violence, and neither makes the international community look very good. Indeed, Israel’s critics would have egg on their face—if only the UN would agree to deliver the eggs.

Either Palestinian civilians are looting the aid, or Hamas (and Hamas-aligned gunmen) are doing so. Which means, to the UN delivery drivers, there isn’t functionally any difference: It’s still not safe enough to go.

The foot-dragging by the UN, however understandable it might be from a safety perspective, is in fact what Israeli officials have been pointing to for months. And what the UN and the Biden administration and our European allies have been pretending isn’t happening. But it is happening. And it has been happening all along.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

It comes up every time someone wistful about peace discusses the two-state solution. “I have to believe” or “I must believe” they say in regard to two states for two peoples. When I hear another robotic pronouncement insisting they must or have to believe in the two-state solution, or peace itself, I always think, “Why must you believe? Why do you have to believe something so obviously false?”

There won’t be a two-state solution, because none of the actual players want this. The Arabs don’t want a two-state solution and neither do the Jews. By the end of October 2023, in fact, support for the two-state solution had dipped to 28.6% of Israeli Jews, while 24% of the Arabs Palestinians supported a two-state solution, down from 59% in 2012. By now, that support—on both sides—will surely have dropped even further.

That’s because two states for two peoples doesn’t solve anything. It is only a nonstarter idea imposed by people who live outside the arena where this longstanding war against the Jews is taking place. The Arabs don’t want two states. They want one state, Judenrein. The Jews don’t want two states, because why should they be required to give up sovereign Jewish territory at all, let alone to those who plague them? That would not be a “solution” but a form of capitulation and subsequent suicide.

Despite the polls and the nonsensical nature of the two-state solution concept itself, liberals continue to proclaim that they “have to” or “must” believe that peace is possible, and that only two states for two people can get us there.

Take the recent hour-long podcast “’I Was Wrong About Antisemitism.’ Sheryl Sandberg on Waking Up,” on Honestly with Bari Weiss. I found myself enthralled, listening to the conversation between these two liberal, intelligent Jewish women, as they discussed Sandberg’s documentary, Screams Before Silence, October 7, Judaism, antisemitism, and politics. The two women had clearly both undergone a sort of culture shock to witness their colleagues’ indifference to the plight of Israeli victims of sexual abuse. It was worse for them still, to hear allowances and excuses made for rapists, in the case where the raped are Jews:

No matter what you believe, we have to stand united against clear use of sexual violence, and then people were still not believing it so I helped organize a conference at the UN where we brought these witnesses who stood there and cried and said “Here's what I saw, what I saw with my own eyes,” and then I took those same witnesses to parliaments in Europe where I certainly think they need to do this, and then we still were having some denial and a whole bunch of silence and some people speaking out, “It's never so black and white.”

Sandberg had worked hard for women’s causes over the years, but now that Jews were the victims, all the women she’d supported and believed were turning their backs, and worse. Some of them were blaming the victims. The general consensus? Believe all women, except when they are Jews. It was a painful revelation for Sandberg. And it woke up something in her Jewish—and liberal—consciousness.

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A post shared by Sheryl Sandberg (@sherylsandberg)

But that consciousness, thus far, only goes so far. Bless Sheryl Sandberg, truly, for documenting sexual violence on and in the wake of October 7. You can see that something changed for Sandberg in the days and months after the massacre, that drove her to do the film. And still, and perhaps all the more so, she “has to believe” in a two-state solution—stubbornly persists in believing what will never be (emphasis added):

What I would say is I think it's made me realize how much harder it's going to be to get to the solution that I still have to believe in. I don't think there's another solution other than two states, but it has to be two states run by people who want their neighbors to live in peace and prosperity.

It flies in the face of all Sandberg has faced and learned since October 7, and yet she persists in forcing herself to maintain hope in a lie, a false dynamic. Why? How does it serve her?

But Sandberg is not unique in insisting on believing something that in reality is a nonsense idea. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006-2009, and who served 16 months of a 27-month prison sentence on corruption charges besides, also feels compelled to believe a fictional fairytale is true, or so he says. Rolf Dobelli, founder of WORLD.MINDS interviewed Olmert in 2023 for Politico, and brought up the subject of the two-state solution (emphasis added):

Dobelli: You’ve been a proponent of the two-state solution for a long time. Do you think the time has arrived to finally implement it?

Olmert: First of all, I think that it is the only real political solution for this lifelong conflict between Israel and Palestinian states. There is no other. Therefore, I have to believe that this is possible.

Olmert did more than pay lip service to the insane idea of a two-state solution. In 2008, he promised to give the Arabs up to 94 percent of the land they wanted for a state of their own. Naturally, the Arabs spurned Olmert’s attempts to woo them with land. For the Arabs it’s all or nothing. One state for one people, and they don’t mean Jews.

It doesn’t seem to matter how smart you are, or highly placed. People have this need to believe in what will never, and can never be, two states for two people living side by side in peace.

Take Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State at the time of Olmert’s temerarious 2008 offer. In 2011, looking back at that time, she wrote: “The conditions were almost ripe for a deal on our watch, but not quite. Still, I have to believe that sooner or later, there will be a two-state solution. There is no peaceful alternative.”

It wasn’t the first time Rice had said this. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of a meeting she had with President Mahmoud Abbas in 2005 (emphasis added):

Remarks With Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas After Their Meeting
Secretary Condoleezza Rice
The Muqata
Ramallah
February 7, 2005

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I would just note that in the Palestinian national elections, President Abbas got numbers that would have made any American president extremely happy. It was a very strong vote for his program of a peaceful resolution to the conflict, of peace with the neighbor Israel, of democratic reform and of reconstruction and development to improve the lives of the Palestinian people. I have to believe that what the Palestinian people were responding to is the opportunity to have their children grow up in an environment of peace and opportunity and that is what the president won his election on. We are going to be supportive partners for him and for his leadership as they try and realize that vision for the Palestinian people.

