Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 08, 2024

Israel is trying to save Rafah civilians. @Amnesty would rather see them dead than leave.

Israel is giving warnings to some 100,000 civilians in Rafah to leave because of an imminent military operation.

Responding to the Israeli military’s orders for over 100,000 residents, most of whom are internally displaced, to “evacuate” whole neighbourhoods in eastern Rafah amid news its military operations in the area are already underway, Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns said:

“The Israeli army’s latest ‘evacuation’ order, issued just 24 hours before it began a ground incursion into eastern Rafah, comes hot on the heels of intensified bombardment in the southern governorate. It follows months-long threats to launch a large-scale ground operation in Rafah, which will further compound the unspeakable suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza.

“In a cruel and inhumane move that already illustrates the disastrous impact of such an operation on civilians, Israeli tanks have launched a ground incursion on the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, blocking a crucial lifeline for humanitarian aid for a population already facing famine and the risk of genocide.

Israel's warnings to the civilians are an obligation under international law. It is meant to save lives. It is the opposite of "genocide."

Amnesty would rather they stay where they are, to force Israel to allow Hamas to survive and attack Israeli civilians in the future.

So humanitarian!

The Lieber Institute at West Point just published an article by Lieutenant Colonel William C. Biggerstaff, a professor at the US Naval War College, on when an army is obligated to give effective warning to, and even evacuate, civilians ahead of military activity.

A long-observed rule of customary international law is that parties must exercise feasible precautions to minimize the risk of any incidental civilian harm when planning and conducting attacks on otherwise valid military objectives. A corollary to these so-called precautions in the attack (or active precautions) is the more specific obligation to provide effective advance warning of attacks that may cause death or other physical harm to the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit...

To be effective, an evacuation warning must be communicated at such a time and in such a manner as to provide the affected civilian population with a reasonable opportunity to meaningfully protect itself.

As this implies, the duty to warn is prospective in nature. Effectiveness thus does not turn on whether, or if so how, the civilians in question heed a warning. Their decision to evacuate pursuant to an attacker’s duty to warn is inherently voluntary. Although an effective warning must allow civilians a reasonable amount of time to evacuate a military objective if feasible, they are not obliged to do so. Accordingly, if the civilians refuse to evacuate, they retain their immunity from being made the object of attack and should still be accounted for in determining the proportionality of any collateral damage.

This is an important point. If the civilians refuse to leave, Israel would be hampered in its ability to attack Hamas - it must still try to avoid killing them as much as possible. But their choice to stay does no tmean Israel cannot attack at all, as Amnesty implies. It means they are choosing to put their lives, and the lives of their families, in danger, and even though Israel must do everything it can to avoid civilian casualties, that does not mean it must call off the military operation. Otherwise, using human shields would change from a war crime to be considered as a legitimate military method.

What about forced evacuations? Israel is not considering that now, and in most cases forcibly moving civilians during war is a war crime, but there is an exception:

Under certain circumstances, evacuation is not merely permitted but is in fact required. The duty to exercise precautions by those subject to attacks (or passive precautions) is set forth in treaty form in the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. In relevant part, Article 58 provides that “[p]arties to [a] conflict shall, to the maximum extent feasible . . . endeavour to remove the civilian population, individual civilians and civilian objects under their control from the vicinity of military objectives.” Although AP I is not universally ratified, this provision is widely recognized as reflecting customary international law applicable to both international and non-international armed conflicts...

This is not possible unless Israel has complete control over the entire territory to be evacuated. But it shows that contrary to what Amnesty is saying, armies with a valid military objective - and destroying Hamas is not just valid but necessary - are sometimes obligated to evacuate civilians.

An earlier article in the same site discussed those who objected to Israel's earlier warning to evacuate Gaza City, and the author - well-regarded expert Michael N. Schmitt - described the choices accurately, and his analysis applies today to Rafah:

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 [Rafah] 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. ...The simple fact is that civilians who [leave] 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.”

This is straightforward and obvious - except for those who are rooting for Hamas.

Like Amnesty.

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05/07 Links Pt2: Phillips: A Holocaust remembrance day like no other; Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out; Imagining a world without antisemitism

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A Holocaust remembrance day like no other

Israel and the Jewish diaspora are not only traumatised by this mass disdain for Jewish life and wholesale adoption of psychotic lies about Israel. They are also astonished by Britain’s suicidal refusal to join up the dots.

They can’t understand why Britain can’t see the direct connection between the Islamists’ aim to destroy and colonise Israel and their aim to destroy and colonise Britain (and America). They are shocked that the British authorities believe seven months of weekly hate-marches screaming “globalise the intifada” and for the destruction of Israel, and which have terrorised British Jews, constitute the legitimate expression of “free speech”. They are astounded that Britain has done nothing to prevent the emergence of a Muslim bloc that now threatens to upend British politics by religious sectarianism.

Israel and its supporters view such a bloc as innately and irredeemably anti-Jew and anti-west; they note the remarks made by some of these people and their supporters that they are now well on course to Islamise Britain; they are amazed at the near-omerta in Britain over this sectarian voting and bigotry against Israel and the Jews; they are appalled that political leaders are not only doing nothing to challenge this but are actively fanning the flames by regurgitating Hamas propaganda lies about Israel; and they observe that anyone expressing concern about any of this is dismissed as the “Islamophobic” fringe.

Isolated by the west; with rockets still flying from Gaza and Lebanon, with Israelis continuing to be attacked and with tens of thousands of them still displaced and unable to return safely to their border homes; with the dread knowledge that the toll of young conscripts falling in Gaza is bound to rise along with anti-Israel global hysteria as the IDF go into Rafah; with the threat of an American weapons embargo and lawfare in international tribunals aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state hanging over Israel’s head; with Iran sprinting towards building its genocide bomb; with our hearts permanently in our mouths but our spirit unbowed, those of us in Israel nevertheless feel it’s safer — and such a privilege — to be a Jew here rather than in Britain at this pivotal moment in Jewish destiny.

Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out

It’s the viral image that captured the clash between the anti-Israel protesters who stormed Columbia and the campus workers who tried to stop them. As the mob invaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, a facilities worker was photographed pushing a demonstrator against a wall.

