Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

A day under fire in the north of Israel (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

Stress poisoning and bombs

On October 13th, I had a very interesting day. Too interesting. By the end of the day, I felt like I had been steam-rolled and it took me 24 hours to bring myself back to normal.

Of course, our normal here in Israel, particularly in the north, isn’t normal at all.

Our day began with a meeting with an important Israeli official in a Haifa coffee shop. The conversation was interrupted by the sound of sirens, screaming that we needed to race to the bomb shelter – only there was no shelter in the coffee shop. What do we do? Everyone got up, leaving their food and drinks on the table and ran across the street to the shelter in the nearest building.

Packed in the shelter of an apartment building with people we don’t know, we had to wait 10 minutes before leaving - because while the Iron Dome is excellent, no system works 100% of the time and shrapnel from the missile interceptions can continue to fall from the sky – so we continued our discussion with explosions overhead and a girl crying in the corner from stress.

Then we returned to the shop, paid our bill, and continued our day.

Later in the day, we drove toward the northern border.

It’s not safe to travel to places under missile bombardment If you are in a shelter, that along with the Iron Dome is likely to keep you more or less safe (and even that is not 100% certain) but traveling between places, there is no shelter and no assurance that you won’t be hit.

But we wanted to see what was really happening to our country. Haifa is under bombardment and the communities along the way to the north have been bombarded even more than Haifa. Traveling that path is a risk but bombs can find you anywhere and the thought that any terrorist would succeed in terrorizing me into not going wherever I want in my own country made me so angry that there was no way I was staying home.

The communities bordering Lebanon have been evacuated for the last year. When the IDF entered Lebanon with ground forces, the area became a closed military zone – meaning that only the military or those approved by the military can travel there.

But from Haifa to Nahariya, life goes on. People live in their homes, go to work, shop, and send their kids to school (according to the assessments of the IDF Homefront Command which shuts down the schools when the bombings are too bad).

We decided to drive on the old road rather than the highway. The highway is faster but the old road has buildings along the way, making it possible to find shelter should we get caught outside when the sirens go off.

We popped in to check on our daughter-in-law who was by herself in their home near Nahariya. Our son, her husband, is enlisted and someplace in the north. That means worrying about him while being bombed. Fun stuff. She told us that although where they live there supposedly is 30 seconds to get to the shelter when the sirens go off, the explosions often come before the siren.

We had a nice visit and continued further north.

After Nahariya, soldiers stand guard closing the area to unnecessary travel – for the protection of civilians and to make it easier for the army to do what they need to do. The soldiers we talked to were pleasant (as our soldiers usually are) but also anxious (which is not usual at all). They were concerned about Hezbollah UAVs invading and bombing them. It was later in the day when we saw just how justified their concern was…

It was getting dark. Definitely, time to go home. That’s when the sirens went off.

We were on the road, nowhere near any kind of shelter. We did what other drivers did – stopped the car on the side of the road and ran down a small incline as far away from the cars as we could get. There was a ditch that provided some semblance of protection so we laid down and covered our heads, as the Home Front Command instructs us to do. When missiles hit shrapnel flies up at an angle so the best bet is to be flat on the ground and cover your head.

The sound of the siren blaring from the nearest community and my phone was nerve-wracking enough. Then I saw on the app update that the sirens were due to an incoming UAV. Then we heard explosions - the IDF trying to intercept – which is more difficult to do than with missiles that have a defined trajectory.

So there I was face down in a ditch, in the dark, shaking and cursing my curiosity. Len covered me with his body. He wanted me to feel safe and calm down so he made jokes to distract me. I laughed. Then I heard a little girl wailing in terror. She was further down the road with whoever it was that was trying to take her home. None of us were hurt but if I was shaking, how would a small child feel?

How long do you wait before moving when it’s a UAV attack and not a missile? I could see on my app that alerts were going off further south so obviously the UAV was moving in that direction, away from us. I assumed that it would be shot down closer to Haifa.

We got in the car and continued on the way home.

Outside Nahariya, the sirens went off again. This time missiles. Like all the other drivers on the road, we pulled over and got out to run to the nearest shelter. There wasn’t anything close and there wasn’t time. Some people stopped next to a wall that couldn’t really help. We were close to the mall so we ran in that direction, hoping to find an entrance. A building outside the mall looked like a bomb shelter but it was closed. It took us a moment to figure out that it was an electricity generator room for the mall (so not a place to go inside). So we stood in between the wall of that building and the wall of the mall, a relatively good place to be. Women from Nahariya were reluctant to stand where we were because they were wearing flip-flops and there were thorny bushes under our feet. But what’s a few scrapes in compared with flying shrapnel? We encouraged them to come in and they waited with us. One had a 10 or 12 year old daughter. She was silent but had tears in her eyes and her face was twisted in fear.

I swallowed my own pounding heart to smile and tell her she was very brave and doing a great job. It is absolutely infuriating to see children being terrorized – and children should not see grown-ups afraid.

There were no more sirens on the way to Haifa. When we arrived we thought we’d take some time to sit outside on the beautiful promenade overlooking the bay, breathe some fresh air, and relax before going home.

The weather was beautiful and the view stunning, as always.

And then, from the base at the bottom of the Carmel we heard their loudspeakers: “Warning! Be prepared for impact! Take shelter!”

What the hell?! First of all it was shocking that we could hear what was happening from so far away. And my reflexive response was, why do our soldiers have to be prepared for impact?! Hezbollah should be preparing for impact!!

And then they shot an intercept missile, bright like a streak of fire into the night sky. The trajectory was so steep, at first it wasn’t clear what direction it was going in – my body tensed before my mind understood what it was seeing. It looked like it went to Lebanon. The light disappeared and then we heard the sound of the explosion rolling back at us like a wave coming in from the sea.

Looking at my phone to see updates on what happened, I began seeing the lists of wounded roll in. The UAV that didn’t explode on us flew all the way to Benyamina and exploded on people there. A lot of people (later we learned that they were soldiers – 4 were killed, dozens wounded, some critically).

We went home and began to unwind from the too intense day. I understood that my body was washed with adrenaline, and I needed to decompress or suffer from stress poisoning, so I drank a lot of water.

And then the sirens went off.

We raced down the stairs to the shelter and listened to the huge explosions of the missile interceptions over our house.

It wasn’t easy to relax and go to sleep after all that but finally we managed – only to be woken up too early in the morning by sirens.

That was just one day when nothing happened to us.

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!

France24 reports:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should not forget his country was created as a result of a resolution adopted by the United Nations, French President Emmanuel Macron told cabinet on Tuesday, urging Israel to abide by UN decisions.

“Mr Netanyahu must not forget that his country was created by a decision of the UN,” Macron told the weekly French cabinet meeting, referring to the resolution adopted in November 1947 by the United Nations General Assembly on the plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state.

“Therefore this is not the time to disregard the decisions of the UN,” he added, as Israel wages a ground offensive against the Iran-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, where the UN peacekeepers are deployed.

