Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 03, 2014

08/03 Links Pt1: The Truth about Gaza's Civilian Casualties; How Gaza became one big suicide bomb

From Ian:

Richard Kemp: Gaza's Civilian Casualties: The Truth Is Very Different

With few exceptions, reporters, commentators, and analysts unquestioningly accept the casualty statistics given by Gaza's Hamas-controlled medical authorities, who ascribe all deaths to the IDF. We have never seen so much as a glimpse of killed or wounded fighters.
Analysis of casualty details released by Qatar-based Al Jazeera indicate that so far most of those killed in Gaza have been young men of fighting age, not women, children or old people.
All Palestinian civilian casualties in this conflict result ultimately from Gaza terrorists' aggression against Israel, and Hamas's use of human shields — the most important plank of Hamas's war-fighting policy.

How Gaza became one big suicide bomb

Gaza is a suicide bomb. It is rigged by its leaders to explode.
This is not a metaphor. It is a war crime. It makes the calculus of proportionality in the use of armed force by the Israeli Defence Forces complex and uncertain.
The Hamas use of suicide bombings is well-developed. A decade ago, it involved the leadership preparing vulnerable Arab individuals to end their lives by blowing up Jews in Israeli cities. The use of Hamas towns and local populations in their entirety as huge suicide bombs to kill Israeli soldiers drawn into them by repeated Hamas provocations is an innovation.
There is clear and abundant evidence of this strategy in leadership declarations of it and in the use of civilian shields, booby traps, refusal of humanitarian ceasefires and lack of civilian protections. In a single street last week, 19 of 28 buildings were found to be booby-trapped. More than 1000 improvised explosive devices have been used by Hamas in Gazan cities so far.

Hamas's Blood-Drenched Cynicism

If, however, there is silver lining to the dark clouds hanging above Israel and Gaza it is the belated recognition – by Palestinians, other Arabs and credulous Westerners – that Hamas has nothing to offer Palestinians, Israelis and the region but death and destruction. Already blacklisted as a terror group by the UK, US and EU (for starters), Hamas has now lost its main backer in Iran (the terror group having sided against the Syrian government against Tehran’s wishes), and its Muslim Brotherhood ally that briefly ruled Egypt. Indeed, Egyptian media now denounce Hamas with vitriol once reserved only for Israel.
Even among Gazans themselves support for Hamas is plummeting. A new survey by a credible Palestinian pollster shows just 15% support Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashal, while an overwhelming 88% want the PA to take over administration of their enclave. Most striking, 70% believe Hamas should maintain a ceasefire with Israel in both Gaza and the West Bank.
Hamas has fired more than 2,000 rockets at Israel, sending millions of Israelis into bomb shelters, and is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Gazans. As the Gaza fighting enters its third week, it should be clear that Hamas offers neither ‘resistance’ nor national liberation, but blood-drenched cynicism and despair.

Times of Israel Live Blog Ahead of funeral, PM calls Goldin ‘a great hero’; rockets fired at Tel Aviv

The IDF late Saturday night confirmed that Givati Brigade officer Hadar Goldin, who according to initially assessments had been captured in Gaza on Friday morning in a Hamas attack, had been killed, and IDF Chief Rabbi Rafi Peretz and other officials broke the news to the family. Prime Minister Netanyahu announced earlier Saturday that the IDF would redeploy when it completes demolishing Hamas tunnels, but that the operation in Gaza would continue for as long as needed to ensure sustained calm for Israel. He indicated that Israel would not seek ceasefire agreements with Hamas, which he said deliberately breached a truce on Friday morning with the “pre-planned” attack in which Goldin and two other soldiers were killed. The deaths in Rafah brought the IDF toll to 64; three civilians have also been killed on the Israeli side. Gazan health officials put the death toll there at some 1,600. Israel says hundreds of those are Hamas fighters.

The Islamic Jihad mouthpiece Palestine Today is bragging that Gaza has won the media war - thanks to all those photos of dead babies. Yay!

