Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Today's insane antisemitism in Arab media

The Islamic Jihad rocket that slammed into the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City has unleashed a torrent of antisemitic reactions from Arab leaders.

Egyptian businessman Alaa Mubarak, the former president's son, wrote to his two million followers that the bombing of the hospital in Gaza is a "genocide" and a "Holocaust" - words that would never be used for anyone else but Israelis.

Algerian newspaper El Khabar both cast doubt on real Holocaust and then claimed that the Jews are performing a holocaust on Palestinians: "If the world was divided over the fact that the so-called 'Holocaust' or 'Jewish Holocaust' occurred, then today we are witnessing a real Palestinian Holocaust taking place in besieged Gaza, carried out by Zionist hands."

Egyptian site Beshara offered a prayer for Muslims to say, which included,

O God, your oppressed servants in Gaza, whom you force upon the cursed Jews and the hateful hypocrites, O God, grant them victory over their enemies, relieve their distress, and have mercy on them, O God, who will protect them but You and who will have mercy on them? In You, O God, we trust and in Your strength we believe. O God, expel the Jews and the hypocrites and strengthen Your power over them. O God, scatter them and make their plans destroy them. O God... O God, O Possessor of power and the kingdom, we have no god but You, O refuge of the oppressed, destroy the Zionists and their machines, and do not leave any of them and those who help them, O Powerful, O Mighty, Glory be to You. Accept our prayers from us, protect our honor, make our feet firm, and give us victory over the Palestinian Mujahideen against the unbelieving people... and the accursed Jews... O God, destroy the Jews completely.

Jordan's Johina News describes reasons why Jews have no rights to Palestine (the usual - Palestinians magically become Canaanites when it is convenient for them) and then the article repeats the popular Arab lie that there is no evidence of the Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount. Temple denial is an acceptable form of Arab antisemitism.

Moroccan site Rassd has an article, "The Jews And Their View Of Human Rights," with the photo shown here, where they extensively create fake Talmudic quotes:

Anyone who thinks that the Jews believe in human rights or even animal rights is a fool. We say to the normalized and the non-naturalized and to those of us who cry over the Zionists, know that the Jews do not consider you to be anything more than their donkeys, and you have an explanation of that in the Talmud - which is a book written by the Jewish rabbis -: “The gentiles are donkeys and God created them to be ridden by God’s chosen people."

It says: “There is no kinship between the nations outside the Jews because they are more like donkeys. The Jews consider the homes of other nations to be animal pens.”

Also in the Talmud: “...Whoever slaps a Jew is like someone who slaps God. It is permissible for Israel to usurp anyone's property. The property of a non-Jew is like abandoned money, and a Jew has the right to own it."

As for women, they are just animals to them, and it says: “A Jew does not sin if he rapes a foreign woman; Because every marriage contract with foreigners is invalid; Because a non-Jewish woman is considered an animal, and the contract does not exist between animals.”

The Talmud also says, “Whoever sheds the blood of an infidel (a Gentile), will offer an offering to God.” ‏

It says: "Whoever kills a Christian, a foreigner, or a pagan will be rewarded with eternity in Paradise and sitting there in the Fourth Palace. "

And as always, there is no pushback in any Arabic media against articles like these that are explicitly and proudly antisemitic. Even though plenty of them insist that the Arab world has nothing against Jews.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

IDF evidence that Islamic Jihad fired the rocket near the hospital

Here is the text of the briefing by IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari about the deadly explosion at the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital yesterday:

_______________________________________

The IDF has concluded an After Action Review and can confirm that the Islamic Jihad was responsible for the strike on the hospital in Gaza City.

We did an immediate review with all relevant branches of the IDF. This is what took place on Tuesday October 17th:

At 6:15PM, a barrage of rockets was fired by Hamas at Israel.

At 6:59PM a barrage of around 10 rockets was fired by Islamic Jihad from a nearby cemetery.

It was at the time, 6:59PM — when there were reports of an explosion at the hospital in Gaza City.

According to our intelligence, Hamas checked the reports, understood it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that had misfired — and decided to launch a global media campaign to hide what really happened. They went as far as inflating the number of casualties.

They understood, with absolute certainty, that it was a rocket misfired by Islamic Jihad — that damaged the hospital.

Analysis of our aerial footage confirms that there was no direct hit of the hospital itself. The only location damaged is outside the hospital in the parking lot where we can see signs of burning,

no cratering and no structural damage to nearby buildings, as opposed to the damage caused by any aerial munition which would have been of a different nature: We would have seen craters and structural damage to buildings, both of which haven’t been identified in this incident.

