Seth Mandel: Israel’s Thankless, But Essential, Role in the World
Hezbollah has signaled its reluctance to widen the war—but, crucially, it has not actually stopped attacking Israel. Which means it wants to continue its torment of Israeli civilians but without getting its clock properly cleaned for doing so. In addition, the most recent Hezbollah casualty was reportedly responsible for the missile attack that damaged Israel’s air traffic control base in Meron over the weekend. It was a retaliatory strike, it was “surgical,” it was successful. Yet it still gets a thumbs-down from the cheap seats.How Hamas Changed Israel's Security Doctrine
It’s almost as if much of the criticism of Israel’s self-defense is pretextual.
Nobody argues that Hamas commanders involved in Oct. 7 are inappropriate targets. A surgical strike taking out such figures without causing “disproportionate” civilian harm (I put the word in quotes because the people using it generally don’t know what it means in relation to armed conflict) is basically Israel waiting tables for the spectators of the world, taking orders and fulfilling them. And the most common response is akin to “the food here is terrible and the portions are too small.”
There is also no ambiguity regarding Hezbollah’s culpability. Like Hamas, Hezbollah is extremely proud of every act of violence it can muster.
“Hezbollah stated on Tuesday that they sent an attack drone to target the IDF’s Northern Command base near Safed,” the Jerusalem Post reports. The piece goes on: “Sirens alerting residents to a possible unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) intrusion sounded in the northern city of Safed and across northern Israel on Tuesday morning. UAV warnings were sounded in Dishon; Yiftah; Malkia; Mevuot Hermon Regional Council; Ramot Naftali; Avivim; Bar’am and Yir’on. Rocket sirens also sounded in northern Israel shortly afterward, including in Malkia and Ramot Naftali, communities that had just received aircraft intrusion alerts.”
If Iran and Hezbollah are trying to avoid a wider war, they have a funny way of showing it. What’s actually being tested here is not Iran’s restraint but Israel’s. And yet we never hear demands that Israel’s displaced northern residents be able to go back to their homes and live in peace. That would require pacifying the north, deterring drone incursions that seek to bomb Israeli territory, and scrambling Hamas’s ability to pull its Lebanese brothers-in-arms into a land war.
What the world wants from Israel is what it always wants from Israel: for the Jewish state to take risks nobody else will but from which everyone will benefit, and to do it all with the beneficiaries taunting the IDF from behind their MacBooks.
“You’re welcome” is all Israel should say to the hypocrites and ingrates that hold Jewish life to be so cheap. And even that is more polite than Israel’s critics deserve.
Few thought that Israel would still be on full war footing three months after Oct. 7, with no clear end in sight.Good terrorists versus bad terrorists
However, this is not a sign of failure. Instead, it is a sign of trying to defeat a well-entrenched enemy - one indifferent to the plight and well-being of their own people - while trying to spare the lives of the kidnapped hostages and IDF soldiers, minimize civilian casualties on the other side, and retain international legitimacy.
Few would have imagined that Israel would have been able to continue its war in Gaza at a very high level of intensity for three months without the world stepping in and imposing a ceasefire.
When the war began, there was much talk about how the diplomatic clock was ticking. Yet the savagery of the Hamas attacks, coupled with an understanding at least at the governmental level in the U.S., Britain, and Germany, has given Israel the time it needs to methodically dismantle Hamas' military capabilities inside Gaza.
In recent years, Israel's security doctrine has been a passive one based on deterrence, the idea being that Israel could live with ideologies on its borders preaching Israel's destruction out of a belief that these organizations would never act on their ideology, knowing full well that if they did, they would incur the substantial wrath of the Israeli army.
Hamas proved this assumption false, showing on Oct. 7 that it was in no way deterred by Israel. This has led to a change in Israel's security doctrine.
Israel is no longer willing to tolerate bloodthirsty terrorist organizations with significant military capabilities living within spitting distance of its civilian communities.
This is also clear in Israel's policy now toward Hizbullah.
We are supposed to believe that overnight the PA has changed its spots. After all, Abbas wears a suit. Op-ed.Egypt denies Israeli request for greater oversight on Gaza borders
No more is it between good and bad. Now, for 2024 and beyond, it’s between bad and worse.
Take your pick. For instance, between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which is better, which is worse?
Which terrorists, in other words, should get to run Gaza, “the day after?” Biden and his people prefer the PA…the lesser of two evils.
In fact, according to their view, there is nothing evil about the PA, because? Because they say so. and they will decide what is best for Israel.
Biden and his people are on this in a big way. Every day they pressure Israel to give it up for Mahmood Abbas and his PA. After all, he is not quite as rotten as Yahya Sinwar.
Therefore, pronto, a two-state solution, with the understanding that these Arabs are peace-loving, just folks like the rest of us.
So goes the sales pitch, as concocted by the Biden Administration and leftists everywhere. As they sold Hamas before Oct 7…you know, good people, live and let live people, if just given the chance…which even conned numbers of Israelis… so too now the PA gets laundered and cleansed, and purified, and never mind Abbas’s five-year Second Intifada, 2000 to 2005,
Never mind the murdering of thousands of Israeli civilians, and the suicide bombings, the stone-throwing, the car-ramming, the incitements.
Israelis were and are safe nowhere. Certainly not under the Abbas/PA pay to slay system. In his schools, kids are being taught to become martyrs for Islam.
Egypt has rejected a proposal by Israel for greater Israeli oversight over the buffer zone on the Egypt-Gaza border and is prioritizing efforts to broker a ceasefire before working on post-war arrangements, three Egyptian security sources said.
Egypt shares a 13km (8 mile) border with Gaza which is the only border of the Palestinian coastal enclave not directly controlled by Israel. Along with Qatar, Egypt has also played a leading role in talks to broker a new ceasefire in Gaza and secure a deal for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
The Egyptian sources said that during those talks Israel had approached Egypt about securing the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow buffer zone along the border, as part of Israeli plans to prevent future attacks.
The current conflict began on Oct. 7 when Hamas launched an incursion during which Israel said 1,200 people were killed and some 240 hostages captured.
Israel has retaliated with an offensive that has killed more than 23,000 people, according to Gaza officials, and driven most of the territory's 2.3 million people from their homes.
An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said joint monitoring Philadelphi Corridor with Egypt was among issues that have been discussed by the countries.
Asked if Egypt had refused, the Israeli official said: "I'm not aware of that."
Egypt's state-linked Al Qahera News cited an anonymous source on Monday as saying that recent reports of planned cooperation between Egypt and Israel on the corridor were false.
The head of Egypt's State Information Service did not respond to a request for comment.
The Egyptian sources said that Israeli officials did not discuss control of the corridor during the current ceasefire talks, but instead asked to participate in monitoring the area, including by sharing usage of new monitoring technology Israel would procure.
Egyptian negotiators rejected the idea, but Egypt has bolstered the physical barriers on its side of the border, the sources said.
Egypt is prioritizing reaching a new ceasefire agreement as the necessary foundation for discussions about post-war Gaza, including securing the corridor, the sources added.