There is a noticeable change in the attitudes of the mainstream media, and condemnation on Israel's targeting of civilians in the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of children, and this is due to the resistance not targeting civilians as the resistance has done previously.' said one Palestinian media analyst.

Hamas and resistance factions began to realize the tools of the battle, in light of the explosion of news and information, and the proliferation of social networking sites, particularly Facebook and Twitter, and it dispensed with the suicide bombings it had used previously.

The resistance in Gaza has tools that enable them to manage the battle ethically, and more realistic, as directed as a battle against the Israeli soldiers.

Recently there have been dozens of articles published in the major British and American newspapers critical of Israel, and its war on the Gaza Strip... U.S. and British newspapers have accused Israel of bombing Palestinian civilians and kill their children, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article by writer Yuli Novak (Breaking the Silence) criticizing the actions of the Israeli army during the war on Gaza, particularly in relation to the behavior of the Air Force , and said that Israeli aircraft bombed civilians in Gaza unabated.

Hani Habib, political writer in Palestinian Al-Ayyam in Ramallah in the West Bank said in an interview with Anatolia News Agency: 'The image is now different, obviously that the resistance triumphed in this battle. This time it differs, both in terms of articles published in the Israeli press, and in articles carries in Europe and the West, which carry pictures of the children of Gaza who are dead, in their bedroom, carrying their toys.'

Abdel-Sattar Qassem, writer and Palestinian political analyst, said that the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip has benefited from their previous experiences at both the military and the media levels.

He told Anatolia: "The resistance benefited from the experiences of previous wars with Israel, and it learned the lesson well, that they can direct painful blows to Israel by targeting its army, without the need to touch the civilians. "

He added, "The tone of condemnation by the media, and academics, in European countries, is evidence of the triumph of a message of resistance."

Perhaps the most absurd part of the statements is the idea that the terror groups did not target civilians with the 3000 rockets they fired on Israeli cities.

But Iron Dome did intercept most of them, so they are now claiming that they never even aimed at civilians to begin with. This is more of that honor/shame mentality - since their rockets aimed at civilians mostly failed, they must claim that they never aimed to kill them to begin with!

They are right about one thing - too many Western reporters confuse results with intent. The absurd claim that Gaza terror groups are not aiming at Israeli civilians might resonate with clueless reporters since there are relatively few casualties. After all, these same clueless reporters conclude that Israel must be targeting civilians because hundreds of them were killed.

It is also notable how the "Zionists" of "Breaking the Silence," who claim they are only trying to improve the IDF's morals, are giving aid and comfort to terror groups via the pages of The Guardian. How moral that is!

UNRWA school déjà vu - again, the media uncritically reports lies

On January 6, 2009, during Operation Cast Lead, the BBC (and every other news outlet) reported:

At least 40 people were killed and 55 injured when Israeli artillery shells landed outside a United Nations-run school in Gaza, UN officials have said.
A number of children were among those who died when the al-Fakhura school in the Jabaliya refugee camp was hit, doctors at nearby hospitals said.

Some media said at the time that as many as 46 were killed. The UN was in the forefront of telling those number to the media.

By the time the Goldstone Report came around to the issue, the claims were downsized a bit, to 24 people killed, and he admitted that the school wasn't hit, but that Israeli fire hit outside the school. And Goldstone even admitted that he didn't verify the figure of 24, but just accepted it from testimonies - testimonies that included known Hamas members.

Of course, at this point, people only remembered the initial lurid headlines.

The Goldstone report wasn't accurate either. From combing through the casualties listed by PCHR, the dates and locations, double checking the names of the victims with known terrorists, and reports from witnesses who Goldstone didn't bother to find, it is certain that there was serious mortar fire originating from the street outside the school and that at least 3 and possibly as many as 10 terrorists were killed in the Israeli retaliation.

That is much different from the initial, lurid, and utterly false headlines. But the truth didn't get reported by any major media outlet.

Now, fast forward to today:

10 Palestinians were killed on Sunday after Israeli shells hit a UN school in Rafah where thousands of people were sheltering from the ongoing Israeli offensive.

