Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
cartoon of the day, ElderToons, infographic, memes, PosterTuesday, October 17, 2023Elder of Ziyon
Most victims of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel weren’t yet buried when some prominent international voices—including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, and Josep Borell, the European Union’s top diplomat—suggested that Israel’s first efforts to defend itself are war crimes. This raises an important question: Does international law require a nation to choose between committing war crimes and having war crimes committed against it?The answer is no. One of the great tragedies of war is that civilians often become victims. That is why countries like Israel resort to war only as self-defense, which, according to the United Nations Charter, is every nation’s inherent right. But if even unintentional harm to civilians constitutes illegal “collective punishment,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called Israel’s operations in Gaza, even defensive war is effectively precluded.The law of war prohibits directly targeting civilians. Israel has made clear that its objectives are only military. “The IDF will destroy Hamas,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday, “and we will hunt down every last man with the blood of our children on his hands.”But military targets can be attacked even when doing so may result in the loss of civilian life. International humanitarian law requires that civilian casualties from a particular action be balanced against “anticipated military advantage,” a rule known as proportionality. In practice, as this rule is understood by Western countries, even significant civilian casualties don’t necessarily make strikes on legitimate targets illegal.Hamas has violated international law by hiding among civilians. But international law doesn’t reward the use of human shields. Instead, it makes clear that “the presence of civilians within or near military objectives does not render such objectives immune from attack.” Israel’s critics want it to fight in a way that would have made it impossible for democracies to wage war in every conflict from World War II to the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS, which killed about 10,000 civilians by some estimates.A legal analysis of Israel’s response must take into account the barbarity and scale of Hamas’s attack. Israel now knows that Hamas’s goal is the annihilation of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Defeating Hamas isn’t simply a tactical military goal but an existential national one—a military objective of the highest order. There is no basis on which to bar Israel ex ante from a generally lawful means of warfare such as siege, or maneuver in urban areas.Israel’s critics will denounce any significant measure the country deploys as a war crime. Israel has laid siege to Gaza, prompting the usual array of EU-funded organizations to accuse it of starving civilians and violating the law of war. But siege is a “legitimate” and ordinary part of lawful war, in the words of the U.S. Defense Department law-of-war manual. As West Point law professor Sean Watts put it in 2022, “Siege—or encirclement as military doctrine refers to it—is an essential aspect of modern military operations. . . . Only starvation directed specifically at civilians is prohibited.”This should be obvious: An army need not help its enemy obtain provisions during a conflict. When military objectives and civilians are intermingled, siege aimed at the former also will affect the latter. As with other situations of collateral damage to civilians, international law permits a siege as long as it isn’t “for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population.”There is no indication that Israel has any strategy of starving out civilians. Nor could it. Gaza has a long border with Egypt, which has long been used by Hamas to smuggle supplies. The evacuation of civilians is a standard measure to avoid humanitarian crises. Israel has moved tens of thousands of its own citizens away from the area along the Gaza border. Hamas, by contrast, has ordered its civilians to stay put, presumably to increase the tally of civilian deaths for propaganda purposes.Egypt is cruelly denying entry to those fleeing the war zone. Israel’s critics clearly aren’t interested in saving civilian lives, because they aren’t offering to take in Gaza’s civilians. Nobody says refugees from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan should be trapped in conflict zones. European countries consider it a virtue to accept them as refugees. But to Hamas’s human shields, the world says: “Don’t go anywhere, we want you right where you are.”It is unclear whether such voices are merely naive or wish to leave Israel perpetually exposed to genocide. What is clear is that if these voices prevail, the commitment of modern international law will have changed from “Never again” to “Whenever they want.”
