Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, December 06, 2023

Was the Maccabean revolt and Chanukah story about Greek sexual abuse of Jewish girls?

Torah.org has an article about last week's Torah portion discussing the episode of Shechem raping Jacob's daughter Dinah in today's Nablus, and the violent revenge on the entire complicit city from her brothers Shimon and Levi.

The analysis concludes that Jacob did not oppose their bloody revenge on moral grounds - the brothers' final statement, "Should he treat our sister like a harlot?" remains unanswered by him. Jacob's opposition was that it was not tactically wise to potentially create enemies, but Dinah's rape was outrageous and the response was apparently the correct one when the tribes of Israel were powerful enough not to worry about repercussions.

This way of looking at how to respond to Jewish women being raped and sexually abused has obviously become relevant these past couple of months.

What most people don't know is that the story of Chanukah, according to some versions, has much of the same incentive behind the revolt.

From My Jewish Learning:

A commentary to Megillat Taanit called the Scholion was composed in the talmudic period but edited sometime between the 9th and 11th centuries. It reports that the Greeks sent officials to the Land of Israel for the purpose of raping brides before their marriage, a legal ordinance also called jus primae noctis in medieval legal documents or “right of the first night,” in modern scholarship.

The rabbis who authored the Scholion report that the Jews, out of fear, responded to this Greek policy by abstaining from marriage, and then by engineering underground weddings. But the upcoming nuptials of the daughter of the high priest prove too prominent to conceal. When a Greek official comes to rape the maiden, the Maccabees defend their sister’s honor. This is what sparks the rebellion.

Two other versions of a Hanukkah story based on the rape-of-the-bride motif appear in two disparate texts: the She’iltot of the Babylonian Rav Ahai Gaon, composed in the 8th century CE, and an anthology entitled Beit Hamidrash, which includes medieval midrashim and aggadot that were collected from Jewish communities in Germany and Poland in the 1800s by Rabbi Adolf Yelenik.
Rav Ahai recounts that after corrupting all the oil in the Temple, in a final act of desecration, a Greek leader attempts to rape Hannah, the daughter of the High Priest, while her father and her betrothed, Elazar the Maccabee, look on helplessly. In Yelenik’s version of this story, the Greek unfurls a Torah scroll to serve as a mattress for the rape.
Meanwhile the priests timidly deliberate about whether to act or await God’s redemption. They look to the eastern mountains, hoping that the Persians, also enemies of the Seleucid Greeks, would come to their rescue. Finally, Mattathias turns to the High Priest and suggests a revolt: “Counting ourselves and our sons, we are twelve, representing the tribes of Israel. Therefore, we can be assured of God’s backing.” Upon hearing this, Mattathias’ son Elazar the Maccabee kills the Greek general, saves his betrothed, and the rebellion begins.
In another tale found both in Rav Ahai’s writing and in Yelenik’s Beit Hamidrash, the woman protests her fate, unlike Hannah, who is portrayed as a silent victim. Like in the previous story, the Jews face increasingly severe oppression, yet subserviently attempt to avoid confrontation with the Greeks. Still the marriage of Mattathias’s daughter draws unavoidable attention.
The unnamed woman discovers that the elders are resigned to abandon her; rather than risking persecution, they plan to let her be raped by the king. But she does not agree. Her rape, she reasons, will be a sign to all the women of Israel that they too will not be protected. She prefers to martyr herself rather than become a symbol of desecration.
Our heroine makes a dramatic protest before she accepts death. She exchanges her fashionable clothing and jewelry for rags, brings a jug of wine to the public square, and drinks with all the passersby. In Yelenik’s version she strips entirely naked at the pre-wedding feast. Her family is embarrassed and outraged by the guerilla theatre she enacts.
“Where are all the good men?” she cries. “Are you ashamed by my nakedness, but you are not embarrassed to abandon me to the uncircumcised?” Her plea finally spurs the Maccabees to hatch a plan. Like a Trojan horse, the stunning bride is paraded through town to the house of the king, who lets down his guard and allows the newly-activated Maccabees into his inner sanctum, where a slaughter ensues.

