This is what happened with a woman named “Samantha Woll,” who was walking, a few days ago, in the middle of crowds in the city of Detroit, in the American state of Michigan, only to be surprised by someone attacking her and stabbing her to death...It was the fingers of the Mossad, which plunged the knife ten times into the chest of the sacrificial victimThe victim, “Samantha Woll,” was none other than the head of a synagogue in the city of Detroit, Michigan, USA. Prior to her murder, she participated in marches denouncing the Zionist massacres in Gaza, accusing Israel of committing war crimes. She also remained in constant contact with several members of the US Congress to persuade them to officially condemn “Israel”, ignoring all warnings to stop her campaign and refusing to submit to the threats, believing that her position as head of a Jewish synagogue would protect her, but the victim receiving fatal stab wounds in the street was a message from the Mossad to public American figures, stating that no one is immune, and that the madness of the Zionist entity in Gaza will not hesitate to extend its crimes to the heart of America and everyone is targeted, just as Jewish affiliation will not intercede for those who tweet outside the flock.
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
- Tuesday, December 26, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- Tuesday, December 26, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
Maher al-Taher |
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! |
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Seth Mandel: The UN’s Humanitarian Disaster in Gaza
The United Nations’ bias against Israel is both obvious and, at times, poorly understood. So we should be thankful for moments in which top UN officials seemingly conspire to make the nature of their corruption clear and plain.Bassam Tawil: How UNRWA Grooms Terrorists
The best examples are when senior UN figures operate against their own organization’s guidelines, definitions, and regulations in order to stick it to Israel, proving that its corruption is intentional and that its other claims to authority on international law are wholly illegitimate.
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the demonization of Israel, recently sat for an interview with Jewish News Syndicate. This was to her credit, making it arguably the first and only thing in Albanese’s UN career that is to her credit. Unfortunately, in the course of the interview, Albanese revealed that she does not know the meaning of any of the key terms relevant to her job.
When asked why she speaks as if Gaza is occupied even though Israel’s occupation ended two decades ago, Albanese says that Israel’s blockade of some goods proves there’s an occupation—an insane assertion on its own, but one that conveniently is also debunked by the UN’s own guidelines and definitions. “Because in order to have an occupation, the determining factor was effective control under article 42 of the Hague Regulations,” she said. As the JNS report points out in a note appended to the interview transcript, according to the UN itself,“three elements are identified as being necessary for the existence of an occupation for the purposes of international law.” According to article 42 of the Hague Regulations, the first of these is “the unconsented-to presence of foreign forces.” Those would be the forces that left Gaza 18 years ago. Albanese’s insistence otherwise is an important window into the minds of the fraudulent forces that have long since hijacked the concept of international law in order to sanction unethical behavior by governments that have UN support. The UN doesn’t believe that Gaza is occupied, but the UN nevertheless will say Gaza is occupied at every opportunity.
Presumably this is why, in the same interview, Albanese gives the OK to Hamas soldiers crossing the border to murder Israeli soldiers on Israeli territory during a ceasefire. In any event, it is helpful to have such extensive on-the-record documentation of UN venality at the highest levels.
By providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with various services, UNRWA exempted Hamas from its responsibilities as the governing body, such as creating a working economy that would pay for education and healthcare, and allowed it, instead, to invest resources in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons.Hamas is in control of UNRWA aid group in Gaza, Palestinian man says: recording
"They [UNRWA] teach us that the Al-Aqsa Mosque belongs to us [Muslims], that Palestine belongs to us," said Atif Sharha, a student at an UNRWA school.
"Yes, they teach us that the Zionists are our enemy," said Nur Taha, a third-year student from Kalandia. "We should carry out an [terror] operation against them [Zionists]."
"The Palestinian matriculation exams [at UNRWA] have become a finishing school in extremism. It is as if the Palestinian Authority is cramming as much hate into the tests as possible, to ensure the twelve previous years of indoctrination stay with them into adulthood." — Marcus Sheff, CEO at the Institute for Cultural Peace and Tolerance in School Education, i24news.tv, July 23, 2023.
Despite years of considerable condemnation of the textbooks, newly produced editions, approved by UNRWA, are exponentially worse....
Whatever hopes that anyone may have held for the trustworthiness of UNRWA have long expired, and were arguably misplaced at the outset. UNRWA, in its current state, has proven itself irremediably defective, unworkable and yet another massive stain on the already scandalously stained UN.
