Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, August 30, 2024

08/30 Links Pt1: Correcting the ‘Escalation’ Nonsense; MK's: No Red Cross visits to Nukhba terrorists without hostage checks first; Gaza shop creates fake UNICEF car stickers

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Correcting the ‘Escalation’ Nonsense

Let’s take as an example the New York Times article on Israel’s antiterror raids in the West Bank this week. “It was a significant escalation after months of raids that have unfolded alongside the war in Gaza,” we’re told. We then learn this: “The operation followed months of escalating Israeli raids in the occupied territory.”

Sounds like a lot of escalations! But what does that mean, exactly? Is it an escalation when Israel sends a numerically greater amount of troops than it did in last week’s or last month’s counterterror operation? Is it an escalation if Israel used a piece of equipment, like an unmanned drone, that it didn’t use last time? What about the number of military vehicles—how many jeeps make an escalation?

Much like its equally annoying cousin “disproportionate,” the term “escalation” appears to be a synonym for “Israeli self-defense.”

“Escalation of war has come to mean an increase in scope or violence of a conflict,” the U.S. Naval Institute offers. Thus what happened in the West Bank this week might truly count as an escalation—but if so, it is not Israel that escalated.

More from the Times: “The raid comes as U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials have said that Tehran is operating a clandestine smuggling route across the Middle East to deliver weapons to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territory. The goal, as described by three Iranian officials, has been to foment unrest against Israel by flooding the enclave with as many weapons as it can, The New York Times reported in April.”

Ah, a clue. Let’s head on over to what the Times reported in April:
Iran is operating a clandestine smuggling route across the Middle East, employing intelligence operatives, militants and criminal gangs, to deliver weapons to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to officials from the United States, Israel and Iran.

The goal, as described by three Iranian officials, is to foment unrest against Israel by flooding the enclave with as many weapons as it can.

The covert operation is now heightening concerns that Tehran is seeking to turn the West Bank into the next flashpoint in the long-simmering shadow war between Israel and Iran.

So what we’ve learned, definitively, is the following: Iran has been escalating the conflict for months, and Israel’s response to this escalation was an attempt to de-escalate—that is, to prevent Iran’s escalation from coming to full fruition. As the Times itself reports, Iran has increased the scope of the conflict, in an attempt to increase the violence of the conflict. If what just happened this week does count as an escalation, it is definitionally Iran’s escalation.

That is also true of Israel’s preemptive strikes on Hezbollah rocket launchers in Lebanon. Using Lebanon as a base of attack on Israel in response to Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza is quite literally increasing the scope of conflict. Israel’s response has been to take actions that, if further escalation takes place, will limit the damage and destructiveness of that escalation. The other goal of Israel’s actions is to prevent that escalation from happening at all.

Words have meanings. Israel is working to de-escalate conflict while being accused of doing the opposite. That’s the reality, and it isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

A step back

Not long ago, I wrote an article titled, “Hostage Talks Won’t Work; Winning the War Will.” A retired American military officer wrote to ask, “What is the definition of winning? What does winning look like?” He wasn’t questioning Israel’s capability; he added, “I am quite sure the IDF can deliver whatever is directed or defined.”

To be clear, an American military officer knows what winning looks like; he was checking on me. That made me nervous, but I also realized that people are projecting different end games on Israel. The Biden-Harris administration, for example, is pushing for a ceasefire and “de-escalation.” (U.S. President Joe Biden told Israel in mid-April to “pocket the win” after Iran fired 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles at Israel and succeeded in killing only one person. Odd definition of a win.)

So, I took a shot.

“Winning” is achieving your war objectives. Israel had three clear objectives announced in October.

Secure the border and the people of Israel. Previous ground and rocket attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah resulted in “ceasefires” that left the timing and scope of the next attack up to Israel’s enemies. There was a ceasefire in place on Oct. 6, and Hamas broke it in the most horrific manner. This time, the Israeli government said, “We don’t want another ceasefire, or a better ceasefire, or a longer ceasefire.”

The goal is to secure the border.

The United States settled for a ceasefire in Korea. And when the minuses outweighed the plusses in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we went home. We put 6,000 or 10,000 miles between us and them. We ignored the mess, the refugees, the killings we left in our wake. For Israel, there is no going home; Israelis are home. If a secure border means a buffer along the Negev and Israeli forces in the Philadelphi Corridor, so be it.

Take away Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. It doesn’t mean “kill them all” or “get a formal surrender.” It means removing the weapons and tunnels already inside Gaza, along with securing the borders so Hamas can’t import more. The tunnels at Rafah tell you that Egypt was a smuggling partner of Hamas. Israel, perhaps naively, assumed Egypt would live up to the agreements it signed in 1982 when Israel withdrew from Sinai and 2005 when Israel withdrew from Gaza. But no, so now Israel has to be in control.

Without military power, Hamas’s governing power wanes. If you believe, as some people do, that the Palestinians aren’t all Hamas themselves or that they don’t support Hamas, but they know Hamas will kill them if they rebel (Hamas has killed many Palestinian civilians since Israel’s invasion, including people trying to get to the “safe zones”), then you have to want the Hamas boot off their necks. The only way to do that for them is by removing the weapons Hamas uses to enforce its will, i.e., to kill them. Or, if you believe, as some people do, that Palestinian civilians do, in fact, support the genocidal program of Hamas, then Israel has to remove as much of the weaponry as possible from the space.

Ministers to Netanyahu: No Red Cross visits to Nukhba terrorists without hostage checks first

Eleven government ministers joined Minister Orit Strock's call on Thursday not to allow visits by representatives of the Red Cross to the Nukhba terrorists imprisoned in Israel.

The Red Cross would visit the terrorists without having visited the hostages held in Gaza and providing them with medication first.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the political and security cabinet were presented with the call, which they were expected to discuss on Thursday night.

Earlier this week, the High Court of Justice issued a conditional order according to which the state must explain why visits by the Red Cross's representatives to Israeli prisons should be prevented. The ministers demand that this position be the state's answer to the High Court.

Minister Orit Strock led the call and was joined by Amichai Eliyahu, Uriel Busso, Yitzhak Goldknopf, Miki Zohar, Amichai Chikli, Idit Silman, Ya’acov Margi, Ofir Sofer, and May Golan.

Authorized Nukhba visits
Last April, politicians and various organizations strongly criticized the decision of the War Cabinet to authorize visits to Nukhba prisoners.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed approving the visits, which was supported by most cabinet ministers, as opposed to ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who opposed it.

