PM Netanyahu (WSJ): Israel's Three Prerequisites for Peace
There are three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza. First, Hamas, a key Iranian proxy, must be destroyed. The U.S., UK, France, Germany and many other countries support Israel's intention to demolish the terror group. To achieve that goal, its military capabilities must be dismantled and its political rule over Gaza must end.Thomas Friedman's emotional numbness
Hamas leaders have vowed to repeat the Oct. 7 massacre "again and again." That is why their destruction is the only proportional response to prevent the repeat of such horrific atrocities. Anything less guarantees more war and more bloodshed.
Unjustly blaming Israel for civilian casualties will only encourage Hamas and other terror organizations around the world to use human shields. To render this cruel and cynical strategy ineffective, the international community must place the blame for these casualties squarely on Hamas.
Second, Gaza must be demilitarized to ensure that the territory is never again used as a base to attack Israel. This will require establishing a temporary security zone on the perimeter of Gaza and an inspection mechanism on the border between Gaza and Egypt that meets Israel's security needs and prevents smuggling of weapons into the territory.
The expectation that the Palestinian Authority will demilitarize Gaza is a pipe dream. It currently funds and glorifies terrorism in Judea and Samaria and educates Palestinian children to seek the destruction of Israel. For the foreseeable future, Israel will have to retain overriding security responsibility over Gaza.
Third, Gaza will have to be deradicalized. Schools must teach children to cherish life rather than death, and imams must cease to preach for the murder of Jews. Visionary Arab leaders in the Gulf have led efforts to deradicalize their societies and transform their countries. Once Hamas is destroyed, Gaza is demilitarized and Palestinian society begins a deradicalization process, Gaza can be rebuilt.
So now Friedman is pleading with the White House, meaning his friend Biden, to have the Israeli war machine halt, to draw a red line, "to declare victory in Gaza and go home," because at this point "Israeli prime minister is utterly useless as a leader" and "prioritizing his own electoral needs over the interests of Israelis."Jonathan Tobin: Israel-haters aren’t refighting the Vietnam War
He suggests a framework: IDF withdrawal, return of captives, and a permanent ceasefire under international supervision. The captive issue, he reckons, "makes rational military decision-making there impossible," and he believes that there is "increasing discomfort in the Israel Defense Forces leadership over the fact that it is being asked by the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu to fight a war in Gaza without a clearly defined political objective."
The problem is that such words could make the Western world – and worse, Hamas – conclude that Israel's international credit is running out, that there's a rift between Washington and Jerusalem. Nothing can give Hamas a better lifeline than that. Friedman might as well have written in his column to Yahya Sinwar: "Hold on a little longer, comrade. It's almost over."
Incidentally, he reckons that after an Israeli withdrawal, Gaza's population will take care of Sinwar themselves. You'd need outbursts of obsessive hatred for Netanyahu and the Right, as well as emotional numbness, to put a stick in Israel's spokes right now, to cast aspersions and make terrible accusations against a Jewish state fighting for its existence and its leadership, and to call on its ally to tie its hands.
It's almost ironic that the most hollow oracle of the liberal-Democratic wing, the one vocally opposed to the "occupation" and Israeli control in the West Bank, is calling on the leader of the great empire to leverage its weight against what he apparently sees as a vassal state – an impudent province that has reared its head higher than it should. It's even more astonishing to see how little respect, if any, this great democrat has for Israeli democracy and sovereignty.
It's one thing to criticize Israel, its government, leaders, military on the pages of a newspaper. But Friedman's explicit call for the superpower to impose policy on Israel as it fights for its survival is a frightening vestige of the imperialist master-subject mentality. It's stunning how such a voice emerges from the heart of the Democratic establishment that effectively views US-Israel relations as analogous to Iran-Hezbollah.
Marxism’s comeback with DEIPhyllis Chesler: Destroying Western culture, one Islamist protest at a time
Still, it’s not entirely wrong to see the roots of today’s anti-Israel protests in those radicals, who were the most violent elements of the protests against the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Unlike most Americans, the Marxists of the misnamed Students for a Democratic Society—veterans of which were featured in the Times article—wanted the Communists to win in much the same way those who compose the mobs tying up traffic, breaking up Christmas celebrations and intimidating Jewish students on campuses want Hamas to defeat Israel.