The size of the damage we see here is due to the warhead of the Islamic Jihad rocket, but most of the rockets propellent is still evident due to the short flight of the rocket (because the launch failed).

The following visual evidence shows infra-red imagery of the parking lot. You can see central locations of fires and some debree on the rooftops. No craters can be identified. And all walls of the surrounding buildings are intact.

We also have examples of what air-to-ground munition craters look like. As you can see, they do not exist in this instance.

Many media outlets immediately reported the unverified claims by Hamas. Those were lies spread by Hamas.

I want to make something clear: It is impossible to know what happened as quickly as Hamas claimed they knew. That should have been an initial warning sign for many.

Unlike Hamas, the IDF launched an immediate examination, which was overseen at the very highest levels of command. This professional review was based on intelligence, operational systems, and aerial footage, all of which we cross-checked.

The evidence — which we are sharing with you all — confirms that the explosion at the hospital in Gaza was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired.

Here are the four main parts of our examination process:

1) First, we confirmed that there was no IDF fire – by land, sea or air – that hit the hospital.

2) Second, our radar systems tracked rockets fired by terrorists from within Gaza at the time of the explosion. The trajectory analysis from the barrage of rockets, confirms that the rockets were fired in close proximity to the hospital.

In addition, there are two independent videos which show the failure of the rocket launch and the continuation of the rocket flight towards the ground, within the Gaza strip — falling in the hospital compound.

3) Third, we have intelligence — some that will be shared here — of ccommunication between terrorists talking about the rocket misfiring. The terrorists realized that a rocket had misfired and made specific reference to the hospital.

We have cross-checked this intercept with other intelligence sources to confirm its accuracy.

It is common for rockets that are fired at Israel, to land short and fall inside Gaza.These rockets fall short of Israel and have caused Palestinian casualties.During this war, we have counted approximately 450 rockets that misfired and fell inside Gaza. Palestinian civilians pay the price.

(I believe these are the locations of the launches, not the landings - EoZ)

We are also sharing this information with our partners, first and foremost the United States. We want maximum transparency, because we take any incident involving civilians very seriously. Unfortunately, many in the media immediately reported the statements coming out of Hamas- controlled Gaza, which blamed Israel.

Instead of waiting for the examination of credible information from the IDF, some media outlets ran with Hamas’ lies. Some of those headlines are still up and have not been corrected.

I understand the desire to break news, but I hope you will all agree that accuracy and credible information comes before speed.

The IDF acts in accordance with international law.

In conclusion, this incident shows how allegations — in this case, false and baseless allegations made by terrorists — against Israel can spread and inflame tensions in the region.

(h/t Daled Amos)

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

10/17 Links Pt2: Why won’t the Jews just let themselves be killed?; Silence of the tenured lambs; 'Antiracist' Intellectual Blames Israel for Hamas Atrocities

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Why won’t the Jews just let themselves be killed?

There is something really grim in the marshalling of the rules of war to shame Israel. Many of these rules – the Geneva Conventions, human-rights law – were introduced in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Nazis’ attempted destruction of the Jews. And yet now it is the Jewish State more than any other – more than the warmongers of the Saudi regime, the bomb-happy Turks, the destructive imperial powers of America, Britain and France – that has these postwar rules barked in its face. ‘We will protect you from genocide’, the Western world said to Jews, yet now it wags its postwar officious finger in Jews’ faces because they dare to hunt down men who committed an act of genocidal terrorism against them. The cant and perfidy of the postwar order have rarely been so starkly exposed. There is a concerted effort to quasi-criminalise Israel’s desire to protect its people from racist torment and murder.

The West’s anti-Israel elites seem utterly bereft of the essentials of morality. Consider their insistence on moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Israel kills children too, they say, so is it really any better than Hamas? The moral infantilism of such hollow platitudes is difficult to comprehend. If you cannot tell the difference between people killed as a consequence of war and people killed because they are Jews, then you are beyond help. Everyone – including Israel – regrets the collateral damage of the war in Gaza, especially if the victims are children. But such tragedy cannot be compared to Hamas’s murder of children in southern Israel for being Jewish. That is of an entirely different order to war. It is the conscious, willing destruction of innocent life from the standpoint of venomous racial hatred. To kill a child on account of its race is the most unconscionable act a society can commit. It is an act of unforgiving eugenicism that brings shame on our species. Nothing – including the accidental deaths of civilians in conflict – comes close to the mindset that would erase a child as an expression of its deeper desire to erase a people.