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This is not simply a human-shield strategy, where the aim is to deter an attack by using innocent lives as a barrier. Hamas is doing something far more insidious: it’s ensuring the mass death of Palestinians. Here is Hamas official Ali Baraka summing up the difference between the two worldviews: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”All those who question the sickening violence of the Hamas attack against Israel must read the words of these forensic scientists struggling to identify the 297 bodies that were so brutalised as to be unrecognisable
When Hamas fires rockets at Israel and kills, captures, and rapes civilians there, they know Israel will retaliate. Hamas leaders put their assets in civilian buildings not in hopes that Israel will hold fire, but in a cold calculation that the retaliation will do terrible harm to Palestinian civilians—despite the extraordinary efforts Israel’s army makes to avoid it. Hamas is working to maximize, not minimize, that harm. This is to generate international pressure on Israel to end its retaliation—and to strengthen Israel’s enemies in their depiction of the Jewish state as a villain.
Israel has moral and practical reasons for avoiding harm to Palestinian civilians. Israelis pride themselves on acting humanely, even in war. Their military officers—like those in the U.S. military—distinguish between civilian and military sites and never purposefully target the former. Even when attacking senior terrorist leaders, Israel tries to avoid harming their family members, let alone unrelated civilians. To avert collateral damage, Israel routinely provides warnings of attacks, even though they increase risk to Israelis and decrease an attack’s chances of success. In the current war, Israel has notified Gazans in various neighborhoods that there would soon be attacks there and they should hasten to designated safe areas.
Hamas’s strategy is innovative in the worst way. For everyone who aspires to strengthen moral constraints on warfare, it is a huge step backward. It is savage, cynical, and unnatural—but what’s worse, it’s effective. That is why it’s being used.
Innocent Palestinians deserve sympathy. But when Americans, Europeans, and others misdirect their outrage at Israel, failing to grasp Hamas’s responsibility, they are encouraging the very cruelty they intend to condemn.
Blame for the purposeful sacrificing of innocent Palestinians goes first and foremost to Hamas, to be sure, but also to those of us in the outside world duped by this strategy.
Schools, hospitals, and mosques will be bombed in the coming days. This is what Hamas wants, what it has made sure will happen. Those, however well-intentioned, who blame Israel are complicit in Hamas’s war crimes.
It’s time to place the blame rightly and stop incentivizing Hamas’s crimes against the Palestinians (let alone against the Israelis). For the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis, and to honor basic decency and law, it is the least we can do.
The charred remains were so disfigured that at first they did not realise it was two people.Foreign media given unprecedented access to forensic institute to witness atrocities
But when pathologists gently began to examine, they could see the bodies were those of an adult and a child. And they were hugging tightly.
That is how it had ended for them, trapped in a room as Hamas terrorists set fire to their home. As the horror of burning to death came to them, the adult had nothing left to offer but to hold that terrified child in their arms.
And as unbearable as that is, it is by no means an isolated case here at Israel's National Centre of Forensic Medicine, where the bodies of the victims of the Hamas attack are being identified. Scientists charged with this grim task told me it is common to have to carefully separate the fused remains of two helpless people who, in their final moments, had found all they could do was embrace in death.
No wonder several professional pathologists broke down in tears yesterday as they tried to explain their vital work to me.
This is the real-life version of Silent Witness, the television drama about pathology experts piecing together forensic clues to solve a case.
Of the 959 bodies so far brought to the Shura military base, the ones that are hardest to identify are taken to the forensics centre here in Tel Aviv, where teams of scientists are working around the clock to find out who they are.
They are acutely aware that the tormented families of the missing are beyond desperate – they just need to know.
The work itself could scarcely be more upsetting. Some victims were shot then set on fire, others trussed up with wire cords and condemned to a burning hell.
As of yesterday, there were 297 bodies so hideously brutalised as to be unrecognisable to anyone. It is the wretched job of these pathologists to try to work it out.
Sometimes, all they have to go on are a few fragments of bone. That is literally all that is left of someone.
For the first time since it opened in 1954, on Monday Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine (Abu Kabir) in Jaffa allowed reporters to see and photograph the dead bodies inside.