First of all, the statement is false. The UN did not create Israel, and the UN partition resolution was never implemented.

Jews created Israel. Jews who worked tirelessly since the 19th century, buying land, building cities, draining swamps, building a government, all while defending themselves. When Israel declared its independence in 1948 it was despite UN and US) desires, not because of them.

But there is a more insidious part of this friendly reminder, perfectly articulated by Arab Israeli diplomat George Deek:

As I hear a world leader reminding Israel that it “was created by a UN decision,” it’s a perfect moment to address why European elites seem particularly vexed by Israel’s independence— and why they expect obedience.

For those European elites, the right of self-determination of the French, Palestinians, or Chinese, is framed as a matter of justice: an inherent, unconditional right of a people to their land. But when it comes to the Jews, the narrative shifts. Their right to self-determination is not viewed as intrinsic, but as an act of European compassion—granted out of guilt for the Holocaust. In this view, Israel exists not because of a millennia-old connection to the land, or because of global rejection or because of Zionist activity, but because Europe, burdened by its conscience, graciously allowed the Jews a state through the UN.

This paternalist narrative strips Jews of their agency and their deep historical ties to Israel. But much worse, it turns their right to a homeland into something conditional—a “gift” from Europe. And like any gift, it can be revoked if the recipient misbehaves.

And this is where the obsession with Israel kicks in. If Europe believes it bestowed Israel’s right to exist, then it assumes the authority to judge Israel’s conduct. The Jews, unlike other nations, are expected to earn their right to sovereignty daily by conforming to the standards set by their “benefactors.” Fail to do so, and the right that was “given” can be questioned—or withdrawn.

This is exactly right. For all other peoples, self-determination is an eternal right - for Jews, it is only temporarily allowed against the world's better judgment.

And that's the thing. The world doesn't really think the Jews are a people, or that they have any connection to the Land of Israel, or that they have the right to defend themselves. They'll pretend that those things are true, but when it comes down to it, they don't act like they believe it.

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 Blinken/Austin letter: The US demands the IDF do the impossible, and threatens Israel when they fall short

The Biden administration sent a letter to Israeli leaders on Monday threatening withholding of weapons if Israel does not do more to facilitate humanitarian aid to Gaza.

The main legal justification the letter brings is a National Security Memorandum created by President Biden, written just for Israel, instructing the Defense Department to force any country that receives US arms to prove that it is facilitating US humanitarian aid:

[I]n furtherance of supporting section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2378-1) and applicable international law, obtain credible and reliable written assurances from a representative of the recipient country as the Secretary of State deems appropriate that, in any area of armed conflict where the recipient country uses such defense articles, consistent with applicable international law, the recipient country will facilitate and not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance and United States Government-supported international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance.

The key word here is "arbitrarily." And that word can be abused by anyone who wants to.

Last month, Israeli media - and practically no one else - reported on exactly how Hamas uses humanitarian aid as a lifeline:

Hamas has profited by at least a half billion dollars from humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip, Channel 12 reported on Tuesday.

“It’s actually become the main oxygen pipeline for the terrorist organization,” reported Channel 12‘s Almog Boker.

Hamas steals the humanitarian aid and sells it to the population. It then uses the money to finance recruitment, Boker said, noting that 3,000 terrorists have been added to Hamas’s payroll in northern Gaza.

Hamas operatives have been recorded saying their warehouses of aid are full. Where is the outrage from the donors seeing the aid being used to fund a terrorist group?

Hamas does not just profit monetarily from controlling the aid once it arrives in Gaza. It also uses it to control the people, to give the impression that it is still in charge, and it is an implicit threat against any civilian who does not do what Hamas demands.

Israel has a legitimate military goal to destroy Hamas. Hamas is cynically using humanitarian aid to stay alive. The two are at cross-purposes.

There is nothing arbitrary about Israel's restrictions on humanitarian aid and its distribution; in every conflict and under international law the war's goals are primary and everything else - including civilian lives - are extremely important but secondary when they conflict. A minor military target does not justify major civilian harm, but a major target does.

The evidence that Israel is not arbitrarily blocking aid is clear from the effective distribution of polio vaccines in September, which everyone considered a success. There was no way for Hamas to profit off those vaccines, so there were few issues in the IDF facilitating distribution.

Aid dropped off at the end of September but, again, it was not arbitrary. Israel placed in a new rule in direct response to Hamas' abuse of humanitarian aid demanding that relief organizations responsible for truck convoys from Jordan to Gaza must complete a form providing passport details and accept liability for any false information on a shipment. The UN refuses to do this, fearful that Hamas will retaliate.

All this context is missing from the letter. And this is part of a larger pattern where the world blames Israel and only Israel for Gaza civilian woes and then ignores everyone else's role.

Israel didn't close the Rafah crossing where the bulk of the aid was entering before May. Egypt did, for purely political reasons, to not deal with Israel directly at the crossing and look like they were allies. There has been no pressure on Egypt to reverse that decision.

Similarly, Egypt has refused to allow Gazans to flee and seek refuge there. And the world is silent.

The US and the world are putting Israel in a humanitarian aid straitjacket and then telling it, sure, you can defend yourself but you must also do it while we give the UN, Egypt and Hamas a pass for making you the party solely responsible for Gaza lives. When you fall short we will add more straps.

I looked at the US Army reports on Operation Iraqi Freedom. While there is lots of documentation on facilitating humanitarian aid after military operations in an area were finished and the US controlled the area, there is practically nothing I can find about humanitarian aid during active combat. The reason is because it is nearly impossible.

In Gaza, Israel is not trying to conquer the sector. It is not holding or occupying large swaths of land. It doesn't have the manpower (and just imagine the world reaction to Israel occupying Gaza territory!) But without full control of the geographic area, humanitarian aid distribution becomes much more difficult - and this is before the enemy turns that same aid into a weapon for itself, something Saddam Hussein didn't even consider.

Beyond that, even after Israel defeats Hamas in an area, the civilians in humanitarian zones are where Hamas units move to in order to use them as new human shields for their military use.

This letter does not take into account any of this context. It, as well as the February Biden memo that it is based on, creates rules for Israel that literally reward Hamas for stealing and abusing aid and using Gazans as shields.

To be sure, Israel should be doing a far better job communicating its challenges. But COGAT issues daily reports on what it does and what its humanitarian aid partners are not doing, and the world media ignores them or treats them as unreliable.

Israel is being asked to do the impossible, and is then blamed for falling short. Ironically, Israel is closer to performing the impossible than any other nation at war has ever done.

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 Arab48 site reports on what they consider alarming statistics on an increased number of Jews visiting their holiest spot.

Recent data shows that the number of Jewish worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque has increased significantly, while deportation orders issued by the Israeli police against those who violate the prayer rules that violate the “status quo” in occupied Jerusalem have decreased by 40%.