SJP proves its antisemitism, every day of every year

Temple University Students for Justice in Palestine held a protest outside the Hillel Jewish student building, cementing their status as antisemites. They waved the flag of the PFLP terror group.

And here is part of their speech on why they protested Hillel.

No room for an ethnostate in the Middle East!

Except that every Arab state is an ethnostate by any definition.

The constitution of the "State of Palestine" says it explicitly in Article 1:

Palestine is part of the larger Arab world, and the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation. Arab unity is an objective that the Palestinian people shall work to achieve.

Sounds like an ethnostate to me! Essentially every Arab nation defines itself specifically as an Arab nation.

So why do they choose Israel as the worst example of an "ethnostate" when the Middle East has nothing but ethnostates that are almost all much larger and less tolerant of minorities?

Could it possibly have anything to do with Israel being the Jewish state?

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!

The IDF kills a Norwegian citizen in Jenin. By the way, he was also a Hamas commander.

Norwegian site VG reports that a Norwegian citizen named Wissam Khazem was killed this morning in Jenin.

The family in Norway claims Wissam was not a militant or Hamas member:

"My son was not a terrorist. He was an ordinary person who worked in a construction company. He tried to get his wife to Norway, but was refused three times. That's why he moved back to the West Bank," says his father, who lives in Skien.

Too bas Hamas itself called him one of their commanders:

The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, announced the martyrdom of the Qassam commander Wissam Ayman Khazem from Jenin camp, who ascended to heaven as a martyr this morning as a result of an airstrike that he was subjected to along with his resistance brothers: the martyr Mujahid Maysara Al-Masharqa and the martyr Mujahid Arafat Al-Amer, following their clash with the undercover forces in the village of Al-Zababdeh, east of Jenin.

Here was his Instagram image, according to VG.

And to make the link with Hamas complete, he's wearing their headband along with his "construction worker" buddies.

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!

The IDF issued a press release showing that they found Hamas documents that prove they manipulated the data of PCPSR polls in Gaza to make themselves look more popular than they are.

The head of the polling institute says it is "highly unlikely" that this happened, since he trusts his Gaza team, but he will investigate.

The IDF published two translated documents from Hamas. (The translations appear accurate from the Arabic.) One of them is a three page general description by Hamas of its influence operations including survey manipulation, and the other was specifically about how they changed the poll numbers from Gaza for the PCPSR March survey.

The first document also detailed other influence operations. And that is the real story that everyone is missing.

Hamas' influence operations are much more sophisticated than one would expect. They have control of social media accounts with over a million followers, they claim to have been able to take down pages and accounts of anti-Hamas and pro-Fatah activists, they have contacts at Al Jazeera who do what they ask (they mention Tamer Almisshal specifically,) they silence opponents by "canceling" them and getting others to threaten them.

There is no published date on the first document. The second one, about the March poll, was certainly recent.

Analyzing the poll data and comparing them to the published PCPSR poll from March, they are claiming to only influence the Gaza numbers of the survey, not the West Bank stats.

Corroborating evidence for the manipulation comes from comparing a similar question between the PCPSR poll and an AWRAD poll, asking Gaza residents who they want to control the Gaza Strip after the war. PCPSR says 52% want Hamas. the leaked document claims the real number was 32%, while AWRAD a couple of months later says only 6% of Gazans prefer a Hamas led government.

If we accept that these are legitimate documents and that Hamas has a massive influence operation with hundreds of employees (they claim 160 employee on Internet operations alone), then what other information is Hamas manipulating?

Let's review the claims of famine in Gaza.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) says that as of June, 342,000 Gazans were in Phase 5 famine conditions, and they predicted that nearly half a million would be there in September. They base these definitions on measuring households with an extreme lack of food, percentage of children facing acute malnutrition and mortality rates.

By their criteria, there should be roughly a hundred people dying of starvation every day. Yet even according to Hamas, fewer than 40 people total have died of starvation since the beginning of the war.

That is a huge disconnect between the three, and it indicates that the other statistics that IPC is basing its analysis on are flawed.

If Hamas manipulates surveys of public opinion, wouldn't they also manipulate surveys of household access to food? The only way to measure that is ...surveys! And wouldn't they try to manipulate the reported numbers of children with malnutrition and even the results of upper arm circumference tests?

Qualitatively speaking, there are very few photos of starving children in Gaza. The media publishes the same couple of children over and over again while their parents and siblings appear well fed. We are not seeing photos that resemble those of famine stricken areas elsewhere worldwide. But according to IPC, the only place in the world with more people in Phase 5 than Gaza is Sudan.

Does this make any sense?

Given that the charge of "famine" generates headlines worldwide, wouldn't there be a huge effort by Hamas to threaten, cajole, or bribe the people gathering data, or those reporting data? And many of them might be Hamas members already, since no one gets a public health job in Gaza without Hamas approval.

We've already seen how much Hamas is willing to lie on casualty counts. This document indicates that their propaganda operations are far more extensive than anyone has reported. If the document is real, and nothing indicates it is not, then it is entirely possible that even the statistics gathered by third parties which rely on Gaza residents for accuracy are in fact not real to begin with.

I'm not saying PCPSR is corrupt or that IPC is corrupt. I'm saying that they all assume a level of trustworthiness from those that they must rely on to gather their data, and that model of trust completely falls apart when dealing with a genocidal terror group that controls the government and the population.

We are being lied to at a scale that no one has even imagined.

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!

Khaled Meshaal, current leader of Hamas outside Gaza, gave a speech remotely in Istanbul to commemorate the anniversary of the 1969 Al Aqsa fire that the Muslim world continues to falsely blame on Jews.

His speech advocated violence - and yet it sounded exactly like "progressive" students on campus.

His main points were:

* Palestinians must return to suicide terrorism. “We want to return to suicide attacks, this situation cannot be fixed with anything other than an open struggle."

* All Muslims must join in the fight. “Today, after 11 months, we are discussing our duties as an ummah, it is not enough to boast about our resistance, what is wanted is to actively participate in the Flood of Al-Aqsa."

* Students must continue what he calls the "Campus Intifada" and an increaseing global protests.

* But everyone must fight: "Jihadi organizations, movements, groups and everyone must make a historic decision. Every responsible person must decide today, before tomorrow, to make the decision to actually participate in the Al-Aqsa Flood from a practical military-jihadi position. "

In short, all Palestinians, all Muslims and all people worldwide should do what Hamas did on October 7.