In all the versions of the story given here, the Maccabees are eventually prodded into action because of the threat to the honor of Jewish women.

That threat is a far greater motivation to action and seeking justice than mere murders or kidnappings.

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!

12/06 Links Pt1: Silence Is Violence — but Not When It Comes to Israeli Rape Victims; Harvard’s President Erases Jews; At least 10 hostages were sexually abused in Hamas captivity

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Silence Is Violence — but Not When It Comes to Israeli Rape Victims

Following the testimonies, Yifat Bitton, an Israeli law professor, noted that the victims had been “silenced twice”— first by Hamas on Oct. 7, and then “by the silence of the very U.N. organizations that were entrusted with the mandate of protecting them.” There were clear signs of sexual abuse from the first moments of the attack, and by mid-November there were authoritative reports of Hamas’s widespread sexual assaults.

Yet it took U.N. Women, the agency that has that mandate to look out for women’s rights globally, eight weeks before issuing a perfunctory statement saying it was “alarmed” by accounts of gender-based atrocities during the attacks of Oct. 7.

As for other so-called human-rights organizations, the website of Human Rights Watch — which includes a page ostensibly devoted to women’s rights — has dozens of news releases about the war in Gaza. Not a word about the rapes. From Amnesty International: nothing that can be found on its website. The National Organization for Women denounced the Oct. 7 attacks on the day they occurred and last week issued a news release condemning “rape as a weapon of war.” But it contained no mention of Hamas.

Why not?

In a remarkable floor speech last week, Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, spoke of “the sting of the double standard,” which, he said, “is at the root of antisemitism.” He also recalled a talk he heard in college by Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, who confronted left-wing hecklers at an event at Harvard.

“We have lived with the double standard throughout the centuries,” Eban told the protesters, Schumer said. “There are always things the Jews couldn’t do. Everyone could be a farmer but not the Jew, everyone could be a carpenter but not the Jew, everyone could move to Moscow but not the Jew, and everyone could have their own state, but not the Jew.”

To which one can today add: Every victim of sexual violence should be heard; no condemnation of rape should ever come with qualifiers; “Silence Is Violence.”

But not when it comes to Jews.

Seth Mandel: Harvard’s President Erases Jews

Why would Gay struggle with such a question? The answer was revealed late in the hearing. Rep. Kathy Manning, Democrat of North Carolina and the former chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, said the following to Gay: “I understand that you have condemned the phrase ‘from the river to the sea.’ But I also know that the Harvard School of Public Health has a course called The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health that introduces students to the concept of settler-colonialism and its health-equity implication. It uses case studies in the United States and Palestine and talks about poorer health outcomes for indigenous and other non-settler communities. President Gay, are you aware that Jews are indeed indigenous to the land of Israel and have lived there for 2,000 years?”

Gay: “I do know about the long history.”

Manning: “So what is Harvard doing to educate members of the community about these phrases and other false accusations that Israel is a racist, settler-colonialist, apartheid state even as Harvard is actually teaching courses with the underlying premise that Israel is a settler-colonialist state?”

Gay: “We have faculty, we have outside speakers who come and, over the last couple of months in particular, have been providing more insight into the nature of the conflict and the ways forward.”

So what the university’s president said is this: Yes, Harvard is teaching a class with an anti-Semitic premise, but you may hear the occasional “outside speaker” who will balance that out by talking about “the ways forward.”

In that way, Gay served ably as both bookends to the hearing. The only thing her answers provided clarity on, unfortunately, was why Harvard has become so overtly hostile to Jews. What it means that Harvard University now has a president that is so clearly comfortable with that hostility is a question we not only need to ponder—it’s a challenge we need to confront.

Eve Barlow: Rape Denial + "Free Speech"

“Those who don't have truth on their side, turn to dishonesty.” It was apt that Katharine Brodsky tweeted this yesterday morning. What’s going on right now in the Israel-Hamas war is bigger than life. It should stop every serious person dead in their tracks.