This is attributed to the implementation of the policy of the Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who called for changing the status quo at Al-Aqsa Mosque, and who stated on several occasions that Jews have the “right” to pray there, despite the government’s denial of any change in the status quo.

The Ynet website reported on Tuesday evening that the intervention and influence of the occupation police in dealing with the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque has noticeably declined, as the number of deportation orders (issued by the regional commander against some extremists) has decreased by about 40%.

According to the data provided by the website, in 2022-2023, 44,317 settlers stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque, while in 2023-2024, 51,223 Israeli settlers and extremists stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque, an increase estimated at about 14%.

However, during 2023, the Jerusalem District Commander of the Israeli Police issued a total of 271 administrative deportation orders from Al-Aqsa Mosque due to “violations of prayer rules” and fear of “violating public security.”

In 2024, during the same period, the police issued only 163 deportation orders; according to the report, these figures indicate a significant decline of about 40% in enforcement and deportation operations issued against settlers related to violating the rules of prayer at Al-Aqsa.

But if prayer is allowed, why are any Jews being ejected from the Temple Mount at all?

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!

10/15 Links Pt2: October 7 and the Battle for the West; The Creeping Authoritarianism of Political Anti-Zionism; No BBC – not everything is equal

From Ian:

October 7 and the Battle for the West

It is this history that has set Jews apart from other communities for millennia, but it has also made them more resilient, because it is built on the proposition that God’s laws take precedence over the laws instituted by those with whom they live and work.

That which makes the Jews strong is precisely what drives others to fury and envy. How dare the Jews persist while we rise and fall? That is the burning question enemies of the Jews have asked themselves from the time of the Philistines, Egyptians, Persians, and Romans to the Nazis and the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies. Now it includes a very angry and frustrated “woke” left.

What is particularly infuriating for them about Jewish history is that it has an overriding moral dimension, expressed through individual action both good and bad. If individuals or a nation suffer success or disaster, responsibility ultimately belongs to human beings, not class or race or gender or intersectionality. Good and evil exist; they are inescapable and crucial dimensions of each individual life, and they reveal the power and justice of God. There is no sidestepping moral decision making, no passage “beyond good and evil” for any of us.

Ultimately, accepting the validity of this perspective offers us a deep sense of freedom, but it’s a freedom that comes with a price: that of personal responsibility before the imperatives of God’s laws.

As it happens, the West is the great inheritor of that Jewish freedom and strength derived from the binding personal relationship with God and God’s laws. It has passed down first through Christianity, and then through the moral foundations of the modern state, including the notions of human rights and individual freedom that the left used to celebrate, and perhaps still does. But paradoxically, the entire thrust of our postmodern Western culture has been to neutralize and then deny that Judeo-Christian inheritance for the sake of a secular ideal based on political expediency and the universal power of self-interest.

Much of the West deliberately exalted this de-Christianized ideal in order to appear tolerant and open to other cultures and identities, including of course Islam. But it has come at a terrible price. By adopting what the French philosopher Pierre Manent has called a “radical secularism,” we have come to deny our own identities, Jew and non-Jew alike.

Which brings us back to October 7, and radical Islam.

The bitter truth is that the Islamists see through our disguise. They know what the West denies, i.e., that we are a Judeo-Christian civilization with deep religious and moral roots. Accepting that fact doesn’t necessarily mean confrontation, let alone unleashing a new spirit of “crusade” (the term from which both radical Islamists and liberals recoil in horror). On the contrary, taking pride in our Judeo-Christian inheritance would make it easier for Muslims and others to come to terms with its living presence in the West, both here in America and particularly in Europe, where the denial of that inheritance has sunk to the level of mass psychosis.

But doing this requires those of us who are non-Jews to acknowledge who we are, and our eternal debt to Judaism—which, paradoxically, the drama of the Holocaust served to obscure (except for evangelical Christians, who understand very well what Israel and the Jews represent for them and the rest of us). To put it slightly differently, just as we can’t and don’t expect Muslims to shed their core identity, we shouldn’t shed ours. The model for Muslims of how to adopt to the modern West should in fact be the Jews themselves, who live in freedom in our midst and recognize our laws without relinquishing who they are, or who they want to be.

In short, what may lie ahead is a new cultural synthesis that can grow up in the shadow of October 7, for Jews, Muslims, and the West alike. A synthesis in which we are all honest about who we are, perhaps for the first time.

The Psychological Barrier of Western Ideology

Western ideology and consciousness fail to grasp the depth of a culture that does not accept a Jewish state in its midst. On Oct. 1, just before Iranian missiles rained down on Israel, two armed Palestinians exited a train in Jaffa, adjacent to Tel Aviv, systematically killing seven civilians, including one young woman clutching a baby to her chest.

The two likely knew they would not survive their rampage to kill as many Jews as possible, but this probably raised their motivation even higher, presenting them with a prize of martyrdom and a place in the hearts of family and community who celebrated rather than mourned their deaths.

Western minds want to believe that we are all alike, that we all want the same things, and that we all just want peace. It is the same thinking that glorifies "resistance" as legitimate and fails to recognize that internal belief systems are far more responsible for behavior than any external environmental factors.

The West's noble but naive approach, based on wishful magical thinking, absolves the putative "victim" of any responsibility and assumes that a "fair" solution would solve everything. As with any ideology, this thinking is hard to crack, despite the test of reality.

A reality where Palestinian leadership rewards terror, with stipends if they survive and subsidies for their families if they are killed. A reality where Palestinians educate children that Jews have no history in the land and have no rights to exist as a state. A reality where Palestinians chose and continue to support Hamas. A reality where Hizbullah and Iran both seek to eliminate Israel.

The inability to recognize the defining role of ideology in the culture of the Middle East has incapacitated much of Western thinking and has tilted policy towards solutions that impose Western-based values on a culture that views things very, very differently.

Seth Mandel: The Creeping Authoritarianism of Political Anti-Zionism

Mason seems understandably baffled by the controversy. But it’s a glimpse into where political anti-Zionism is headed. Mason was told he violated a party rule with his comments but has not been told what that rule was. There’s a certain consistency to this. After all, if the modern left-of-center anti-Israel movements are going to subscribe to Soviet anti-Zionism, the same folks surely subscribe to Soviet logic as well.

At its heart this is an authoritarian mindset: It’s never clear what the rules are so you must obey the party leadership, never challenge it. You are in violation if the party says you are.

And it’s easy to see where this is going. Scotland has laws against “hate speech,” and the trend both there and in wider Europe is to increasingly criminalize speech. It’s likely that future crackdowns will make Mason’s punishment seem positively generous—he’s not even going to jail for saying Israel isn’t committing genocide! What a benevolent system this is.

Modern Western progressive politics exists on a slippery slope—there is no even ground. For how long will it even be considered acceptable to deny an anti-Jewish blood libel?

We should note the flip side of this. The pro-Hamas hordes marching through the streets of the enlightened West have been openly calling for genocide against Jews, including but not limited to chanting a Hamas founding statement that seeks the murder and expulsion of non-Arabs from the region.