It is high time for the international community and those who actually want a better future for the Palestinians to liquidate UNRWA and take actions that truly help the Palestinians move forward to a golden life.
A man identified as a Palestinian living in Gaza told the Israel Defense Forces on audio tape that Hamas has direct control over the United Nations group coordinating the delivery of humanitarian aid in the territory.
In recordings of the phone call, obtained by The Post, the man accused the troubled Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East, known as UNRWA, of being under Hamas’ power, telling an IDF officer that the terrorist group has been hogging all the supplies.
“The situation is terrible because the humanitarian people, those responsible for the humanitarian aid, are thieves,” the frustrated Gaza resident said in the recording.
“Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers, and it manages UNRWA,” he alleges. “From the day they [Hamas] rose to power they took control of everything.”
The man also claimed that Hamas has made sure the incoming humanitarian supplies were distributed to its own people first as opposed to the more than one million civilians who have been displaced by the war.
An IDF official told The Post the call between the soldier and civilian was recorded when the officer was making his rounds to inform Palestinians of where to evacuate to and seek aid supplies as Israel continues its bombardments in Gaza.
The allegations, which reveal the civilian’s frustration over the lack of aid arriving in Gaza amid the war, was just the latest in a troubling series of discoveries made by the Israeli forces during its offensive, including the presence of UNRWA-labeled bags carried by Hamas operatives, the IDF official said.
UNRWA did not respond to The Post’s request for comment Sunday.
- Tuesday, December 26, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- Tuesday, December 26, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- Tuesday, December 26, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
The genocidal war waged by the Zionist-American alliance against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and the massive Western alignment with it, reveals to us the extent of deception and historical falsity that the world experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries AD, where history was falsified and rewritten to suit the new Jewish era, which began its rise in the 17th century AD, established its rules in the 18th century AD, and then continued building on these rules in the 19th century AD. And the first half of the 20th century AD politically, economically, legally, socially, and intellectually, before it embarked on a process of escalating hegemony in the second half of the 20th century AD until now. In order to understand the nature of this war and the true motives of the Western countries for supporting it, we urgently need to reread Western history in this period that witnessed massive bloody transformations, from which the Jewish movement was not far removed under its Masonic cover, which they had the upper hand in establishing, financing and spreading and developing it.
In a march in solidarity with Gaza in an American city, an American girl carried a sign reading: "Do you want to kill Christ twice?"It seems that the American girl's question angers and annoys Biden, Blinken, and the Washington administration more than the kings and rabbis of the Kingdom of David. 50 million Americans belong to Christian Zionism. These people's ideological conviction says: that Israel is the smaller America, and that America is the greater Israel. When Biden said that he is a Zionist, it is not necessary for a Zionist to be a Jew... and he was not delirious or hallucinating.Biden, Blinken, and Austin rushed to Israel in the first days of the Al-Aqsa Flood War and after October 7, armed with the doctrines of the Torah and the ideology of the rabbis of the Kingdom of David, the divine promise, and Greater Israel.What America, Britain and France are doing is an implementation of the divine biblical promise. ...The bodies of children and women in Gaza are offered as an offering to the Jewish gods... a Palestinian Holocaust stained with the blood and dignity of all ArabsYes, Christ was killed twice and more.. Today, if Christ were to descend again on the land of Palestine, the leaders of the Kingdom of David would kill him and prevent him from returning to heaven.