So what we’re seeing since yesterday is a truly thrilling marriage of two phenomena: Jewish genocide calls are being protected as “free speech” by the highest elite institutions in America, while the rape of Jewish women on October 7 onwards by Hamas is being denied on an industrial scale. A match made in hell (or I guess heaven if you’re Yahya Sinwar)! Which means that from the most esteemed people in America downwards, everyone can say whatever they want to bring harm to Jews and once they have achieved that harm to Jews, they can also deny it. Happy chanukah, everyone!

Let’s look at the rape denial first.

Yesterday at the UN, witnesses gave testimony about sexual violence on October 7. I watched one first responder testify, and he could barely get words out of his mouth. You can tell that the man has not been able to close his eyes for two months for the horrors that lie behind his eyelids. Some of the first responders couldn't even tell you if the bodies they found were men or women. That's how much Hamas mutilated the human beings on October 7. This particular witness recalled that “nails” and other objects were found in women’s vaginas.

There is no end to my fury.

Yes, I too am incensed that nobody cares. Israeli women are not women apparently. Their rapes aren’t rapes. So many SA activists still say absolutely fuck all about October 7. That's fine. But just so you know, from now on we understand that the only reason you post about rape is when you think it makes you look good. Yes, the only reason you post about rape is because you have convinced yourself there’s some benefit to you talking about someone else’s pain. You’re all sadists, just like Hamas. The level of silencing, gaslighting, deception, bullying, and abuse that Jews as a whole are experiencing currently is absolutely appalling.

Well, Briahna, the victims are in the morgue so…

The Jews are re-living the worst eras of our history. So everyone who isn’t a Jew will fall into one of two camps: either you’re participating in our abuse and attempted annihilation, or you’re sheltering us from it. There is nothing bigger than this right now. Ergo: you’re in one of those two camps. Pick.

From Ron E. Hassner, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Wall Street Journal:

When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).

That's 86% of college students who either don't understand or actively support a call to destroy Israel.

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10% [I think 5% - EoZ] , thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.

But we cannot blame many of the students. They never learned basic facts to begin with, and therefore they are receptive to antisemitic lies.

Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.

An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.

A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percent of those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yet another 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be threatening, even racist. (This argument had a weaker effect on students who self-identified as progressive, despite their alleged sensitivity to offensive speech.)

In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region’s geography, history or demography. Those who hope to encourage extremism depend on the political ignorance of their audiences. It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education.

This begs the questions - how can a student make it to college, let alone graduate, without a basic understanding of history?

And how can they support a slogan that they do not even begin to understand?

There is a lot of pleasure in protesting against injustice. One feels accomplished, and well-informed, and - most of all - self-righteous. The more people the modern antisemites get to join, the more emotionally invested they are in what they are spending time protesting. Those people are quickly beyond help. It is a self feeding cycle of smugness and refusal to consider any facts that contradict what one is emotionally invested in.

This survey shows that most students haven't been seduced into joining those protests, but they are primed to. They only hear one side, and they don't even know there is another. Meaning, unless things change, as bad as things are now, they will be far worse in the future.

This is a major failure in American education. And no one seems to be in a hurry to fix this, since the priorities are on teaching "diversity" instead of teaching geography.

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!

Why is it so hard to understand that lying is an integral part of Hamas' strategy?

Hamas, and its fans, continue to insist that Hamas treated Israeli hostages well, that the hostages were happy and thankful at how they were treated.

This was an important narrative to Hamas. So important that they gave tranquilizers and extra food to the hostages before they were released to the Red Cross.

So important that they went out of their way to make the freed hostages wave to them and shake hands while the captives were still uncertain if they were really free. .

So important that they forced one of the hostages to write a letter "thanking" them for how well they supposedly treated her daughter.

Yet every day we learn more horrors of how the children - let alone adult males - have been treated in Gaza.

One child said he kept track of time by tearing off pieces of his fingernails and saving the clippings to count the days. Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev, the director of Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, said another child asked a flurry of questions: “Are we allowed to look out the window? Are we allowed to open the door? Can we walk outside the room?” Another child said she was confused to see people waiting for her because she was told that no one was looking for her, that no one cared for her, and that there would be no Israel left for her.