This is permitted speech, but at what point will it become mandatory speech? In the Scottish National Party, it is not permitted speech to say that Israel isn’t committing genocide. It’s not much of leap from Mason’s expulsion to “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” becoming something like a loyalty oath, the way professing one’s anti-Zionism already is among various university clubs in the U.S.

“Israel should disappear” is rapidly becoming the default position of political parties and movements around the world. The SNP’s expulsion of Mason suggests it’ll soon become the only acceptable position.

10/15 Links Pt1: An Astonishing Threat From the Biden Administration; The UN’s History of Aiding Hezbollah; Hamas HQ in Turkey directed failed Tel Aviv suicide bombing

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The UN’s History of Aiding Hezbollah

In the summer of 2000, Israeli forces pulled out of South Lebanon, where they had maintained a security buffer between Hezbollah and the Israeli civilians in northern Israel. A few months later, Israel was rewarded for this gesture when Hezbollah ambushed three soldiers on the Israeli side of the border and took them captive.

The Iran-backed terrorists disguised themselves as employees of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and attached UN markings to the trucks used in the attack. The next day, UN workers tried to tow away the trucks but were stopped by Hezbollah operatives. The UN workers turned the vehicles over to Hezbollah.

But there was a twist. The UN had videotaped the scene, which was filled with evidence of the previous day’s kidnapping.

What the UN did with that tape is crucial to understanding the UN’s role in Lebanon and in shaping the conflict up to the present. With that tape, the UN did… nothing.

The news this weekend was saturated with coverage of UNIFIL blaming Israel for putting its cardboard peacekeepers in danger while the IDF responds to Hezbollah’s continued attacks. Israel, in turn, exposed the fact that the UN has allowed Hezbollah to construct tunnels and weapons depots under its nose, protecting the terrorists from IDF counterstrikes.

But all of this begins back in 2000, with that videotape.

Israel’s Labor government pleaded with the UN to turn over the recording, which could help Israel in its search for the captives. Time was, as always, of the essence: Every minute that went by put the kidnapped Israelis’ lives in more danger.

Instead of turning over the tape, the UN lied repeatedly by claiming there was no tape. Eventually, scenes from the tape leaked, revealing what everyone knew the entire time: Of course the tape existed. At that point, the UN publicly admitted they’d had the tape all along.

By then, the soldiers were dead. In 2004, Israel would trade hundreds of terrorists in Israeli jails in return for the bodies of the three soldiers.

There was some irony here: The Hezbollah terrorists dressed as UNIFIL and then UNIFIL aided and abetted their getaway and helped ensure the murder of the soldiers. What had started with terrorists impersonating UN members ended with the UN impersonating Hezbollah. The two were on the same team, cooperating in acts of profound evil. It was manifestly unclear where the UN ended and Hezbollah began.

Sound familiar? It should: It’s also the story of UNRWA, the Gaza-based UN agency that has become an adjunct of Hamas. Its members participated in the Oct. 7 attacks last year and even helped hold Israeli hostages. The head of the UNRWA teachers union turned out to be a high-level Hamasnik with ties to Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of Oct. 7. We even have video of an UNRWA worker dragging away the body of a murdered Israeli alongside a Hamas terrorist. Where does one end and the other begin?

Israel is here to stay. We will not let Hezbollah destroy us.

Five times over the past two weeks, rocket attacks from distant lands have sent me running for the bomb shelter in my home in central Israel. When Israel came under attack from about 200 Iranian missiles last week, I huddled together with my wife and children and we sang songs while air raid sirens blared outside our shelter and the room shook from the booms of Israel's missile interceptor defense system.

Just days before that, we had rocket attacks on two successive days by Houthi militants in Yemen - the second while my three older children were with friends at a local park on a Saturday afternoon. With nowhere to shelter, they ran to a nearby wall and covered their heads with their hands.

Meanwhile, residents of northern Israel have been under incessant attack from Hizbullah since Oct. 8, 2023, displacing more than 60,000 Israelis. Many of their hometowns lie in ruins as a result of attacks by Hizbullah rockets, drones and anti-tank weapons. Nearly 50 Israelis have been killed there.

The root of the conflict in the Middle East is painfully simple: Israel's foes refuse to accept it. It has been that way since Israel's establishment in 1948. Israel's enduring enemies want to reverse the outcome of Israel's 1948 War of Independence and wipe Israel off the map. What choice does Israel have other than to fight?

Israel does not covet territory in Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Iraq or Syria. Israel wants to live in peace with these countries. But they refuse to give up on their dreams of annihilating the Jewish state. So Israel must respond to their attacks, ensuring they never become capable of destroying it. That's what Israel's response to Oct. 7 is all about.

The rest of the world should applaud Israel and offer it greater operational and intelligence support because these rogues threaten us all. In Israel, we understand that peace will come only when the country's enemies accept that Israel is here to stay. Until then, Israel must be strong - and continue to degrade those sworn to its destruction.

Israel’s red-blue line: Why is the Litani River so crucial in the war against Hezbollah?

With the end of the Second Lebanon war in 2006, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 required Hizballah to disarm completely—as did two previous Security Council resolutions—and more specifically required the terrorist group to remove itself south of the Litani River. (Why the first requirement doesn’t render the second unnecessary continues to befuddle me.) Pushing Hizballah north of the Litani is often cited as a possible Israeli goal in the current war. Lahav Harkov explains this waterway’s significance:

The Litani River is Lebanon’s longest river and a major water source for the country. It mostly runs north to south, but part of the river runs from east to west towards the Mediterranean Sea, in parallel to the border between Israel’s Upper Galilee region and southern Lebanon. The section parallel to the Israel-Lebanon border, also known as the Blue Line, is about seventeen miles north of Israel.

The population south of the Litani is 75-percent Shiite Muslim, making it a Hizballah stronghold, while the other 25 percent are Sunni Muslim, Druze, and Christian. [Since 2006], Hizballah stockpiled weapons and missiles throughout the area between the Litani and Israel, dug tunnels, and crossed into Israel with no significant pushback from the UN International Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

Hizballah uses the Litani River as a line of demarcation for its “first line of defense” against Israel. . . . Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser [said that] since UNIFIL has proven unable to enforce such resolutions, Israel will have to have a system for monitoring river crossings. “The Litani can only be crossed in a few places, so it can be supervised,” he said. “If we don’t want IDF soldiers there, then we have to monitor from afar. . . . It won’t be simple, but the supervision has to be Israeli because no one else will do it.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) never condemned Hamas for any of its terror attacks that killed Jews - not October 7 nor any of the hundreds of Hamas attacks in the decades beforehand.

Perhaps you can justify this and say that they only issue press releases about Muslim victims of the war. After all, they are a Muslim advocacy organization. Maybe they only issue statements when Muslims are killed?