It is horrendous that children in Gaza have died. Which is why some of us believe the US, the UK and the UN should be putting enormous pressure on their tyrannical allies in Egypt right now to construct well-resourced, Red Cross-approved refugee camps in the Sinai to which Gazans might flee. However, it is a warning sign to civilisation itself that Jewish children have been killed for being Jewish children. That in this new millennium the genocidal execution of Jews has returned. The Western world fails to recognise at its peril what a vast moral challenge this poses to the enlightened values we claim to hold dear.

Israel’s Western haters cannot see what is at stake. This is about more than the Middle East. It is about whether we are willing to stand against the forces of unreason and anti-Semitism, and for the values of liberty and decency. Are you for civilisation or barbarism – that is what the horrific events of last Saturday demanded of us all. Far too many are giving the wrong answer.

Hamas invaded Israel to murder Jews, not for Palestinian statehood

The connection between the horrors of the Holocaust and of the massacre in Israel are clear. The Nazis hated Jews because they were Jews. They murdered Jews because they were Jews. And Hamas did too. They hate Jews and they hate the fact that Jewish people have a sovereign country of their own.

It was the dehumanizing effect of antisemitism that motivated Hamas terrorists to murder babies, to execute elderly couples, to abuse corpses, and to rape women.

Antisemitism is also the reason Hamas supporters across the world are celebrating this week. It is the cause for the rise in attacks on Jews across Europe, it is the cause for speakers at rallies extolling the virtues of those who carried out unspeakable acts of barbarism. Those people on the streets of London or New York cover themselves in progress labels but they are racists, nothing more, nothing less.

Israel will defeat Hamas. It will recover from the devastating events and use its military might to ensure that what happened last Saturday can never happen again. That is the right and responsibility of any country toward its citizens.

For the rest of us, there is another mission, a parallel one. That is to wage a no less committed and concerted campaign to defeat antisemitism. It won’t be with military force but it should be with all the tools we have at our disposal. Through education, through legislation, through the media, and by calling out antisemitism wherever we see it.

In 1945, the world promised “Never Again.” But it did happen again. This past week, not for the first time we were reminded exactly where antisemitism always leads. We were reminded that the fight against antisemitism is a fight to save Jewish lives. It is a fight we have no choice but to win.

Jonathan Greenblatt: Let’s Be Honest About the Hate That Drove the Hamas Attack

The Third Reich constructed a vast edifice of empire predicated on the core idea of answering the “Jewish Question.” It expanded into all spheres, not just military, but arts, industry, faith, and more, instrumentalizing these sectors to pursue their objective of eradicating the world of the Jewish people. For years, their neighbors in Europe ignored the facts or underestimated their ambition or dismissed their stated goals. It took the combined forces of the Allied powers and the horrifying, singular discovery of the concentration camps, to awaken the conscience of the West, or at least force it to reckon with the price of its inertia and ignorance.

Few thought such an egregious moral failure could replicate itself. No one imagined it might be possible for the world to miss such a moment once again. I know what I would do, ordinary people have told themselves, trying to appease their consciences.

Think again.

And yet, even with the sight of brutalized, raped women being paraded across Gaza by gleeful militants and hooted at by cheering crowds, we see rallies across America and in European capitals extolling the resistance and denying the inhumanity so obvious that it boggles the mind and chills the soul. We see students at our most prestigious and famous university, Harvard, blaming Israel for the massacre of its own citizens. At ADL, we are tracking dozens of demonstrations and countless op-eds blaming Israel for this massacre of its own people at the hands of hooligans with automatic weapons, men funded and trained in the dark arts of death by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

If we are to move forward and address such moral corruption, it will not be achieved after a single military maneuver in Gaza. As we saw in the wake of the World War II, we need a philosophical and psychological reckoning, a wholesale cleansing of the ideology of antisemitism and hate that leads people to ridicule life and applaud death.

We need a modern day “de-Nazification” that seeks to find a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. It must address the absolute moral rot at the core of the anti-Zionism that fueled the Hamas massacre, that fills the sermons of countless imams across the Muslim world, that informs the college students praising the massacre as “decolonization,” that tells activists that it’s reasonable to pull up swastikas on their cellphones when they see a Jewish person.

This is the real and long-term fight. In the short term, the difficult challenge for the Israeli military will be targeting the Hamas infrastructure—operation centers, where they store their materiel, where their Gaza leadership is hiding out—while making all efforts to limit civilian casualties. But it will take decades to rid the world of the disease of antizionism that has settled in like a permanent plague.

The process must start now.