Later, it emerged that the protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $2.3 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five years.

Now, in an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Mario Torres describes the experience of being on duty as protesters stormed the building in the early hours of the morning, breaking glass and barricading the entrances. “We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves,” he said.

“They came from both sides of the staircases. They came through the elevators and they were just rushing. It was just like, they had a plan.” Mario said protesters with zip ties, duct tape, and masks “just multiplied and multiplied.”

At one point, he remembers “looking up and I noticed the cameras are covered.” It made him think: “This was definitely planned.”

Torres was trying to “protect the building” when he ended up in an altercation with Carlson: “He had a Columbia hoodie on, and I managed to rip that hoodie off of him and expose his face.” (Carlson was later charged with five felonies, including burglary and reckless endangerment.) “I was freaking out. At that point, I’m thinking about my family. How was I gonna get out? Through the window?”

Torres has not been to campus since the incident. He says he does not feel safe. “When it comes to the public safety, the workers’ safety, people don’t feel comfortable walking through a mob to punch in to get into campus. That’s crazy,” he said.

He added that he’s worried Columbia might take disciplinary action against him for speaking out. He worries about losing a job he loves. He worries about supporting his young family.

“Is Columbia going to retaliate and find a reason to fire me? Is someone going to come after me? So I’m taking a big risk doing this, but I think that they failed. They failed us. And I think that’s the bigger story. They failed us. They should have done more to protect us, and they didn’t.”

Transit union honcho to sue Columbia alleging mistreatment of staffers in building takeover

A prominent transit union leader plans to sue Columbia University over alleged mistreatment of school staffers during a building seizure last week — the latest labor group to wade into the debate surrounding campus unrest.

John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union — which represents 155,000 workers across the airline, transit, railroad, universities, utilities and service sectors — castigated Columbia President Minouche Shafik for waiting too long to authorize the NYPD to clear out Hamilton Hall after demonstrators occupied it last Tuesday night.

“It’s on them to protect their workforce and they didn’t do it,” Samuelsen told POLITICO. He called dissidents’ behavior toward staffers working at the time of the takeover, including two custodians and a security officer, “an outrageous affront to working people.”

One of the union’s local branches represents 725 workers at Columbia, including custodians, security officers and electricians.

Officials should have known the building was a target given its history as the site of an occupation by students advocating for racial justice in the 1960s, he charged.

“We’re exploiting every legal means at our disposal against Columbia, against the individual occupiers of the building … [who] thought that they could hold our custodians hostage to their ideology,” he added.

Yisrael Medad: The anti-Jewish collegiate revolution

We are facing, I would suggest, a situation in which could be said that never have so many university students been not only on the wrong side of history but on the most immoral side as well. That is true at least since 1933 at Oxford, when 428 students against 275 voted in favor of the resolution, which Winston Churchill termed “that abject, squalid, shameless avowal” not to fight for king and country “under no circumstances.”

Any fair observation of the happenings across campuses this past month in the United States would not be wrong to characterize them as aggressive, threatening, menacing, occasionally out-right violent, foul-mouthed, damaging and very anti-Jewish.

Even a correspondent for The New York Times, Katherine Rosman, could not avoid writing on April 26 that the “issue at the core of the conflict rippling across campuses nationwide [is] the tension between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitism.” Three days later, she highlighted how it works when three Jewish students approached a tent village at Columbia University and the cry went up: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.”

At the University of California, Los Angeles, a campus journalist was prevented from walking about. A Jewish female student there was beaten and required medical attention and an older man was attacked and threatened. One Christian, supporting Israel at the University of Pennsylvania by holding the blue-and-white flag, was “ghettoized,” having a chalk circle drawn around him (at 0:54 on a CNN video). At Stanford, a protester dressed up as a Hamas suicide-bomber. This violence—actual and implied—and more probably led to the ugly scenes the night afterwards. But the atmosphere of violence was initiated by the pro-Palestine proponents.

This has led to a situation whereby students have termed as “conditionally Jewish” those Jews who are barely acceptable in polite society on campuses, as Tessa Veksler explained to Mandana Dayani. There’s a scale now for being Jewish, and it has nothing to do with Judaism as a religion or ethnicity. Rather, it has to do with the degree of revolutionary value—specifically on behalf of the ideology, Palestinianism—that seeks to eliminate both Jewish national identity and as many Jews as possible.

UN Women prefer Hamas "media office" for statistics to the Gaza health ministry

Here's a detail from a graphic from UN Women as of April 16:

The footnote says these statistics come fromthe Gza Media Office - meaning, Hamas.

And here's a detail from a graphic from the Gaza health ministry Telegram channel today:

Less than 5,000 women killed according to the MoH but over 10,000 weeks ago according to the Hamas media office.

For months, we have been told that 70% of the dead were women and children. But when they actually count them, it is only a little over 50% - and male adults of military age, who are less that 25% of Gaza's population, is the largest category of those killed.

Even if the total number of correct, and every single one of the missing 10,000 are women and children, it is impossible to reach 70% women and children fatalities.

Why is UN Women taking inflated statistics from Hamas instead of from the health ministry, which issues detailed reports every couple of days?

The key word is "inflated."

UN Women want to grab the highest number they can, and if Hamas is the one behind those numbers, they just call it the "Gaza Media Office" which sounds like a real organization and not some masked guy with a Telegram channel.

When they exaggerate by 100%, though, perhaps the UN is not the most honest broker.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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05/07 Links Pt1: Biden betrays Israel with Hamas ‘deal’ that wasn’t; The US's hypocrisy is infuriating; Why are pro-Palestine protesters heckling Holocaust survivors?

From Ian:

NYPost Editorial: Biden betrays Israel with Hamas ‘deal’ that wasn’t

Joe Biden betrayed Israel last night.

Hamas announced with great fanfare that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal. There were celebrations in Gaza, and the White House said it was “reviewing” the deal.

Except: The Israelis knew nothing about it.