Monday, December 25, 2023
- Monday, December 25, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
- cartoon of the day, ElderToons, memes
- Monday, December 25, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
A new training regimen for fighters in Hamas’s armed wing employs slide presentations and a whiteboard rather than Kalashnikov rifles and grenades. The young men wear polo shirts instead of fatigues and black masks. They do not chant anti-Israel slogans, but discuss how the Geneva Conventions governing armed conflict dovetail with Islamic principles.The three-day workshop, conducted last month by the International Committee of the Red Cross, followed numerous human-rights reports accusing both Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, of war crimes in their devastating battle last summer, and came as the International Criminal Court prosecutor conducts a preliminary inquiry into that conflict....Red Cross leaders say they have seen an increasing commitment from Hamas leaders and linemen alike, if only because they now consider their international image a critical component of their struggle.Mamadou Sow, who heads Red Cross operations in Gaza, said that in April he presented a critique of Hamas’s conduct during the 2014 hostilities to its top political and military leaders, and that they “welcomed it” and “indicated that they are a learning organization.” He said they also “challenged us to keep in mind the topology of the Gaza Strip,” one of the most densely populated patches on the planet.“For the first time,” said Jacques de Maio, director of the Red Cross delegation in Israel and the Palestinian territories, “Hamas is actually, in a private, protected space, expressing a readiness to look critically at a number of things that have an impact on their level of respect for international humanitarian law.”He added, “Whether this will translate into something concrete, time will tell.”Besides participating in the workshops, Hamas has altered its propaganda in the aftermath of the war. New talking points stress that tunnel attacks last summer targeted military positions, not civilian communities, and argue — dubiously — that rockets fly toward civilian areas because the Gaza groups lack guiding technology.Still, Hamas leaders routinely praise attacks on Israelis, and there are widespread reports that Qassam is rebuilding tunnels to infiltrate Israeli territory.Last week, in announcing the arrest of a Qassam fighter in July, Israel’s security service said that he had told interrogators “the organization’s fighters endanger many civilians by storing explosives in their homes, on the instructions of Hamas commanders.”
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The UN’s Disgraceful Response to Hamas Massacre Can’t Go Unchallenged
Just two days after the October 7 massacre, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) demonstrated exactly why it is one of the UN’s most notorious and hypocritical organizations. The Pakistani representative, Zaman Mehdi, called for and received a minute’s silence to remember the victims in the “occupied Palestinian territories” and elsewhere, saying it was a result of more than “seven decades of foreign occupation, aggression and disrespect for international law.” He didn’t mention Israel, and he also failed to mention Hamas — the perpetrators of the massacre. By referring to “seven decades,” he made it very clear that he attributed all blame to Israel’s very existence since 1948.Melanie Phillips: The failure of Holocaust education
Also disturbingly, despite the overwhelming forensic evidence of sexual assault against Jewish women, including videos, these rapes were completely ignored by the United Nations, including by groups whose entire purpose is to protect women. Only after two months and an international campaign to call attention to the UN’s complete failure to even acknowledge the sick sexual violence, did the UN Women organization finally issue a weak condemnation.
Then there is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, whose staff, officials and teachers have long been exposed for involvement in terrorist violence in the past. Despite its supposed pretext of helping Palestinian refugees, it is one of the major impediments to any kind of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians.
The majority of UNRWA’s $1.6 billion budget, of which Australia contributes $20 million, promotes policies that support the “right of return” for Palestinians into Israel — meaning ending the existence of the State of Israel.
During the current conflict, it was revealed that UNRWA staff celebrated the massacre, and weapons caches have been discovered in UNRWA facilities. It was also revealed that a UNRWA teacher held a hostage captive in their attic. UNRWA denies all this, saying they are being defamed.
Finally, there is the most powerful person in the UN hierarchy, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who had the nerve, even as Hamas terrorists were still running wild and massacring civilians throughout towns and villages of southern Israel, to call for “maximum restraint” from Israel. He cemented his continued descent into the moral abyss by encouraging “understanding” of the attacks by Hamas, saying they “did not happen in a vacuum,” and were a result of the “occupation.”
What happened on October 7 in southern Israel was pure unadulterated evil. The UN had a chance to choose to stand on the side of good against that evil, but as it’s so often done in the past, it made the wrong choice, adding to its ever-growing shame.
Since the Hamas pogrom of October 7 in southern Israel, a tsunami of hatred against the Jews has surged across the west. Decent people everywhere are aghast and astonished that this should be the response by so many to the greatest single act of mass murder against Jews since the Holocaust.‘Tis the season for United Nations to see Jewish holidays as less equal
They are even more perplexed that a recurring characteristic of such attacks is to tear down the posters of the Israeli hostages that have been pasted up in public areas in a forlorn attempt to keep their fate alive in the public mind so that they may be returned home.
The reason for such driven and unhinged behaviour against posters stuck on walls is as obvious as it is appalling. Certain people simply cannot tolerate the fact of Jewish victimhood. So intolerable do they find this, they have to literally tear down the evidence with their own hands. No less significant is the way they do so, with both verbal and facial expressions of the most intense disgust. They find the idea of Jewish victims disgusting. And that’s because they find the very idea of Jews disgusting. What they are doing to those posters is what they would like to do to Israeli Jews.