Which presumably includes rape,

(h/t Debra)

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!

08/29 Links Pt2: The moral cowardice of European Christian leaders; Rare First Temple-era stone seal unearthed in Jerusalem; Nick Cave on Israel and BDS

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The moral cowardice of European Christian leaders

The outspoken chief rabbi of South Africa, Dr. Warren Goldstein, has once again given voice to crucial truths that others have shamefully ignored.

He accused both Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, of being indifferent to the murder of black Christians in Africa and the terrorism threat in Europe while being “outright hostile” to Israel’s attempts to battle jihadi forces led by Iran.

“The world is locked in a civilizational battle of values, threatened by terrorism and violent jihad,” said Goldstein. “At a time when Europe’s very future hangs in the balance, its two most senior Christian leaders have abandoned their most sacred duty to protect and defend the values of the Bible. Their cowardice and lack of moral clarity threaten the free world.”

Goldstein’s blistering accusations were on the mark.

Christians in Africa have been subjected to barbaric slaughter and persecution by Islamists for decades. Two years ago, Open Doors, an organization that supports persecuted Christians, observed: “In truth, there are very few Muslim countries—or countries with large Muslim populations—where Christians can avoid intimidation, harassment or violence.”

In January 2024, a report for Genocide Watch confirmed that, since 2000, 62,000 Christians in Nigeria have been murdered by Islamist groups in an ongoing attempt to exterminate Christianity. In addition, more than 32,000 moderate black Nigerian Muslims and non-faith individuals have been massacred.

According to a report in 2020 by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Christians in Myanmar, China, Eritrea, India, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Vietnam are being persecuted.

These facts were reported in June by Peter Baum for The Daily Blitz. Yet the mainstream media all but ignore these atrocities. There are no marches in Western cities to accuse these countries of facilitating crimes against humanity. There are no NGO-inspired petitions to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare these countries and groups guilty of genocide.

Instead, the media and Western elites demonize Israel as the pariah of the world for defending itself against these genocidal Islamists. This unique and egregious double standard is the hallmark of classic antisemitism.

The attitude of the church leaders is even more astonishing. The hundreds of thousands of victims of this persecution are their flock. The goal of this onslaught is the wholesale destruction of the faith they lead.

Yet from Welby and the pope have emerged little more than occasional expressions of measured concern. And even then, they usually refuse to call out what’s happening by its proper name—the Islamist war to eradicate Christianity and destroy the West.

Macron’s stand against the far-left a relief to French Jewry

French President Emmanuel Macron is resisting pressure to appoint a left-wing prime minister, as the political deadlock plaguing the country since its parliamentary election in July continues.

By keeping a left-wing alliance out of government, Macron has blocked from power the far-left France Unbowed (LFI), a party that 92% of French Jews think is antisemitic, according to a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee Europe.

The French president is tasked with choosing a prime minister and a cabinet following a parliamentary election, and that government is then put to a vote in the National Assembly. In last month’s legislative election, the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) coalition won a 190-seat plurality of the National Assembly’s 577 seats — far short of a working majority. Centrist and right-wing parties said they would vote against an NFP government.

NFP is made up of LFI, socialists, communists and Greens who came together ahead of this year’s election to form an alliance meant to block the far-right National Rally from taking power.

Macron said on Monday that choosing a cabinet led by NFP would threaten “institutional stability,” and would be blocked by the other factions making up a majority of parliament. LFI leaders called Macron’s remarks an “anti-democratic coup” and vowed to impeach him.

American Jewish Committee Europe Managing Director Simone Rodan-Benzaquen said that Macron’s leverage is a result of NFP lacking a legislative majority.

“Any government involving LFI or even just relying on their support would be quickly brought down,” she said.

No, James Carville, Israelis Are Not Whiter Than Palestinians

It was, to put it mildly, foolish of the veteran Democratic party strategist James Carville to say the other day, when asked about the pro-Israel position of the great majority of Republican voters, “It’s really about the racism that drives the thing. . . . The reason I suspect that most of these people describe themselves as pro-Israel is because the Jews [in Israel] are whiter than the Palestinians.”

As was pointed out in the wake of Carville’s remarks, Israelis are not demonstrably “whiter than Palestinians”; nor, since both groups vary greatly in skin color, would it be feasible to come up with a metric that might enable a comparison to be made. There are light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Palestinian Arabs, and light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Israeli Jews—and while Israelis and Palestinians can usually tell at a glance which of the two groups one of them belongs to, they do not do so on the basis of skin color. What they instinctively look for are other indicators, such as body language, facial expression, hair style, clothing, and head garb, and sometimes they guess wrong.

It is commonplace to observe that, when applied to skin color, white and black are as much sociological as physical categories. Many so-called whites are far from white; many blacks are not at all black. Nor does it necessarily have to do with ancestry. As we all know, Barack Obama’s mother was white and Kamala Harris’s was a native of India. If both Obama and Harris are considered, and consider themselves, black, this is because they identify with the African American community and because this seems natural to most Americans. As the Columbia University linguist and New York Times language columnist John McWhorter noted in a recent column:
Imagine how strange it would be if someone called [Obama] white. Imagine how strange it would be if he called himself white. . . . My maternal grandfather was light enough that he could easily have passed for white. My mother was quite light-skinned, too. Yet I have never considered myself anything but Black, nor did my grandfather or my mother. To look at photos of the three of us and see three “Black” people makes perfect sense to me because I have never known anything else.

True, many younger Americans with histories like Obama’s or Harris’s prefer to call themselves biracial, a relatively recent usage that was not an option in the past. (My 1955 Oxford Universal Dictionary, for example, reprinted with “corrections and revised addenda” from an original 1933 edition, does not even list “biracial” as a word.) The growing popularity of the word biracial reflects profound changes in attitude toward race and racial background in the United States, since traditionally, Americans of mixed ancestry have been expected to identify with the racial affiliation of either one set of their ancestors or the other; moreover, racist attitudes dictated that even in cases of white appearance, such as that of John McWhorter’s grandfather, a single known black forebear was enough to classify the person in question as black (or “Negro” or “colored” at a time when these words were still admissible).