The stench of death and putrefaction was overwhelming on Abu Kabir’s bottom floor where bodies that await specialized examination and bone fragments are unloaded for DNA extraction or study by anthropologists.
Some of the journalists couldn’t stomach viewing the horrific scenes in the autopsy rooms as the center’s teams worked reverently and professionally, burying their emotions for the moment.
Despite how intensively Abu Kabir’s staff are working as they try to establish the identity of the most degraded remains of the mass-murderous Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities on October 7, it was felt important to make room in their tight quarters for journalists to document these atrocities for the world to see.
There are still hundreds of unidentified bodies, and forensic experts at Abu Kabir and from the IDF and police are working around the clock to provide definitive answers for the victim’s families.
Dr. Hagar Mizrahi told the journalists that as of Monday morning, 959 body bags containing remains in various states had arrived at the IDF’s Shura base near Ramle and 504 victims had been positively identified. There were still 297 bodies or bags of remains unidentified, most of which were expected to be transferred to Abu Kabir for advanced forensic examination.
At least 1,300 Israelis — the majority of them civilians — have been killed and at least 199 have been taken hostage by Hamas in Gaza (Hamas claims an additional 50 Israelis are being held by other groups).
Tuesday, October 17, 2023Elder of Ziyon
Jordanian King Abdullah II says that neither his country nor Egypt will accept Palestinian refugees, declaring it a “red line.”At a press conference held after meeting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Abdullah says that “some of the usual suspects are trying to create facts on the ground,” according to Sky News Arabia.“There will be no refugees in Jordan and no refugees in Egypt.”
Why not, exactly?
Jordan took in 1.3 million refugees from Syria. About half are in camps and the rest live in the cities. It wasn't happy about the situation, but Abdullah certainly didn't draw a "red line" against them.
Egypt, similarly, has taken in - equally reluctantly - hundreds of thousands of refugees from Sudan, Syria, and elsewhere.
But even though both those countries accepted Syrian refugees, they didn't treat them all the same.
Jordan turned away many Syrian refugees - if they were of Palestinian origin. It didn't allow the ones who came earlier to live in the same refugee camps that they set up By policy, Palestinian Syrians were treated like garbage.
Egypt gave rights to Syrian refugees - but not if they were considered Palestinian. Palestinians who arrived via air were immediately sent back to Syria.
For decades, the Arab world pretended that they cared about Palestinians, but when it came to actual living Palestinians, they not only refused to help - they actively worked to deny them help.
They always wanted Palestinians to be cannon fodder against Israel and nothing more.
Clueless world leaders and diplomats never even commented on this official discrimination against Palestinians. The Arab leaders would say how central the Palestinian issue was to them while they mistreated the ones under their control.
Now, it is happening again, in broad daylight: Arab leaders refuse to save Palestinian lives, because they have great propaganda value when they are dead, but they are merely an expense when they are alive.
If you look at Jordan's reporting of the meeting, Abdullah adds something interesting:
His Majesty reaffirmed rejection of attempts to forcibly displace the Palestinians and cause their internal displacement, stressing that such attempts would plunge the region into another disaster and a new cycle of violence and destruction.
"Internal displacement" includes moving them to the West Bank.
But here too, the example of Syria is instructive. Because Abbas had the opportunity to save some Palestinian Syrians, and he said he'd rather see them dead because Israel would ask them to renounce "return."
These examples prove as much as possible that the entire purpose of the Palestinian cause is not to help Palestinians but to use them as a weapon against Israel. They have been pawns for 75 years of the Arab leaders, including their own leaders, with no one actually caring about them even as they insisted that they were the most important issue.
The cynicism is obvious to anyone who bothers to look. But the world media and the Western world simply doesn't want to accept that Palestinians are hated so much by their own Arab brethren and by their own leaders.
If there is another explanation for why Palestinians have been singled out and treated worse than every other Arab, refugee or otherwise, by Arab leaders, I sure haven't seen it.