Unlike most of the Americans who were against the war in the 1960s without expressing hatred for their own country, the motivations of the large number of young people and Muslims who have swelled the numbers of the anti-Israel movement are ideological in nature. They are the product of a generation of education in which leftists—many of them former ’60s radicals—who believe in the myths of intersectionality that falsely analogize the Palestinian war against Israel to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. They’ve been indoctrinated in the toxic catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as well as critical race theory, which divides the world into two immutable groups: victims of racism and racist oppressors.
This is a neo-Marxist dialectic not unrelated to the ideas of the so-called New Left that spawned SDS and the radical Weatherman terrorist movement that tried to blow up the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department and dozens of other targets during their campaign in what might well have been termed a real “insurrection.”
And that is what blinds them to the fact that they are devoting their energy and passion to supporting a cause that is fundamentally evil. The ideological prism through which they view the world mandates that the side that is designated by leftist doctrine as “white” and colonial (Israel) must be wrong and the one labeled as the cause of the oppressed “people of color” (the Palestinians) must be right.
They are insensible to obvious truths about a complex conflict that isn’t racial and that has always been driven by Arab refusal to share the land with the Jews. Their acceptance of the idea that Jews, who are the indigenous people of their ancient homeland, are colonizers in Israel much as Americans were depicted in Vietnam is as egregious as it is false.
But that doesn’t matter to the protesters because they see the facts as irrelevant. Nor do they care about the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7 or even against their own people as they continue to sacrifice them on the altar of their never-ending war against the Jews.
Mainstreaming antisemitism
It’s true that Hamas’s useful idiots are using some of the same tactics pioneered by the anti-Vietnam movement. But what those seeking to lionize today’s demonstrators want to obfuscate in their alleged idealism about helping Gazans is given the lie by the antisemitism they are spreading. The arguments about Vietnam were not predicated on the horrible notion that wiping the only Jewish state off the map—an objective that could only be achieved by the genocide of the Jews—is a righteous cause. And even at their worst, the Vietnam protests didn’t target Jewish students, Jewish businesses or seek to drive Jews from the public square as these mobs seek to do.
There’s no denying that the same core ideology driving the movement to destroy Israel is linked to the war on the West and the principles of American freedom that were championed by the Marxists of the ’60s New Left. Yet what is so damaging about demonstrators right now is not just their unabashed antisemitism. It’s the fact that their lies are being bought not by just a radical fringe but by a broad cross-section of young Americans who have been educated to believe that a genocidal, Jew-hating terrorist movement is the underdog deserving of support. This is the greatest tragedy of the post-Oct. 7 protests. And it is ultimately one that not just threatens Israel or the Jews, but the future of the United States as a free country.
Just last week, pro-Palestinian Arab demonstrators tried to stop Congressmen Richie Torres and Mike Lawler, from speaking about Israeli-Arab peace through the Abraham Accords at the 92nd St Y in New York City.
Approximately twenty to twenty five protestors stood up in waves, one after the other, yelling out "Free Palestine" and "Genocide is not peace." It took about twenty minutes to clear the room. The assembled audience booed them and eventually started yelling "Get them out" and "Yeah, free Palestine from Hamas."
Torres sat on the platform entirely unfazed. Afterwards, he tweeted: "No amount of Astroturf Anti-Israel agitation is going to bully me into supporting a ceasefire that perpetuates the genocidal terrorism of Hamas. I refuse to be intimidated by a fanatical fringe that represents no one and nothing but itself."
This demonstrating-in-waves is hardly original. It is an Islamist/Marxist tactic long in use.
For example, in 2008, female students, members of the Muslim Student Association (a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood), chose to interrupt my friend and colleague Nonie Darwish's lecture about eight Iranian women who were facing execution and about Sharia law. Each hijabbed student sat at the end of each row, cleared their throats rather loudly, and then proceeded to leave, one after the other, for the bathroom. Their interruptions continued as Nonie spoke.
In 2010, ten Muslim students interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren's lecture at the University of California's Irvine campus. They continued to heckle and shout him down. "Michael Oren, propagating murder is not an expression of free speech" and "Sir, you are an accomplice to genocide." Amazingly, the students were charged, found guilty and sentenced to three years of probation, 56 hours of community service and fines.
For the last twenty years in America outside lecturers, professors, and students have been bullied, cancelled, and shut down all across America. Loud mobs have harassed politicians at their homes, on the street, and while dining out with their families.