The supposed agreement wasn’t even on the table. Hamas had changed the terms of a previous treaty to one more favorable to the terror group. To take just one horrific alteration: Rather than turn over hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Hamas would surrender dead bodies of the hostages it had killed.

That Hamas would try to pull this ruse, with the help of negotiators in Egypt and Qatar, is typical. It wants to pretend that Israel was the one “rejecting” a ceasefire it never knew about. Anti-Israel protesters in the US and a compliant media would eat it up, and they did.

But there’s a shameful twist. Axios reports that the US was aware of the Hamas deal but did not brief Israeli officials.

“Two Israeli officials said the feeling is that ‘Israel got played’ by the U.S. and the mediators who drafted ‘a new deal’ and weren’t transparent about it,” the outlet says.

Just as those same officials are willing to give Iran everything and more for the terrible nuclear deal, so Biden would bend over backwards for Hamas if only it will placate the Israel-haters on his left.

But this is beyond the pale. To push through an agreement without Israel’s input? To let Hamas, which attacked Israel, killed, raped and took hostages, dictate the terms? The US is siding with terrorists!

Seth Frantzman: 'The Godfather' in Gaza: What a mafia movie tells us about Hamas war

Again, it’s worth going back to that scene in The Godfather when the heads of the mafia families meet and Don Corleone finally realizes that it was “Barzini all along” who had been behind this war. The war that Hamas launched on October 7 was not just launched by Hamas in Gaza. This is evident from the fact that the Hamas leadership in Doha was not surprised by the attack. They didn’t run and make frantic phone calls to their hosts, saying, “We didn’t do this; we had no idea.” Their hosts didn’t call their allies in the West and say, “Hamas has betrayed us; we hosted them but they have carried out this terrible attack.” In fact, if you go back to October 7, there is no evidence that anyone linked to Hamas was surprised by this attack. Moscow didn’t make frantic calls. Tehran didn’t. Ankara didn’t.

Back on October 6, Israel was being sold a story that portrayed Hamas as “deterred.” Back on October 6, Israel was being sold a story that portrayed Hamas as “deterred.” After October 7, we are told that it is almost impossible to defeat Hamas because of how strong it is, and that defeating most of its 24 battalions is enough of a “win” in Gaza. The two narratives don’t make sense. If Hamas was deterred and incapable of doing much damage to Israel, then how is it also so powerful that it is almost impossible to defeat? And, if Hamas was actually known to be very powerful, with 24 battalions of fighters – 30,000 terrorists – then why was the border left almost undefended against a genocidal terrorist group?

Clearly, the answer to that question is that Israel trusted Hamas because Hamas was filtered through a kind of Don Barzini character. After Hamas lied about being deterred and carried out a huge massacre, it continued to rely on its hosts and backers abroad during the war on Israel. For instance, Israel was told in December to transition to a lower intensity war in Gaza. In February, Israel was told it should do a ceasefire for Ramadan. Then Israel was told to postpone a Rafah offensive. At each stage, Hamas got the breathing space it needed and was able to Shanghai the hostage talks. We now understand that Israel was likely deceived throughout the entire process using a strategy of bait and switch. The macabre talks have been prolonged by Hamas, which continues to refuse to hand over a list of living hostages. Hamas has said that it wants to release one hostage for each day of a ceasefire so that it can parade them to get applause in the region.

It now wants up to a weeklong ceasefire for each hostage. Hamas’s goal and the goal of its backers is to use the hostage deal as an end to the war in order to take over the West Bank in the long run.

It’s now fair to say that it was Barzini all along. The powers that stand behind Hamas and have been influencing this war from the start, in order to keep Hamas in power in Gaza and bring it to power in the West Bank, are Barzini.

24 States Urge Congress To Permanently End Funding for ‘Anti-Semitic’ UNRWA

A coalition of 24 state attorneys general are calling on Congress to permanently end all American funding to the United Nations’ chief Palestinian aid group, citing its anti-Semitic bias and links to the Hamas terror group.

Led by Iowa attorney general Brenna Bird and South Carolina’s Alan Wilson, the state officials want Congress to enact a permanent ban on American funding to the United Nations' Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), saying that lawmakers must step forward to "stop funding anti-Semitic education efforts run by the United Nations body tied to terror organization Hamas," according to a copy of the letter sent Tuesday to congressional leaders and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

"Not one more dollar should go to fund this organization so long as it is committed to spreading anti-Semitism—much less an organization 10% of which had links to foreign terror organization Hamas," the attorneys general write, citing information indicating that UNRWA employees participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror rampage through Israel. The letter follows similar calls from outside advocacy groups, as well as efforts by Republican lawmakers to permanently freeze UNRWA’s funding as a result of its ties to Hamas.

The letter signals a growing appetite on the state level to hold UNRWA accountable for its history of promoting anti-Semitic educational materials and allowing Hamas to overrun its facilities in the Gaza Strip. Earlier this week, Israel struck a Hamas command center located in an UNRWA facility, one of several that have been discovered over the course of the seven-month war. At the state level, some officials and advocacy groups have floated the possibility of stripping the tax-exempt status enjoyed by UNRWA USA, the aid group’s American fundraising arm.

"The U.S. should not be funding terrorism. Period," South Carolina’s Wilson told the Free Beacon. "We’ve known UNRWA is used by terrorists and has helped facilitate terror attacks for decades. The UN’s own investigation confirms what we’ve been raising the alarm about for months. It’s time to permanently cut funding for UNRWA, and we need to do it before they receive another dime."

UNRWA, the state officials say in their letter, has mainlined anti-Semitic propaganda to a generation of Palestinian children that have become radicalized supporters of Hamas’s campaign to eradicate Israel. American funding—which totals millions and accounts for a sizable portion of UNRWA’s budget—is responsible for spreading anti-Semitic hatred, the attorneys general say.

Antisemitism in European universities in 1930, before Hitler was in power

A Jewish newspaper, Modern View, reviewed antisemitic incidents around Europe in 1929 and 1930; a significant number occurred in schools and universities.

A lot of the things mentioned here sound disturbingly familiar from recent news stories.