Latest Gaza memes, posters and cartoons

Previous ones here.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Here is a great summary of the international law issues with the Gaza war by Eugene Kontorovich that shows not only what is legal, but why it has to be legal, or else terrorists could take advantage and ensure they never lose simply by hiding among civilians.

From the Wall Street Journal (paywalled):

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.”

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

10/17 Links Pt1: Hamas’s Strategy of Human Sacrifice; It's Only a War Crime if Israel Is Doing It; Why Are So Few Talking About the Hostages?

From Ian:

Hamas’s Strategy of Human Sacrifice

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.”

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.

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

The charred remains were so disfigured that at first they did not realise it was two people.

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.

Foreign media given unprecedented access to forensic institute to witness atrocities

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).

Times of Israel reports:

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.

Israel has always resisted moving Gazans to the West Bank, but I haven't seen anyone talk about this option today. Certainly there has been no word from the Palestinian Authority offering to save some Gazans for the duration of the war - even though they wouldn't become refugees, they would still be in "Palestine," and there is a lot more room in Areas A and B than in Gaza.

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.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Cartoon by Peter Brookes, Times of London, 2014

There have been a number of stories about Gaza City's Shifa Hospital and how it is trying to cope with the number of injured

But Shifa isn't only famous for being the biggest hospital in Gaza.

It is known for being the headquarters of Hamas. And this has been well known since at least 2009.

As Tablet wrote in 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.

Judging from the coverage in this round, the reporters are sticking to the Hamas playbook perfectly.

Hamas doesn't only hold meetings, treat its members separately, and use the hospital as a command and control center. It has also used it as a launching pad for rockets - something else reporters only rarely would mention out of fear. A Finnish reporter bravely said that she witnessed a rocket launch from there. in 2014: "At two o'clock in the morning from the parking lot located behind the hospital, a rocket was launched. This really happened right here, and the sound was very loud."

She's one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.

When Israel bombed the tunnels under Al Wehda street in 2021, reporters didn't mention that Shifa Hospital is right at the end of the street - meaning, it is a hub or terminal for Hamas' extensive tunnel system, and a bomb aimed at that tunnel could collapse the hospital over the heads of the patients. (Israel actually built the underground bunker at the hospital in 1983 to be a secure location for operating rooms.)

A report by Amnesty International in 2015 said Hamas used a section of the hospital “to detain, interrogate, torture and otherwise ill-treat suspects, even as other parts of the hospital continued to function as a medical centre.”

Shifa Hospital is the paradigm of how Hamas uses human shields and how it endangers civilians. But because Hamas doesn't want reporters to mention that....they almost never do.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

There was a meeting in Beirut Monday between Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine discussing "the historical and distinguished relationship between the Jihad and the Front, the ways of cooperation and coordination, and the emphasis on bilateral relations and joint work."

Hating Jews makes the oddest couples, bringing people together who would hate each other in any other context. Islamic Jihad is an extremist Islamist group and the PFLP is a socialist hard Left organization - but they routinely cooperate with each other and with Hamas. And they happily pose together.

Egypt-based Fath News, a Salafi newspaper, hates the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, which is an offshoot. But Dr. Yasser Borhami, Vice President of the Salafist Call, said, "We disagree with them on major methodological issues, but when it comes to defending the most marginalized and oppressed of the people of Palestine, we do not disagree with them, but rather agree....Therefore, we will pray for them, 'May God grant you success. O God, grant them victory with a mighty and sustaining victory. O God, the sender of the Book, the one who moves the clouds, and the destroyer of parties, quick to reckon. Defeat the Jews and those who support them, and shake them, and give us victory over them.”

The Salafists don't even try to pretend that they are against "Zionist," with articles saying thing like "Jews are people of treachery, lying, betrayal, procrastination, and breaking promises."

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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10/16 Links Pt2: Hamas Uses Western Morality as a Weapon Against Israel; Hamas releases new footage of a hostage; Feminists for Palestine?

From Ian:

Haviv Rettig Gur: What Were the Palestinians Thinking?

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.

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.

Hamas did it because we are Jews

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.

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.

Hugh Hewitt: Why Hamas' Methodical Slaughter of Jews Carries a Special Horror

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.

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.

Alan Dershowitz: Hamas Uses Western Morality as a Weapon Against Israel

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.

Ken Roth, the former Human Rights Watch head, tweeted:

"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

He gave the source from the ICRC - and it proves the opposite of his attempt to paint Israel as guilty.

The first paragraph, which he skips, defines collective punishment:

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.