At least 30 were injured in the strike, according to Ministry of Health spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra.

The Washington Post agrees:

A United Nations school was attacked in southern Gaza on Sunday, killing at least 10 and injuring more than 30, as Israeli shells continued to bombard southern Gaza, hours after President Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that Hamas would pay “an intolerable price” for its assaults.

Was a school hit?

As Israel Matzav reports, some media are mentioning a slightly different story. From ITV:

A deadly air strike near a United Nations-run school in Gaza was targeting a vehicle outside the front gate of the school, a witness has told ITV News.

Well, that's a little different, isn't it?

Most of the most recent reports are already walking back from the charge that the school was hit, since it wasn't. It remains to be seen if the reporters at the scene will actually try to ferret out the truth. Given the false initial reports, the chances for that are pretty small.

It will take some time to find out the facts, but as usual, reporters are rushing into quote known liars like UNRWA spokespeople and the Gaza Ministry of Health without any mention of their unreliable record - just as they did in 2009.

If the IDF targeted a car, and knowing that the IDF usually uses fairly small missiles to hit cars, it seems quite possible that the car was carrying explosives or rockets that went off and ended up hurting and killing people outside the school.

This doesn't stop UNRWA officials from saying that Israel is targeting UN facilities deliberately.

The media laps it up, knowing that the IDF takes hours to investigate and make a statement because of the complexity of researching real facts rather than the ease of parroting ridiculous charges from known liars.

As we see the face of Hanan Ashrawi all over the news channels defending Hamas terror, it is worth reminding people about what the NGO that she founded, Miftah, has done:

They published an article that says Jews drink Christian blood for Passover, then attacked me for noticing it, before taking it down days later under international donor pressure- but they never apologized in Arabic, the language of the article.
They censored every single post on their Facebook page questioning how they could publish the blood libel
They published another article praising female terrorists (it was silently removed after I exposed it).
They attacked Judaism, claiming that any Jew saying that the Temple Mount was the site of the Temple is only saying that for political reasons.
Their "media monitoring unit" that supposedly looked for bias on both sides deliberately ignored all antisemitic incitement in Arabic media.
It tried to politicize a UN resolution meant to politically empower women into an anti-Israel springboard.
Against the wishes of its funders, Miftah is explicitly against any sort of co-existence and dialogue with Israelis.

Does this sound like a moderate?

Since my exposures of Miftah's excesses last year, it has kept a decidedly lower profile, no longer commenting on the news with vicious anti-Israel screeds. But that doesn't mean that Miftah has changed - just that it is scared of losing its funding.

So why is Ashrawi such a favored guest on major news outlets? Why hasn't anyone investigated her a little more?

The truth is that her views, and the toxic viewpoints of Miftah, are not anomalous in Palestinian Arab society, but mainstream. Since she speaks English well, and the news media doesn't want to point out the huge disconnect between her smooth sounding words and her actual opinions, all of this gets papered over.

Assabeel reports that Jordanians are snapping up Israeli flags - in order to be able to burn them.

Ramiz Ali, who works in a shop in central Jordan, said that with the events in Gaza the number of customers who buy the Zionist flag has increased. They are forking over between 5 and 10 dinars (between $7 and $14,) and possibly more depending on the quality of the cloth.

Not long ago buying the Israeli flag was considered a disgrace, but the demand for it has been booming from activist movements, political parties, and trade unions, to burn in rallies and demonstrations and national festivals or put it in front of homes to walk over.

In the city of Maan the municipal council put the Israeli flag on the floor of the entrance to the building so everyone who enters the building would step on it.

Political activist and union leader Mahmoud Amin Hiari said that that Jordanians are snapping up the Zionist flag in order to burn it, part of a campaign of solidarity with the Gaza Strip.