So much for that theory:

CAIR Condemns Israeli Massacre in Christian Village in Lebanon

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today condemned the Israeli massacre of at least 21 people in a Christian village in northern Lebanon.

An Israeli airstrike hit an apartment building in the village of Aito in northern Lebanon on Monday, killing at least 21 people, according to the Lebanese Red Cross.

Nope. Israel attacked Hezbollah hiding among Christians, using them as human shields, and this gave CAIR an opportunity to condemn Israel as they have, daily, for over a year.

So they don't condemn when Jews are murdered, burned alive, kidnapped and raped for being Jews, but they condemn the incidental deaths of (apparently) Christians and Muslims, calling them all "massacres."

Yup. CAIR is antisemitic.

Israel said that it was targeting Hezbollah.

CAIR may or may not have knows this at the time of the press release, but AP reports that the entire building was rented out to the Hijazi family who fled southern Lebanon. Hijazi is a Muslim name. If Israel was targeting Christians, then what a coincidence that they accidentally hit a building with Muslims in the middle of a Christian village!

But the idea that Hezbollah sent their people deliberately to use Christians as human shields does not seem to be to the radar of world media.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Germany 1938 in Australia 2024: Jewish owned business defaced with red triangles and a threat, plus the Nazi origins of the triangle

This was the scene outside Avner's bakery in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday:

The Jewish-owned bakery was defaced with the Hamas "red triangle" targeting threat.

If that wasn't enough, a letter was shoved under the door threatening the owner: "Be Careful."

The owner, former TV chef Ed Halmagyi, said, "It’s hard to be intimidated by inner-city middle-class Cosplay Radicals who graduated primary school without their pen license.”

He kept serving customers in front of the Nazi-like imagery into the afternoon.

I do not see a single pro-Israel post on Avner's Instagram. The bakery was targeted because it is unapologetically Jewish, not because it is "Zionist." (Avner's is unfortunately not kosher.)

This is becoming an everyday phenomenon, and the fiction that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism gets more and more absurd.

___________________________________

The Nazis used the inverted red triangle, and triangles of other colors, to classify political prisoners.

As Seth Mandel noted a few weeks ago, when Donald Trump used that symbol in social media ads in 2020, he was attacked as using Nazi iconography to smear his political opponents.

His campaign removed the ads as soon as they could.

I highly doubt that either the Trump campaign or Hamas knowingly chose the Nazi symbolism in using the red triangles, but isn't it interesting that Trump was immediately accused of being a Nazi and that he should have known better in 202 - but outside Jewish circles, the media has generally not noted the Nazi origins of the red triangle as used by Hamas?

And isn't it even more interesting that no one expects Hamas to drop the red triangle even after its Nazi origins are pointed out?

When the media routinely treats a presidential candidate as being worse than Hamas, we have a bigger problem than just red triangles.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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The far-fetched case for Israel annexing Lebanon to the Litani

Turkeys' Anadolu Agency reports:

Israel’s escalating war on Lebanon, particularly the intensified attacks and ground invasion in its southern region, are all parts of the historical Zionist objective of controlling southern Lebanon and parts of the wider region, according to a prominent Lebanese analyst.

Even before there was the state of Israel, the Zionists were pushing for the British “to put the borders between Lebanon and Palestine at the time at the Litani River” as they saw it as part of their “Jewish homeland,” Karim Makdisi, an associate professor at the American University of Beirut, told Anadolu.

"They’ve always had this interest to try to have some form of control over south Lebanon, whether it’s through occupation, annexation or through, in more recent times, a kind of demilitarisation in the way of like the Sinai or these kinds of areas, "he said.

There is even the possibility of taking over southern Lebanon through illegal Israeli settlements, as in the Occupied West Bank, as that has been on the agenda of extremists who are now in power in Israel, he added.

You can find Israelis who advocate thousands of ideas. Their existence does not mean that the government is remotely considering those ideas. International law is 100% against such an idea, and I cannot imagine as single country supporting any such Israeli plans.

That being said, I found a couple of articles in Hebrew media about the idea of annexing southern Lebanon to the Litani, and they are worth at least entering in the conversation.

In Mida, Yaakov Feitelson goes over the history of the early discussions of the borders of the Jewish national home shortly after the Balfour Declaration. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the World Zionist Organization published its vision for what the borders should be.

This goes north of the Litani, and even includes the Zahrani River.

These are probably not Biblical boundaries. No one is quite sure exactly how far north the tribe of Asher went, nor how well they controlled the territory they did have, but most of Lebanon was controlled by Phoenicia during Biblical times.

Ben Gurion wrote about the desired borders of the Jewish state in a letter from Poalei Zion to the British Labor Party in 1921. His main concern wasn't Biblical but economic. He knew Israel would need reliable water sources, both for irrigation and for energy. "The Land of Israel is an arid land, and without artificial irrigation it is absolutely impossible for a large population to grow. There is no coal in Israel. And water power should be the main driving force of industry in the Land of Israel, " he wrote. The Litani was part of his vision.

Interestingly, Canada supported this idea, according to a news report I found from 1921 (The Hebrew Standard of Australasia, March 18, 1921):

Feitelson's main concern is not economic but security. Even though Hezbollah has long range rockets, there is immense value in strategic depth. He suggests the Zahrani River as being included because any rockets that are shot from north of there would give crucial extra time for people in Israel to seek shelter. He is not considering building settlements in Lebanon.

Hakol Hayehudi interviews Amiad Cohen, who advances a similar argument. But he is looking from the perspective of topography: a nation should have, as much as possible, natural borders and Israel needs to control high ground for its security. The current borders are the results of political concerns between England and France, not security. He points out that if Israel had not controlled the Golan Heights in 1973, the Syrians could have destroyed Israel during the Yom Kippur War. He looks at the Litani as the major natural boundary between Israel and her northern neighbors for similar reasons.

Cohen explained it on CBN in July.

Again, these ideas seem highly unlikely in today's world. But they are worth discussing if we want a solution, not a forever war between Israel and Hezbollah.

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

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Since Israel started sending ground troops into southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has been telling everyone that the IDF utterly failed - it failed to gain any ground, it was turned back at every village it tried to capture.

Then Israel started giving tours to villages in southern Lebanon to the media, showing not only that Israel had captured territory, but it was confident enough that Hezbollah would not fire on them because the areas around those villages were cleared.

This was totally unacceptable to the terror group that wants to control the narrative. And it went mostly after the BBC, which it sees as the weakest link and easiest to manipulate.

L'Orient Le Jour reports:

Hezbollah strongly condemned what it describes as dangerous behavior by several Western media outlets, following a promotional tour organized by the Israeli army for journalists.

In a statement released on Monday, the group had initially reacted to a BBC report by Jerusalem correspondent Lucy Williamson, who crossed into southern Lebanon as part of the convoy arranged for journalists by the Israeli military.