Tom Phillips, British ambassador to Israel from 2006-2010, also pled to believe in a falsehood, in an undated article appearing in The JC:

“If you look at the Palestinian story and the depth of their sense of victimhood — ‘we lost our homes, we have a right of return’ — they must compromise as well. Each side must compromise on an issue that touches its identity. That is going to require great leadership on both sides. I have to believe there is the leadership to do that,” said the ambassador.

But why? Why does anyone “have to believe” there is Arab leadership with the will to make peace, when no such leadership exists?

On October 24, 2023, Jake Tapper of CNN, interviewed Roy Yellin, director of public outreach of the fifth column anti-Israel organization B’Tselem. Yellin too, is delusional, forcing himself to believe what can never be. It’s almost like he’s trying to persuade himself (emphasis added):

I have to believe that in order to stay here. And I do believe that, the only option is to find a way to live with Palestinians, as equal. That I do believe that only we provide people on the other side with full, complete human rights, future, equality, democratic norms. Only like that we can live together.

Academics, too—people you’d expect to be at least slightly intelligent—spout the mantra, resolved to believe a whopper. Here is Janet Freedman of the Brandeis University Women’s Research Center, writing on Feminism and Zionism in 2017 (emphasis added):

I have found that when I offer my definition of Zionism – the right of Israel to exist as a state – those with whom I am speaking usually agree with me. Yet in recent times, there are those who do not, and as eager as I am to embrace coalition politics on a wide range of issues, if a person or group does not support this basic assumption, I will seek others with whom to work toward a resolution of the serious, but, I must believe, still resolvable Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

In seemingly every sphere of society, you can find people pledged to believe something that is not true. Jared Stein, for example, a senior account executive with Customer.io, a "customer engagement platform for tech-savvy marketers" wrote a kumbaya-style essay for LinkedIn about how he chooses to perceive the post-October 7 anti-Israel protesters (emphasis added):

I have to believe that the people marching across the world want the same thing that I do for Israelis and Palestinians - self-determination. Security. Peace. We're all on the same team and should be marching together.

Just try it Bub, and see what happens. Presumably with a name like “Jared Stein,” you won’t last very long—and probably not long enough to realize the extent to which you are self-deluded.

Tova Leigh is a mommy blogger. Or at least she was until she turned 40. That’s when she released her first book, ‘F*cked at 40: Life Beyond Suburbia, Monogamy and Stretch Marks’ in which “Tova takes the reader on her journey of rediscovering who she is after motherhood and beyond the norms society forces upon women, whilst encouraging them to break free and just be themselves.”

Leigh, too, has fallen sway to the demented self-assertion that she really should believe something stupid and untrue (emphasis added):

There is distrust between these two people that runs so deep that sometimes I wonder if it will ever be bridged.
But I want to believe that the people who are ripping down posters of kidnapped babies or chanting "gas the Jews" do not represent the majority of Palastinians, just like I'd like to believe that the people chanting "make Gaza a cemetery" do not represent the majority of Israelis.

Why? Because I would rather believe that more people are good than bad, otherwise I can't function in this world.

Tova? Methinks thou dost profess too much.

But at least Tova Leigh is honest. She simply can’t handle the truth—her brain can’t take it in. Leigh needs to believe a lie in order to function.

There seems to be a lot of that going around. Even or especially now, when the two-state solution has never been less desired by the relevant parties, and has never been so far away. People need to and must believe what they don’t really believe, or they wouldn’t be working so hard to persuade themselves. But it takes more than a will to believe to generate any real hope for the future, or the promise of a better, more peaceful life for Arabs and Jews.

Belief, manufactured or otherwise, won’t cure the Arabs of the enmity they have for the Jews. Two states, ten states, one hundred states won’t slake the Arab lust for Jewish blood. In the end, peace can only come when we acknowledge evil, look it squarely in the face, and banish it from the world.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

06/19 Links Pt1: ‘Obama’s Law’ is bringing destruction and death to most of the Middle East; Hamas is like Boko Haram, says Kemi Badenoch; Rafah: 'No home without a tunnel,'

From Ian:

‘Obama’s Law’ is bringing destruction and death to most of the Middle East

Edward Luttwak — soldier, strategist, historian, rancher — calls it Obama’s Law: “Iran may attack all, but none may attack Iran.”

The Biden administration has followed Obama’s Law in the same fumbling, shambolic way as an apparently catatonic Joe Biden followed Obama’s cue to leave the stage at a June 15 fundraiser in Los Angeles. The result is Iran on the verge of the bomb, Israel attacked from all sides and chaos and war across the Middle East.

The Biden administration is now trying to prevent full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah – or, rather, continuing to stop Israel from responding fully to the war that Hezbollah launched last October.

Since 2006, according to the State Department, the US has given $2.5 billion to Lebanon’s official army, the Lebanese Armed Forces. The object is to create an “institutional counterweight to Hezbollah”, the real power in the land. The money is supposed to be spent on four areas: sovereignty, border security, internal security and counterterrorism.

A 2022 report by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies found that only in counterterrorism had the LAF developed its capacity. In every other area, Hezbollah had continued to advance its conquest of Lebanon.

As with its subventions to the Palestinians, no one really knows where the money ends up. As with American support of the Palestinians, a policy that is intended to support “moderates” has in effect given diplomatic and financial cover to terrorists.

Hezbollah has ignored UN Resolution 1701, which ordered the demilitarisation of southern Lebanon. The US has looked the other way. Some 80,000 Israelis are refugees in their own country, yet the Biden administration pressures Israel not to respond.

Obama’s Law is also in operation in Gaza. The Biden administration does not want Israel to destroy Hamas. It wants Israel to domesticate Hamas. The administration claims to believe that a genocidal Islamist group will not only accept the existence of a Jewish state; Hamas will also accept a piddling non-state as a pay-off.