Hiari explained the significance of the symbols on the Israeli flag. He noted that the Israeli flag bears the Star of David with a hexagon; which is formed from two triangles of equal sides, one representing the tribe of Judah, and the other represents the tribe of Benjamin. Jews this star the shield of King David. But it is not only political, but it has other dimensions; signs of Freemasonry, which attracts negative energy and concentration, and if you look at the back of a dollar bill atop a pyramid, and above an eye that sees everything, and this eye symbolizes the one-eyed Antichrist, who Jews believe is the Savior.

The two blue lines, of course, represent the River Nile and the Euphrates River; referring to the desired boundaries of Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.

(If anyone reading this believes any of that nonsense, besides feeling sorry for you, Wikipedia has a more accurate description.)

Of course, I have to repost this classic video:

Malaysian couple decides to burn Israeli flag on their wedding day

From Astro Awani (Malaysia):

A couple decided to create something memorable on their wedding day: stepping on and burning the Israeli flag as a sign of protest against the regime's violence towards the Palestinians in Gaza.

Mohd Hilmi Muslim and his bride Norfadhilah Mohd Badroldin, both 27-year-old architects, did it because they felt very sad in seeing Muslims suffer, especially the women and children who were victims of the Zionist regime.

Mohd Hilmi said as a Muslim, he strongly objects to such inhumane acts carried by the Israelis.

"Alhamdulillah, I am thankful that the wedding ceremony went smoothly and we get to express our disappointment and grief towards the violence at the hands of Israel in Gaza. As Muslims, we strongly object and condemn the act," he said.

The wedding ceremony began around 2pm where both the bride and groom were paraded to their house in Kampung Umbai, Jasin.

The couple then trampled on the Israeli flag and burned it before entering the house.

The flag was placed in front of the entrance so that 3,000 guests who attended the wedding could also take turns stepping on it.

Isn't it great that they decided to begin their marriage with such an act of love?

08/02 Links: Netanyahu to Shapiro: US must ‘never second-guess me again’ on Hamas

From Ian:

Michael Oren: In Defense of Zionism

They come from every corner of the country—investment bankers, farmers, computer geeks, jazz drummers, botany professors, car mechanics—leaving their jobs and their families. They put on uniforms that are invariably too tight or too baggy, sign out their gear and guns. Then, scrambling onto military vehicles, 70,000 reservists—women and men—join the young conscripts of what is proportionally the world's largest citizen army. They all know that some of them will return maimed or not at all. And yet, without hesitation or (for the most part) complaint, proudly responding to the call-up, Israelis stand ready to defend their nation. They risk their lives for an idea.
The idea is Zionism. It is the belief that the Jewish people should have their own sovereign state in the Land of Israel. Though founded less than 150 years ago, the Zionist movement sprung from a 4,000-year-long bond between the Jewish people and its historic homeland, an attachment sustained throughout 20 centuries of exile. This is why Zionism achieved its goals and remains relevant and rigorous today. It is why citizens of Israel—the state that Zionism created—willingly take up arms. They believe their idea is worth fighting for.
Yet Zionism, arguably more than any other contemporary ideology, is demonized. "All Zionists are legitimate targets everywhere in the world!" declared a banner recently paraded by anti-Israel protesters in Denmark. "Dogs are allowed in this establishment but Zionists are not under any circumstances," warned a sign in the window of a Belgian cafe. A Jewish demonstrator in Iceland was accosted and told, "You Zionist pig, I'm going to behead you." (h/t Jewess)

