Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

07/30 Links Pt1: With Israel, the world is blaming the victim; Netanyahu's Popularity Soars to 82%

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Israel, Hamas and Obama’s foreign policy

When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.
Obama called Netanyahu while the premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli territory.
Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over the Gaza Strip.
No ministers were recommending that Israel end its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal, and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.

Alan Dershowitz: The 'occupation of Gaza' canard

Enemies of Israel, who are seeking to justify Hamas rocket and tunnel attacks against Israeli civilians, are mendaciously claiming that Israel has continued to occupy the Gaza Strip, even after its soldiers and settlers left the Strip in 2005. They claim that because Gaza was unlawfully still occupied, despite the absence of Israeli soldiers, resistance to the occupation - including the murder of Israeli civilians - is justified as a matter of international law. This claim is wrong for several independent reasons.
First, it is never justified to target and murder enemy civilians. Even if Israel did have a military occupation, as it does on the West Bank, it would still be a double war crime to fire rockets at Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields. It would also be a war crime to use terrorist tunnels to murder or kidnap Israeli civilians. The only legitimate resistance to occupation is to target the soldiers who enforce the occupation.
Second, a military occupation of Gaza - as distinguished from civilian settlements - would be entirely justified, both as a matter of law and common sense, because Hamas, which controls Gaza, is at war with Israel and has repeatedly refused to make peace with the nation-state of the Jewish people. A military occupation is proper as long as a state of war exists.
Third, and even more important for any future peace, is the indisputable fact that Israel, in fact, ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005.

ToI Live Blog: Hamas rejects humanitarian lull; UN condemns shelling of school

Timeout to last four hours; UN calls for accountability after UNRWA school hit, killing at least 15; army says it was returning fire; rockets shot at Israel after quiet night; cabinet ministers debates next step in war
Tunnel found in UNRWA health clinic:

An Israeli elite squad searching for tunnels near Khan Younis uncovers a booby-trapped opening in a small UNRWA health clinic.
The troops send in sniffing dogs and a small robot to minimize damage to the structure, but despite the precautionary measures, the explosives rigged to the tunnel are detonated, demolishing the building on top of the soldiers.
Earlier reports indicated that a number of soldiers were injured.Brig. Gen. Micky Edelstein says militants have used more than a thousand IEDs so far, destroying thousands of buildings in the Gaza Strip.
For instance, he says, in sweeps of a single street of 28 buildings last night, 19 were found to be booby-trapped.

More on the importance of Arab honor in understanding the conflict

On Monday I wrote an article about how crucial it is to understand the importance Arabs give to honor in order to understand the conflict altogether.

While Westerners like to look for win-win solutions to problems, Arabs look at everything as a zero-sum game - because when the other side gains, their honor of defeating the enemy is taken away.

The Federalist has an article about the same phenomenon:

To understand why Hamas would pursue such a strategy, one has to go back more nearly 70 years, to the founding of Israel in 1947-48 and the collective Arab response. In the late summer of 1947, Abba Eban, who would later become Israel’s first representative to the United Nations and serve as foreign minister during the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, met with Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League. Eban hoped to secure Azzam’s support for a partition of Palestine and a two-state solution. He reasoned with Azzam that, “if there is a war, there will have to be a negotiation after it. Why not negotiate before and instead of the war?”

Eban records Azzam’s telling response in his memoirs. The speech, Eban wrote, “has never been canonized as one of the major signposts in Jewish and Zionist history.” It should be. Azzam said:

If you win the war, you will get your state. If you do not win the war, then you will not get it. We Arabs once ruled Iran and once ruled Spain. We no longer have Iran or Spain. If you establish your state the Arabs might one day have to accept it, although even that is not certain. But do you really think that we have the option of not trying to prevent you from achieving something that violates our emotion and our interest? It is a question of historic pride. There is no shame in being compelled by force to accept an unjust and unwanted situation. What would be shameful would be to accept this without attempting to prevent it. No, there will have to be a decision, and the decision will have to be by force.
Eban knew that Azzam was being realistic, that Jews would only win their state in the crucible of war, regardless of whether they secured U.N. recognition. During U.N. deliberations in 1947, the Arab states refused to consider either of the two options put forth by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The majority UNSCOP report urged partition, which the Arabs flatly rejected. (After the General Assembly voted in favor of partition, Azzam stormed out of the Assembly hall and declared to the press that “any line of partition drawn in Palestine will be a line of fire and blood.”)