Germany:

Austria:

Hungary:

Romania:

Poland:

Soviet Union:

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31. The "Draw Your Own Conclusion" Fallacy: "35,000 Gazans are dead. Whose fault is that?"

32. The Dunning-Kruger Effect: "I read Mondoweiss, so therefore I know everything I need to know about Israel."

33. Noble Effort fallacy: "For decades, the US and EU invested countless hours into trying to achieve a two state solution and building up a Palestinian government. It is the only path to peace."

34. Either/Or fallacy: "If you do not boycott Israel you are a genocide supporter." "Either Israel gives citizenship to millions of Palestinians or it is an apartheid state."

35. Equivocation: "I am against Israeli occupation," but without saying that they consider all of Israel to be occupied territory.

36. Esoteric Knowledge: "How can you claim Khamenei's anti-nuclear weapons fatwa is not a binding legal ruling? You aren't a Muslim!"

37. Etymological Fallacy: "How can I be an antisemite? I'm an Arab Semite myself!"

38. Middle of the Road fallacy: "My articles/decisions as president of the university get complaints from both Zionists and anti-Zionists so they must be fair and correct."

39. The Excluded Middle fallacy: "I read that Israel tortures terrorists in prison, therefore they should all be released."

40. The False Analogy: "Israel censors some news articles, just like Nazi Germany did!"

41. The Free Speech Fallacy: "I'm allowed to threaten the lives of artists who perform in Israel; it's free speech."

42. The Free Speech Fallacy counterpoint: "Zionists are not welcome to speak on campus/to enter our encampment because they make Palestinians/me feel uncomfortable."

43. The Fundamental Attribution Error: "We cannot believe anything the IDF spokesperson says because Zionists/Jews are liars."

44. Gaslighting: "Jews on campus aren't being attacked. They always exaggerate the slightest events." "All the protests are non-violent."

45. Guilt by Association: The entire David Miller body of "research," energetically defended by many academics.

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

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Read all about it here!

The "starvation" slander

The British Medical Journal published today an article accusing Israel of implementing an intentional policy of starving Gaza.

Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza

In December 2023, we led Medical Aid for Palestinians’ (https://www.map.org.uk/) and the International Rescue Committee’s first emergency medical team in Gaza. On that trip, three months into Israel’s bombardment and siege, we saw the disturbing and shocking conditions that Palestinians were forced to live in.

We have seen the warning signs of the current hunger crisis for months. ..In February, the World Health Organization warned that the decline in the nutrition status of the population in Gaza was unprecedented—people were being starved at the fastest rate the world had ever seen. But still, the international community did nothing to avert this entirely foreseeable catastrophe.

Since then, the situation has become worse. In late March the International Court of Justice observed that, “Palestinians in Gaza are no longer facing a risk of famine, but that famine is setting in.” At Medical Aid for Palestinians, we have seen this happening and have repeatedly warned of the devastating harm that malnutrition and hunger has on civilians, especially among newborns and children under 5, in whom it can lead to development delays and long term adverse health outcomes.

Approximately 1.1 million people, around half the total population, are currently facing catastrophic food insecurity in Gaza.5 One in three children under 2 years of age in the north are now acutely malnourished, affecting their immune systems and making them more likely to die from infectious diseases. Parents are witnessing their children die of starvation or are forced to live off animal feed to try and survive. None of this is inevitable, mass starvation is entirely preventable. This is not happening because of a natural drought or crop failure, but the deliberate withholding of food and aid by the Israeli government.

This article says that things are getting worse in Gaza, and Israel is deliberately withholding food from the sector.

It is an outrageous slander.

Israel has coordinated over 20,000 trucks of food, water and medical supplies into Gaza, with hundreds more each day. That is a lot of people, a lot of effort, and a lot of coordination with international aid organizations. There is no way anyone can say that Israel is doing all of this while at the same time pursuing a policy of deliberate starvation.

According to the Gaza health ministry, 28 people - all children - have died of starvation since the beginning of the war. If true, this is indeed a tragedy, and even one death is unacceptable.

Now compare Gaza deaths to the United States.

In 2022, 20,500 Americans died of malnutrition. That is a rate of 6 per 100,000 population, roughly triple the death rate in Gaza if you assume the same rate of starvation deaths throughout 12 months.

But, one might argue, the 28 deaths are only the beginning of an expected wave where the numbers will dramatically increase as food supplies dwindle and Israel keeps the supplies artificially low, as we are told by countless NGOs. The number of Gaza deaths will be expected to accelerate.

This is what the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee said in mid-March:

The findings of the FRC review confirm that Famine is now projected and imminent in the North Gaza and Gaza Governorates and is expected to become manifest from mid-March 2024 to May 2024. The Famine threshold for acute food insecurity has already been far exceeded and the steeply increasing trend in malnutrition data indicates that it is highly likely that the Famine threshold for acute malnutrition has also been exceeded. The FRC expects the upward trend in non-trauma mortality to accelerate and for all Famine thresholds to be passed imminently.

For the combined southern and middle governates, the FRC concludes that there is a risk of Famine between mid-March and mid-July in a reasonable worst-case scenario.

It is vital to note that the projected Famine can be prevented or alleviated. All evidence points towards a major acceleration of death and malnutrition.

If this analysis is true, then we would be seeing the number of daily and weekly malnutrition deaths in Gaza increasing over time.

Yet, according to the same Gaza health ministry, there have been zero deaths from malnutrition or dehydration in Gaza in the entire month of April and so far in May. The total was 28 in late March and it remains 28 today.

Zero deaths.

(In fact, the number of starvation deaths seem to have decreased since mid-March. UN OCHA quoted the health ministry saying that 31 had died as of March 15. Newer OCHA reports don't quote any number anymore. The May 5 MoH report says 28. So the official number of starvation deaths since March 15 is -3.)

According to the World Food Programme, about 25,000 people die of starvation every day worldwide. That means some 750,000 people have died of starvation in the month of April alone, during the time period that NGO after NGO have written paper after paper on how Gaza is starving and yet no one died.

The New York Times wrote an article this week about whether Israel could be liable for intentional starvation of Gazans. The other 750,000 who really did die of starvation? Not worth reporting on.