At times, a social worker or psychologist would step out of the room to cry.

“They spoke about death as if they’re going down to the grocery and speaking about which ice cream they will buy,” Dr. Mozer-Glassberg said.

And every day we learn more and more.

Hamas went through a lot of effort to create the fantasy of having treated the hostages well. And this is all solid evidence of the levels of deception that they go through to spread their narrative.

Everything Hamas said about the hostages has been proven a lie. But these are not mere lies - they are carefully pre-planned deceptions on multiple levels.

This isn't a set of off-the-cuff lies. This is a strategy. And this strategy extends way beyond the hostages to every aspect of this war. Because Hamas understands, perhaps better than Israel does, that the cognitive war is at least as important as the kinetic war.

Hamas' attempts to fool the world about how they treated the hostages are now proven. Equally proven are the absurd Hamas' denials of rape or even murdering civilians. Some of their lies are laughably obvious, like when they claim to have destroyed hundreds of IDF armored vehicles or killed thousands of soldiers, or that Israeli airstrikes hit the Al Ahli hospital. Any slightly objective observer can see these for the lies they are.

But they are all part of the same strategy to manipulate world opinion - there are plenty of antisemites who will cling to any crumb of Hamas lies and insist that it is Israel that is lying, and they are faithful soldiers in Hamas' propaganda army. Any time Hamas casts doubt in the general public about the truth, they win, no matter how provably false their claims are. And they are also playing to their base in the Arab world, with Al Jazeera eagerly parroting their lies on cable TV.

If Hamas lied about the hostages, and they did, then we can assume they are lying about everything in the same attempt to manipulate world opinion. Lying is an integral part of Hamas' war strategy.

Of course there have been children and women who have died in Israeli airstrikes. But that truth is part of a much larger web of falsehood claiming a huge percentage of the dead are women and children, that practically no terrorists are dead. In the past Hamas counted people who died of natural causes as being victims of Israeli fire - and hundreds of people die of natural causes in Gaza in any normal month. We've seen plenty of faked Pallywood productions of dramatic footage of injured and dead children, bulking up the real footage.

This is why it is so frustrating when the media or politicians make it sound like Hamas claims have equal or greater weight than what Israelis say. The hostage story shows that everything Hamas says must be assumed to be part of this propaganda strategy, that they are leavening a few drops of truth with a tsunami of falsehoods, and they look very sincere when they try to fool gullible Westerners and rally Arab allies.

Literally every word they say is aimed at manipulating the listener. That is the most important fact that the media is not reporting.

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!

You can scream "Kill the Jews" at Jews at major US universities without fear of punishment. It all depends on "context."

Last year, Harvard issued Title IX training that warned that students could be dismissed if they use pronouns that offend the person they are talking to.

Students were given mandatory training in appropriate behavior and one slide showed the "Power and Control Wheel" to help them identify cases where they might make other people feel unsafe.

Now, keep this in mind as you watch Rep. Elise Stefanik grill the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania about whether public calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their universities' codes of conduct.

The answer? It depends. It depends on context. If the desire to murder all Jews is not accompanied by action - perhaps actually killing Jews - then it sounds like it is protected speech.

I think they are saying that if the death threat is directed at one individual, that might be crossing the line. But if someone screams at a Jew, "All Jews must die," based on their testimony here, it sounds like that is not actionable.

Here is a really great clip of questioning by Rep. John James where he asks them what they are doing to fight antisemitism on their campuses. The answer is silence.

You can watch the whole thing here.

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!

12/05 Links Pt2: Seth Mandel: The Dream of Peace After the Nightmare; The ridiculous US plan for ‘the day after’; To Be a Jew in America after 10/7

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Dream of Peace After the Nightmare

Avi Dabush, of Rabbis for Human Rights, said he still believes in his work but that it’s unrealistic to expect it to bear fruit in Gaza as long as Hamas rules the enclave: “Right now I can’t see any way that we, the communities there and myself and my family, can live with Hamas on the border.”