For evidence of that, watch this video by Avi Horowitz who went to San Francisco State university to “raise money to kill Jews”. He found 28 out of 35 people with whom he engaged supported this aim, and 17 out of 35 actually offered him money “to kill Jews”.
How is such abhorrent behaviour to be explained? A major reason is that many if not most of these Jew-haters subscribe to the doctrine of “intersectional” identity politics and victim culture, which holds that some groups of people are oppressed and others are oppressors. The “oppressed” can never be held responsible for bad things they may do; the “oppressors” can never be victims of the “oppressed” or of anyone else. The haters believe that the Jews are all-powerful, that they drive capitalism and thus control the levers of world power which they manipulate in their own interests and against those of everyone else.
Why do they believe that? Because “intersectional” identity politics is the product of an education system which has long been captured by Marxist ideology, at the root of which lies an exterminatory hatred of the Jewish people. In other words, those who subscribe to identity politics are motivated at root by Jew-hatred.
And that also motivates those who are indifferent to identity politics but who believe — because historic Christian culture embedded in the west tells them so — that the Jews are motivated by vengeance and blood-lust. So they have eagerly swallowed the demonisation and defamatory lies of the Palestinian narrative, parroted day in, day out by the Hamas Broadcasting Corporation, Sky News and certain posh newspapers which spread the libel that the Israelis are wanton child-killers.
The fact that more than 1200 Israelis were slaughtered on October 7 by the supposedly “oppressed” Palestinians and more than 230 taken hostage, with an unknown number subsequently tortured, raped and murdered by those “oppressed” Palestinians while more than 100 remain captive in the hell-holes of Hamas, gets in the way of that narrative.
Leading with a tree emoji, the official United Nations account on X posted on Sunday to its 16.4 million followers: “Merry Christmas to all who are celebrating!”
A JNS review of prior holiday messages on the United Nations account revealed a single instance where the international body—which has long been accused of antisemitism and of unfairly targeting the Jewish state—appeared to celebrate a Jewish holiday.
That lone instance, from last April, came when the United Nations managed to lump a Jewish holiday together with several others.
“‘Peace is needed today more than ever.’ During a special interfaith ‘Prayer for Peace’ moment, António Guterres,” the U.N. secretary-general, “says that even the calendar is sending a message of unity, as Ramadan, Easter, Passover and the Sikh festival of Vaisakhi coincide this month,” the United Nations posted on April 14.
The United Nations shared something similar again on April 14 and on April 6. Those appear to be the only times that the United Nations has posted about a Jewish holiday.
A search of all the handle’s posts on X yielded no other results for “Passover,” and no results for “Pesach,” “Hanukkah,” “Chanukah,” “Shavuot,” “Shavuos,” “Sukkot,” “Sukkos,” “Purim,” “Yom Kippur,” “Rosh Hashanah” nor “High Holidays.” “Jewish holiday” and “Jewish holidays” also returned no results.
“Festival of lights,” returned four results, but none related to the Jewish festival of lights. “During Diwali, the festival of lights—celebrated in India and by followers of many faiths across the world—clay lamps are lit to signify the victory of good over evil,” the United Nations posted on Nov. 11. The U.N. account also mentioned “festival of lights” and wished a happy Diwali in 2022, 2020, 2019 and 2018. (It also wished a happy Diwali in 2021, and two more times in 2020, without mentioning “festival of lights.”)
- Monday, December 25, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
In his first public message since the massacres of October 7, Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar on Monday remained defiant, while grossly inflating the terror group’s achievements in the war.Sinwar falsely claimed that the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, had “targeted” over 5,000 Israeli soldiers and officers, and killed about third of them — that is, over 1,500.The actual figure of IDF deaths is one-tenth of what the terror leader alleged. According to the IDF, 156 soldiers have so far been killed in the ground operation in Gaza. Over 300 members of the security forces were killed in Hamas’s initial October 7 onslaught.The terror leader also gave inflated claims of the number of Israeli soldiers injured in the war, and the amount of Israeli military equipment that has been destroyed. He claimed that around 3,500 troops were seriously wounded or disabled, whereas that figure according to the IDF stands at less than 200.He further said that Hamas had completely or partially destroyed 750 Israeli military vehicles. While the IDF has not provided official figures, the commander of the IDF Technology and Maintenance Corps, Brig. Gen. Ariel Shima, said in early November that very few IDF vehicles had been severely damaged beyond repair, and that most vehicles that are hit return to fighting.