I'm not saying that there are no food shortages in some areas of Gaza, or that many Gazans are food insecure. But the confident predictions of deaths by starvation have not materialized, which means either the researchers or incompetent or that no one is reporting that Israel's efforts to bring food into Gaza are quite successful.

The evidence is overwhelmingly against any intentional starvation by Israel. And the evidence is equally overwhelming that NGOs and the media are intentionally lying about the topic to demonize the Jewish state.

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The Jerusalem Post reported over the weekend:

Is Marwan Barghouti expected to be released soon from prison as part of the apparent hostage deal between Israel and Hamas? A Saturday report from Maariv citing the Saudi Asharq channel reported that Israel no longer opposes the release of Barghouti but insists on releasing him to Gaza and not to the West Bank.

It was also reported that Hamas is expected to demand his name on the list of the first phase of the deal.

Barghouti, former leader of the Tanzim, a militant faction of the Palestinian Fatah movement, was sentenced in 2004 by an Israeli court to five cumulative life sentences and 40 years in prison for terrorist acts in which five Israelis were murdered and many injured.

Releasing Barghouti would definitely shake things up. he is by far the most popular political figure for Palestinians - if there would ever be an election, he would win.

Which is why the reports that Abbas is against his release are probably true.

Senior Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have requested from mediators that Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti be excluded from a potential prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hamas, a source has told Middle East Eye.
A source familiar with the negotiations told MEE on Sunday that the request was made by Majid Faraj, the director of Palestinian general intelligence, and Hussein al-Sheikh, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's (PLO) executive committee.
The source added that senior PA leaders believed Barghouti's release would threaten the leadership of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
According to the source, the United States, one of three mediators involved in the indirect Gaza ceasefire negotiations, had reportedly agreed to remove Barghouti's name from any potential lists Hamas is expected to present.

If he is released, and Israel enforces his being only allowed to live in Gaza, it might backfire. Barghouti has had a Jekyll and Hyde personality; claiming to support peace and a two state solution while at the same time organizing terror attacks and saying he supports such attacks. From Gaza he would have plenty of influence, and that would weaken the PA just as much of not more than his being in Gaza. He might change the center of gravity of Palestinian leadership from the West Bank to Gaza, which would benefit Hamas.

If Hamss is destroyed, then it will be a Wild West situation.

Abbas is quite old although he is still appears fairly vigorous, but he cannot last that much longer. A Barghouti release would push up the open succession battle to now.

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

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05/06 Links Pt2: A somber Israel marks Yom Hashoah; The war against the Jewish story; A History Lesson for the Hillel-Haters

From Ian:

The war against the Jewish story

On the occasion of Yom HaShoah, which began yesterday evening, Yossi Klein Halevi isn’t calling for more or better Holocaust education, but for something else:

The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West. This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By overemphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated anti-Semitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust—the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible—was often lost.

Holocaust education was intended, in large part, to protect the Jewish people. . . . Yet the movement to turn Israel into the world’s criminal nation emerges from a generation that was raised with Holocaust consciousness, both in formal education and the arts. And this latest expression of the anti-Semitism of symbols is justified by some anti-Zionists as honoring “the lessons of the Holocaust.”

Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West intuitively understand that coopting and inverting the Holocaust is a far more effective way of neutralizing its impact.

Johnathan Tobin: Yom Hashoah after Oct. 7: How Holocaust education failed

We keep being told that many of those who demonstrate in favor of an end to the current war that would leave Hamas alive and well—and able to make good on its promises to repeat the horrors of Oct. 7 again and again—are well-meaning and simply sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians. But the objective of the movement these supposedly well-meaning people support is to strip the Jews of Israel—and Jews everywhere, for that matter—of the ability to defend themselves against Islamists for whom Oct. 7 is just a trailer for what they wish to do to every Jew on this planet.

Simply put, if you are demonstrating for Hamas’s survival, you are on the side of a group that wishes to repeat the Holocaust. No matter how well-intentioned you may claim to be, that makes you no different from those who viewed the Nazis, who had their own narrative of grievance, with equanimity.

The German people suffered terribly as a result of the war that they launched, yet today, those who claim to speak for humanitarian values believe that there can be no consequences for those who commit or condone (as is true for the overwhelming majority of Palestinians) the mass murder of Jews and that Jews who defend themselves against genocide are the Nazis. Would those who demonstrate against Jewish self-defense apply the same lessons to the Allies who, in order to liberate the Nazi death camps had to kill many people, including civilians?

By the same token, those who wish for universities and other institutions to engage in discriminatory commercial conduct that would divest from anything to do with Israel are not criticizing Israel’s policies or leaders, but supporting a contemporary version of Nazi boycotts of Jews.

It is also just as clear that the leftist/Islamist attack on Israel is also aimed at the West and the United States. This debate over the war against Hamas is not one about whether Israel or its government and military are perfect but about a struggle for the future of the West, much as was true of the war against the German Nazis. The Jews are, as they were during the Holocaust, the canaries in the coal mine, warning humanity of the dangers of tolerating genocidal hate.

As we remember the Shoah, rather than stick to our usual routine of memorialization, it’s time for decent people of all backgrounds and faiths to understand that the war on the Jews didn’t end with the defeat of the Nazis. It continues to this day under new slogans, flags and worse, with many of those who claim to stand for enlightened thought allowing the enablers of Jew-hatred to pose as advocates for human rights and the oppressed. Those lies must not be allowed to stand.

There should be no Holocaust Memorial Day observance without it being made clear that there can be no proper honor given to the Six Million slain by the Nazis without linking that struggle to those against the antisemites of our time. We must not tolerate those who shed crocodile tears for Jews murdered in the past while tolerating or even supporting policies that enable antisemitism in the present, envisioning Israel’s destruction and the continued slaughter of Jews. If we cannot understand that, then invocations to remember what happened or ensure that it is “never again” allowed in this world are nothing more than pointless and counterproductive virtue-signaling.