"Following our previous statement regarding the promotional tour organized by the Zionist occupation army for several Western media outlets, it has become clear that, in addition to the BBC, networks and institutions such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, Fox News, Reuters, The New York Times, The Financial Times, the Associated Press and other networks and channels also participated in this tour," Hezbollah said.

“The BBC, with all its platforms and in different languages, did not just blindly side with the murderers and criminals and justify the Zionist barbarism against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples, but brazenly sent a team that entered a southern village accompanied by the occupation army and violated the sanctity of Lebanese territory, sovereignty, and applicable Lebanese laws, as shown by the reports published by this institution,” Hezbollah said in a statement Monday.

Hezbollah’s Media Relations condemned “this unjustified and absolutely unacceptable move and demands the Ministry of Information, the National Media Council, and the relevant judicial and security agencies take the necessary legal measures against the BBC and its teams in Lebanon and protest to the BBC Company and the legal bodies representing it. It also demands that the unions of journalists, editors, and free media outlets in the world condemn this step,” Hezbollah concluded.

Six employees of BBC Arabic in Beirut announced their resignation today, Monday, in protest against a report published by BBC English about the fighting in southern Lebanon after the team visited Lebanese areas accompanied by the Israeli army.

The seven employees are Sana Khoury, Mohamed Hamdar, Marie-Josée Qazzi and Joey Sleem, along with three others from the BBC Extra team. They stated that "they will not return to work unless the institution issues an apology for the report or holds accountable the team that accompanied the Israeli army."

Wow. Who knew that journalists embedded with an army were breaking the law? All those reports from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere where every major media outlet participated were illegal, according to Hezbollah!

This is Hezbollah panicking about losing a battle in the information war. The usual response is an over the top, crazed reaction, knowing that Western reporters do not want to be harassed by anti-Israel drones on social media and perhaps in real life.

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!

10/14 Links Pt2: Why Western ‘solidarity’ is a death sentence for Palestinians; Dreyfus: A Very Modern Affair; Veteran Loses Job After Shooting Anti-Israel Attacker

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Why Western ‘solidarity’ is a death sentence for Palestinians

There is a question we must ask, ugly and unsettling though it is: who benefits from Palestinian death? It is my belief that Israel does not. On the contrary, given that the influential of the West hold up every civilian death in Gaza as hard proof of the unique evils of Zionism, it is always damaging for Israel when Palestinians die, even when the IDF does its utmost to avoid the loss of innocent life. The staggering double standard by which the woke judge the world’s only Jewish nation – we fight wars, it commits war crimes – means Israel is indicted more ferociously than any other state on Earth for that terrible thing that attends all wars: civilian casualties.

Hamas, on the other hand, clearly spies political advantage in Palestinian suffering. It knows every dead Palestinian will be marshalled by the West’s cultural elites as part of their zealous crusade to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish State. It knows the fires of Israel-hate that burn so fiercely in our opinion-forming circles are further stoked by every tragedy in Gaza. It believes there is moral benefit in the ‘martyrdom’ of civilians. And here’s the awful thing: there is. The swirling global culture of Israelophobia acts as an open invitation to Hamas to permit, and even puppeteer, ever greater levels of Palestinian pain, in the knowledge that this will land yet another blow on Israel’s prestige. Let us speak frankly: Hamas wants people to stay in northern Gaza because it wants them to die.

This is why the Battle of Northern Gaza matters. First, because it is proving to be one of the most intense confrontations yet between the Jewish State and the terror army that wishes to destroy it. And second, because it speaks to a truth too often obscured by the bigotries and bullshit of our Israel-obsessed elites. Namely, that this war they falsely depict as a genocide by Jews, as fascism rehabilitated by fascism’s one-time victims, is in reality a fight between a democratic state and a death cult. Between a civilised nation that regrets death and a barbarous outfit that relishes in it. Between a country that just wants to exist and terrorists dreaming of that ultimate state of non-existence: ‘martyrdom’.

Consider Hamas’s flagrant lie that it is discouraging people from leaving northern Gaza because it is ‘too risky’ elsewhere. You wouldn’t know it from the emotionalist coverage of the mainstream media, which depicts the clash in the north as a deranged one-sided assault by Israel, but Hamas militants are fighting furiously. There are around 5,000 of them in the north, many concentrated in the Jabalia camp Israel has been targeting. They have been shooting guns, firing anti-tank missiles and using high explosives to target IDF soldiers. Hamas is not telling people to stay in the north to avoid the risk of death elsewhere – it is telling them to stay to subject them to the risk of death. To the gross, inescapable dangers of life on a patch of land where a terrorist army fires deadly weapons in heavily populated areas.

Incapable of beating Israel on the physical battlefield of Gaza, Hamas seeks to wound it in the global battlefield of ideas, of images, of viral Palestinian suffering that the self-styled virtuous of the West lap up, retweet and weaponise against that state they hate above all others. Hamas is open about the moral boon it believes it can get from Palestinian death. Yahya Sinwar, its military leader in Gaza, has described the deaths of Palestinians as ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get the Israelis ‘right where we want them’. He believes, in CNN’s words, that the ‘spiralling civilian death toll in Gaza’ will ‘work in [Hamas’s] favour’. Western influencers’ frantic, giddy sharing of Palestinian pain to try to dent Israeli prestige directly inspires Hamas’s grotesquely cavalier attitude towards Palestinian life.

As I argue in my new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, ‘Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue’. It is your ‘commodification of Palestinian pain’ that incites Hamas to offer up yet more of it – such as by beating people with sticks to make them stay in a warzone where they might very well die. The gravest threat to Gaza right now is the death cult that rules it – and the Western apologists for that death cult. Free Palestine? Yes. Please. From the death-mongering of Hamas and the lethal pity of faraway elites who have no idea of the harm they are doing.

Anti-Semitism? What anti-Semitism?

There’s certainly been no shortage of the latter of late. In February, the Community Security Trust (CST) reported a 96 per cent rise in anti-Semitic assaults following 7 October. Bricks and bottles have been thrown at British Jews. One man, on his way home from a synagogue, was kicked by ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters and told, ‘We are going to rape your mother, you dirty Jew’. No doubt, this was just misplaced anger about the goings on in Gaza, because racially menacing British Jews is a totally normal response to a war raging in the Middle East.

Sarcasm aside, those still trying to pretend that this is anything other than pure anti-Semitism would do well to read that CST report from February. The peak in anti-Semitic incidents, it found, came just a few days after Hamas’s barbaric assault on Israel – weeks before Israel’s ground invasion into Gaza began. It represented a grotesque kind of ‘celebration’ of the pogrom, it concluded. Holding British Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government is disgusting enough. But even that doesn’t capture what has been going on.

Anti-Semitism has been metastasising for years now, yet the ‘anti-racists’ have been determined not to notice. Even before 7 October, British Jews were suffering a quarter of all religiously motivated hate crimes while making up just 0.5 per cent of the population. Stories of elderly Jewish men being sucker-punched on the street or Jewish sites being desecrated came and went without much comment. There’s a synagogue in Kent that has been smashed up eight times in 10 years, yet that story has struggled to break out of the local and Jewish press.