But the minority UNSCOP report called for a federal state in which the Arab province would have veto over immigration to the Jewish province, essentially allowing the Arabs to secure permanent domination over a Jewish minority. The Arabs rejected this option, too. Eban understood the Arabs’ intransigence for what it was: “The only solution they would consider would be the establishment of an Arab state in which the existence of a separate Jewish minority would be ignored.”

Fast-forward to the current crisis in Gaza: Hamas’ leaders are stuck in 1947. For them, nothing has changed since Azzam proclaimed a line of “fire and blood.” The intransigence of Arab leaders nearly 70 years ago is the present-day inheritance of Hamas.

Notice what Azzam said: "There is no shame in being compelled by force to accept an unjust and unwanted situation."

While is seems counterintuitive to Western sensibilities, Israel's continued attempts for 66 years to find a path to peace that would involve compromise on Israel's part is what keeps Arab hopes alive that Israel is weak and can be defeated. This is why Israel's existence is not accepted as an unwanted but permanent fact, and this is what fuels terror. (There is another factor: the value that Israel places on every Israeli life means that Arab terrorists can claim victory for every Israeli they kill, making "victories" much easier.)

For more on the Arab insistence on a zero-sum game, see here and here.

Hamas video praises #EyalGiladNaftali murders, another says Jews

From Palestinian Media Watch:

Unabashedly praising the murderers for capturing their "prey - a child," the song puts them on a pedestal:
"You are from Hebron, O hawk, and all are proud of you."
The song encourages further kidnappings as a means of freeing terrorist prisoners.

From MEMRI:

Osama Hamdan: The Israelis concentrate on killing children. I believe that this is engraved in the historical Zionist and Jewish mentality, which has become addicted to the killing of women and children.

We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos. This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence. It happened everywhere, here and there.

But of course all those "pro-Palestinian" protesters with "We are all Hamas" posters aren't antisemitic in the least.

"Moderate" Mustafa Barghouti lies repeatedly to justify Hamas war crimes (video)

Here are excerpts of an interview on Australian TV with Mustafa Barghouti showing how much "moderate, pacifist" Palestinian Arabs will lie to justify Hamas war crimes.

(h/t Ahron)

Third time's the charm! Rockets found yet AGAIN in UNRWA school (ElderToon)

From Reuters:

The United Nations agency that looks after Palestinian refugees said on Tuesday it had found a cache of rockets at one of its schools in the Gaza Strip and deplored those who had put them there.

United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) spokesman Chris Gunness condemned those responsible for placing civilians in harm's way by storing the rockets at the school but he did not specifically blame any particular party.

"We condemn the group or groups who endangered civilians by placing these munitions in our school. This is yet another flagrant violation of the neutrality of our premises. We call on all the warring parties to respect the inviolability of U.N. property," Gunness said in a statement.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week expressed alarm at the discovery of 20 rockets at a vacant UNRWA school and at another school a week before that.

Gunness said the body had called in a U.N. munitions expert to dispose of the rockets and make the school premises safe, and added that he could not get to the site due to fighting in the area.

Gaza has UN munitions experts? Which UN agency, specifically, does he work for?

And where was he the first two times? Did UNRWA bring one in through the Erez crossing after the discovery of the third cache? Has he just been hanging out a hotel in Gaza waiting for a chance to serve?

Forgive me if this story sounds fishy, especially after the debacle of the first two school rocket caches (the first went to Hamas, the second disappeared and probably ended up with Hamas.) Suddenly finding a UN explosives expert in Gaza seems awfully convenient.

Anyway, the big question is how this keeps happening. But I think Chris Gunness has his own ideas about that.

(h/t lots of people)

Rocket tally from IDF much lower than from Gaza groups

As of this morning, the IDF says that 2600 rockets had been fired from Gaza to Israel.

Hamas claims to have fired 2090 rockets.

Islamic Jihad claims to have fired 2039 rockets.

Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade hasn't added them all up but they have fired about 10 a day, and the PRC perhaps 5 a day. Other groups also claim a number of rockets a day.

There is nearly a 2000 rocket gap.

How to explain this?

Are the terror groups exaggerating? I'm sure that there is some of that. But their counts are very precise by rocket type.

Is the IDF lying? They have no incentive to lie to minimize the rocket threat.

The terror groups seem to count mortars, and I'm not sure if the IDF does. That would account for quite a few.

My guess is that there are a lot of rockets that are blowing up on at the launchpad, some are being double-counted from joint operations, and hundreds are falling short in Gaza, injuring and killing many - like the ones that killed kids in Shati and Shifa yesterday.

If only there were credible, objective observers in Gaza who could tell us what is going on instead of parroting Hamas talking points.

07/29 Links Pt2: Why Anti-Zionism Is Modern Anti-Semitism; 8 Times Kerry Betrayed Israel

From Ian:

Why Anti-Zionism Is Modern Anti-Semitism

Israel’s defensive Operation Protective Edge against Hamas rocket fire revealed that it took a military conflict to show that anti-Zionism cannot be decoupled from anti-Semitism.
As veteran observers of contemporary anti-Semitism are aware, the rejection of Jewish state sovereignty in Israel (i.e., anti-Zionism) has always been an inherent part of Jew-hatred.
In the late 1960s, the Austrian Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery wrote, “Anti-Zionism contains anti-Semitism like a cloud contains a storm.” To put it mildly, Amery’s definition of modern anti-Semitism wasn’t accepted by post-Holocaust Europe as a force to be combated. Anti-Zionism was deemed by many Europeans to be a politically and socially correct world view. In short, they viewed it as a form of legitimate “Israel criticism.”

Pro-Israel Hackers Overtake Hamas Sites

On Sunday, a number of Hamas-friendly websites were hacked by a Pro-Israel cyber team.
Users who viewed the various web sites expecting to see radical jihadi Islamist content were caught off guard and instead shown a split-screen display of videos taken from Israel and Gaza.
On one of the hacked jihadi sites, the user was treated to “Ramadan in Gaza,” where viewers are pointed to videos of chaos and destruction in the Gaza Strip during the now three-week long Operation Protective Edge. On the other side of the screen, viewers saw “Ramadan in Israel,” which showed Muslims casually enjoying their holiday without interruption.

Pictures Don’t Justify Anti-Israel Media Bias

The problem is the willingness of much of the international media to buy into Palestinian propaganda while ignoring the plain facts about the culpability of Hamas for the fomenting of the current conflict and the casualties that have resulted from its launching of the latest round of fighting. A media that isn’t willing to place the video of Palestinian suffering in a context of Hamas decisions to build shelters in the form of a vast tunnel network for their fighters and rocket arsenal while staking out civilians as human shields to be killed when Israel responds to rocket and tunnel attacks is one that can’t then turn around and advise Netanyahu that his country’s public-relations problems are its own fault. To the contrary, the willingness of much of the international media to whitewash Hamas and vilify Israel has only convinced Israelis that this is not the moment to hazard their lives on promises from the Palestinians or the Obama administration.
Asymmetrical warfare between a nation state and a terror movement that operates for all intents and purposes as an independent state in Gaza does generate problems for Israel. But if the goal is peace, then the only answer for Israel and the United States is to crush Hamas, not allow the pictures of the suffering that the terror group has orchestrated to force–as Kerry’s proposals have indicated–the West to grant them concessions. If both the administration and journalists like Fournier don’t understand this, the fault lies with them, not Netanyahu.

Italian journalist confirms Hamas killed kids at Shati and sanitized the area

A tweet from Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati tells the truth about the incident at Shati and Shifa yesterday, and it reveals even more than that:

Out of #Gaza far from #Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children yday in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris
— gabrielebarbati (@gabrielebarbati) July 29, 2014

In this one tweet, we have confirmation:

The rocket that killed the 9 children came from Hamas.
When Hamas made the area off limits to reporters, it was cleaning the area from any debris that could show the truth.
Hamas intimidates even good journalists from telling the truth, so much so that they won't report what they see while they are in Gaza.