There’s a hard-earned realism in those comments that doesn’t surface in the younger, Tel Aviv-based activists profiled by CNN and calling themselves Gen Zayin (Get it? Gen Z?): “The group’s anti-war position won’t be welcomed by most of the Jewish population at this current moment, they say, which is why Gen Zayin members stick up posters in the dead of night and surreptitiously share pamphlets that espouse their anti-war, anti-government manifesto in high schools.” The CNN article also interviews family members of victims and other activists, not just the know-it-all high school manifesto crowd. They, too, speak with anguish of reconciling their desire for peace with their will to continue as before.

There is a very good chance, however, that they will never come any closer to their goal than they were before Oct. 7, when it became tragically clear just how far they had been from it.

The picture we see in our minds of the border communities only contains what’s visible: the nearness, the friendly interaction, the breaking bread, the stillness between rocket alarms, a tense and hopeful status quo maintained by a fence. But that picture is painted by the unseen: surveillance cameras, remote-controlled machine guns, and underground barriers. Hamas used drones to disable the cellular-reliant surveillance and remote-controlled guns. The underground barrier was rendered useless because the terrorists simply bulldozed barricades and drove over the fence.

In other words, what you saw was only a façade. When Hamas made it so that what was visible was all there was, Israel fell victim to an unprecedented massacre followed by widespread Palestinian looting and rioting while Israeli survivors hid in safe rooms. Israeli border security—of which there will be more, not less, going forward—made it possible to believe that one day Israeli border security wouldn’t be needed. I don’t know how many Israelis will be prepared to believe that ever again, no matter what they see when they look out their windows.

Victor Davis Hanson: Weimar America

For the last 40 years, while Western leftists have naively supported Palestinian terrorists, their governments have appeased terrorist-supporting Middle Eastern governments for very practical reasons. The old subtext to such mollification was that 500-million irate Arab Muslims, and a Middle East with 40 percent of the world’s oil reserves, in realist terms, simply argued against the interests of 10 million Israelis.

But now there are two new, venomous elements in the matrix.

One is that the racist DEI industry assumes that all intersectional nonwhite communities are victims of white privilege and supremacy. Therefore, as permanently oppressed, they are declared incapable of being racist themselves. And so they can harass with impunity the supposed victimizers—in this case American Jews, who are declared culpable whites.

So the oppressed, according to the DEI bible, cannot be anti-Semitic, though many certainly are. And they apparently cannot be held accountable for their hatred or frequent violence.

Secondly, in the last two decades there has been an epidemic of immigration into Western nations from the Middle East. In often-divided democracies like ours, politicians seek to appease as many pressure groups as possible, whether citizen voters or merely resident demonstrators, to acquire and maintain power.

Such pro-Hamas demonstrators, rah-rahing from a free, prosperous, and secure West, expect no rebuke for their obvious hypocrisy in cheering on an autocratic, dictatorial Hamas that has wrecked the economy of Gaza, shoots dissidents, and allows no free expression. And Middle Eastern guests and immigrants are never reminded that their very demonstrations are predicated on not being physically present in their homelands, where they might be shot for what they say and do freely in the West.

We are on a trajectory similar to that of 1930s Germany.

Every time a student is cornered, harassed, or threatened; a high school mob tries to swarm and harm a teacher; a government spokesperson dismisses such hatred; or American soldiers are targeted by Iranian-fed terrorist organizations; the madness, racism, and anti-Semitism will increase—until it reaches a saturation point of abject violence in our streets.

Once a society mainstreams the values of thuggish brownshirts, and ignores their “from the river to the sea” eliminationist chants and screams of “beat the f—king Jew,” then the next emboldened step is foreordained.

True, most Americans were appalled by October 7 and accept that every nation has the right to defend itself from terrorist killers. Most Americans deplore vicious demonstrators and their calls for violence on behalf of the Hamas death cult. And most Americans want their President to demand the release of American hostages and to deter Iranian-backed terrorists who attack U.S. military personnel in the region.