Piers Akerman: All we are saying, is give war a chance

THE real message coming from the Gazan conflict is give war a chance. That’s right. All peace-loving people should be demonstrating in the streets and singing, “All we are saying, is give war a chance”.
If, as the Left says, the Palestinians want peace, then let Israel smash the terrorist group Hamas, which runs Gaza and uses Palestinian children as human shields. Get the terrorists out of the hospitals, get their rockets out of the schools (a third stockpile was found in a UN school earlier this week), get them out of their rat-run tunnels and away from the civilian population.
On the other hand, if the Left wants the terrorists to smash Israel, and that is the clear message from the Greens and Labor MPs who attend rallies where the flags of Hezbollah, Hamas and the jihadists fly, there will be no holding back terrorism around the world.
Strip away the Al Jazeera propaganda that the ABC broadcasts and Fairfax media supports in its commentaries by erratic penny-a-line scribblers like Mike Carlton, and there is no other way to view the conflict. There is no moral equivalency argument to be had. Loss of civilian life is of course abhorrent. But in this conflict there is only one side which is going to great lengths in its attempt to avoid killing civilians. No, not Hamas, which enjoys the support of the anti-Israeli rallies staged by so-called peace groups and some deluded Christian churches here and elsewhere in the West, but Israel.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The Most Dangerous Moment in Gaza

There is near-unanimity in Israel already that Hamas represents an unbearable threat. Add in the perfidy of a raid conducted after a ceasefire went into effect and near-unanimity becomes total unanimity. The most interesting article I've read in the past 24 hours is an interview with the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, the father of his country's peace-and-compromise movement, who opened the interview with Deutsche Welle in this manner:

Amoz Oz: I would like to begin the interview in a very unusual way: by presenting one or two questions to your readers and listeners. May I do that?
Deutsche Welle: Go ahead!
Question 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?
Question 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?
With these two questions I pass the interview to you.
The point is, if Amos Oz, a severe critic of his country's policies toward the Palestinians, sounds no different on the subject of the Hamas threat than the right-most ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing cabinet, then there will be a national consensus that it is not enough to manage the Hamas rocket-and-tunnel threat, but that it must be eliminated if at all possible. This doesn't mean that the Israeli government wants to see the Hamas government in Gaza replaced. What it could mean is that the Israeli public demands that its leaders ensure them that the tunnel threat, in particular, is neutralized in a decisive way. (h/t Jewess)

White House ‘Champion of Change’ Goes After Black Pro-Israel Activist

An Obama administration-endorsed “champion of change” has lashed out at an African American pro-Israel activist, accusing her of forgetting “where she came from” and implying that she is being manipulated by the pro-Israel community.
Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American Muslim activist who has been honored by the White House as a “champion of change,” upbraided pro-Israel activist Chloe Simone Valdary Thursday on Twitter after she criticized the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has come under fire for engaging in anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The heated exchange between Valdary (@Cvaldary on Twitter) and Sarsour (@lsarsour on Twitter) elicited multiple responses from observers who accused Sarsour of engaging in racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes. (h/t MtTB)

Weekly round-up

July saw the highest readership at EoZ by far - over double my average number of hits. And things keep increasing; these past seven days were also a record with over 125,000 hits to my webpage alone (including RSS feeds, emails and the like, perhaps double that number.)

The most popular posts were the ones that tore off the mask of journalists covering the war: the Spanish journalist who admitted that reporters in Gaza were under threat, the Italian journalist who said that the massacre at the Shati camp was from Hamas, and the videos of reporters being scared by nearby rocket fire.

Here's another one where a reporter admits that rockets are fired from the Shifa hospital parking lot.

The posts I liked most were:

And these are only a selection of the 60 stories I posted this week!

Thank G-d for Shabbat! I would be completely burned out if I didn't take off one day a week.

I need to thank again those who donated to the blog and who paid for the e-book of my major stories from the first three weeks of the war. You guys are the best.

08/01 Links Pt2: Goebbels on the BBC; Beinart's The ‘Myths’ Of Gaza; Obama's Gaza Game

From Ian:

Sarah Honig: Another tack: Goebbels on the BBC

Imagine Josef Goebbels invited to speak his mind on the BBC, smack dab during the Battle of Britain and the blitz. Sound absurd? Sure, but only in the context of normal nations. No sane Briton would have tolerated the notion of the BBC broadcasting German propaganda to Londoners as they ran for shelter from German bombs.
Abetting Nazi belligerence would have been a nonstarter even under the guise of a detached reporter’s interview, part of an evenhanded approach, a sporting consideration for the aggressor’s point of view.
But not so in Israel. Here we operate in an alternative universe. Nothing that would be unthinkable anywhere else is out of bounds for our broadcasters.

