Friday, May 31, 2024
From Ian:
Caroline Glick: Does Biden reject Israel’s right to self-defense?
Caroline Glick: Does Biden reject Israel’s right to self-defense?
The most basic function of all governments is to provide for the collective defense of the governed. The most basic foundation of sovereignty is a state’s right to defend its country from aggression. Take away a state’s right to self-defense, and you’ve effectively transformed it into a non-sovereign state.Douglas Murray: International Criminal Court runs wild, threatening Israel and anyone who criticizes it
Six Biden administration actions and policies subvert Israel’s right to self-defense. Whether analysed separately or all together, they make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the administration’s ultimate end is to undermine to the point of ending Israel’s right to self-defense, and so end Israel’s sovereignty, for all intents and purposes.
The six policies the administration is undertaking relate to the battle in Rafah, Gaza’s border town with Egypt; its posture vis-à-vis the International Criminal Court amidst the ICC’s stated intention of issuing arrest warrants against Israel’s leaders on false war crimes charges; the administration’s effort to coerce Israel into accepting Palestinian Authority control over post-war Gaza as a stepping stone towards the swift establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, and parts of Jerusalem; the administration’s policies in relation to Saudi-Israeli normalization; and finally, the administration’s determination to block Israel from taking any effective action to prevent Iran from building a nuclear arsenal.
Rafah
Sunday, the IDF carried out an airstrike targeting two senior Hamas terrorists in Rafah. Some 45 people Hamas asserts were civilians were also killed in the bombing. Immediately after the incident, the administration harshly criticized Israel for the operation. Vice President Kamala Harris said “the word tragic doesn’t even begin to describe” the loss of human life in the incident. Other senior officials voiced similar revulsion at Israel’s alleged killing of innocent civilians as a result of its killing of two senior terrorists. The U.S. State Department announced it would investigate the incident, which it referred to as “heartbreaking.”
Within moments of the airstrike, IDF forces on the ground were reporting that the fire that caused the deaths of the additional Palestinians was sparked by a secondary explosion. Early assessments were that the explosion was caused by Hamas rockets hidden adjacent to the encampment.
It was also clear, immediately after the bombing, that the operation was not carried out in a humanitarian safe zone, as Hamas alleged. At Israel’s urging, in recent weeks nearly a million residents of Rafah fled to the zones, which the IDF set up to protect them from the crossfire of battle. The bombing was carried out in the war zone, where civilians had already left.
It was also known immediately after the incident that the Air Force used the smallest ordnance permitted to limit to the greatest degree the possibility of the attack causing additional deaths beyond the two terror commanders Israel targeted.
In the two days after the incident, the IDF released intercepted phone conversations between people on the ground who stated outright that the fire in the tents that caused the additional deaths was the result of a secondary explosion of Hamas munitions. Israel played no role in the carnage. Hamas was entirely responsible for everything that had happened.
Given the fact that Israel’s careful prosecution of the war has led to the smallest ratio of civilians to militants killed in the history of modern war, its ally, the United States, could have been expected to give it the benefit of the doubt and not rush to pile on international condemnations of the Jewish state based entirely on Hamas footage and propaganda.
But the fact is that for months, Washington did everything possible to block Israel from carrying out its vital operation in Rafah, knowing all along that Israel cannot defeat Hamas if it leaves the international border under Hamas’s control. The administration’s latest effort to delegitimize Israel’s operation in Rafah by embracing Hamas’s quickly discredited rendition of events follows the administration’s now-established pattern of undermining the operation.
The ICC is not just threatening US senators. It is saying they are already criminals in the eyes of the ICC prosecutor. Making the ICC effectively impossible to criticize.A Progressive Pogrom – Of Shani Louk, Jean Améry, and the anti-Zionist left
An almost divine institution.
Criticize the ICC and you become a war criminal-in-waiting too, apparently.
Well, the puffed-up prosecutor might note several things.
Not least that the USA is not a signatory to the Rome Statute.