An Israeli survivor of the Holocaust and Oct. 7 says after the recent atrocities, we ‘held our heads high’

As for the connection people are drawing between the Oct. 7 attack and the Holocaust, Ben Yosef said that “over the decades, fate brings us all kinds of ups and downs, and that was one of the most difficult low points, but to compare the days of the Holocaust and Oct. 7 — it’s not the same.”

“In the time of the Holocaust, we were spread all over the world and when we were massacred, we couldn’t do anything. Today we are in our own country with our own army. The losses were tremendous, the shock was great — but we held our heads high,” she said.

Ben Yosef took part in a project initiated by the Israel office of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, called “Sharing Memories,” in which influencers upload videos of Holocaust survivors telling their stories. This year Meta Israel is highlighting survivors who were in Israel’s south on Oct. 7. The participants are mostly Israelis, so the videos are mostly in Hebrew, but actor Michael Rapaport produced content in English; they have an aggregate following of over 7.2 million people on Instagram. The project will raise funds for Israeli NGO Latet to provide essential needs to impoverished survivors, and the clips were available to watch on the VOD service of one of Israel’s biggest cable companies, Yes TV, starting on Sunday night.

Hamas murdered several Holocaust survivors on Oct. 7, including some of the 15 elderly people found dead in the street in Sderot, where they were waiting to board a bus to the Dead Sea. One of them was Moshe Ridler, 91, the oldest resident of Kibbutz Holit, who escaped a concentration camp when he was 11 years old.

The eldest of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, Shlomo Mantzur, 86, is a survivor of the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom against Jews in Baghdad, inspired partly by Nazi influence in Iraq. Farhud survivors are recognized as Holocaust survivors under Israeli law.

In the Farhud, Shlomo’s sister, Hadassa Lazar, told a Knesset committee earlier this year, the Iraqis “murdered, raped, tortured babies, kidnapped, decapitated… It was the Kristallnacht of Iraqi Jewry and the world was silent. Shlomo saw things that stayed with him his whole life. We used to think ‘never again’ – it did not occur to us that such things could happen again when we have a sovereign state.”

Some of the other hostages have close relatives who are Holocaust survivors, including Michael Kuperstein, 82, the grandfather of Bar Kuperstein, 22, who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival, and Tsili Wenkert, 82, whose grandson, Omer Wenkert, was taken from the festival and appeared in a hostage video released in January. Bella Chaim is the grandmother of Yotam Chaim, who was kidnapped to Gaza and accidentally killed by IDF soldiers. Ruth Haran, 89, had seven relatives kidnapped and three murdered; her grandson-in-law Tal is still being held hostage in Gaza and her daughter Sharon, daughter-in-law Shoshan, grandchildren Noam and Adi, and great-grandchildren Neve and Yahel were kidnapped by Hamas and released in November.

Haran, who was born in Romania and spent years fleeing the Nazis, survived the Oct. 7 attack on Kibbutz Be’eri and said that “people who survived the massacre talked about death, murder, women raped and the destruction of our community. The whole trauma of being a Holocaust survivor came back to me…As a Holocaust survivor, I know how to deal with pain, but this time I don’t know how to cope.”

NATO described Hamas' human shield strategy in 2014

NATO's Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence wrote a clear-headed description of Hamas' strategy of using human shields in a white paper in 2014.

Here's the executive summary:

Hamas, an Islamist militant group and the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip, has been using human shields in conflicts with Israel since 2007. According to the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the war crime of using human shields encompasses “utilizing the presence of a civilian or other protected person to render certain points, areas, or military forces immune from military operations.” Hamas has launched rockets, positioned military-related infrastructure-hubs and routes, and engaged the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from, or in proximity to, residential and commercial areas.

The strategic logic of human shields has two components. It is based on an awareness of Israel’s desire to minimise collateral damage, and of Western public opinion’s sensitivity towards civilian casualties. If the IDF uses lethal force and causes an increase in civilian casualties, Hamas can utilise that as a lawfare tool: it can accuse Israel of committing war crimes, which could result in the imposition of a wide array of sanctions. Alternatively, if the IDF limits its use of military force in Gaza to avoid collateral damage, Hamas will be less susceptible to Israeli attacks, and thereby able to protect its assets while continuing to fight. Moreover, despite the Israeli public’s high level of support for the Israeli political and military leadership during operations, civilian casualties are one of the friction points between Israeli left-wing and right-wing supporters, with the former questioning the outcomes of the operation.

This is as good a summary of the current war as could have been written ten years ago. The only major thing missing is how Hamas built its extensive tunnel infrastructure since then, but the tunnels are based on the exact same logic: nearly all of them were built under heavily populated areas, making every single civilian in Gaza a human shield.

There is no ambivalence by the military experts at NATO that this is Hamas strategy. They don't try to find excuses like "Gaza is so small, what choice do they have?"

The paper doesn't have great solutions, and what they do suggest Israel has tried, but latent antisemitism means that too many people suspect that Israel doesn't tell the truth.

 The use of human shields can be considered an example of ‘lawfare’ – i.e. the use of the legal system against an enemy by damaging or delegitimising them, tying up their time or winning a public relations victory.
 Even if a targeted strike may be justifable from a legal perspective, first impressions frame the narrative. Public opinion tends to be influenced more by images depicting the suffering of innocent civilians than by well-thought-out legal arguments.
 National governments should be able to publicly justify their position, and reveal their adversary’s use of civilians in combat. This can only be accomplished by thoroughly documenting incidents, preparing supportive messages, and working across multiple channels to convey those narratives.
 Priority should be given to information activities aimed at the very civilians who are used as human shields, in order to undermine the adversary and convince civilians to actively or passively refuse to serve as human shields. Such activities need to be coherent, consistent and coordinated.

(h/t Scott)

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!

A continuation of a series about the many, many logical fallacies that we hear in anti-Israel arguments. When academics or supposedly wise pundits engage in these fallacies, it shows that they do not have any real arguments. Part 1 here.

16. Big Lie technique. "Israel is an apartheid state." "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza." "Most Palestinians are against terrorism." "Most Palestinians support a two state solution." "Hamas has shown flexibility in its demands." "Israel is the obstacle to peace." "There were no rapes on October 7." "Israel bombed the Al Ahli hospital." "Fatah is moderate." etc. etc.