The ‘Myths’ Of Gaza

In Haaretz, Peter Beinart imparts readers with some hard truths about the recent history of Gaza. “Much of what we’ve been told about Israel’s ‘withdrawal’ from Gaza,” he contends, is simply not true. The mythology created by Jewish-American leaders, he writes, builds a narrative that does does little more but rationalize Israel’s “wrong” war.
Now, there are a number of problems with Beinart’s predictably distorted version of this conflict’s history—which could use a thorough debunking—but the most obvious glitch is that most of the myths Beinart claims to dispel aren’t ever actually uttered by Jewish leaders, or anyone else, for that matter.
There are three distortions Beinart believes gullible Jewish American use to justify their “skepticism of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.”

Former UN official charged with anti-Semitism, now California academic, takes on Israel in Gaza

Richard Falk, the notorious former United Nations human rights official who was widely castigated for his anti-Semitic statements and aggressively anti-Israeli stance before finally leaving office in May, is at it again.
Falk, formerly the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of the Palestinian people, is orchestrating a new manifesto accusing Israel of making war against “the people of Gaza as a whole,” calling on the U.N and “in particular the United States of America” to hold Israeli political leaders and military commanders accountable for war crimes, and demanding that the U.N. Security Council refer the entire situation in Palestine to the International Criminal Court.
The manifesto is signed by Falk, who is now at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and 124 other legal academics around the world, including a handful in the U.S. The most prominent signatory aside from Falk is John Dugard, a South African legal scholar who was also widely condemned for anti-Semitic findings as the U.N.’s human rights special rapporteur on Palestine — until Falk took his place.

Where does Hamas get the money for the tunnels and weapons? From you!

Here's a partial answer: from you.

I just updated a chart I did a couple of years ago: (Source of figures)

There are the top recipients of international aid, sorted by aid per capita.

The PA spends over half its budget on Gaza - even when they are not controlling Gaza. Which means that Hamas has money to buy weapons and build tunnels instead of helping Gazans and building infrastructure.

As we've seen, UNRWA projects and other international projects that were allowed to import cement recently are run by corrupt people who will ensure that some of the dual-use material ends up in Hamas' hands. But the tunnels were clearly being built when Israel allowed cement to be imported, as well as when Egypt did.

So, yes, our tax dollars - which pay the Palestinians more per capita than any country every single year - went a long way towards helping build the terror infrastructure Israel faces today.

Where are the experts in ballistics and urban warfare on TV?

One of the most striking omissions in the wall-to-wall coverage of Gaza is the complete absence, as far as I can tell, of any real military experts.

You would think that with all the talking heads on TV they could dig up someone who actually knows what it is like to be in an urban battlefield, or even in a war itself.

To most Westerners, the army is an abstract, monolithic entity and people are clueless about how the chain of command works, about any checks and balances, about realtime battlefield conditions and decisions, about the rules of engagement.

All we are seeing are videos and photos of dead children and wailing mothers.

To put it mildly, this is irresponsible. Especially because news organizations, by their very names, have access to real experts and not just two token loudmouths from either side who yell at each other.

Journalists are making assumptions about the situation, based on very incomplete information. The IDF, in the middle of a war, cannot explain in real time the reasons for its decisions. But it is not a bunch of rogue cells - it has rules, it has a command structure, it plans how to react to scenarios in as effective yet safe a way as possible.

How do I know? Because I'm one of the few people who read the responses the IDF gave to critics after the 2009 Gaza war that I reproduced here.. The same kinds of incidents, with the same kinds of horrific civilian deaths, are investigated and described. Mistakes are frankly admitted. But there is an entirely different dimension to the fighting that reporters who are a few miles away in their hotels, away from the action, cannot see for themselves unless they want to put themselves in extreme personal danger.

If you want to say that all those reports on all those incidents are a whitewash by the IDF, then there should still be no objection to the media including real experts on their panels about a war. Let the viewers see inside the heads of soldiers, not only victims.