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Tuesday, October 17, 2023Elder of Ziyon |
| Cartoon by Peter Brookes, Times of London, 2014 |
The idea that one of Hamas’ main command bunkers is located beneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City is one of the worst-kept secrets of the Gaza war. ...The location is so un-secret that Hamas regularly meets with reporters there. On July 15, for example, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Back in 2006, PBS even aired a documentary showing how gunmen roam the halls of the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building—where the camera crew was obviously prohibited from filming.What Hamas wants is for reporters to use ... photos of Palestinians killed and wounded by Israelis, which make Palestinians look like innocent victims of wanton Israeli brutality.To that end, the rules of reporting from Shifa Hospital are easy for any newbie reporter to understand: No pictures of members of Hamas with their weapons inside the hospital, and don’t go anywhere near the bunkers, or the operating rooms where members of Hamas are treated....What Hamas has done, therefore, is to turn Shifa Hospital into a Hollywood sound-stage filled with real, live war victims who are used to score propaganda points, while the terrorists inside the hospital itself are erased from photographs and news accounts through a combination of pressure and threats, in order to produce the stories that Hamas wants.
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Tuesday, October 17, 2023Elder of Ziyon
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The October 7 massacre seemed to many Palestinians as a rational step on the road to liberation rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet another in a long string of self-inflicted disasters for the Palestinian cause. The Palestinian strategy of terrorizing Israeli civilians, going back to 1920, follows the basic theory that the Jews are an artificial, rootless polity removable by sustained violence, so sustained violence must be deployed to remove them. This Palestinian vision of Israelis is taught to Palestinian children as the basic truth of the Palestinian struggle.Hamas did it because we are Jews
For Israelis, if the response of Palestinians to the Oslo peace process in the 1990s was the mass murder of Israeli civilians beginning in 2000 with a wave of 140 suicide bombings in Israeli cities and towns - killing grandmothers and infants in buses and pizzerias - and the response of Palestinians to the current stagnation of the peace process is the mass murder of Israeli civilians, then Israeli policy isn't the cause of Palestinian mass murder of Israeli civilians.
On October 7, for a moment, Israel's guard went down. Hamas was free to live out its intentions. It did so with blazing clarity and purpose. Israelis are now convinced that the massacre, in its enormity and astonishing cruelty, and especially in the joy with which it was carried out, wasn't a Palestinian miscalculation. The goal, as in 2000, was simply the complete removal of the Jews from this land.
With clarity comes closure. Israelis are unified as never before. No peace and no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse or grant Israeli Jews safety from this kind of wild, joyful hatred. And that brutality has now made itself too dangerous to be tolerated. In the Israeli mind, any brutality Hamas can commit it will commit. And so it cannot be allowed to ever commit any act ever again.
Two days after the 9/11 attacks, French newspaper Le Monde captured the global mood. “In this tragic moment,” the paper wrote, “we are all Americans.” It gave voice to the upwelling of grief and sympathy as the Twin Towers lay smoldering and thousands of Americans lay under rubble.Hugh Hewitt: Why Hamas' Methodical Slaughter of Jews Carries a Special Horror
As I write this piece, Israel is at war. On Saturday, terrorists launched a vicious and unprovoked attack, setting off thousands of rockets, slaughtering hundreds of innocent civilians, and taking dozens hostage. Men, women and children, young and old alike, were massacred on the streets, in their homes, and at a music festival. Their only crime: being Jewish.
And yet, in Israel’s tragic hour, no newspaper dares declare that they are now Israelis. Of course, this is sadly expected. Antisemitism finds its rawest and most sinister power in silence. For far too many around the world, Hamas’s actions were justified, even welcome.