My mind often drifts back to those racist scumbags who drove around Finchley Road, another Jewish area of north-west London, in 2021. They chanted ‘Fuck the Jews… Fuck their mothers… Rape their daughters’ out of megaphones, in cars decked out with Palestinian flags. There they were, calling for precisely the kind of violence and sadism we saw meted out on the innocent Jews of southern Israel a few Octobers later. This was a call for barbarism dressed up as national liberation, in the middle of our capital city. And yet it provoked little more than perfunctory tweets from the great and good.

If they were willing to let that slide, they were willing to let anything slide. The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ since 7 October won’t have surprised anyone who has been paying attention. But it must deprive the woke set of the moral high ground for good. After years of raging against cultural appropriation, microaggressions and inanimate objects, they clammed up when genocidal terrorists achieved the most deadly assault against Jews since the Holocaust, and anti-Semitic marches became part and parcel of British city life. They showed once and for all that they don’t care about racism, particularly when it’s levelled against Jews. Never let them forget it.

10/14 Links Pt1: Israel’s best strategic position in decades; UNIFIL’s failure means it must leave or reform; Hezbollah drone attack on IDF base marks major escalation

From Ian:

Israel’s best strategic position in decades

Likewise, on Israel’s northern border, the threat of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal prevented Israel from taking offensive action. The thought of another conflict with Hezbollah was enough to paralyze decision-makers, including senior IDF commanders, intelligence officials, and political leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid. They were ready to throw in the towel and stop a war with Lebanon. But Netanyahu didn’t listen to those voices. In a series of daring, James Bond-like operations, Israel took out Hezbollah’s mid-level leadership with precision-targeted attacks that eliminated its command structure.

These strikes were a turning point in the war against Hezbollah, whose long-range rocket attacks are also being disrupted. And as it did in Gaza, the IDF is systematically dismantling Hezbollah’s vast tunnel network and confiscating weapons the terror group stored to use in a massive infiltration, which would have been worse than the Oct. 7 attack.

In another display of daring, Netanyahu took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the heart of Beirut. He did so without informing the Biden administration and, in true Israeli fashion, aimed to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. (And for the record, rather than forgiveness, the United States owes Israel its thanks for eliminating an evil dictator with American blood on his hands.)

Despite the pain and tragedy of Oct. 7, Israel is in a far better situation strategically than it has been at any time since its founding in 1948. Sadly, it took the horrors of that fateful day to awaken the Jewish spirit and finally do what was needed to defend ourselves. Today, we are a stronger, better-prepared nation, ready to face our enemies.

Netanyahu’s leadership has been instrumental in achieving this reality. He has demonstrated that Israel will not be bullied or dictated to when it comes to its survival. As the only freedom-loving country in the region, Israel is willing to take on Iran, the largest state sponsor of terror in the world, and destroy its capabilities, which threatens not just Israel but the entire region.

Israel is at the point where it can take the fight to its enemies. The threat of Hamas in Gaza is being neutralized, Hezbollah’s infrastructure is being dismantled and offensive strikes are also destroying terrorist strongholds in Judea and Samaria. Israel is no longer waiting for the next attack. Rather, it is taking the upper hand to prevent future attacks.

As we begin the new Jewish year, we begin it with hope. Israel is safer and stronger, having taken decisive action to ensure a more secure future, not just for itself but for the entire Middle East and the freedom-loving world. The pain, mourning and trauma of Oct. 7 continues, along with a stronger Israel that is shaping the future of the region and the world with a renewed sense of purpose.

Alan Dershowitz: President Biden Can Still Save the World in His Remaining Time in Office

"[I]n 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier I would have said it): 'The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!' But they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well-armed, better than they, then they started the war!" — Joseph Goebbels, Germany's Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 1933-1945.

Obama has been the "Chamberlain" in this 21st-century version of Great Britain's and France's appeasement of an evil and dangerous regime.

The Biden administration has extended Obama's destructive policy, resulting in an even stronger and more dangerous Iran. Under the Trump administration, Iran was considerably weakened economically and thus militarily. Now it is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear arsenal which will allow its proxies to operate under the protection of Iran's nuclear umbrella.

The other step that Biden could take would be to work with Israel on preventing Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal. Unfortunately, this cannot be achieved by more treaties or negotiations. As recent history shows, Iran will simply cheat, as it did after Obama's 2015 JCPOA "nuclear deal." The only way to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is through a military attack against its nuclear facilities, many of which are very deep underground. This can be achieved through U.S.-Israeli military and intelligence cooperation.

Israel should not give up any military advantage in exchange for intangible promises. Just look at how Russia violated its commitment, in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for the latter giving up its nuclear weapons. Ukraine gave the weapons up; in 2014 and 2022, Russia invaded anyway.

Although the United States, even as far back as the Obama administration, has pledged to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no reason why Iran should believe that, considering US appeasement tactics under Democratic administrations.

So the only realistic alternative – the least bad among the series of not very good alternatives – is a joint military attack, as surgical as possible, on Iran's nearly-completed nuclear weapons program. To allow Iran to cross the threshold and acquire nuclear weapons would pose a catastrophic threat to world peace. Stopping Iran from having a nuclear arsenal would, on the other hand, be a great accomplishment and a lasting positive legacy for the Biden presidency.

The result of inaction will be a terrorist regime with a nuclear arsenal, followed by a global nuclear-arms race. The fault for such a dangerous outcome will lie squarely with the "Chamberlain" Democrats.

UNIFIL’s failure means it must leave or reform

Hezbollah’s use of UNIFIL as a human shield not only endangers the peacekeeping force but also hampers Israel’s ability to defend itself from Hezbollah’s aggression. On Oct. 12, according to Shoshani, an IDF tank carrying wounded soldiers backed a few meters into a UNIFIL post because it was under fire and dealing with a mass-casualty event involving the evacuation of dozens of wounded soldiers.

“Again we were communicating with them. They [UNIFIL] were in their safe area. No UNIFIL people were in danger at the time of the event because of our communications with them,” he stressed. “Every time we operate in the area against Hezbollah, we give them [UNIFIL] a heads up to make sure they have a chance to get out of harm’s way or to go to the safe areas that they have in their posts.”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s Oct. 13 visit to Israel’s northern border further underscores the severity of Hezbollah’s military buildup in Southern Lebanon, which was totally ignored by UNIFIL and absent from its annual reports.

Gallant toured IDF operations aimed at dismantling Hezbollah’s tunnels and weapon stockpiles, which included hundreds of RPGs, munitions and anti-tank missiles. Hezbollah has established extensive military infrastructure in Southern Lebanon, including sophisticated missile-launching systems capable of targeting Israeli civilians with pinpoint accuracy. Don’t expect to find any of these weapons or plans for a mass-murder invasion of northern Israel in UNIFIL’s reports.