08/29 Links Pt1: The United Nations is ‘terrified’ of Trump; Dozens of Palestinian diplomats celebrated October 7; Torres accuses U.S. airlines of ‘effectively boycotting’ Israel

From Ian:

Strangling Iran: What holds true in the West Bank, holds in Gaza

The IDF’s actions on Wednesday in Jenin, Tulkarm, Tubas, and the Far’a refugee camp in the Jordan Valley indicate that it has learned that lesson. The failed suicide bombing attack last week in Tel Aviv was the catalyst for implementing this lesson.

A terrorist believed to be from Nablus, identified as Jafar Muna, carried an 8 kg. bomb outside of a crowded synagogue when the device exploded – apparently a “work accident” – killing him and injuring a passerby. The country heaved a sigh of relief at its good fortune for this miracle, at having averted a mass-casualty incident.

But it was a wake-up call. That an explosive device of this magnitude was smuggled into Israel showed that the country needed to take the growing terrorist infrastructure developing in Judea and Samaria quite seriously. It also needs to take threats from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which took responsibility for the bomber, seriously as well.

Iran, which successfully identifies areas of weak governance around Israel to set up proxies to lash out at the Jewish state, has been making serious inroads into the West Bank for the last decade, smuggling weapons to a myriad of different terrorist groups there through Lebanon and Jordan.

Last August, after a 42-year-old mother of three, Batsheva Nigri, was murdered near Hebron in a shooting attack on her car, both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pointed fingers at Iran.

“We are in the middle of a terrorist onslaught that is encouraged, guided, and funded by Iran and its proxies,” Netanyahu said. Gallant added that the wave of terror at the time, two months before October 7, was “guided by Iran, which is looking for any way to harm Israeli citizens.”

Both Palestinian terrorists and Iranian officials have also acknowledged Iran’s involvement. Since October 7, Iran has stepped up these efforts, hoping to ignite another front against Israel.

In July of 2023, senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk was quoted in the Iranian press saying Iran is actually fighting alongside “the resistance in Palestine” through its generous support. An editorial published by the Iranian Tasnim News Agency that same month said Iran’s successful arming of the West Bank would sink the “leaking ship of Israel.”

Automatic weapons and crude pipe bombs have been replaced in the hands of terrorists by powerful improvised explosive devices (IEDs) used against troops conducting counter-terror actions in the West Bank. These IEDs, including the one that Muna wanted to explode in Tel Aviv, reveal a terrorist infrastructure developing – including IED manufacturing labs – directly under Israel’s nose that Iran could use as yet another pressure point against the country.

This is something that Israel cannot allow, and last week’s attempted suicide bombing set alarm bells ringing regarding how far Iran’s program had advanced and convincing policymakers of the need now to quash it.

The IDF’s action on Wednesday was reportedly the most significant military maneuver in the West Bank since Operation Defensive Shield which began in March of 2002, following the Netanya Park Hotel Passover Eve massacre where a suicide bombing attack killed 30 people at a Passover seder.

Up until then, the IDF – under the Oslo Agreements – stayed out of the large Palestinian cities, thereby enabling a terrorist infrastructure to thrive, one that included labs for manufacturing bombs for suicide attacks.

The Park Hotel bombing was the trigger for bringing the IDF back into the Palestinian cities. It took several years of intense military action throughout Judea and Samaria, but these actions did lead to an end to the Second Intifada and significantly degrade terrorist capabilities, leading to a precipitous drop in the number of Israelis killed in terrorist attacks: from 457 fatalities in 2002 to 9 in 2019.

Just as some of the lessons learned from Gaza on October 7 can be applied to the West Bank, the reverse is also true: lessons learned over the years fighting terror in Judea and Samaria can be applied in Gaza. For instance, the operation currently underway in northern Samaria is an indication of what the future holds in Gaza.

The 42-day Operation Defensive Shield that began in March of 2002 was a turning point, and Israel did degrade terrorist capabilities. But this was not a one-off deal, with Israel just leaving the territory after the operation.

Rather, it takes continuous work to ensure that the terrorist infrastructure does not reappear, what security officials continuously refer to as “mowing the lawn.” What this predicts is that when the intense fighting stops in Gaza, the continuous war against terrorists – preventing the resurrection of a terrorist infrastructure there – will continue for years, if not decades.

Just look at Judea and Samaria. Twenty-two years after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield, it is still “mowing the lawn” there and trying to prevent the re-emergence of a vast terrorist infrastructure. It is endless labor, with no clear finish line. What holds true in Judea and Samaria will certainly be the case in Gaza as well.

Revealed: Dozens of Palestinian diplomats celebrated October 7

Scores of Palestinian diplomats at the United Nations, across Europe and around the world celebrated the attack on Israel on October 7, compared Israel to the Nazis or made other disturbing statements, the JC can reveal.

The findings raise serious questions about the legitimacy of Palestinian Authority (PA) officials on the world stage. The PA is increasingly expected to participate in governing Gaza after the war and help build a two-state solution.

A dossier of evidence compiled by investigators from the GnasherJew group uncovered troubling details from the social media activity of ambassadors, other officials and even embassy accounts.

The analysis of hundreds of posts from more than 30 profiles found senior diplomats smearing Israeli troops as Nazis, supporting the actions of Hamas and advocating the erasure of Israel.

The most disturbing statements began on October 7 itself. Hassan Albalawi, the deputy head of the Palestine mission to the EU, reacted by celebrating Hamas as “heroic”, while Adel Atieh, the Palestinian ambassador to the EU, described the terrorists as “the people of the mighty”. Meanwhile, Khuloussi Bsaiso, a Palestinian diplomat at the UN, shared a map of the Middle East without Israel. “Palestine as it should be,” he commented.

When questioned by the JC, Bsaiso claimed that his social media posts were not shared in a professional capacity, adding: “For your information we the Palestinians are Jews, Christians and Muslims.”

In Britain, meanwhile, Rana Abuayyash, consul at the Palestinian mission to London, shared a post on November 3 showing the Israeli flag morphing into Hitler and reposted a TikTok video of Netanyahu underneath the Nazi dictator. There are dozens of similar examples.

As the war in Gaza continues to rage, many of those named in the dossier are regarded as moral authorities in their host countries, invited to discuss the conflict on television and posting to thousands of followers on social media.

Sullivan: Israel-Hamas truce talks down to ‘nitty-gritty’

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Thursday that Gaza ceasefire-and-hostages-for-terrorist-prisoner talks were making progress.