This is more than an independent confirmation of what the IDF said.

It is more than a confirmation that the IDF tells the truth and that Hamas knowingly lies.

This is a scandal: Every single Gaza reporter who was there in Shati and Shifa are keeping their mouths shut.

Yesterday I wrote that every reporter got it wrong. I was too kind. Every reporter knowingly trampled on the truth.

If reporters being in Gaza only promotes Hamas propaganda and willfully ignores the truth, then what value is there to send "journalists" there to begin with? You might as well just translate the Hamas Ministry of Information webpage and call it a day. Because that is exactly what the reporting out of Gaza has been like.

Every single report on TV from Gaza should have this disclaimer:

"Our reporters have been threatened, implicitly and perhaps explicitly, by Hamas to only report one side of the story.Viewers must not trust anything they are saying."

There is an assumption of fairness in journalism, a contract between the media and the viewers. This contract has been broken, as far as I can tell, by nearly every single reporter in Gaza in nearly every report, with a couple of rare exceptions.

I understand that it isn't easy to report from a war zone. But when reporters are so willing to follow the dictates of the local government, and to allow themselves to be threatened without reporting that fact, then their reporting is nearly worthless, and they simply cannot be trusted.

EoZ Gaza War E-Book

I took my top articles about Operation Protective Edge as of last Sunday and created an e-book (in PDF format.)

For a $25 donation, I'll send you a copy.

Use the PayPal button on the top right of the blog or you can send an Amazon gift card.

(If you have given me a donation of over $25 in the past three weeks and didn't receive your copy already, let me know.)

Yes, it's a fundraiser, but I am working ridiculous hours to keep the blog updated during this war, and I want to be able to do even more.

If you want to understand the IDF viewpoint, you MUST read these

One of the problems that the IDF has is that the people making accusations against it don't understand how the army can possibly justify some of its actions.

This is inevitable. An army cannot be fully transparent during a war without compromising the security of its troops and citizens.

But we do have history.

The most famous - and most famously flawed - indictment of Israeli actions during Operation Cast Lead in 2009 came from the UN's Goldstone Report.

What most people did not hear about were the two responses made by the IDF to the report.

When you read the responses, you get the impression that Goldstone, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and the media's criticisms of the IDF are somewhat like an 8-year old trying to understand the US tax code. Their assumptions and guesses about how a military works, what the intent of the IDF was in various operations, and even about what international law really says are breathtakingly naive.

So far, the level of criticism indicates that no one has bothered to do the most basic research, reflecting a willful blindness rather than an honest desire to gather facts.

There could be valid criticisms of IDF actions in the previous Gaza ground war. But the critics - if they are going to be intellectually honest - owe it to themselves to actually read the IDF responses to criticisms last time, if for no other reason than to not be as staggeringly ignorant this time around.

07/29 Links Pt1: Excuse Me For Living; US diplomacy is going bankrupt; It's terrorism, stupid

From Ian:

Hamas denies agreeing to 72-hour cease-fire

Fatah official Yasser Abd Rabbo claims announcement was made with consent of all Palestinian factions, however Hamas says cease-fire cannot exist while Israeli forces are inside Gaza.

Times of Israel Live Blog: Hamas says it’s ready for 24-hour truce as IDF indicates op reached goals

Military death toll at 53 after 10 soldiers killed Monday; IDF kills senior Islamic Jihad officer and strikes home of Hamas’s Haniyeh, amid massive airstrikes; rocket barrage fired at central Israel in wee hours

Excuse Me For Living

Israel has all the proof it needs that world opinion will never consider its right to exist important. The Obama White House, and a lot of the US News Media, portray the Hamas-Israel conflict as something like an amateur soccer match, with the uneven score (40-odd Israeli soldiers killed versus 1000-plus Palestinians, mostly civilians) showing that the contest is unfair, that Israel has “gone too far,” that they have entered the same moral zone as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, carrying out a “genocide.”
Of course, this is a real hot war, not a diversity training exercise, or a self-esteem course, or any sort of the kindergarten psychotherapy that has come to form the basis of American thought and policy. And a vicious world opinion uses America’s own moral fecklessness the way Hamas uses women and babies to shield its rocket installations.
Apparently world opinion also doesn’t take seriously Israel’s founding maxim, “never again,” meaning that Israelis will not passively wait for world opinion to save them from an enemy that plainly and clearly seeks to annihilate them, as happened 1933-45. The Hamas organization is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That is not a rhetorical gimmick; it is its declared unwavering primary goal. (h/t The_Kenosha_Kid)