This lunacy is nothing more than the logic of the “two-state solution”, played out in reality. The West expects that the Palestinians can be bribed into becoming a shoddy version of Israel, a pluralist, Western-style democracy with the rule of law. Both states can then be integrated into an American-run regional architecture.

This is delusional and dangerous.

The Return of Peace Through Strength

Si vis pacem, para bellum is a Latin phrase that emerged in the fourth century that means “If you want peace, prepare for war.” The concept’s origin dates back even further, to the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian, to whom is attributed the axiom, “Peace through strength—or, failing that, peace through threat.”

U.S. President George Washington understood this well. “If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for war,” he told Congress in 1793. The idea was echoed in President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” And as a candidate for president, Ronald Reagan borrowed directly from Hadrian when he promised to achieve “peace through strength”—and later delivered on that promise.

In 2017, President Donald Trump brought this ethos back to the White House after the Obama era, during which the United States had a president who felt it necessary to apologize for the alleged sins of American foreign policy and sapped the strength of the U.S. military. That ended when Trump took office. As he proclaimed to the UN General Assembly in September 2020, the United States was “fulfilling its destiny as peacemaker, but it is peace through strength.”

And Trump was a peacemaker—a fact obscured by false portrayals of him but perfectly clear when one looks at the record. Just in the final 16 months of his administration, the United States facilitated the Abraham Accords, bringing peace to Israel and three of its neighbors in the Middle East plus Sudan; Serbia and Kosovo agreed to U.S.-brokered economic normalization; Washington successfully pushed Egypt and key Gulf states to settle their rift with Qatar and end their blockade of the emirate; and the United States entered into an agreement with the Taliban that prevented any American combat deaths in Afghanistan for nearly the entire final year of the Trump administration.

Trump was determined to avoid new wars and endless counterinsurgency operations, and his presidency was the first since that of Jimmy Carter in which the United States did not enter a new war or expand an existing conflict. Trump also ended one war with a rare U.S. victory, wiping out the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) as an organized military force and eliminating its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

But unlike during Carter’s term, under Trump, U.S. adversaries did not exploit Americans’ preference for peace. In the Trump years, Russia did not press further forward after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Iran did not dare to directly attack Israel, and North Korea stopped testing nuclear weapons after a combination of diplomatic outreach and a U.S. military show of force. And although China maintained an aggressive posture during Trump’s time in office, its leadership surely noted Trump’s determination to enforce redlines when, for example, he ordered a limited but effective air attack on Syria in 2017, after Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons against its own people.

Endangering Israel’s Security – and Our Own

Prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration lacked any sort of realistic perception of the situation in the Middle East. Mere days before the attacks, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters, “The [Middle East] region is quieter than it has been for decades.”

This misperception led the Biden administration to divert critical assets away from terrorist groups like Hamas – ultimately leading to the failure to anticipate or disrupt the events of Oct. 7. In November, senior administration officials admitted that, following 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies almost completely stopped spying on Hamas and other violent Palestinian groups, believing that Hamas constituted no direct threat to the U.S.

Indeed, Washington deprioritized the Middle East as a whole. After the Biden administration’s takeover, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to reduce the number of civilian intelligence analysts tasked with monitoring the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, lawmakers, and congressional aides testified that this deprioritization of the Middle East had left the U.S. vulnerable and unable to anticipate the attacks.

The Biden administration also spent significant resources in a misguided attempt to appease Iran – a policy that directly led to the Hamas attacks and regional escalation. Less than a month before the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration announced it would issue a waiver giving Iran access to $6 billion that had been previously blocked by U.S. sanctions.

By unfreezing Iranian assets, the administration presented the world’s largest state sponsor of terror with unprecedented resources, allowing it to direct, fund, arm, and train Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the myriads of other terror groups currently attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. This both enabled Oct. 7 and allowed for increased attacks from groups like the Houthis, an Iranian-armed terrorist group that has been disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, causing shipping delays and increased costs to ordinary consumers.

The Biden administration also provided U.S. adversaries with valuable resources in the form of international aid. For example, the administration reversed Trump’s funding cuts and restored more than $200M in aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an organization with direct ties to Hamas – as demonstrated by the alleged involvement of 12 UNRWA employees in the Oct. 7 attacks and kidnappings.

President Biden’s approach to national security poses a stark contrast to that of President Trump. Biden reversed nearly all of Trump’s foreign policies, opting to alienate Israel and appease Iran – a policy that has endangered both the U.S. and its allies.

Absent aggressive congressional oversight to assess the Biden administration’s intelligence priorities – and to investigate its handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the recent decision to withhold information and weapons from Israel – the situation will only get worse. Failure to accept responsibility for the national security malpractice – as demonstrated in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now the Israel-Palestine conflict – will create present and serious consequences for Americans.

Under the Biden administration, rising foreign instability and conflict escalation have become routine. America needs to change course immediately and return to policies that foster peace and stability – both abroad and at home.

How stupid is Thomas Friedman? (How wet is water?)

I generally don't bother reading Thomas Friedman's columns. He is insufferably smug, thinks he knows what he is talking about when he doesn't, and writes as if he is the center of the universe.

But sometimes, someone sends me a link to hsi latest idiocy, and sometimes I end up reading it.

My estimation of Friedman keeps going even lower.

From his latest idiocy:

Yes, yes, I can hear the criticism from the war hawks right now: “Friedman, you would let Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, come out of his tunnel and declare victory?”

Yes, I would. In fact, I wish I could be at the news conference in Gaza when he does, so I could ask the first question:

“Mr. Sinwar, you claim this is a great victory for Hamas — a total Israeli withdrawal and a stable cease-fire. I just want to know: What existed on Oct. 6 between you and Israel, before your surprise attack? Oh, let me answer that: a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a stable cease-fire. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stick around for a few days to watch you explain to Gazans how you started an eight-month war — causing the destruction of roughly 70 percent of Gaza’s housing stock and leaving, by your count, some 37,000 Gazans dead, many of them women and children — so you could get Gaza back to exactly where it was on Oct. 6, in a cease-fire with Israel and no Israeli troops here. Another Hamas victory like this and Gaza will be permanently unlivable.”