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! |
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- Monday, December 25, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
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! |
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- Monday, December 25, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
Jordan's Ad Dustour newspaper briefly summarizes a brand new book, Jews and Violence - Book One - How Religion Becomes Evil
Author Munir Al-Aksh draws a complete historical picture of the Jewish mentality and argues that it is not a religion but rather an ideological hallucination or a “political programme” in the words of the philosopher Kant, and that it was formulated at a late date to measure the needs of its desert society that is cruel and expressed its spirit and the reasons for its violence and self-worship, and its dreams of inheriting other people's countries and depriving them.These dreams and ambitions are what made these clans a functional religion, the most prominent of which is deadly violence, and which has:(a) a sacred centrality called “the covenant”(b) and a goal that sanctifies conquest, plunder and annihilation called “the Promised Land”(c) and a sacred obligation called “self-worship”(d) An exceptional hereditary (genetic) myth called “divine choice.”(e) an absolute innocence from its Lord regarding “the right to sacrifice the other” and the permissibility of its existence called “The Curse of Canaan.”(f) A ritual of worship that they call prohibition (slaughtering, destroying, and burning), thinking that their Lord is pleased with the smell of roasted corpses(g) a warrior god obsessed with annihilation who “pushed” before her whatever nations of the earth she wanted to annihilate.The texts from which the mentality was woven and centered around the idea of Israel, the “promised land” (occupying someone else’s land and replacing one people with another), put us before a genocidal ideology that can only be achieved through lethal violence. It is embodied today by the Jewish and non-Jewish Zionist movement. What the world is witnessing in Gaza today is a live ritual display presented by the religious government with audio and video of this genocidal and prohibitive ideology, which was and still is a cult of theirs that has haunted the idea of Israel since the day they believed that their Lord announced His marriage to Israel.
What would the world lose if the Jews became extinct?! Quite the contrary, humanity will have a good opportunity to live quietly and without the evils of this malicious sect. The idea is so wonderful that I can almost see the desert blooming, the earth getting excited, and millions of beings losing their minds from extreme happiness!Jews are the curse that came from the worst dreams of the accursed Devil. Without them, humanity would not have known atheism, the theory of evolution, and racism. With their help, the prophets were killed, usury and immorality spread, wars broke out, and nations perished. With their dirty thinking, epidemics developed, the death trade became widespread, and the world turned into an arena of conflict in which man eats man and death spreads everywhere. .If humanity had not known this malicious sect, it would not have known socialism, capitalism, and Nazism. It would not have known Zionism, Freemasonry, Illuminati, and Wahhabism. It would not have known the Cold War, nuclear and hydrogen bombs, and it would not have known corruption, anomalies, drugs, cancer, global warming, the right to veto, America, injustice, and oppression.They are a dirty, atheistic sect that claims faith, a dirty race that considers itself the only one worthy of life, and a strange society that contains the essence of meanness, malice, and deception accumulated over thousands of years. Their history is rotten, their books are false, their principles are evil, their morals are malicious, their methods are satanic, their goals are ominous, their presence is dangerous, and their survival is not good for man or animal.These people never lived among a people without their corruption, unrest, and devastation spreading, and they never moved to any country without carrying evil with them to it.. So it behooves all humanity to be hostile to them until it is safe from their evil, and I am not exaggerating here if I say that their disappearance is life and good, and their survival is death and evil. If humanity wants to live in peace, it must first stop their evil; And everyone who stands against them is on the side of truth, goodness and peace.There is no alternative to God’s laws, and the path of Satan and his servants will end in failure. Everyone who stands against them will be helped and supported by God’s care. Goodness, which is the path to salvation, is in standing against evil, not by standing by and watching. The responsibility that one cannot escape from bearing is through awareness, work, and patience, and the outcome is survival and victory in This world and the hereafter, God willing..