Such is the antipathy toward the Jewish people and the Jewish state; even the most obvious and brutal terrorism can be excused and explained. Our enemies revel in Israel’s pain. The Jewish people must unite
Which is why Jewish people the world over must band together now. The hundreds of teenagers massacred by Hamas at the music festival likely did not support the ruling Likud party’s conservative politics. The scores of Kibbutz Be’eri residents killed in cold blood were not overtly religious. But that made no difference to their murderers. “They shot indiscriminately, abducted whomever they could, burned down people’s homes,” observed one survivor.
Secular or devout, young or old, liberal or conservative, kibbutznik or city dweller, pro-judicial reform or against it – our enemy made no distinctions during the slaughter. And so, neither should we make such distinctions among ourselves. This is a time for all who love the Jewish state to rally behind the banner of our shared identity, a time to put aside our internal squabbles and stare down the evil at our door. We must send a unified message: An attack on the Jewish state is an attack on all Jews. This extends the world over.
In the days following the attack, Americans – Democrats and Republicans alike – were quick to issue condemnations of Hamas. In the weeks to come, as Israel responds with military force to the threat in its midst, those political figures should keep the moral clarity of those statements in mind – particularly when armchair critics chastise Israel’s justified self-defense with the latest chorus of what-about-ism.
Evil people commit unspeakable crimes against humanity with horrifying regularity. But somehow Hamas' slaughter of Israelis feels different, in its intensity and immediacy, and not just because the terrorists grotesquely exploited social media to document their atrocities. The chilling and methodical depravity that stalked infants and the very old, as well as young people joyfully dancing at a music festival, was profoundly disturbing. An army of mass murders rampaged in search of victims targeted solely because they were Jews. No military objective, no strategic aim.Alan Dershowitz: Hamas Uses Western Morality as a Weapon Against Israel
However much, over the past three-quarters of a century, we have seen crowds chant "Death to Israel" and "Death to America," many of us never imagined the existence of would-be Nazi hordes who, given the chance to kill Jews, would kill and kill and kill, and then celebrate the carnage. We clung to the ideas of deterrence and that the Islamist menace could be contained. We believed that the sort of irrational hatred that fueled Adolf Hitler's legions of killers was a thing of the past - or at least limited and incapable of producing mayhem on the scale that befell Israel.
We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of believing "Never again" actually meant "Never again." Israel will now wage the war it must, to shatter the very idea that the deep evil driving Hamas can be allowed to thrive. The U.S. and the civilized world - which of course includes many Muslim nations - must support this effort.
Israel has declared northern Gaza a war zone. They have given its civilians the opportunity to move several miles south in order to protect themselves from Israeli bombing of legitimate military targets. In giving civilians sufficient warning to leave, Israel has gone further than other Western nations at war. In World War II, the U.S. did not warn the civilians of Japanese cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that were about to be nuclear targets. Great Britain did not give the civilians of Dresden the opportunity to leave.
Israel is generally held to a higher standard of morality by other governments, the media, and academia. Hamas knows this and exploits it as a weapon of war. When dead children are shown on TV, many viewers fail to distinguish between deliberate targeting of civilians and unintentional collateral deaths. Hamas has named this misuse of morality "the CNN strategy."
Israel must not permit itself to be limited in its preventive military actions by any double standard of morality. It is an all-out war against Hamas-controlled Gaza, and Israel is entitled, by any fair reading of international law, to do to Gaza City what the U.S. did to Berlin and Tokyo in 1945. It has warned civilians to leave. The collateral deaths of Palestinian civilians, caused directly by the Hamas decision to use them as human shields, would be the moral, political, and legal responsibility of Hamas.
Israeli reluctance to violate the double standards imposed on it by friends and foes alike allowed Hamas to re-arm and re-coordinate its military to facilitate the recent horrible massacres. These brutal attacks against Israeli civilians must change all that. Israel should apply its own very high standards of morality in deciding how to balance the collateral deaths of Palestinian civilians against the need to prevent the intended deaths of its own civilians at the hands of Hamas.