17. Blind Loyalty fallacy: "I don't know enough about history or current events, but everyone else on campus/my favorite professor says Israel is evil."

18. Blood is Thicker than Water fallacy: "As a Muslim (or Arab,) I support Palestinians no matter what they do."

19. Brainwashing: "There is only one solution, Intifada Revolution" chants repeated over and over. Or this:

20. Calling "Cards": "Zionists on campus are playing the antisemitism card."

21. Circular reasoning: "We know Israel is so evil, it has been trying to wipe out Palestinians for 80 years. Israel is performing genocide, which proves Israel is evil."

22. Complex Question or Loaded Question: "Why do you support Israel's genocide of Palestinians?"

23. Confirmation Bias: "I read about a study that says all Ashkenazi Jews come from Europe; that proves they cannot be real Jews." "All the evidence Amnesty/HRW gathered proves Israel is an apartheid state" without mentioning all the counter-evidence they ignored.

24. Default Bias: "Israel cannot stop Palestinian terror/'resistance' so it must learn to accept it."

25: Nihilism: "Everything is Israel's fault. Dismantle it."

26. Defensiveness: " I supported Hamas' pragmatism and how they appeared to care about Gazans. After October 7, I still support Hamas' decision to start a war that destroyed Gazan's lives."

27. Deliberate Ignorance: "Why am I protesting Israel? Don't ask me, ask one of the leaders."

28. Diminished Responsibility: "After decades of occupation, what else can you expect from Palestinians?"

29. Disciplinary Blinders: "Modern Middle East studies discount the idea that there was ever a powerful Jewish kingdom in the region, so we can ignore recent archaeological evidence to the contrary."

30. Dog-Whistle Politics: "She's a Zionist. Enough said."

Lots more coming.

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!

05/06 Links Pt1: Genocide Enablers; Why the Left failed on October 7; Hamas says it has accepted Egyptian cease-fire proposal; Alternatives to Replace UNRWA Immediately

From Ian:

Genocide Enablers

The man who ignored the information which arguably could have saved nearly a million lives was Kofi Annan, then U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping operations. Annan told PBS in 2004 that he ordered Dallaire to share his intelligence with the genocide’s architects because “sometimes it is a very good deterrent” to inform rogue states that “we know what you are up to”—as if such a tactic has ever worked before or since. Not surprisingly, during Belgian government investigations into the Hutus’ murder of Belgian peacekeeping soldiers, Annan blocked Dallaire from testifying, and declined to testify himself.

Annan made another telling remark in the PBS interview. Pointing the finger at Security Council members, the former secretary general noted that, although these states had even better intelligence than his office, he knew the “mood in the council”: The members, Annan said, were not going to say, “We are going to send in the brigade” or “send reinforcements to General Dallaire.” While clearly self-serving, Annan’s remark is a reminder of the complicity of the so-called “international community,” including the U.S., which, at the time, did not wish to even utter the word “genocide.” “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing,” Susan Rice, then director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council, said, “what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”

The author who later excoriated Rice for this comment was none other than Samantha Power, who, two decades later, would nevertheless join Rice in government as ambassador to the U.N., when the Obama administration was abetting the mass slaughter in Syria. In her current role as USAID administrator, Power, in order to advance the Biden administration’s obscene policy of “surging” aid to Gaza, has falsely claimed that Israel is causing a “famine.”

Annan’s boss during the genocide, then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was the one responsible for covertly selling the Rwandan government much of their weapons stockpile in the first place. That $26 million worth of weapons, approved by Boutros-Ghali while still Egyptian foreign minister in 1990, made up a large part of the supplies the U.N. blocked Dallaire from seizing. Boutros-Ghali later dismissed Dallaire’s original fax as merely one among many “alarming reports from the field,” thus not worth serious consideration at the time. Once the genocide was in full flood, however, all Boutros-Ghali and Annan allowed Dallaire to do was attempt to negotiate an impossible cease-fire between the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front and the very government slaughtering their kin. Though he admitted to PBS in 2004 that “I failed in Rwanda,” he never truly took personal responsibility. When he traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and reluctantly visited the site of the barbaric Nyarubuye church massacre, he toured the untouched mounds of putrefied innocents for 18 minutes, told the living to be of good courage, and then left.

Current U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, did something arguably worse 28 years later. Barely two weeks after Oct. 7, he appeared to give subtle justification to Hamas’ own Nyarubuye massacre of Jews, saying that it “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Still, perhaps the most stunning correlation between the U.N.’s abetment of genocide in Rwanda and in Israel 30 years later is its insistence upon “humanitarian” support for mass murderers and their civilian accomplices. A less-remembered side effect of the Rwandan civil war was the exodus of around a million Hutus into Tanzania and Zaire, whom the U.N. and international community aided lavishly. Many of these refugees were known at the time to have either supported the genocide’s aims or personally been part of the Interahamwe death squads, but they were given food, medicine, and shelter anyway. The thousands of killers among them became community leaders within the refugee camps and then, when the genocide was over, returned to their villages to live in sight of those few who had survived their butchery.

Today, the U.N. demands that Israel supply food, medicine, and shelter to people who passionately support Hamas and their genocidal exploits. Under severe U.S. pressure—including threats of stopping arms supplies, sanctions, and support for ICC prosecution of Israeli officials and IDF soldiers—Israel has been forced to oblige, even though they know that Hamas will steal the aid for itself, as it habitually does. The Biden administration has even begun constructing a $320 million pier to supply the terror group’s enclave, and is demanding Israel protect the aid convoys replenishing its enemy.

Nevertheless, there is one difference between the U.N.’s perfidy in Rwanda and hostility toward Israel. In Rwanda, the U.N.—even while often refusing to use the word—did understand that Hutus were, in fact, committing genocide against Tutsis. Today, however, the same U.N. actually accuses the victims of an act of genocide of being the murderers, while blessing the act’s perpetrators as the true victims.