I have a news flash for Tom Friedman: Gaza is not a democracy. Yahya Sinwar has never given a press conference in his life and he never will. He isn't afraid of reporters' questions because he would kill any reporter who manages to publicly ask him something that would make him look bad.

Every reporter in Gaza knows this, but somehow the great award-winning Tom Friedman hasn't quite grasped that

And to Israelis who would ask, “Friedman, are you crazy, you would let Sinwar run Gaza again?” my answer would again be — yes, for now.

And who, pray tell, would remove Sinwar sometime in the future? I guess that's a "day after" question that he doesn't need to answer.

The only people who can defeat Hamas are the Palestinians of Gaza. They, too, need better leadership, and if they find it, we should help them rebuild. But until then, Israel would be crazy to want to stay in Gaza and be responsible for its reconstruction. That honor should go to Sinwar.

Moron. That "honor" goes to the UN and EU NGOs who are happy to pick up the pieces, every time, and reward Hamas terror without doing a thing to effect change.

I believe that the morning after the morning after Sinwar emerges from his tunnel, many Gazans will want to pummel him for the disaster he has visited on them. And if not, Sinwar and Sinwar alone will be responsible when the water doesn’t flow, when the building materials don’t arrive, when the sun doesn’t shine — not Israel.

And if he is so foolish as to restart the war with Israel or attempt to smuggle in weapons instead of food and housing for his people, it will all be on him.

Sinwar doesn't give a damn about what Gazans think of him - he is openly dismissive of their concerns and their lives.

Not only that, but Sinwar knows something that Friedman does not grasp: Israel is always blamed. Israel has been blamed for every shortage in Gaza and is blamed today when the UN refuses to distribute aid. Israel is blamed when Egypt refuses to accept injured or fleeing Gazans. Israel is blamed when the Palestinian Authority restricts medicine or paying for electricity for Gaza. Only Israel is blamed, never anyone else.

Friedman is thoroughly under the spell of the if/then fallacy - the assumption that Palestinians would act according to rational Western standards when given a choice. The idea that they overwhelmingly support terror, or that they are overwhelmingly antisemitic, or that they overwhelmingly support Hamas even during this war, is utterly foreign to self-declared "experts" like Friedman.

Friedman apparently is unaware of every single poll of Palestinians since October 7. Hamas' popularity has soared since the massacre. Some individuals are on video blaming Hamas for Gaza misfortune, but the majority of those polled agree with Hamas' handling of the war. Sinwar's approval rating in Gaza is at 60%, compared to Joe Biden's 38.4%.

Friedman, even more than most media personalities, cannot distinguish between his own wishful thinking and the truth.

Truth is an endangered commodity when it comes to Middle East analysis.

(h/t Scott)

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Rampant cigarette smuggling—fueled by high prices for tobacco—has become the latest manifestation of a breakdown in law and order that is slowing the delivery of lifesaving assistance.

A group of Palestinian men approached a United Nations warehouse in central Gaza last week and demanded access to aid stored inside. The gang wasn’t interested in food, fuel or medicine. It wanted something it considered far more valuable: contraband cigarettes hidden in the humanitarian cargo.

Aid trucks and storage depots have become targets for Palestinian smugglers seeking to retrieve illicit smokes stashed inside shipments by their accomplices, say U.N. and Israeli officials. Other local criminals are also attacking vehicles they suspect have cigarettes hidden somewhere on board, they say.

Cigarettes sell for as much as $25 apiece in isolated Gaza, so getting hold of even a pack can be enormously profitable.

Prices have soared for smokes since Israel limited imports into Gaza to essential goods—which doesn’t include cigarettes—after the Oct. 7 attacks in which Hamas militants and others poured into southern Israel and killed around 1,200 people, according to authorities.

Trade in cigarettes managed to continue for months, with smokes surreptitiously making it through the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, which Hamas-backed authorities controlled. But when Israeli forces seized control of that crossing on May 6, the door was slammed shut on cigarette deliveries. Cigarette smugglers found another route through the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza but were unable to pull trucks aside to unload their contraband, as they had at Rafah.

Criminal attacks on aid convoys have become so severe that over a thousand truckloads of aid have been left sitting on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel.

Before May, Gazans could smuggle in cigarettes through Egypt.

Which means that they could also smuggle in (small) weapons and ammunition that could also get past inspectors.

Israel stopped the smuggling trade. Apparently, completely. Not only that, but Israel also stopped the criminals and Hamas from controlling the incoming aid and diverting it,.

These are unanticipated secondary problems, but they are proof that Israel is making things better, rather than continuing with the corruption and thievery embedded in Gaza's very fabric.

Are the additional problems from Gaza's criminals Israel's fault? Would things be better if Hamas was back in control, taxing the cigarettes, importing weapons and preparing for the next October 7?

Israel has allowed commercial trucks to enter Gaza, which is what is alleviating the food crisis. Enterprising Gaza businesspeople could negotiate to bring in cigarettes and any other goods that have shortages. This is a more efficient way to provide more goods for everyone. I somehow doubt that the UN and other aid groups were officially importing cigarettes.

The free market is a better way to distribute goods to Gazans than having aid agencies - often corrupt and colluding with Hamas themselves - do all the logistics. Commercial imports could also include medical equipment and medicines - it would be easier for aid organizations to buy the goods locally rather than arrange to transport them themselves. They could also provide food vouchers to residents who do not have enough food, allowing them to choose what and how much to buy, rather than being told to make do with too much rice and not enough juice.

In other words, the cigarette black market indicates that things are getting better in all other ways, and it points to a way to fix this problem using the free marker as a more efficient way to bring much-needed goods into Gaza.