Monday, October 16, 2023Elder of Ziyoncollective punishment, international law, ken roth
"International humanitarian law prohibits collective punishment of...protected persons for acts committed by individuals during an armed conflict. The imposition of collective punishment is a war crime." -- Red Cross @ICRC
The term refers not only to criminal punishment, but also to other types of sanctions, harassment or administrative action taken against a group in retaliation for an act committed by an individual/s who are considered to form part of the group. Such punishment therefore targets persons who bear no responsibility for having committed the conduct in question.
224. The Appeals Chamber finds that the correct definition of collective punishments is:i) the indiscriminate punishment imposed collectively on persons for omissions or acts for which some or none of them may or may not have been responsible;ii) the specific intent of the perpetrator to punish collectively.
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Monday, October 16, 2023Elder of Ziyon
The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him. (Article 7)The enemies have been scheming for a long time ... and have accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money, they took control of the world media... With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the globe... They stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about... With their money they formed secret organizations - such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions - which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests... They stood behind World War I ... and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains... There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it. (Article 22)Zionism scheming has no end, and after Palestine, they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates River. When they have finished digesting the area on which they have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion. Their scheme has been laid out in the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. (Article 32)
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Hamas reacted to the Israeli warnings by telling the residents of Gaza City to “remain steadfast in your homes and to stand firm in the face of this disgusting psychological war waged by the occupation.”Alan Johnson: For the Total Defeat of Hamas, Against the ‘Total Siege’ of Gaza
In this post, I take issue with these assertions based on the facts on the ground and the law. They ignore the reality of what is about to occur (or perhaps has by the time of publication) and turn well-established IHL rules on their head. I will not take on the more legally and morally complex issue of the so-called siege, which has been, and will continue to be, dealt with elsewhere (see, e.g., here and here).
The Reality of the Situation
It is beyond dispute that civilians moving out of Gaza City and northern Gaza will face great hardship, especially considering the lack of access to food, medicine, and other essential supplies. The situation is tragic, and measures must be taken to provide humanitarian assistance in southern Gaza, where the population is heading (especially from across the border with Egypt). This is essential, for once the IDF moves into Gaza City and the surrounding area, delivery of humanitarian aid through the battle zone will be operationally impossible for some time.
But that Israel may lawfully defend itself against Hamas’s attacks by moving against the organization into the Gaza Strip, especially Gaza City, is equally clear (see here). It must do so for valid operational reasons to effectively defend against Hamas, especially in light of the continuing rocket attacks and Hamas’s remaining military capability (and the long lineage of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians). In that regard, a reality that seems to have been missed by many is that the longer the IDF waits to move into Gaza, the more difficult the fight will be, placing the civilian population at greater risk. After all, Hamas is undoubtedly using the opportunity to strengthen its defenses and otherwise prepare for the Israeli assault. This explains the short suspense on the evacuation. I would also note that the ICRC’s suggestion that “it is impossible for Gazans to know which areas will next face attack” is unfounded. The IDF has unambiguously indicated the penetration of the Gaza Strip will be in the north; informed observers will have already come to that conclusion, for that is where Hamas is dug in.
Reduced to basics, an assessment of Israel’s warnings to evacuate requires a comparison of two alternatives: an urban assault into an area full of civilians; and evacuation into a place that is not fully prepared to accommodate them. Undoubtedly, residents of Gaza City and other concentrations of civilians in the north will be at a greater risk of harm staying in place than moving away from the combat zone. Moreover, once the operation starts, fleeing the hostilities will become extraordinarily dangerous, and access to humanitarian assistance will become impossible for those remaining behind. Regardless of the lawfulness of Israel’s siege-like actions, the simple fact is that civilians who head south will be safer. Moreover, warning the civilian population makes good sense not only because it protects civilians but also militarily, as U.S. forces learned in Fallujah and Mosul.