The word "retaliation" makes it sound as if the action must be done deliberately as a punishment, not as a consequence of going after the actual guilty party.

For example, if a terrorist group gets its arms flown in on flights t a commercial airport, a nation can bomb that airport runway - even if it means that legitimate airplanes cannot land. It definitely affects innocent people but it is not collective punishment, because that is not the intent.

Similarly, other dual use targets - power stations, TV and radio broadcast stations - may be attacked if they are also used by the combatant. (All of these are subject to proportionality analysis, as with any military action.)

Looking at specific legal rulings listed the ICRC, we see that collective punishment was defined quite clearly by the Special Court for Sierra Leone:

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.

Although sometimes individual politicians have said stupid things in the heat of argument, but Israel has made it clear in its policy and actions that it has no intention of hurting the Gaza population for anything Hamas has done.

This brings up a bigger question. In many points of international law, such as the principle of distinction, proportionality and even genocide, the intent of the parties is paramount in determining guilt. No one is a mind reader so the only evidence we have on intent is the actions - if they can be explained without resorting to malicious intent, then such intent should not be assumed. On the other hand, if there are other examples where the malice is clear, due to what parties said or because their other actions leave no other explanation, then one can assume the intent is malicious.

With Israel, NGOs and people like Ken Roth always assume malicious intent - which they have never done for Hamas.

This is how people can quote international law to damn Israel. Even when they quote everything accurately, they are assuming Israel is breaking the rules and therefore they interpret intent in that way.

And if you automatically assume that only the Jewish state has malicious intent against civilians in war, especially when there are thousands of counterexamples that prove otherwise, that pretty much make you an antisemite.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

It is perverse to see so many toss around the word "genocide" for Israel's fight against Hamas.

The definition of genocide is quite clear: any of a set of acts (like killing) "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

Israel has done more to preserve the lives of the civilians of its enemies that perhaps any nation in history. A genocidal entity wouldn't carefully choose munitions so as not to cause collateral damage. It wouldn't ensure a lower ratio of civilian to militant deaths that in any urban conflict in history.

But when it comes to Hamas, it isn't even a question.

The Hamas covenant - which was never replaced - says, "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it."

It incites hatred against Jews with lies: "When the Jews conquered the Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed that 'Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women.'

It doesn't differentiate between Israel and Jews: "Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people."

And this: "In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised."

And more antisemitism meant to dehumanize Jews:

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)

The operative word in the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention is "intent." Hamas has broadcast its clear intent to destroy Israel (as a national group) and Jews (as a religious group.) Therefore, every single terror attack since it was founded is an act of genocide by its definition.

All the more so the slaughter of October 7, where they made very clear from their tactics and actions, as well as evidence found afterwards, that the overarching goal was to kill as many Jews and Israelis as possible.

When Palestinians accuse Israel of "genocide," it is arguably one of many examples of their own psychological projection - ascribing to one's enemies your own mindset.

But when pundits, NGOs, and op-eds use the language against Israel it is something far more insidious. Projection is a reflection of how one views the world, but when people who don't think that way accuse Israel of genocide, especially after the worst attack on Jews since the paradigmatic genocide that spawned the term itself, it is not a psychological quirk. It is a deliberate attempt to excuse Hamas and attack Jews with the worst crime there is.

It is akin to comparing Israeli Jews to Nazis. It is pure antisemitism, pure hate, that is meant to incite others to hate Jews.

How can one tell that these people accusing Israel of genocide are dyed in the wool antisemites? Because they never use that word against Hamas, even after 10/7. Even though it is impossible to chart Hamas' actions against the Genocide Convention and not come to that conclusion.

They aren't soberly looking at Israeli actions and saying, "this fits." As with the false accusations of apartheid, they are shoehorning a very distorted view of Israel to fit some bizarre definition of the term and then using it as a means to incite against Jews.

This is part of a process to dehumanize Israel - subjecting it to standards no one else is judged by and demonizing the Jewish state when it doesn't reach these imaginary human rights levels.

And the same people who are accusing Israel of genocide are trying to lay the groundwork for another real genocide against Jews.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

10/16 Links Pt1: West Point Professor: "Hamas is legally obligated to evacuate the civilian population; IDF displays arms, plans, torture manuals collected from Hamas terrorists

From Ian:

West Point Professor: "Hamas is legally obligated to evacuate the civilian population

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.”

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.”

Alan Johnson: For the Total Defeat of Hamas, Against the ‘Total Siege’ of Gaza

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.

British writer Douglas Murray praises Israel's efforts to safeguard citizens

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.