Gaza still needs a decent governing body that cares more about the residents than about its military. It would need that anyway, just none f the dozens of NGOs in Gaza ever cared enough to complain about how Hamas had taken the entire population hostage. To fix gaza, Hamas has to go, and unfortunately the only way to get rid of Hamas is to get rid of the entire infrastructure it built to hide its military assets, which is the entire area. When there is a tunnel entrance in every other house, they all need to be destroyed.

People who disagree are tacitly saying that Hamas must be allowed to do whatever it wants.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

"Humanitarian" argues against saving hostages

The New York Times discusses the failure of the US-built pier in Gaza that was meant to bring in humanitarian aid.

There are a number of bizarre parts of the article, like "military officials are now warning aid organizations that the project could be dismantled as early as next month, a looming deadline that officials say they hope will pressure Israel to open more ground routes." This implies the lie that Israel is limiting aid into Gaza when in fact there are hundreds of trucks of aid that the UN has not picked up or distributed - the bottleneck is not the existing land routes.

Not to mention how bizarre it is that the looming dismantling of an aid pier that never brought in significant amounts of aid should pressure Israel.

This doesn't compare to the jaw-dropping statement by an official from Project HOPE:

Earlier this month, the Pentagon rejected claims on social media that the pier had been used in an Israeli raid that freed four hostages but that led to the deaths of scores of Palestinians.

In the hours after the rescue, video circulated online showing an Israeli military helicopter taking off from the beach with the U.S. pier in the background.

After the videos emerged, U.S. Central Command said in a statement that the pier and “its equipment, personnel and assets were not used in the operation to rescue hostages today in Gaza.”

Last week, Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, denounced “inaccurate social media allegations” that the pier was part of the rescue, but said that “there was some type of helicopter activity” near the pier during the operation.

Arlan Fuller, the director of emergency response with Project Hope, said the image of “the helicopter taking off from the beach really was contravening to the overall use of the humanitarian space.” He added that the image “muddies the waters” and could put humanitarian workers on the pier in greater risk.

Israel apparently used a helicopter on a beach near the pier to rescue civilian hostages from Hamas. The pier had nothing to do with the rescue, except, perhaps, that it was an area already secured from potential attack since the IDF is responsible for securing the pier for the US troops there.

According to this NGO, however, having a pier in the background of an unconfirmed video of rescuing civilian hostages "was contravening to the overall use of the humanitarian space."

What, exactly, is more humanitarian than saving people's lives?

Apparently, the answer is "optics." Israel not only has to be concerned with actual logistics of rescuing people, but it must also guard against how Jew-haters will lie about the rescue and is therefore responsible to ensure that antisemites cannot come up with more conspiracy theories.

No, Israel should have instead brought the helicopter to a place where an RPG could bring it down and kill the hostages. Or better yet, it should not rescue hostages at all.

This is how the head of a humanitarian mission views things. And it reveals that in today's world, Jewish lives simply do not matter.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

I watched much of the Munk Debate on Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism that was held on Monday night in Toronto.

Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff argued that anti-Zionism is antisemitism; Mehdi Hasan and Gideon Levy argued against.

Murray and Hansdorff won the debate handily, with the audience supporting their side 66% to 34%. But I didn't really see where they refuted Hasan's main argument that he made in his opening statement; much of the debate got sidetracked in discussions about Gaza and college campus protests.

Hasan was loose and fast with the facts. He took quotes by Arthur Balfour and Theodor Herzl out of context; (Hansdorff had the real Balfour quote and showed how Hasan lied.)

But Hasan's main argument did not seem to be addressed directly by the other side. So, I'll do it.

Here is what Mehdi Hasan said:

In 1917, over 100 years ago, Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, a card carrying anti-Semite, a man who had denounced the evils of Jewish immigration into the UK, a man who referred to Jews as an alien and hostile people.

Balfour was not an antisemite and he did not refer to Jews as an "alien and hostile people." He wrote, in his forward to Nahum Sokolow's History of Zionism, that antisemites refer to Jews that way, calling Zionism "a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile,." (The idea that Sokolow, in a book surveying Jewish peoplehood and nationalism from 1600 to 1918, would allow an antisemite to write the forward only makes sense in the minds of antisemites.)

He issued his Balfour Declaration, which promised a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

It was the first time a major world power had come out in favor of Zionism, which at the time was a pretty new and pretty controversial movement, calling not just for a Jewish homeland, but for the building of a Jewish majority state in Palestine.

And yet the only Jewish member of the British cabinet at that time, a man named Edwin Samuel Montague, adamantly opposed both Zionism, which he called a mischievous political creed, and the Balfour Declaration, which he referred to as anti-Semitic and a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.

The only Jewish member of the British cabinet. That is what he said.

And yet tonight, here in Toronto, over 100 years later, we are being asked to vote for a motion that would damn Montague as the anti-Semite while praising Balfour as the champion of Jews and Judaism.

That's ridiculous.

Another false argument Mehdi and others use is to argue that Jews before 1948 who were ambivalent or argued against Zionism are comparable to today's anti-Zionists. That is false. Before 1948, there were valid arguments about whether a Jewish state would be good for the Jews - some Jews were concerned that their host countries would expel them if there was a Jewish state, for example.

But once Israel became a fact, wanting to see an existing country get destroyed is a much different and extreme idea than not wanting the country to be set up to begin with. No one talks about dismantling Pakistan or Syria or China; only Israel. And the only reason for that is because it is the only Jewish state.

In fact, this entire motion tonight is ridiculous, disingenuous, ahistorical. It says. "Be it resolved, anti Zionism is anti-Semitism."

It doesn't say some anti Zionists engage in anti-Semitism, which I don't disagree with.It doesn't say some anti-Semites hide behind the cloak of anti Zionism, which again I don't disagree with....

The motion says anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

No ifs, no buts, no caveats, no exceptions.

Anyone, anyone who takes an anti-Zionist position is automatically, inherently, unavoidably anti-Jewish, an anti-Semite, a racist.