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! |
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Sunday, December 24, 2023
- Sunday, December 24, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
The birth of Jesus Christ comes this year, and the city of birth, Bethlehem, is experiencing a sadness that it has not seen before this day. The occupation forces oppress and kill the children of Palestine, and snatch the innocent smiles from the faces of the living among them, as none of our people, women, men, and the elderly, were spared. From this killing, terrorism, attempts at forced displacement, and the destruction of thousands of homes, it reminds us of what happened in the Nakba of 1948.
In 1948, Arab nations were places of refuge for their fellow Arabs from Palestine. In 2023, they have uniformly shut their doors. And not one Palestinian leader will say a negative word about them.
We hope that the anniversary of Christmas will come, and with it the beginning of a new year, with which hope will be renewed, life will be renewed, and the forces of evil will be defeated.
Guess who the "forces of evil" are? Hint: It isn't Hamas.
Here I say to our people and to our families who take refuge in the church in Gaza, and who were not spared from the barbarity of the Israeli aggression, and to all the people of Gaza, that your torments, and the torments of our people at home and abroad, will not be in vain, and that the sun of freedom and the independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital will inevitably come. But it's just around the corner. The river of blood, great sacrifices, suffering, and heroic steadfastness of our people on their land is the path towards freedom and dignity.
The brutal bombing committed by the occupation affected the Evangelical Baptist Hospital in Gaza,
the Orthodox Cultural Center, the Greek Orthodox Church Hall,
and the Holy Family Church,
in addition to mosques, schools, and hospitals
...did not differentiate between a Muslim and a Christian, and the occupation’s aggression also affected the Christian presence...
As for you, peoples of the world, we salute you and thank you for taking to the streets all over the world, demanding freedom for Palestine, and this is a pride for us and a defeat for tyrants.
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Netanyahu to Biden: ‘We will fight until absolute victory’
The Gaza war will continue for “however long it takes,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told U.S. President Joe Biden on Saturday night.Bridges of Trust between Israelis and Palestinians Have Been Blown to Smithereens
Speaking during a Cabinet meeting at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv on Sunday, the premier said, “Last night, I spoke again with President Biden. I appreciate the steadfast U.S. position—which supports our war effort—in the U.N. Security Council. I told President Biden yesterday that we will fight until absolute victory—however long that takes. The U.S. understands this.”
The prime minister denied “erroneous reports” claiming the U.S. had prevented Israel from taking action against other hostile entities in the region. (The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Biden blocked Israel from attacking Hezbollah on Oct. 11, four days after the Hamas attack on the northwestern Negev.)
“Our decisions in the war are based on our operational considerations, and I will not expand further. They are not dictated by external pressure. The decision on how to use our forces is an independent decision of the IDF and nobody else,” the prime minister said.
Netanyahu referred to the 14 IDF troops killed in action this weekend, including 10 on Saturday: “This is a difficult morning, after a very difficult day of fighting in Gaza. On behalf of all members of the government and the entire people of Israel, I would like to send condolences to the families of our heroic soldiers.”
He said IDF soldiers have killed “many thousands of terrorists” and will continue to grind away at the Hamas terrorist group until it is destroyed, the hostages are returned and Gaza “will never again constitute a threat to the State of Israel.”
I live in Kibbutz Nirim, less than two km. from the border with Gaza. People from my community have always held our hands out in peace to the residents on the other side of the border. I have participated in a number of projects and interactions with Palestinians, to try to build bridges. I've worked with people from Gaza who understand that we in Israel genuinely believe in coexistence with anyone who wants to live in peace with us. I always tell whoever will listen that it is in our best interest to see them thrive and prosper and have good lives.I Just Sent Five of My Children to War
On Oct. 7, many of those bridges collapsed. People on Nirim were reporting in the kibbutz's WhatsApp group that they were hearing automatic machine gun fire and shouting in Arabic outside their houses. We were alerted to shutter and lock doors and windows, then lock ourselves in our safe rooms. The problem was that the doors of the safe rooms, which were built to keep us safe from mortars, rockets and shrapnel, as opposed to infiltration by terrorists, do not lock. When we were finally evacuated from Nirim on Oct. 8, we had to drive through an active war zone.
I had believed, when the Qatari suitcases of dollars were allowed into Gaza, that all our lives would be safer. In light of the discoveries made by our troops now fighting inside Gaza, clearly the money was invested in building an underground terror network instead of helping Gazans. I had faith in the belief that if we allow thousands of Gazans into our country for work, they would be able to feed their families and live better lives. We now understand that it was many of those people whom we were hiring who were busy at the same time betraying us, mapping out our communities, including names of residents and where they lived, in order to weaponize that knowledge on Oct. 7.