Gallant emphasized the IDF’s mission to dismantle these immediate threats, noting that Hezbollah launchers, located in civilian areas, could strike Israeli homes in seconds. Yet, UNIFIL has consistently overlooked these violations.

UNIFIL’s inability to prevent Hezbollah from rearming and operating freely in southern Lebanon has rendered its mission a failure. As such, its two logical choices should be to either leave the area, where it is doing more harm than good, or to seriously reform. The status quo, in which an international community convinces itself that its faux peacekeepers are contributing to stability in Lebanon, should not continue, as it has benefited Hezbollah almost exclusively.

The mounting evidence of Hezbollah’s exploitation of UNIFIL positions, combined with the force’s inability to report or monitor these violations, demonstrates that UNIFIL’s presence is not only ineffective but dangerous.

The situation calls for immediate decisions. UNIFIL must either adapt to the current realities on the ground or withdraw entirely from Southern Lebanon. A reformed UNIFIL, as suggested by the Alma Center in July, would involve a shift from its current model of a large force of 10,000 personnel to a more agile, reporting-driven approach. This would involve developing capabilities for Access, Reporting and Communication (ARC), allowing UNIFIL to monitor and report violations in real time, rather than serving as a static and vulnerable presence.

However, any discussion of dismantling Hezbollah’s military infrastructure will likely require international supervision beyond UNIFIL, which has proven unwilling to confront Hezbollah directly.

Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Washington D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former U.S. Army officer who taught at West Point, stated on a webinar on Oct. 3, “What’s going to happen when the IDF leaves? Well of course we know what’s going to happen: Hezbollah is going to move back in, and you can’t count on the UNFIL forces to do anything of course, if past is prologue. So that means Israel will have to have the means, the weapons, and the political permission, if you will, to periodically go back into Lebanon as necessary to take things out. And that’s where the United States comes in.”

Amnesty USA tweeted:

Palestinians in Gaza have been subjected to relentless bombardment and multiple waves of mass displacement by Israel for over a year.

Amnesty International reiterates its calls for an immediate ceasefire to end civilian suffering. The Israeli military must stop issuing mass evacuation orders which amount to forced displacement of the civilian population.

The only reason Gazans have been fleeing from one area to another within Gaza is because they are barred from fleeing Gaza altogether. That is, to a large part, the fault of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

Since the start of the war, Gaza civilians have been begging to flee to Egypt. Several thousand lucky ones were able to pay exorbitant sums to pay bribes to leave before Egypt closed the Rafah crossing.

But Egypt put up a massive wall specifically to stop any Gazans from entering. And neither Amnesty nor Human Rights Watch said a word.

Refugee protection is one of the topics that human rights groups should excel at. Nations are not likely to condemn Egypt for its stand against Palestinians refugees, because they don't want to endanger their own rights to choose whom to allow in their own borders. But human rights groups have in the past publicized the plight of refugees, from Myanmar to Syria and Sudan, and successfully pressured governments to allow refugees to enter.

If HRW and Human Rights Watch had created campaigns of the type they regularly mount against Israel, they would have caused public pressure on Egypt pointing out its hypocrisy in pretending to support Palestinians but not willing to save any of them. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans could be in semi-permanent housing in Egypt instead of being forced to go from one area to another since Hamas insists on using them as human shields wherever they go.

Thousands of lives could have been saved.

Outside of one article in The Hill by the HRW head refugee affairs (not a Middle East analyst) who mildly suggested that Gazans have the human right to flee, I cannot find a single statement by any human rights group demanding Egypt or any other country open their borders for Gazans to take refuge. The human rights groups seemingly fully swallow the propaganda that flight would result in the Gazans never being allowed to return because Israel would annex Gaza.

Everyone has the right to leave a country, the right to seek asylum, and the right not to be forced to return to face persecution or other serious threats. Egypt additionally has signed the the 1969 Organization of African Unity Refugee Convention which says they agree to not block any refugees in need from entering their country. These are basic human rights that the human rights community have conveniently decided don't apply to Palestinians.

When Amnesty condemns Israel for telling Gazans to move out of areas they intend to attack Hamas - something meant to save their lives - it is pointedly misdirecting from the real issue: why has it never called for Gazans to have the right to take refuge elsewhere, a right they insist upon for every other war zone?

Hamas is responsible for most Gaza civilian deaths, but Egypt and HRW and Amnesty should not be left off the hook for their role in denying Gazans their human rights and blocking them from being able to flee to a safe place.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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In 2010, The Guardian wrote an article about Wikileaks memos on the Iraq war.

It found that US troops often shot and killed innocent Iraqi civilians, including families, at checkpoints when they wouldn't slow down or stop after being instructed to and warning shots.

The interesting thing about the article is that The Guardian, while quite sympathetic towards the victims, is also sympathetic towards the soldiers who make these tragic mistakes and it explains the difficulties of avoiding killing civilians in wartime:

In the secret logs the killings mainly figure as "escalation of force incidents". Commanders send in reports outlining how soldiers faithfully followed the rules of engagement: first signals, then warning shots, and as a last resort direct fire to disable a vehicle or its driver.

The relentless drumbeat of civilian deaths illustrates the nature of 21st century warfare and key differences from the way the Americans conducted themselves in their eight-year war in Vietnam.

Suicide attacks were unknown in America's last major foreign conflict before Iraq. There was no expectation that anything on wheels or indeed any pedestrian could be a moving bomb. The second difference is a change in western military doctrine, common to other Nato armies during counter-insurgencies.

Known since 2001 as force protection, it puts a high premium on minimising all conceivable risk by permitting troops to bypass traditional methods of detecting friend from foe in favour of extreme pre-emptive action.

Notice how different the tone is from all the articles about Israeli actions during war in The Guardian and elsewhere. This is real reporting, describing the difficulties for modern professional armies in urban environments to avoid civilian deaths. In no way does The Guardian accuse the soldiers of deliberately targeting civilians or of even being reckless in enforcing their own policies. Additionally, the article points out that the US soldiers do what all NATO nations do under similar circumstances.

In short, this article provides context.

It is jarring to read something like this after a year of anti-Israel articles that consistently assume Israeli mendacity, Israeli guilt, Israeli depravity.

The other interesting thing about providing context of how Western armies acted in other conflicts is that they had no transparency. These incidents - and much more egregious ones, involving actual executions of innocent civilians including women and children - were covered up and only mentioned in secret memos, or the soldiers engaged in these actions were exonerated or given a slap on the wrist many years later after the incidents were publicized.

The contrast with the relative transparency of IDF investigations in incidents could not be starker. The IDF admits mistakes far more readily and quickly than the US Army ever has, often within days instead of years. And when the IDF finds that it did nothing wrong, as the US Army usually does when it mounts its own investigations, it is accused of covering up the truth or outright lying.

Here we have an example of journalism in The Guardian. Ask yourself why we aren't seeing this context and even-handedness in the mainstream media during the current war.

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!