Throughout this statement, Mehdi relies on a straw man argument. Saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism does not mean that everyone who has an opinion against Zionism is an antisemite. Some people become anti-Israel out of ignorance or from believing propaganda; the bar for calling a person an antisemite is much higher than calling anti-Zionism itself antisemitism.

[The debate is] about the legitimacy of anti-Zionism.

Whether you can be anti-Zionist, opposed to Zionism, which remember is a political ideology, a nationalist movement, not a religion, not a race, not a protected class. Whether you can be anti-Zionist, without being smeared, tarred, demonized as an anti-Semite.

And I want to be clear tonight, you could be the most pro Israeli person in this room tonight, the most proud and ardent Zionist here, and still vote against this motion with a clear conscience.

Still vote with our side, the right side.

Because this motion is not about whether you are pro Israel or pro Zionist.

It's about whether the rest of us have the right, the freedom to take a different view, on Israel, on Zionism, on Benjamin Netanyahu, even without being silenced, without being told we're racists. We're not.

Everyone has the right to be anti-Zionist just as everyone has the right to be antisemitic. There is no law against it. No one is being silenced. It is another straw man. Hasan wants the right to make antisemitic arguments and not be called out on it.

Anti Zionism is not anti-Semitism. I'll tell you three reasons why.

Number one, if you vote for this motion tonight, you're throwing logic, history and the English language under the bus. Because anti-Semitism is hating Jews, the people, and Judaism, the religion.Anti Zionism is opposing Israel, the state, and Zionism, the ethno- nationalist ideology that underpins that state.

Zionism is not Judaism. It's a very modern, secular political ideology movement that was founded less than 150 years ago by an atheist named Theodor Herzl,....

Hasan is right that Zionism is not Judaism, although Judaism is Zionist. However, anti-Zionism is not being a critic of Zionism - it is a fanatic obsession, a pure hate that can only be compared to classic antisemitism.

Anti-Zionists keep trying to find new ways to make others hate the Jewish state. Whether it is "colonialism" or "ethnic cleansing" or "occupation" or "apartheid" or "genocide" or "Jewish supremacism" - all of these are falsehoods meant to make antisemitism palatable.

Hasan wants to look at anti-Zionism in a vacuum, but it is part of a continuous tradition of hate for Jews that has morphed over time to be identical to whatever is most unpopular in every age. Only after the Holocaust has naked antisemitism become unfashionable, hence the arguments that Israeli Jews (never Israeli Arabs) "Zionists" are the worst people in the world, which is merely an update of the Nazi racial antisemitism and the Russian conspiracy theory antisemitism, the "philosophical" antisemitism of Voltaire and the rabid Christian antisemitism of Luther. Just as with the earlier versions, the practitioners of the new antisemitism have a missionary zeal to convince the rest of the world that Jews in Israel and their Jewish supporters in the Diaspora are uniquely immoral and evil.

Notably, before and soon after Israel was reborn, Arab antisemites claimed to be anti-Zionist in international forums, but they made clear that they were boycotting Jews, not Zionists, from every country. This is the DNA of BDS.

...[Herzl] ho said, and I quote, "The anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries, our allies." His words, not mine.

Herzl was writing in his diaries about a fantasy he had that Jews in the Diaspora should turn antisemites into friends, by having the Jews liquidate their assets in their host countries when they leave to go to Israel, so the antisemites couldn't argue that they are taking national treasures with them.

Just as with the Balfour quote, this is the opposite of what Hasan is claiming.

#2 If you vote for this motion, you're throwing Palestinians as a people under the bus.

You're telling an occupied people, a dispossessed people, to accept their own occupation, their own dispossession meekly in silence.

Otherwise they're racists.

As my friend Yusuf Munayyer the Palestinian American activist, says to ask Palestinians not to be anti Zionist is to ask Palestinians not to be.

Well, every poll shows that Palestinians are indeed the most antisemitic people there are. That's reality. No amount of whitewashing can obscure that fact. They overwhelmingly support the most vicious terror attacks against Jews (way before October 7.) Look at Palestinian Media Watch. And then see of you can find Mehdi Hasan ever condemn Palestinian or other Arab antisemitism.

And #3.

Last but not least, if you vote for this motion you throw a lot of Jews under the bus as well. If you vote for this motion tonight, you'll say my debate partner Gideon Levy, whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, who served for Shimon Peres, who's written for Haaretz for over 40 years, just won Israel's top journalism prize three years ago - he's an anti-Semite.

You're saying the Satmar, the world's biggest Hasidic Jewish sect, which says it is fighting God's war against Zionism, is anti-Semitic.

You're saying Jewish college students on campus, maybe some of them your kids, members of If Not Now and Jewish Voices for Peace, they're anti-Semites.

You're saying some of the most respected Jewish voices in the world, like Abraham Berg, the former speaker of the parliament, Miriam Margonis, the actress from Harry Bloody Potter. They're all anti-Semites.That is what you are saying.

No, although some of them undoubtedly are. We are saying that today's anti-Zionism is the modern manifestation of antisemitism.

And again, it is worthwhile to look at the history of antisemitism. The original racial antisemites swore they had nothing negative to say about Judaism, just the inferior Jewish race - they were more cultured than Christian antisemites. Nazis justified their antisemitism as a defense against Jews polluting their pure Aryan blood. Every single flavor of antisemitism justified its hate for Jews as logical and even sophisticated - just like today's version which justifies its hate on the basis of creating false and twisted definitions in the lexicons of human rights and international law.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

06/18 Links Pt2: Israel Is Not a Colonial State. If Anything, It's the Reverse; The Campaign to Delegitimize the Very Idea of Antisemitism; Douglas Murray Vs Mehdi Hasan

From Ian:

Israel Is Not a Colonial State. If Anything, It's the Reverse

The distorted narrative painting Israel as a country of "colonizers" is a tawdry falsehood.

Given that many Israelis were driven out of surrounding Middle Eastern countries and many others were survivors of the Holocaust, branding them "colonial" is laughable.