Twelfth Lesson of Gaza War: The Israeli Left is Waking Up

Writing in Haaretz, July 10, Avineri bluntly conceded: “We were mistaken.”
The Israeli left was mistaken to believe “that we were talking about a dispute between two national movements, and that the other side felt the same way,” Avineri wrote. “The Palestinian side does not believe that we are talking about a dispute between two national movements: It believes that we are talking about a dispute between one national movement–the Palestinian–and a colonial imperialistic entity that will eventually die off.”
“The Palestinian title for the two-state solution is different than the Israeli version,” Avineri pointed out. “The Israeli stance talks about ‘two states for two peoples’ but in the Palestinian version the phrase ‘for two peoples’ does not appear. It only talks about ‘two states.’ If someone thinks that this is just poor phrasing, he should ask his Palestinian counterpart to express an opinion about the ‘two states for two peoples’ version and he will sooner or later get the answer that there is no Jewish people…in the Palestinian narrative, the Jews are not a people or a nation, but only a religious group, and therefore they are not entitled to a state.”
Avineri concluded: “The source of the dispute is not borders, settlements or even Jerusalem…[T]o ignore these deep-seeded views constitutes a lack of intellectual honesty.”
Lesson Twelve from the Gaza War: The Israeli Left is going to have a lot of soul-searching to do. And it’s starting already.

Articulate Zionist Young Man Of DoomTM

More disproportionate force inflicted on two anti-Israel protesters, at the hands of another of our secret weapons.
Get this kid a political party with Mohammad Zoabi and I’ll sign up.

18 year old vs 2 grown men Atlanta Stands with Israel 7 25 14

Hamas killed 9 Arab children yesterday. No one seems upset at them.

The evidence that two Hamas rockets were wildly fired and killed at least ten people yesterday is overwhelming.

The first and best piece of evidence is that the IDF denied doing anything in that area to begin with. Usually they say they were targeting terrorists and it takes them many hours to even begin to release results of an investigation, but in this case they knew immediately that it wasn't them - because they weren't there.

In every case I can recall of that sort of categorical denial by the IDF, it always ended up being proven true.

Here is what the IDF investigation found.

Presumably this came from the Iron Dome radar that calculates the trajectory of every rocket that is fired from Gaza in seconds. Given that one of the rockets headed for Ashkelon, and that terrorists shoot the same kinds of rockets in each volley, we can see that all of the rockets were probably Grad-types - Qassams don't reach Ashkelon.

The destruction we saw was consistent with a Grad rocket.

Other bits of evidence came in. A WSJ reporter tweeted (and then deleted) that the damage to the hospital was inconsistent with an airstrike.

An early tweet that may have been deleted from a reporter said that he saw a "shallow crater" at the Shati camp, again inconsistent with an Israeli airstrike.

Hamas barred the media from the area as they presumably cleaned up any evidence of the rocket - something they have done in the past when there was a high-profile misfire that they want to blame on Israel.

Reporters in Gaza still give credence to Hamas claims as if the terror group that brags about targeting millions of civilians is trustworthy.

It is also worth noting that, yet again, "eyewitnesses" say they saw an airstrike and it was not. This has happened countless times but lazy reporters keep quoting "eyewitnesses" who have no idea of what they are saying (or that are lying, as often happens.)

The funny thing is that no one has ever protested about the children Hamas kills. UNRWA isn't protesting Hamas' disregard for the lives of the people they say they are prottecting.

No NGO is calling this a potential crime against humanity. Probably because they only accidentally killed Gazan children while they were aiming at Israeli children, which isn't problem at all for these hypocrites. The NGOs manage to read the minds of Israeli generals to determine intent, yet they ignore direct terrorist threats against civilians and policies designed to endanger their own people as not quite enough evidence.