Given this reality, it is bewildering that humanitarian organizations are not encouraging the civilian population to move away from what will be a destructive and deadly urban battle, in which telling the difference between fighters and civilians is particularly difficult, especially considering Hamas’s past tactics of operating near civilians, engaging in perfidy, and failing to distinguish themselves from civilians.
Along the same lines, it is mystifying that humanitarian organizations are not condemning Hamas’s efforts to keep the civilians in place. Obviously, this is an attempt to exploit the civilians as human shields to complicate Israel’s operations, for the more civilians in the area, the more complicated Israeli targeting and clearance operations become. And, sadly, the more civilians who tragically will become “collateral damage.”
WRONG AS POLITICAL WARFARE
A ‘total siege’ is counterproductive in the war against Hamas for another reason. As Walzer has noted, ‘the media are omnipresent, and the whole world is watching’ in modern wars, so ‘war has to be different in these circumstances’. A policy of ‘total siege’ would mean that, very quickly, the only story being told by the world’s media will be the desperate plight of Gazan civilians. Indeed, as of late Friday, it almost is, certainly on social media. Those tempted to say ‘Well, to hell with the Hamas-apologists rallying in support of the pogrom, why should we care about what they say?’ are, we believe, missing the point. A humanitarian crisis in Gaza will mean opposition to Israel’s war against Hamas bleeds into the political mainstream, and from there to resolutions at the UN, and to private calls from US presidents to Israeli Prime Ministers to wind down the war against Hamas. The outcome of the media war is organically connected to the success or otherwise of alliance-maintenance. The freedom of manoeuvre Israel needs to defeat Hamas and PIJ depends on avoiding policies — such as ‘total siege’, but also bombing that can be seen as untargeted — that will isolate Israel diplomatically and in global public opinion.
CONCLUSION
We are in no doubt: Hamas must go. It is beyond reasonable human endurance for the grieving people of Israel — and of its Gazan periphery in particular — to live adjacent to Hamas after 7 October. And we recognise that achieving that necessary goal while adhering to the distinction between combatants and non-combatants is an agonising, strategically hideous challenge.
But as it proceeds in the coming weeks and possible months, Israel’s campaign against Hamas and PIJ will be more just and more effective if it is a just war justly conducted, and is seen to be such, a liberal democratic state fighting an antisemitic terrorist organisation, not the people of Gaza. This distinction must be rendered clear to all to strengthen international alliance and influence the direction of western public opinion, or what is salvageable of it from the wreckage of pervasive anti-Zionism and media complacency and disingenuousness. For all these reasons, we suggest, the policy of ‘total siege’ is both morally wrong and an obstacle to the real goal: the total defeat of the eliminationist antisemites of Hamas.
In a heated debate on the Gaza conflict on TalkTV, British writer Douglas Murray praised Israel's efforts to safeguard its citizens, contrasting it sharply with the tactics of Hamas.
"Israel tries to use the IDF to protect its citizenry. Hamas uses the citizenry to protect Hamas," Murray said.
Sparked by Shadow Secretary of State for International Development of the United Kingdom Lisa Nandy, the discussion delved into the dire situation faced by Gazan citizens and the morality and proportionality of Israel's reactions.
'Proportionality in conflict is a joke'
Challenging conventional opinions, Murray said, "Proportionality in conflict is a joke; it's a bizarre British concept."
He further articulated that only Israelis are expected to have a "precisely proportionate response" during conflicts, which he finds unreasonable.
Highlighting the disparities in wartime goals, Murray added, "The difference between the Western way of war and the Hamas terrorist way of war is that their objective is to kill civilians. The objective of Hamas is to kill innocent people."
In contrast, he emphasized that nations like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel aim "to kill as few innocent people as possible."
Murray also underscored Israel's meticulous efforts to minimize collateral damage.
"Israel uses precision-guided missiles to limit civilian casualties," Murray said.
However, he also hinted at a potential shift in Israeli sentiments and tactics: "I do not doubt that after the atrocities of the last week, the appetite of the Israeli public and military and politicians to continue this precision game will change."