My own grandfather was nine when, in 1935, his parents managed to get him out of Mashhad in Iran - a city where being Jewish was punishable by death.

Following pogroms in Mashhad a century earlier, those who weren't murdered or didn't manage to escape were forced to convert to Islam.

At home, his family preserved their identity and traditions. My grandfather would tell me about their underground synagogues, clandestine matzah baking on Passover, and secret Shabbat observance.

In Baghdad, my husband's grandfather wasn't having a great time either. After Iraqi independence, Jews were no longer allowed to hold public office, their houses were regularly looted.

Riots saw them murdered and abducted. Most of the Jews fled, leaving everything they possessed behind.

If you can spot a colonialist in this story so far, please do stop me.

Some 850,000 Jews were driven out of their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Tunisia, Iran and Libya. The Holocaust survivors also don't fit the colonial bill.

NGO Monitor: Commission of Inquiry’s 5th Report: Denying Security Threats to Israel

On June 12, 2024, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC)’s permanent “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel” (COI) published its newest report detailing Hamas’s brutal attack in Israel on October 7th and Israel’s defensive military response. The report contained two accompanying “conference room papers” – a 59-page report on “attacks carried out on and after 7 October 2023 in Israel” and a 126-page report on the “military operations and attacks carried out in the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 7 October to 31 December 2023.” While the COI discusses the Hamas atrocities, it minimizes their severity, ignores the geo-political context, draws false moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, engages in victim blaming, and denies Israel’s right to self-defense and self-determination. Absurdly, the COI ultimately concludes that while both Israel and Hamas are guilty of war crimes, only Israel is guilty of “crimes against humanity.”

In one of the most egregious lines from its report, the COI claims, “there is no evidence suggesting that the events of 7 October, as tragic and outrageous as they were, at any time posed a real threat to the continued existence of the State of Israel or of the Jewish people.” The COI seems to be ignoring the multitude of Hamas officials’ public statements claiming “October 7 was just a rehearsal” and “The Al-Aqsa Deluge [the name Hamas gave its October 7 onslaught] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” The COI also disregards that the Hamas Charter clearly calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and the elimination of the Jewish people.

The Commission has consistently minimized and negated Israel’s right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism, implying that terrorism is not a valid justification for Israel’s security concerns and claiming that the term “is not clearly defined under international law.” It has also whitewashed terrorists as “human rights defenders,” abusing this framework. The COI’s last report (October 2023) also placed scare quotation marks around the words terrorism, terrorist, and terror every time they appeared, belittling the term and discounting Israel’s legitimate security measures. It similarly ignores the role of Iran and the ongoing and serious security threats posed by Iranian proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and of course Hamas.

The COI itself also must be held accountable for its role in inflaming the conflict. By denying Israel’s right to self-defense against terrorism, drawing equivalences between Israel and Hamas, and denying the existence of Palestinian terrorism, the Commission ultimately emboldens and encourages terrorist organizations and violent acts against Israel, such as what occurred on October 7.

Methodology
The report relies heavily on unverifiable, anonymous testimonies and politicized NGOs. It is unclear if and how the COI attempted to independently corroborate these sources and to what extent it engaged in any investigation beyond a narrow selection of source material and individuals confirming the COI’s predetermined conclusions.

According to the report, “The Commission conducted remote interviews with victims and witnesses and consulted other sources of information inside Israel, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and in several other countries…the Commission was able to gather valuable first-hand accounts, including from children, of acts committed in Gaza since 7 October 2023. It met with more than 70 victims and witnesses, more than two thirds of whom were women.”

Moreover, the COI claims that “Information that met the criteria of reliability and authenticity was included and analysed under the standard of proof of ‘reasonable grounds to conclude’.”

Welcome to The Omnicause, the fatberg of activism

I’d like to talk about The Omnicause. Oh, you haven’t heard of The Omnicause? How embarrassing for you, because it’s quite the dernier cri! The Omnicause is, simply, every cause you must care about if you’re A Good Progressive rolled into one, because everything in the world is connected.

So trans rights are connected to Palestinian rights are connected to environmental concerns, and any self-respecting progressive who cares about one has to care about the other two. Queers for Palestine; headlines in the Guardian such as “Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have immense effect on climate catastrophe”; standfirsts in the New York Times such as “In many students’ eyes, the war in Gaza is linked to other issues, such as policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism and the impact of climate change.” Too long, didn’t read? “Everything that I don’t like is fascism.” I’ve lost count now of the number of Democrat senators whose social media biographers finish with “she/her. Palestine.”

Gender, environment, Gaza: they’re all the same, even though LGBT people live under the threat of death in Palestine, and I haven’t heard too much from Hamas about the environment. According to The Omnicause, they’re all magically connected. It’s the fatberg of causes, and the fat gluing them all together is Western narcissism.

Fossil Free Books, for example, is very much part of The Omnicause. You have doubtless read about FFB: the shadowy pressure group that has decided the best way to fight climate change is to campaign against wealthy investment companies from funding arts events. Yeah, shut down a little book festival in the north of England: that’ll fix the environment! But of course, FFB aren’t only interested in the environment – that would be impossible. Despite their name, their social media feed suggests their main interest is – can you guess? - Palestine, or, more specifically, campaigning against Israel. Their main complaint against Baillie Gifford, which – until FFB had its way – supported most book festivals in the UK, was that it had a tiny amount of investment in companies connected to Israel.

If you had any doubt of the clod-hopping, philistine stupidity of Fossil Free Books and all who travel on its dead-end coattails, Jeremy Corbyn has been cheering it on, tweeting triumphally after Barclays withdrew its funding for UK music events, “We will continue to demand all arts festivals stand on the side of humanity and peace.”

Ah yes, because there’s nothing that screams “war-mongering genocide” more loudly than, say, a music festival in a London park on a summer’s evening. Still, it must be hard for Jeremy to care about the arts when his cultural hinterland begins with regular appearances on Russian TV and ends with similar gigs on Iranian TV. Thank God he’s taken a stand against that true cultural evil: British book festivals.