The trust we put in them enabled the slaughter of over 1,200 people and the kidnapping of over 240, many of whom were and are my friends. It is also what has caused those of us who live on Nirim and the other border communities to be refugees in our own country. Can any of us ever trust any of the Gazans on the other side as not being Hamas collaborators, or not betraying my safety because Hamas terrorists have forced them to, by threatening them or their family by putting a gun to their head?
I fear that the bridges so many of us strived to work towards have been blown to smithereens. In their place are the dark shadows of doubt and suspicion of our neighbors, and for that, I have Hamas and what they did to us on Oct. 7 to blame, as well as misguided citizens and countries of the world who embolden and support these terrorists.
For the first time in my life I drove on Shabbat, taking my son to defend our people. The scene repeated itself three more times as I sent my other sons off to war.
I woke up at 6:30 AM this past Shabbat/Simchat Torah to the sound of thunder and my light fixtures shaking. I opened the blinds and the sky was blue but the thunder continued. I went outside and saw streaks across the sky.
I woke up my wife and said, “Miriam, get up, I think we are at war.” Neighbors slowly started to come outside to see what was happening. We all have kids in the army or on reserve duty. Most of our kids were home for the Jewish holiday. Since we hadn’t heard any news we didn’t know what was happening and we went to synagogue as usual.
There were booms and clear signs of the Iron Dome throughout the service. At 8:45 AM we had our first of what would be many air raid sirens. After a few minutes in the bomb shelters we emerged and went on with the prayers. We danced a little, completed the reading of the Torah and started Genesis.
During this time young men in my shul started to get called up from the army. I asked my youngest son who is in active duty in the tank brigade called Shiryon if he got a call. He went and checked his phone and that moment his commanding officer called him. He said that things were very serious and that he should start packing a bag as he would be called in later in the day.
My wife and I have five children (four sons and a daughter); three of them are married, and two granddaughters from my oldest son. I’m privileged that all four sons or ours are in the infantry and a daughter-in-law in the air force.
I was asked to lead the prayers for the welfare of the State of Israel, and the welfare of the soldiers, and the Mussaf service. As I put on my white kittel for the special prayers for rain recited on Shmini Atzeret and sang the words “to life and not death,” I could not stop thinking of the prospect of my son being deployed. The day felt more like Yom Kippur than Simchat Torah.
- Sunday, December 24, 2023
- Elder of Ziyon
Over the past couple of weeks, nearly all of my tweets have been responded to - often immediately - with bots.
Our tendency as Arabs and as Palestinians, specifically, to learn the Hebrew language is a very important strategy and method of resistance in managing the essence of the long-term Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only from a military security aspect, but also from cultural, societal and historical aspects, it is necessary to understand the language of our opponent....Just as the resistance in southern Lebanon did in employing the Hebrew language and using it within the framework of the “psychological strategy” that expresses its doctrine regarding “media” and the importance of the cognitive and psychological aspects of the conflict between the resistance and “Israel,” so the Palestinian resistance did in the context of the current ongoing confrontation with the enemy. It seemed that the resistance’s mastery of the Hebrew language goes beyond describing it as a tool for communication and communication, but rather comes within its cultural and cognitive context as a tool for understanding others and their ways of thinking.The resistance today realizes that victory is achieved not only by fighting on the battlefield on the ground, but also in the “media and psychological” battlefield. Propaganda in the “battle of awareness” is what creates victory, and because it is so, it must be managed in an intelligent way to yield the best results. In this context, knowing the enemy's language constitutes a great help in understanding him and identifying his weaknesses or strengths, which makes it possible to exert strong pressure on him...The resistance emphasizes the importance of the “visual medium” that it broadcasts, which affects thousands of Israelis. Therefore, it is keen to film its actions and broadcast them in all available media, accompanied by Hebrew translation, victory music, or poignant comments directed, such as scenes of targeting enemy soldiers and vehicles, and pictures and videos of prisoners, Which the resistance continues to broadcast in parallel with developments in the internal Israeli scene, has a psychological importance that is equivalent to “combat achievement.”