“The negotiators are bearing down on the details, meaning that we have advanced the discussions to a point where it’s in the nitty-gritty, and that is a positive sign of progress,” Sullivan told reporters in Beijing, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

On the Gaza issue, officials from the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Israel met in Doha on Wednesday to follow up on talks that took place in Cairo over the weekend and extended to Monday.

Jerusalem’s delegation—composed of officials from the Israel Defense Forces, the Mossad and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet)—had returned on Tuesday from the round of negotiations in Cairo.

The high-level Cairo talks ended on Sunday without a deal, but discussions continued on Monday with lower-level officials to attempt to bridge the remaining gaps.

“In Doha, the delegation is expected to meet with representatives of Egypt, Qatar and the United States who are continuing the negotiations and work with Israel and Hamas,” according to Israel’s Channel 12.

U.S. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk held talks on Tuesday in Doha with senior Qatari leaders ahead of Wednesday’s negotiations, the Associated Press reported, citing a U.S. official.

While American officials have expressed optimism about closing a deal, Hamas has publicly rejected the terms on the table and is accusing the United States of supporting Israeli demands. Egyptian officials have also expressed skepticism.

Persian Satrap Hits Reply-All On Haman's Proclamation To 127 Provinces (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Persian Satrap Hits Reply-All On Haman's Proclamation To 127 Provinces

Susa, August 29 - Continued chaos enveloped royal correspondence with all parts of the Achaemenid Empire this week when the governor of one far-flung territory, in a moment of carelessness, selected the option to include every other recipient of the original letter in his inquiry for clarification of details in the royal decree, palace sources disclosed today.

King Ahashverosh's seal adorned official missives to the one hundred twenty-seven provinces of the kingdom, apprising the administrators of each province, and the cities and towns therein, to prepare for a special day of reckoning regarding the Jews among them, to take place as this coming winter transitions into spring, the thirteenth day of the month of Adar. The 127 couriers carrying 127 copies, plus several spare scrolls, made their way to each provincial capital. Then the governor of the territory of Sarmatia decided to request more information, but accidentally selected Reply All and soon he, too, had sent 127 couriers with 127 copies of his letter not just to the king, as intended, but to all of the governors, satraps, and other high officials of the empire.

The resulting confusion snarled communications throughout the realm for weeks. Witnesses reported that the use of so many couriers strained the supply for other important communications, on top of which at least two dozen irate governors of other provinces saw fit to reply-all in kind to berate the Sarmatian prince, compounding the problem further.

Exhausted couriers recalled hauling satchels full of scrolls containing invective and ridicule that could make a Greek blush. They did not desire to deliver any such epistles, but performed that duty nevertheless.

"I'm pretty sure the admonition not to kill the messenger hasn't been widely adopted yet," observed a nervous rider of the swift camels. "I hope this hubbub dies down before I do."

The impetus for the decree remains unclear. Rumors point to Royal Vizier Haman's resentment that a prominent Jew named Mordechai refused to bow to him, and that personal insult drove Haman to find some pretext to get rid of Mordechai and the metaphorical horse he rode in on, i.e. Jews and Jewish culture. Haman then presented his case to the king as a pressing concern for the unity and stability of the empire, rather than as a petty, self-absorbed scheme to seek disproportionate vengeance against the only person in the kingdom not to bow to him, which he could have shrugged off and dismissed as unimportant in light of all the other honor and power he enjoys, but no, he let it consume him, like the fruit of the one forbidden tree in a vast, sumptuous garden of delights.

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The Washington Post demonstrated yesterday how to be anti-Israel without directly lying.

The headline (since updated) says 10 Palestinians killed. The article says, twice, 10 Palestinians killed.

Finally, in paragraph four, it mentions Islamic Jihad admitted six of its terrorists were killed and Hamas admitted three of its own terrorists were killed. That's nine out of ten.

The headline implies that all the dead were civilians. At least nine of out ten were terrorists. Perhaps the tenth was also a terrorist, from the PFLP or Al Aqsa Brigades.

But how many people read that far?

Even worse, when it mentions the six dead Islamic Jihad terrorists - which included two Islamic Jihad mujahid children, not mentioned - it adds that "it was not immediately clear whether those casualties were included in the count announced by authorities." In other words, even though they just showed that most of the dead were terrorists, maybe they weren't counted, so Israel really did kill ten civilians.

The headline should have said Israel kills at least nine militants in the West Bank, so readers know that the Gaza war is being waged there as well by the same Hamas and Islamic Jihad trying to attack Jews in Israel and the same groups that massacred 1200 people on October 7.

Their choice of language and placement of the facts gives the opposite impression than the truth.

The WaPo gets its message across that the IDF kills civilians without saying it, so it can say it didn't do anything wrong.

These are the games the media plays; pretending to be accurate purveyors of news when in fact they are only promoting anti-Israel libels. Worse, this article proves that they know the truth and choose to mislead the readers.

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"Human rights group" says Israel's attempts to SAVE civilians is proof of its "genocidal nature"

The Palestinian Center of Human Rights is a respected organization by the human rights community.

It is also insanely antisemitic.

The headline of a news release this week says, "Latest Israeli Displacement Orders Further Prove Their Genocidal Nature.

The very things the IDF does to avoid civilian casualties in order to get to Hamas targets hidden in civilian areas are being viewed as evidence of genocide!

The press release says this statement that no sane person could write: "The establishment of these so-called ‘humanitarian safe zones’ reveals a genocidal pattern designed to forcibly displace Palestinians to areas lacking essential services necessary for their survival. "

If the IDF wanted them dead, why spend the time and effort and resources to ask them (not force them) to leave?

That's not even the only example in this very press release of interpreting Israeli actions to save Gazan lives as genocidal.

Israel has been working hard with UNICEF and WHO to bring polio vaccines into Gaza, a complex undertaking to do safely. Over 1.2 million doses have been imported. The entire operation is complicated by the fact that thse vaccines must be kept cool, so appropriate cooling equipment must also be brought in and there must be assurance that they will work during power outages. The entire operation so far has been accomplished in only a couple of weeks.

Israel has also appointed a brigadier general whose only job is to coordinate with international organizations for aid delivery and distribution into Gaza. I'm pretty sure that no army in history has ever done so much to ensure aid to the enemy's side.

But here is how PCHR reports it:

The delay in the vaccination campaign due to Israel’s displacement orders highlights a trend of weaponizing previously eradicated, highly infectious diseases as a tool of genocide. This strategy deliberately uses such diseases to inflict permanent disability or death on Palestinian residents of Gaza.