The discourse between Nandy and Murray underscores the multifaceted dilemmas nations face during the conflict. As the situation in Gaza unfolds, such debates bring to the fore the ethical quandaries linked to warfare, defensive measures, and the overarching principle of civilian protection.
Monday, October 16, 2023Elder of Ziyon
We are not going to be intimidated or silent when they say Hamas is a terrorist organization. The fact is it is not a terrorist community.And we have to say to them that terrorist is Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. But not only Benjamin Netanyahu and his government but everyone that stands behind them and supports him, killing people in Palestine.We are not afraid to say it. You know why? Because it is the truth. And we have to say it because we are responsible before God. ...Let me tell you, let me tell you what happened on Sunday. So what happened on Sunday was shameful. Here in Michigan.Our representative went to a synagogue and that is not the issue. But what they did there is shameful. While people are being dead. Under the rubbles of their homes. From the bombs that made in the United States. And give it to Israel to kill people. They were standing and dancing and laughing on our bodies, on our homes.
Monday, October 16, 2023Elder of Ziyon
Thursday night’s order by the Israel Defense Forces to Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate their homes within 24 hours was dangerous and deeply troubling. Any demand for a mass evacuation on extremely short notice could have devastating humanitarian consequences.
As secretary general of the United Nations, I appeal to Israeli authorities to reconsider.We have approached a moment of calamitous escalation, and find ourselves at a critical crossroads. It is imperative that all parties — and those with influence over them — do everything possible to avoid fresh violence or spillover of the conflict to the West Bank and the wider region.We urgently need a way out of this disastrous dead end before more lives are lost.
Baraka: "In the past couple of years, Hamas has adopted a 'rational' approach. It did not go into any war, and did not join the Islamic Jihad in its recent battle."Interviewer: "But all this was part of Hamas's strategy in preparing for this attack."Baraka: "Of course. We made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [in Gaza], and has abandoned the resistance altogether."
Monday, October 16, 2023Elder of Ziyon
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| Abdullah Abdul Rahim Mustafa al-Madhooun, called a "civilian" by PCHR |
Sunday, October 15, 2023Elder of ZiyonColumbia, Joseph Massad
What can motorized paragliders do in the face of one of the most formidable militaries in the world?Apparently much in the hands of an innovative Palestinian resistance, which early on Saturday morning launched a surprise attack on Israel by air, land and sea. Indeed as stunning videos show, these paragliders have become the air force of the Palestinian resistance.Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the major offensive led by Hamas on 7 October, was not expected by anyone.It came in retaliation for the ongoing Israeli pogroms in the West Bank town of Huwwara and Jerusalem, especially by settlers storming al-Aqsa mosque during the Jewish High Holy Days over the last month, not to mention the ongoing siege against Gaza itself for more than a decade and a half.No less astonishing was the Palestinian resistance’s takeover of several Israeli settler-colonies near the Gaza boundary and even as far away as 22 kms, as in the case of Ofakim.Reports promptly emerged that thousands of Israelis were fleeing through the desert on foot to escape the rockets and gunfire, with many still hiding inside settlements more than 24 hours into the resistance offensive.In the interest of safeguarding their lives and their children’s future, the colonists’ flight from these settlements may prove to be a permanent exodus. They may have finally realized that living on land stolen from another people will never make them safe.
Notice that Massad considers all Israelis to be "settler-occupiers." He also says that massacring women and children is "especially" justified as a response to Jews quietly visiting the Temple Mount.
Later on in his article he castigates Arab nations for asking Hamas to stop the massacres. Because the more dead Jews, the better!
This antisemitic asshole teaches at a prestigious university.
There is a petition for Columbia to fire a professor who waxes poetic at the slaughter of innocents.
Sign it. Columbia won't do anything to a tenured professor but they will hopefully at least think twice before hiring another Hamas groupie.
(h/t EBoZ)
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