It is only fitting, then, that one U.N. official reportedly described pointless cease-fire talks between the RPF and Hutu killers as “rather like wanting Hitler to reach a cease-fire with the Jews.” No observation could better encapsulate three decades of moral depravity dressed up as idealistic decency.

The women cheering on Hamas rapists are an insult to feminism

For all the loathing she received on social media, Karen was harmless. Her successor is not. This woman throngs university campuses, leading protests, wrapped up in keffiyehs and a face covering, passionately crying out for what she calls freedom fighters and their “just war” against Zionist apartheid, genocide and occupation, and the general existence of the Jewish state.

What she is doing – perfectly explicitly in many cases – is teeny-bopping for Hamas, as girls used to yell and scream for the Beatles. It’s truly chilling. In the sick world of too many pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine women protesting, the acts of sexual violence carried out by Hamas on October 7 are Zionist fabrications, designed to further deepen the Israeli stranglehold on Palestinian self-determination and freedom. Others know perfectly well that the rape, torture and abductions happened, but seem to think it’s all wonderfully noble “resistance”.

A sick irony lives in the fact that these protest babes, ardent, self-righteous, self-avowed progressives, are cheering on terrorists who, when not raping women, insist on a brutal patriarchal society.

Do these women really want an Isis-style caliphate? Do they want rape and the threat of murder as an instrument of control as the framework for society in which all must live? Or do they only want these things for the “Zionists”?

Perhaps they don’t really know what they’re wishing for, but they should be careful nonetheless. They might just get it.

Why the Left failed on October 7

A sentence I never imagined I’d write: I now think Jeremy Corbyn did Jews in Britain a favour. His time as Labour leader, between 2015 and 2020, was an extremely weird one for British Jews, but eye-opening all the same: I now think it prepared many of us for the Left’s reaction to October 7, whereas American Jews seemed far more surprised. The gaslighting (the attack didn’t happen), the defences (if it did, Jews deserved it), the hectoring moral superiority (how can you care about that when this is so much more important?): all that we saw after October 7, we had seen under Corbyn.

Now is not the place to rehash the many examples of Corbyn’s jaw-dropping attitudes towards Jews, never mind Israel, ideas some of us naively thought had died out with Stalin. Those are specific to Corbyn, whose political relevance is now, thankfully, in the past. But two general truths emerged from that era that would prove extremely relevant after October 7.

The first was how little people across the Left cared when Jews pointed out the obvious antisemitism they saw in the Labour Party. In 2018, 86% of British Jews said they believed Corbyn was antisemitic; and still the Left supported him, and still The Guardian backed him in the 2019 general election. Would they — good Lefties one and all — have done this if the vast majority of another minority said they believed Corbyn was bigoted against them? Would the Left have supported an Islamophobic leader in 2018? A homophobic one? A racist one? It’s hard to imagine. “What are Jews so scared of? It’s not like Corbyn’s going to bring back pogroms,” a prominent figure on the Left asked me. I briefly amused myself by imagining a response: “Why are black people so against the Tories? It’s not like they’ll bring back lynching.” But I stayed schtum. The Left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on, and that was — it turned out — a good lesson to learn.

There was another lesson, too. When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.

Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.

To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt.

Middle East Eye, a UK-based web newspaper reportedly funded by Qatar, reports that Egypt has been creating an alliance to help stop any influx of Palestinians who want to escape Gaza in case of an Israeli invasion of Rafah:

Egypt’s military intelligence has held meetings with Sinai tribes in recent weeks to discuss their potential role in the event of an Israeli invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, Middle East Eye can reveal.

At the meetings, Egyptian intelligence officers said they estimated a Palestinian influx of between 50,000 and 250,000 people towards Sinai if Israel carries out a ground operation in the Palestinian Rafah.

The meetings were held prior to the controversial creation of an alliance of tribal groups at the Egyptian side of Rafah, led by the influential pro-government businessman and militia leader Ibrahim al-Organi.

According to three Sinai tribal sources and one Egyptian security source, in the weeks leading up to the event, a number of meetings were held in North Sinai between senior members of Bedouin tribes, officers from the Secret Service apparatus in the military intelligence (known internally as Group 55), and others from the Second Field Army.

The main topic of these meetings was the possibility of the influx of a large number of residents of the Gaza Strip due to a potential Israeli military operation in the Palestinian city of Rafah, which now hosts about 1.5 million displaced Palestinians.

All sources spoke on condition of anonymity fearing reprisals from the Egyptian army.

According to three people who attended these meetings, the army and intelligence officers emphasised the necessity of assisting the armed forces and security agencies in “monitoring any infiltration of Palestinians” towards the villages and centres of North Sinai should this displacement occur, and warned against harbouring any of them and immediately reporting any movement of unfamiliar individuals in the areas close to the border.

According to the three Sinai sources, during meetings between Group 55 and Sinai tribal leaders, a number of attendees said it would be difficult to comply with official demands to prevent the entry of Palestinians into Sinai and report any movements across the borders, even with promises that the government would accommodate all displaced individuals. They highlighted their familial ties and relationships with people in the Gaza Strip, particularly Rafah, stating that it would be against their honour and Bedouin and tribal traditions to refuse hospitality and reception to them.

Egypt tries hard to say that they want Gazans to stay put fo rthe good of all Palestinians, but n Arabs seem to buy it. At the same time, no one wants to say otherwise out loud at the risk of being accused of being a Zionist.

One story later in the article sheds some new light on what some Gazans thought of "occupation:"

During one of his meetings with the tribes, General Shousha shared an anecdote with the participants, asking them not to publish it, dating back to 2005 when the Egyptian border was breached by large numbers of people from Gaza following the Israeli withdrawal from the Strip. At that time, he was the commander of the border guard forces.

Hold on: Israel withdrew from Gaza and a large number of Palestinians fled to Egypt? Even before Hamas took over the sector?

Why?

Apparently, they felt that Israeli "occupation" was far preferable to any Palestinian self-rule.

This is the sort of story that gets suppressed by the media because it doesn't follow the narrative. As a result, politicians make decisions based on incomplete information.

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!