Jews being burnt during the Black Plague

This is simply a 21st century update of the Black Death blood libel against Jews.

It isn't coming from neo-Nazis but from a respected human rights organization - one that partners with Amnesty and HRW, among others, and whose reports are trusted by those organizations as well as the UN.

To PCHR and other "human rights" NGOs, the idea that Israeli Jews are immoral, homicidal maniacs is the first principle from which these organizations interpret everything else. Once the idea that Jews are the worst people is established, then any counter-evidence becomes, instead, evidence of the truth of their antisemitic conspiracy theories.

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

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The story of an Islamic Jihad "child" terrorist

A Palestinian NGO called "The Shireen Observatory," ,named for the late Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh and staffed by Palestinian journalists, has been trying to keep track of all the fatalities since October 7 and the circumstances of their deaths.

They reported on a child killed on Sunday:

The two young men, Adi Al-Taroush and Musab Al-Maqsqas, were martyred after being shot in the area of the Ariel settlement, which was built on the lands of Salfit. An audio recording of the two martyrs was circulated before their martyrdom, in which they said that they had been kidnapped by a settler, and when they tried to escape, the occupation soldiers surrounded them and opened fire on them, which led to their martyrdom.

How awful! They were kidnapped and narrated their own murders as they tried to escape!

The story falls apart when you find out they were both members of the Jenin Battalion of Islamic Jihad. (Taroush's real name was Adi Nizar Nimr Abu Naasa,)

Times of Israel reported:

An IDF soldier was lightly wounded in a car-ramming near the settlement of Ariel, the military announced, one of several attacks in the West Bank on Sunday.

Two Palestinian assailants in the vehicle were shot dead.

According to the Israel Defense Forces, the pair arrived by car from the Tapuah Junction and drove against the oncoming traffic toward Ariel, crashing into several cars on the way.

The assailants then tried to ram into IDF soldiers stationed in the area, who opened fire, killing them, the military said.

In their vehicle, the IDF said, troops found a military vest and several assault rifle magazines.

This article confirms that the two assailants were Naasa and Maqsqas. Look how peaceful the older partner looks!

The Shireen site of course knows all this. They don't even link to any article about the "settler kidnapped them" story - the article they link to shows they were the car ramming terrorists.

And the audio recording? Assuming it is real, here is what Naasa/Taroush said:

Young men, young men, we entered Ariel and we do not know where we are. I am Adi Al-Taroush. We kidnapped an Arab Israeli and we beat him. It turned out that he was a settler, so we fled to Ariel and he is following us. I do not know where I am. Forgive us if anything happens to us.”

He added in the clip: "I am Adi Taroush and with me is a man named Musab. A settler kidnapped us."

This is followed by the sound of gunfire. (The audio of the last sentence is not clear, so he might not have even said that "a settler kidnapped us.")

He admits they kidnapped and beat an Israeli citizen! They were obviously not kidnapped themselves because they were in his car during the recording.

If the recording is real, perhaps they were being chased by the victim, panicked and drove into traffic in Ariel where soldiers shot them to protect themselves.

But the recording itself shows that they are terrorists, not innocent victims.

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

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Rifat Audeh is described by Al Jazeera as "a Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist," He directed a film about the Mavi Marmara incident.

This "human rights activist" also advocates murdering anyone who isn't 100% against Israel.

In an article in Hezbollah mouthpiece Al Mayadeen (English), Audeh describes the imagined horrors of the "genocide" in Gaza - and how he wants to see revenge and "justice."

Once again, we see the images of children with their limbs blown off, or under the rubble screaming, or crying over their family and friends killed in the most horrific way such as being deliberately crushed to death by tanks, or worse. The pain they have felt and seen is indescribable and beyond what any human can endure. So do not blame them and the rest of the Palestinians, when they seek revenge. And do not blame us when we seek revenge for them. Do not blame them, when tomorrow, they engage in martyrdom operations -or what the West calls suicide bombings- against those who sadistically and gleefully practiced these horrors against them.

This is a call for a global intifada - and he sure doesn't mean it in a peaceful way.

But he isn't only calling for suicide bombing against Israelis.

It must be kept in mind that all of these crimes and atrocities, culminating in this genocide would not have been possible without the mainstream media propagandizing and parroting the false Israeli narrative for decades, along with the despicable politicians who continue to support this genocide. So when revenge is sought, it must be exacted against everyone who aided and abetted these slaughters, whether they are politicians, propagandists, influencers, or others. These include the obvious ones, such as Genocide Joe and Bloody Blinken, but include many others such as Jake Sullivan ("We do not believe what is happening in Gaza is a genocide") and Lindsey Graham for example, who called for nuclear bombs to be dropped on the 2.3 million people of Gaza. Others include Matt Miller, Nir Muller, Stuart Seldowitz, Michael Rapaport, James Whale & Piers Morgan and Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkTV), Dana Bash (CNN), and many more.

Do they all think that somehow they are invincible, untouchable or unreachable? Don’t they realize that once this global army of recruits begins its work, these vile, despicable, heartless, soulless individuals will be easily found and held accountable with the same level of mercy they showed towards the children of Gaza?

Anything less than this form of justice is no longer acceptable.

That is a direct call for all anti-Israel protesters to start murdering anyone who knows that there is no genocide in Gaza.

He is threatening me. He is probably threatening you. He is calling on "pro-Palestinian" activists to blow up , stab and shoot most Americans, most Europeans, and a great number of Arabs.

Audeh is very proud of this article. He asked his Facebook followers to help it go viral.

Well, I'm doing my part to let the world know that a supposed human rights activist calls to murder anyone who disagrees with him.

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!

08/28 Links Pt2: Tears of a Clown; Scenes from the massacres; The trouble with Candace; WaPo Outright Lies About BDS

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Tears of a Clown

The plot of the movie was rather straightforward. A clown is arrested by the Nazis for making fun of Adolf Hitler. He’s sent to a concentration camp where he is required to lead children to the gas chambers.

We may still see the script filmed in some format: Producer Kia Jam says he has acquired rights to the original, pre-Lewis screenplay. But Lewis is the real draw: the legendary Jewish funnyman directing a Holocaust drama about a clown, combined with the fact that it was filmed and then buried, is the reason for the almost mythical stature of The Day the Clown Cried.