And so, threatening US senators with a statute that the US does not recognize is as scary as threatening someone with your imaginary black belt in karate.
But all this should be a reminder of a serious truth.
In recent decades, there have been repeated pushes to make America join the court.
There has been much international criticism of this country for not coming under the court’s jurisdiction.
But America was completely right not to do so.
And the response of the prosecutor to the senators is a fine example of why.
The ICC’s current case is being backed up by such luminaries as Amal Clooney, who has a career-long dislike of the state of Israel, and whose involvement in the case against Israel reveals that hatred.
If Americans don´t think that senators, soldiers or anyone else should be threatened by Amal Clooney and a couple of rogue foreign judges, they are right.
But our allies shouldn’t be subjected to this either.
I hope Americans continue to tell these pompous political judges where to sling it.
I cannot join the protesters on the barricades for the elemental reason that too many of them have explicitly sanctioned the murder of my friends. Pretty basic stuff really. If faced with Columbia student protest leader Khymani James, in fact, it would be as much self-interest as fraternal solidarity which caused me to run. For James would murder me, too. ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live,’ you see. James assures us that ‘I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill,’ but I am not much mollified by the thought that my end would be quick. The Columbia disciplinary panel to which James spoke these words was apparently rather less concerned than I, since they acted only when the clip went viral.
Show me a protest which hates the war and Hamas in equal measure; which seeks desperately a free Palestine alongside a secure Israel; which is possessed of a moral clarity and a belief in the sanctity of all innocent life: I will be there, placard in hand, in a heartbeat. There has been no such protest because there is no anti-war left presently capable of it. A note to them: if you want to see how it is done, follow the extraordinary exiled Gazan writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. Alkhatib has so far lost 31 members of his extended family to the war and manages to hate and protest it while also inveighing against the evils of Hamas, consequently making many enemies amongst other supposed proponents of the Palestinian cause who would justify 7 October. His is a truly moral position.
A LEFT THAT CAN ACCOUNT FOR SHANI
The road to this squalid reaction to 7 October has been a long one, with many a disastrous turn leading the far left into ever more dangerous and bankrupt territory. It is what happens when dogma becomes more fashionable than critical thought; when radicalism trumps reason; when the antidote to Orientalism is taken to be Occidentalism; when the counter to cultural imperialism is moral relativism; when it is ‘better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron’; when Foucault decides, for us all, that Iranian women and Iranian democrats can go to hell – the Ayatollah is, after all, just too damned exciting.
Yes, the present swamp was fed by myriad fetid tributaries. So too does it inevitably become more and more contaminated. Generations raised on blather masquerading as profundity and on nihilism masquerading as radical chic. This next generation has far exceeded Butler in both irrationality and the explicitness of its contempt for Israeli life. Butler at least offered a condemnation of 7 October, of sorts (though it was still ‘armed resistance’, not ‘terrorism’) only to find that the beast they have played a not inconsiderable part in creating now considered them rather a copout. And your sons and your daughters are beyond your command…
Yes, the left of the 21st century needed the children of Victor Serge and Sophie Scholl, of Dr King and Nye Bevan. In too many places has it received instead the children of Nechayev and Che, of Mao and Ulrike Meinhof. For many this treason has led to a self-imposed exile, an auto-excommunication from the left. For me, as for Améry before me, this is impossible. Whether we are capable of a consequential renaissance remains to be seen. It is a Sisyphean task and one which 7 October has shown us cannot be left to the gatekeepers. No, as Améry noted, ‘the answer must come not so much from those who hold positions of responsibility but primarily from those possessed of an actual sense of responsibility.’ Go with Orwell, if you prefer, and that the answer lies with the proles.
The wait may be a long one. In the meantime, I would encourage the emerging leftist who senses something wrong in all this but is not quite sure where to start, to begin by adapting the famous proposition of Rabbi Greenberg. After the holocaust, said the Rabbi, ‘No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.’ Well, henceforth, brook no statement from the left on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would not be credible if uttered on that truck with Shani. It is the best – perhaps it is all – you can do for her now.