06/18 Links Pt1: ICC, UN blamed Israel for a famine that never happened in Gaza; Dozens of hostages held in Gaza remain alive; Where is the Red Cross hiding?

From Ian:

Why Israel Will Never Back Down

Hamas terrorists murdered 61 of the 950 residents of Kibbutz Kfar Aza and kidnapped 19. Kfar Aza is just 60 miles from the center of Israel. The implications of this fact seem to be lost on those in the West who are bewildered by Israel's refusal to end its war against Hamas.

Israel's founders understood that Jewish powerlessness was no longer viable. After nearly 2,000 years of exile and persecution, Israel promised to radically alter the Jewish condition: Jews could now defend themselves; they would determine their own destiny.

As Israeli philosopher Micah Goodman has written, the horrors of the Oct. 7 massacre awakened Israelis to "the fragility of Israel's existence." While much of the world has moved on from the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, Israelis have not. When, post-Oct. 7, Israelis describe Hamas as an intolerable threat, they mean it. Israelis understand that their ability to defeat Hamas will determine whether or not Israel has a future in the region.

The Jewish state can secure its existence in the Middle East only if the forces that wish to destroy it are deterred. But if Israel loses the war in Gaza, Goodman explained, "the Middle East loses its fear" of Israel. In other words, "if there is no victory, there is no survival." And no amount of international pressure or outrage can convince Israelis to sacrifice their very existence.

If Israelis feel they are being forced to choose between international opprobrium and death, they'll choose the former without thinking twice. Perhaps more than any other nation, Israelis understand that nobody else can be trusted to secure the Jewish state's existence. Israelis have learned to believe their enemies' threats, and not to rely on their friends' promises.

In 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush promised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that should Israel pull out of Gaza, "the United States will lead efforts...[to] prevent the areas from which Israel has withdrawn from posing a threat." That promise was not kept.

Seth Frantzman: Experts: ICC, UN blamed Israel for a famine that never happened in Gaza

The experts say they followed the data closely since the beginning of the war. “We do that professionally. We don’t rely on stories. The hard data on food supplies are not difficult to obtain. Our analysis is based on data from COGAT, as well as reports and data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report.

These data display a totally different picture from what the ICC and UN are trying to paint, and directly refute the baseless claims that Israel is causing a famine or using starvation as a method of war.” COGAT is the IDF coordination unit that is responsible for dealing with aid entering Gaza. It also publishes information on the amount of aid entering.

Aid that enters Gaza enters through Israel, especially after Egypt closed the Rafah crossing on May 8. “The first part of that food supply chain is in Israel’s hands because Israel is the major force that controls what comes into Gaza. Once the food enters Gaza, however, the supply chain is no longer under Israel’s control, as the food is taken over by NGOs, the UN, and interventions by Hamas,” the academics note.

“We found that the food supply entering Gaza is more than sufficient to feed all 2.2 million Gazans according to what is considered a normal diet in North America. This is because if just 250 truckloads enter Gaza every day (more actually enter), and assuming the food is adequately distributed, every Gazan would receive the amount of food that the average individual consumes in North America. This is in addition to the food that Gazans continue to produce themselves.”

They note that their calculation is based on each truckload carrying 20 tons of food. This means that 250 truckloads provide five million kilograms, about 2.25 kilograms per person in Gaza. “This is almost identical to the 2.36 kg of food per day that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates the average individual consumes in North America.”

The professors note that “our findings have been recently independently corroborated by a working paper written by researchers from Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, University of Haifa, Ben Gurion University, Shaare Zedek, and The Israeli Ministry of Health. The conclusion of that paper is that every Gazan was provided 3,374 Kcal a day, while only 2,100 Kcal is needed.”

While enough aid is entering Gaza, they note that it may not always be distributed to people due to other factors, such as war and Hamas control. “We can say with a high degree of professional confidence that if there was a famine somewhere in Gaza, it was not instigated by Israel. To the contrary, Israel is engaged in a variety of efforts to ensure that sufficient food enters Gaza through land crossings,” they state.

The examination of the data by the professors joins a growing body of evidence pushing back on the claims of famine in Gaza. However, the chaos of the war in Gaza and other factors mean that Israel will continue to be blamed for what is occurring in Gaza, even if Israel is not to blame for the failed distribution of food.

Hamas not only appears to hijack aid trucks but it also benefits from claims of famine because Hamas can then try to leverage these claims to pressure Israel to stop the fighting.

The International Criminal Court Betrays the Legacy of Nuremberg

The mandate of the International Criminal Court is "the continuation of the Nuremberg trials," according to its first president, Philippe Kirsch. President Harry Truman credited the Nuremberg trials with "the blazing of a new trail in international justice" that "will be long remembered" for serving "faithfully and well the cause of civilization and world peace." The actions of today's ICC are the exact opposite and threaten to undo Nuremberg's legacy.

The ICC's arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas military leader in Gaza, equate the attacker and defender in the context of war. This fallacy was itself highlighted at Nuremberg in the Einsatzgruppen Trial of the Nazis' paramilitary death squads. One defendant at that trial, a commander named Otto Ohlendorf, insisted that the murder, under his supervision, of tens of thousands of innocent Jews was no different from the death of civilians from Allied bombs.

The judges rejected the argument: "A city is bombed for tactical purposes....It inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed...an unavoidable corollary of battle action...that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force...dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them."

The Nazis committed their acts so that millions would die; the Allies killed the people they did so that millions more wouldn't die. The opposite purposes of the Nazis and the Allies are clear.

Today, unaccountable terrorists - the new death squads - can massacre and kidnap babies, women and the elderly and hide behind innocents, and accountable governments are powerless to defend against such tactics without taking steps that inflict unwanted casualties. Legal strategies that erase the distinction between the two sides invert Nuremberg's accomplishment. It isn't just the legacy of Nuremberg that is at stake; it is the defense of civilization.