“The original story was a tale of horror, conceit, and finally, enlightenment and self-sacrifice,” script co-writer Charles Denton told JTA. Lewis apparently renamed the clown Helmut Doork. “Jerry had turned it into a sentimental, Chaplinesque representation of his own confused sense of himself, his art, his charity work, and his persecution at the hands of critics.”

According to Denton and his co-writer Joan O’Brien, the decision to keep it buried isn’t actually Lewis’s. By the time he shot the film, it’s not clear his producer still had rights to the script. Plus, O’Brien and Denton “were so horrified by the footage Lewis showed them that they refused to ever grant him, or any entities associated with him, the right to release it — a provision that still holds true today, despite all three parties having died.”

Which means the Library of Congress has limits on what it can release to the public. It does not have the full movie and it will not hold screenings or public exhibitions of what it does have. The materials Lewis gave the library can be viewed with permission by researchers.

The movie’s apparent terribleness is also part of the draw. Holocaust movies are about as rare as Abe Lincoln biographies: Though they can be very different from each other, the genre itself is always producing something. Even oddball takes on it break through. Just consider Quentin Tarantino’s vengeful revisionist bloodbath Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Taika Waititi’s satirical farce JoJo Rabbit (2019).

But a secret flop from a Jewish comedy megastar? There’s a reason it’s among the most famous movies never made. (Or, in this case, never released.) There’s been a ton of theorizing about what actually went wrong, but the writer Devorah Baum probably got it right when she told the BBC that Lewis may have just looked at the raw film he shot and thought, “actually, this wasn’t such a great idea.”

Scenes from the massacres

Sunday marked the 200th anniversary of the unveiling of Eugène Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres at Chios, a fourteen-by-twelve-foot oil painting now housed in the Louvre. To Martin Kramer, this painting, with its images of huddled survivors and scattered corpses, “cannot but evoke the primal brutality of October 7.” He explains its historical background:
In 1822, the prosperous Ottoman-ruled island of Chios, in the Aegean Sea, was seized by Greek insurgents. The Ottomans recaptured the Greek-populated island with a ferocity that shocked Europe. Estimates vary, but the Ottomans massacred, enslaved, and starved as many as 100,000 Greek Christians, leaving the island depopulated. Graphic accounts of savage torture spread across the continent, fueling the philhellene movement with rage and resolve. In composing his painting, Delacroix relied on such reports, as well as conversations with a French eyewitness.

In Kramer’s view, the connection to the depredations of Hamas is more than just visual:
The foremost French specialist on Islam and politics, Gilles Kepel, in his new book Holocaustes: Israël, Gaza et la guerre contre l’Occident, has presented October 7 through the lens of its perpetrators, as a ghazwa (razzia in European parlance): a raid deliberately intended to subjugate and dehumanize a non-Muslim adversary. The prophet Mohammad conducted such a raid against the Jewish tribes of the Khaybar oasis in Arabia in the year 628.

The line that connects the years 628 and 2023 (with 1824 along the way) is one of traditionally Muslim and now Islamist supremacism. It not only promises victory but seeks to inscribe it upon the bodies of the vanquished.

France has become the antisemitic capital of Europe

In 2018 I claimed that France is the most “dangerous European country for Jews,” noting that antisemitic attacks had increased that year by 74 percent on 2017. I returned to the theme in January 2020 in an article entitled “How long until there are no Jews left in France.”

Since Hamas unleashed it barbarous attack on Israel ten months ago, antisemitic acts have rocketed by 200 percent, according to figures announced this week by Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister. Included in the figures are two attempts to burn down synagogues.

The first was in May when police shot dead an Algerian man as he attempted to set fire to a synagogue in Rouen. The second happened on Saturday when a man wearing a keffiyeh and a Palestinian flag carried out a similar act in a suburb of Montpellier, igniting the building and blowing up two cars on the street outside.

There was the customary condemnation from all political parties, including President Emmanuel Macron and the man who is still filling in as prime minister, Gabriel Attal.

Their words did not go down well with many of the country’s Jewish community. Chief Rabbi Haïm Korsia bemoaned “tears that look more like crocodile tears than tears of compassion.”

He accused Jean-Luc Melenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise of fanning the flames of antisemitism, as did Simone Rodan Benzaquen, director of the American Jewish Committee in France and Europe. “I consider today that La France Insoumise [LFI] has structurally become an antisemitic party,” she said.

Similar accusations were leveled at the party in June by Serge Klarsfeld, France’s most venerable Nazi hunter, who has dedicated his life to bringing to justice those responsible for the Holocaust.

A rising star in La France Insoumise is Rima Hassan. “Outside Western hegemonic thinking, no one considers October 7 an act of terrorism,” she said recently, not long after allegedly attending a rally in Jordan which paid tribute to Ismail Haniyeh, the political chief of Hamas assassinated last month in Tehran.

Asked who he would vote for if he had to choose between Melenchon and Marine Le Pen, Klarsfeld said the latter because in his opinion she has purged her party of her father’s antisemitism.

Days after that interview, Macron and his government were given a similar choice before the second lround of the parliamentary election. In their case, however, they had a third option: to remain neutral. Instead, the government sided with LFI and the left, telling voters it was their “moral duty” to prevent Le Pen’s party coming to power. Their alliance stretched to grubby agreements in which candidates dropped out in close contests to boost their chances of defeating the Rassemblement National. Gérald Darmanin, for instance, might have lost his seat to the Rassemblement National had not the LFI candidate stood down.

No wonder French Jews are frightened about the future. Do they even have a future in France given that a large swath of the political class is aiding and abetting the terrifying resurgence of antisemitism? I’ll repeat the question I asked four years ago: how long until there are no Jews left in France?

08/28 Links Pt1: Could Hamas Be Exiled?; The real reason Hamas can’t free the remaining hostages; UNSC omits Hezbollah from resolution renewing UNIFIL mandate

From Ian:

Could Hamas Be Exiled?

Exile of Hamas from Gaza will appeal to a wide range of actors involved in this conflict. For Israel, it would not only enable a deal that would return the hostages. It would allow for an end to the war in Gaza, which has taken a financial and societal toll on Israel after nearly eleven months of fighting. Ending the war would also allow the Israelis to begin to rebuild the country’s public image after a withering public relations war mounted by Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other malign actors.