That would be journalism.

If anyone knows any real experts in these areas that would be willing to talk to me on the record, I would love to ask them questions. I would love to ask about photos of damage and injuries and what weapons were most likely to cause it. I would love to ask about the fear that soldiers face in a new, unknown situation.

And a lot of people besides me would love to hear the answers.

08/01 Links Pt1: WSJ Ed for '68: Things Permitted to Other Nations Are Forbidden to the Jews

From Ian:

WSJ Republishes Op-Ed From 1968: ‘The Jews Are a Peculiar People: Things Permitted to Other Nations Are Forbidden to the Jews’

The Wall Street Journal on Thursday republished an Op-Ed, originally printed by the LA Times in 1968, by a non-Jewish winner of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom who spoke of the condition and treatment of the Jewish people and their struggle to defend Israel.
Written after Israel’s victory in the 1967 War, what is striking is that the challenges faced by Jews and Israel then are almost the same as today.
"There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we did in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.
The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources. Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to American and the West in general.
I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us."

'Hamas wants Israel completely destroyed'

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the world's most prominent fighters against radical Islam, defends Israel's right to fight Hamas, says the West is refusing to recognize the danger of growing Muslim extremism • "Netanyahu should get a Nobel Peace Prize," she says.
Is there any point in negotiating with Hamas? With any Muslim movement?
"You can negotiate with fellow human beings with whom you have some kind of common ground. The assumption as we negotiate is that there is fair play. The problem with negotiating with Hamas is that they have a vision, a certain kind of utopia. And for that utopia to be realized, the State of Israel must be completely destroyed. Shariah law has to be established, ideally, all over the world. You can never trust a Jew, you can never trust a Christian. That is the utopia. Women have to behave a certain way, they have to be locked up, it is very totalitarian. You can negotiate until you are as blue in the face as the American flag, but it will never yield anything on the other side.
"Everyone was upset with [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu when he said that he would not negotiate before the other side said that they recognize the existence of the State of Israel. That is a basic demand. Without that it is pointless to go to the negotiations table. It is Negotiations 101."

JPost Editorial False causes

In Gaza recently, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said: “We love death like our enemies love life. We love martyrdom, the way in which [Hamas] leaders died.”
This is the sort of rhetoric favored by the likes of Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. These are not organizations that can be negotiated with – unless of course one is willing to submit to a violently reactionary form of Islam. Perhaps when Hamas is defeated or severely weakened there can be talk of peace. But not before. No change in Israel policy short of the disappearance of the State of Israel will satisfy Hamas. And that is not going to happen.

Times of Israel Live Blog: PM tells Kerry ‘Hamas will pay’ as IDF hunts for soldier seized in Rafah during truce

IDF toll rises to 63, after 2 soldiers killed in same Rafah attack and 5 soldiers killed late Thursday; US-UN plan for 72-hour ceasefire and talks falls apart; Israel cabinet meeting Friday afternoon

IDF Blog: Live Updates: IDF Soldier Suspected Kidnapped by Hamas

Following ten days of Hamas attacks against Israel and after repeated rejections of offers to deescalate the situation, the IDF started a new phase of Operation Protective Edge. A large IDF force entered the Gaza Strip. Their mission is to target Hamas’ tunnels that cross under the Israel-Gaza border and enable terrorists to infiltrate Israel and carry out attacks. The IDF intends to impair Hamas’ capability to attack Israel.
Since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge more than 2,968 rockets have been fired from Gaza at Israel.
1:30 PM: This morning, on 9:30 AM, in violation of the latest ceasefire, Hamas terrorists, including a suicide attacker, fired at our forces in southern Gaza. We suspect that Hamas kidnapped 2nd. Lt. Hadar Goldin, an IDF officer, during the exchange of fire and dragged him into a tunnel. The IDF is currently conducting extensive searches in order to locate the missing soldier. During the event, 2 IDF soldiers were killed by Hamas fire.