For the United States, this would also have great benefits. Ahead of the 2024 election, there is significant pressure on Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden Administration to end the hostilities in Gaza. A Reagan-style deal could minimize (though certainly not eliminate) the risk of a wider war with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its many foreign fighting forces. Indeed, the regime and its proxies have indicated a tentative willingness to stop their war if there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Economically, there is also a clear virtue to this approach. The Pentagon has dispatched significant military assets to the region on several occasions. And the cost of doing so is not small. Importantly, there are also eight American hostages that our government has an obligation to return home.

Finally, a deal would also be in the interest of Palestinians in Gaza, who are desperate for a ceasefire. After eleven months, the Gazans would finally have the opportunity to rebuild—and under a deradicalized government. The Sunni Arab world would also welcome this, and some of the Gulf states may be inclined to support Gaza’s reconstruction once Hamas is officially in exile.

Admittedly, a deal does not come without drawbacks. Hamas would continue to exist. The group would likely work overtime from abroad to stoke unrest in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and beyond. In other words, Israel’s fight against Hamas would continue. But this will likely be the case regardless.

There is also the risk of normalizing Hamas. That turned out to be the fatal flaw in the Reagan plan. In 1982, the PLO was widely viewed as a villainous organization. But after only nine years of exile in Tunisia, Arafat returned to Gaza in 1993 in triumph as part of the Oslo Accords. His PLO was made the backbone of the newly created Palestinian Authority. Despite his efforts to convince the world that he and his organization had turned a new leaf, the old terrorist returned to violence with the Second Intifada of 2000.

Israel and the United States should make it clear that Hamas will never have a future in Palestinian politics. Other countries should be called upon to support this, as well.

Finally, there is the question of Yahya Sinwar himself. Israel will almost certainly refuse to offer the architect of the October 7 attacks a lifeline. Sinwar may be able to negotiate a life sentence in an Israeli jail. While the Hamas leader may not love this idea, it’s a better alternative to the certain death that currently awaits him should he continue to try and fight Israel from within the tunnels of Gaza.

The Biden Administration’s repeated ceasefire initiatives have tanked, primarily because they lack creativity. Each failed proposal has closely resembled the previous ones. Taking a page out of the Gipper’s foreign policy playbook could be a chance to break that cycle.

The real reason Hamas can’t free the remaining hostages

Only around 20 of the Israeli hostages are being held by Hamas and these are being kept in handcuffs as human shields around its leader, Yahya Sinwar, intelligence sources have told the JC.

The terror chief has surrounded himself with the captives, who are being held with him underground. Israel has already had several opportunities to eliminate him after locating the tunnels in which he was hiding but the attack was not authorised because of the danger to hostages, intelligence sources have said.

The rest of the captives, both living and dead, are believed to be in the hands of smaller terror groups.

It comes after 52-year-old Qaid Farhan Alkadi, from the largely Arab city of Rahat in Southern Israel, was rescued by Shayetet 13, the 401st Brigade, Yahalom, and ISA forces under the command of the 162nd Division in a complex operation in the south of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.

The grim revelation about the other Israeli captives, based on information gathered by Israeli intelligence in cooperation with Gazan informants and captured terrorists, throws new light on the complexity of securing a hostage deal, currently the subject of intense negotiations in Qatar.

Many Israeli abductees are being held by a menagerie of smaller terror groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Mujahideen Brigades, the al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, intelligence sources have confirmed.

These groups are locked in a dispute with Yahya Sinwar’s Hamas. While Sinwar is demanding the release of Hamas prisoners as a priority, they want prisoners from their own ranks to also be represented on the list. This has led them to contemplate a coup against Hamas in recent months.

They are also arguing that no compromise must be made with Israel, insisting that any deal includes the release of all terrorists from Israeli jails, including 1,236 murderers who have been sentenced to life imprisonment.

Clifford D. May: Tehran holds its fire

When I say Hamas, I really mean Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 attacks. Following the funeral of Mr. Haniyeh, he was named the organization’s supreme leader—commander of both its “political” and “military” wings.

Why did Mr. Sinwar say no deal? Likely because his interests would be best served were Mr. Khamenei to widen the multifront and avowedly genocidal war against Israel.

Which brings us to what happened beginning around 5 am local time Sunday. In response to intelligence indicating that Hezbollah was imminently preparing to fire from Lebanon as many as 6,000 long-range missiles at Tel Aviv and other targets, 100 Israeli fighter jets struck 40 Hezbollah missile launch sites.

Since the day following the Hamas invasion, Hezbollah has fired close to 8,000 rockets, missiles and drones at Israeli communities, killing soldiers and civilians, burning towns, farms and forests, and causing more than 80,000 Israelis to abandon their homes.

In retaliation, Israel has carried out precision strikes inside Lebanon, including, on July 30, killing the group’s senior military commander, Fuad Shukr.

Mr. Shukr, you should know, has long been wanted by the U.S. for his role in the killing of 241 American servicemen in the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. Our State Department posted a $5 million bounty for information on his location.

Hezbollah still has thousands of missiles left, all emplaced in southern Lebanon in flagrant violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which was intended to bring the Iranian proxy’s 2006 war with Israel to a halt.

Another all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel would undoubtedly cause significant death and damage in Israel. But it would almost certainly decimate Hezbollah and destroy what is left of Lebanon, a formerly vibrant nation that has become a failing state since Hezbollah seized power.

Mr. Khamenei understands the importance of strategic patience. He demonstrated that in 2015, when he agreed to President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) because it gave him a patient pathway into the nuclear weapons club, along with tens of billions of dollars.

That same year, Mr. Khamenei spoke of 2040 as the date by which Israel is to be exterminated.

To that end, he has been waging a war of attrition, death by a thousand cuts, most of those cuts made by Arabs whom he is only too happy to martyr in pursuit of his imperial ambitions.

Mr. Sinwar is fine with that. He has said that Gazan civilians are “necessary sacrifices.” But would it surprise you if he’d rather not be among them?

Late last week, a senior Egyptian official told an Israeli reporter that Mr. Sinwar wants a guarantee that he won’t be assassinated.

I don’t think Israeli leaders will make that promise. But I can imagine them giving Mr. Sinwar safe passage to another country, say Turkey (incongruously both a NATO member and Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood supporter), in exchange for the release of however many hostages have not yet been brutally murdered.

This may be a long shot, but nothing would be lost if Mr. Biden’s envoys were to suggest such a deal, conveying to Mr. Sinwar that it is the only way he will ever see light at the end of his tunnel.