But unless the public demands that their universities enforce on campus the Bill of Rights and the right to move freely in safety, that police enforce laws against mob violence on America’s streets and in our schools, and that the United States stops greenlighting mass immigration from anti-Western nations and extending student visas to residents of anti-American, terrorist-supporting, and autocratic Middle East regimes, then in suicidal fashion we are headed for a 1930s nightmare.

A Plea to the International Law Community: On De-Humanizing and the October 7th Atrocities

The paper that I was going to present today addresses cases where there is an apparent contrast between the formal articulation of international law and shared basic moral intuitions. When I initially used the term “common sense” it was in the assumption that we have shared basic moral intuitions. I assumed that we could be consistent with our positions and apply the same academic standards to all cases in good faith regardless of who the parties are. And in fields that deal with a broken world such as jus ad bellum and jus in bello, I assumed an ability to accommodate complexity and contrasting interests that literally involve life and death.

I am currently having significant doubts about whether this is really the case. The reaction to the events of October 7th by so many of our international legal community have left me broken.

Let me give a few examples. In a post published on Opinio Juris on October 10, the author almost celebrated the Hamas atrocities that had occurred 3 days prior.* Not only was there an apparent lack of empathy expressed for the victims of those atrocities or even an acknowledgment of those crimes, the author instead referred to October 7 as a “counter-offensive” and cited Frantz Fanon and Sukarno to justify the events stating that “‘decolonization is always a violent phenomenon’ for the coloniser ‘does not give up their loot easily.’ ״ For the reader to understand their use of the term, “counter-offensive,” the author hyperlinked to an essay that speaks at length in unvarnished celebration of the October 7 attack (e.g., lauding the “spectacular feat … an amazing and highly daring offensive;” an attack that “dealt a heavy blow to the unbearable haughtiness” of the Israeli government and stating, “[t]he Israeli flag was projected on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on the evening of 7 October in a contemptible display of fawning over the state of Israel”).

Sadly, this is not a unique example, but instead is representative of a trend within the academic community in general and within the community of international lawyers in particular. Various academics celebrated the atrocities in various public forums, while others justified the horrible crimes on social media. In a recent post, Opinio Juris published a piece calling for States to act to prevent a potential genocide in Gaza without any reference to the events of October 7 or their perpetrator, Hamas,—not to mention the analysis of those acts under the Genocide Convention. It is no wonder that this author failed to mention the October 7 atrocities, as he had in fact justified it on that day, posting that morning on X: “UNGA Res. A/RES/33/24 on 29 November 1978: ‘Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle’.” There were and are, of course, many such posts on X and elsewhere celebrating the atrocities of October 7. But what is notable here is that mainstream international law blogs are willing to publish posts that justify such atrocities without much resistance of the international law community.

How can we truly think of shared moral intuitions if one of the leading international law blogs is willing to publish a post that effectively celebrates the brutal and intentional murder of children, men, and women including holocaust survivors, the raping of women, the destruction of entire communities, and the abduction of more than 200 hostages including children as young as 9-months-old? How can we reconcile the acceptance of such posts and public positions by some members of our community? Are we willing to accept a situation where some human beings do not deserve protection, like my young son Gev, due to the power relations between parties to a conflict?

This week's EoZ cartoons and memes

Yeah, I've been doing a lot since 10/7. Because sometimes a graphic can say what an essay can't.

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!

UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict STILL silent about October 7

Over the weekend, after mounting pressure,UN Women belatedly issued a condemnation of Hamas sexual assaults of Israeli women on October 7.

Their statement was clearly issued reluctantly nd only because of the pressure. They would never have issued it otherwise.

How can I be so sure? Because another UN office I mentioned last week - whose only mission is to combat this exact crime - has remained mute.

The Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, whose X handle is @EndRapeInWar, has been actively tweeting since October 7.

But not a word condemning Hamas or expressing the least bit of empathy to victims of rape and horrific violence in Israel.

This UN office has one job. It knows that UN Women issued its late condemnation. Even though it often retweets UN Women, it didn't bother retweeting that.

EndRapeInWar's silence cannot be seen as anything but complicity and as condoning Hamas war crimes.

The Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, has had a choice every day fo reight weeks. She chooses not to condemn perhaps the most disgusting sexual attack on civilians in recent decades.

(h/t Irene)

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!

12/05 Links Pt1: Lahav Harkov: We must bear witness; Victor Davis Hanson: The Unhinged Among Us; Hamas drugged freed Gaza hostages to make them seem calm and happy

From Ian:

Lahav Harkov: We must bear witness

Two months after Hamas terrorists massacred, raped and kidnapped Israelis, there are still people who are trying to deny any of it ever happened.

Then, there are those who don’t deny October 7 happened, but they ridicule and downplay it. Being held hostage isn’t so bad, they say. The conditions were “reasonable.” No women actually testified to being raped.

Sadly, this form of evil is not new.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his essay "Anti-Semite and Jew:"
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

Those of us who do not delight in antisemitism, those of us who value the Jewish people and the spirit of every human being, created in the image of God, must bear witness. We must be armed with the knowledge of what Hamas did, in the face of the absurd arguments put forward with a straight face by those who hate us.

Today, I bring you articles for that purpose, so that we know the evil that Hamas committed on October 7.

The testimony in these articles is at times graphic and difficult to read, so I will provide a shorter preview than usual here, and link to further details.

Amid documented sexual violence, a new civil commission aims to hold Oct. 7 perpetrators responsible
As the Israel Police sifts through the massive quantity of evidence from Hamas’ massacre of Israelis last month, it’s working to build the case for charges of rape against many of the terrorists. Meanwhile, the founders of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, outraged at the silence from international women’s and humanitarian organizations, are documenting cases of Hamas’ use of sexual violence as a weapon against Israelis.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Unhinged Among Us

The “rules of war” are violated by Hamas daily. Such protocols require combatants to wear uniforms not to blend in with civilians, not to use them as shields, not to murder noncombatants, not to rape them, not to mutilate them, and not to execute civilians without trial.

Why then would millions ally themselves with this odious reincarnation of the SS?

Are they ignorant of the history of the Middle East?

Are they arrogant since few challenge their hate and threats?

Are they opportunists who feel mouthing anti-Western shibboleths gains them career traction in leftist-run media, academia, and popular culture?

Are they bullies who count on the Western silent majority remaining quiet as they disrupt lives, trash Western tolerant culture, and commit violence?

Like Hamas that they support, do they despise Jews? Why else do they express an existential hatred toward Israelis that they never display to any other group?

Those now on the street utter not a peep about the Sudanese Arab mass killers in Darfur, Chinese oppressors of the Muslim Uighurs, Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine, or ISIS, Syrian, and Yemeni murderers of fellow Muslims.

Yet all of these terrorist killers are guilty of the very charges the protestors falsely attribute to Israel. But they are all not Jewish—and that explains the pass given them by our anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas street.

NYTs: Accounts of Sexual Violence by Hamas Are Aired Amid Criticism of U.N.

Since the Oct. 7 attack, during which more than 1,200 people were killed and some 240 people were kidnapped, Israeli officials have accused the terrorists of also committing widespread sexual violence — rape and sexual mutilation — particularly against women.

Yet those atrocities have received little scrutiny from human rights groups, or the news media, amid the larger war between Israel and Hamas — and until a few days ago, they had not been specifically mentioned or condemned by UN Women, the United Nations’ women’s rights agency, which has regularly spoken out about the plight of Palestinian women and girls.

Israelis and many Jews around the world say they feel abandoned by an international social justice community — women’s groups, human rights groups, liberal celebrities, among others — whose causes they have supported in crises around the world.

On Monday, some 800 people, including women’s activists and diplomats representing about 40 countries, crowded into a chamber at U.N. headquarters in New York for a presentation laying out the evidence of large-scale sexual violence, with testimony from witnesses like Ms. Mendes and Mr. Greinman.

“Silence is complicity,” Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive, told those assembled. She, along with Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, was among the event’s primary organizers. “On Oct. 7, Hamas brutally murdered 1,200 souls and in some cases, they first raped their victims,” Ms. Sandberg added. “We know this from eyewitnesses, we know this from combat paramedics, we would know this from some victims if more had been allowed to live.”

Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sex crimes, which it said would violate Islamic principles.

But ample evidence has been collected, like the bodies of women found partially or fully naked, women with their pelvic bones broken, the accounts of medical examiners and first responders, videos taken by Hamas fighters themselves, and even a few firsthand witnesses like a woman, in a video made public last month by police officials, who said she had watched Hamas terrorists take turns raping a young woman they had captured at a music festival, mutilate her and then shoot her in the head.

Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said in an interview that it had documented “violent rape incidents, the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen,” on Oct. 7, against women and some men. “I am talking about dozens.”

Israeli officials have not estimated how many women were sexually assaulted or mutilated. They say that overwhelmed forensic scientists had to focus at first on identifying bodies, rather than collecting perishable evidence of rape. Few victims or eyewitnesses survived, and fewer have spoken publicly.

Two people embrace in front of a group of people sitting in the background.

At the United Nations on Monday, Yael Richert, a superintendent with the Israeli police, presented video of witness interviews, including with a paramedic who said, “Shooting was targeted at sexual organs, we saw that a lot.”

Outside, hundreds of protesters accused the United Nations of a double standard when it comes to sexual violence; some chanted, “Me too, unless you are a Jew.”

The United Nations, and UN Women in particular, have become a primary focus — though hardly the only one — of mounting anger for their silence. Secretary General António Guterres immediately condemned the Hamas massacre, but not until late November did he issue a statement that the related sex crimes specifically must be “vigorously investigated and prosecuted.”

From Reuters:

Israel has assembled a large system of pumps that may be used to flood tunnels used by militant group Hamas under the Gaza strip in a bid to drive out fighters, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing U.S. officials.

Around the middle of November, Israel's army completed the set-up of at least five pumps about a mile north of the Al-Shati refugee camp that could move thousands of cubic meters of water per hour, flooding the tunnels within weeks, the report said.

It was not clear whether Israel would consider using the pumps before all hostages were released, according to the story. Hamas has previously said it has hidden captives in "safe places and tunnels."

It is instructive to look at 2015, when Egypt did the same thing to destroy the smuggling tunnels under Rafah to Gaza.

At the time, mainstream media criticism was quite muted. Egypt's government obviously hated Hamas, linked to the despised Muslim Brotherhood, The flooding was meant to hurt Hamas economically as a large part of its revenue stream at the time came from taxing goods illegally smuggled through those tunnels.

Al Jazeera and other pro-Hamas news sites were more critical, saying that the flooding would damage groundwater supplies, houses could be destroyed by landslides caused by the collapsing tunnels, and the people whose livelihoods depended on smuggling would be hurt.

And it wasn't only seawater. Some reports say that Egypt pumped poison gas or deadly chemicals into the tunnels. And "human rights groups" were silent.

The funny thing about the coverage is that while Gazans were upset, they emphasized that they still loved their brothers in Egypt - who were trying to destroy their economy.

For Bakeer, 61, the fact that Egypt, once a gateway to the world for Gaza's 1.8 million Palestinians, was behind his family's suffering, was particularly painful.

"We respect our neighbors, we love Egypt, but our neighbors are making our life harder," he said in his one-storey unfinished cinder block house, around which water seeps and cracks in the ground are growing wider.

If Israel decides to do it, though, we will see the "undrinkable water" and "landslide" narratives to be far more prevalent than in 2015. There will also be one word dominating the coverage that no one heard in 2015: "genocide." Because when Jews do something, even with far more care not to damage things than Egypt ever would, they are always much more guilty.

I don't recall any investigations by human rights groups into these accusations, especially the poison gas case which would be a clear war crime.

It is fascinating to see how Egypt, which refuses to allow Gazans safe haven, is still regarded by Gazans as their friends.

Because they aren't Jewish.

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Another Moroccan who was attacked for condemning Hamas on October 7

Last week, I noted a Moroccan intellectual who condemned the Hamas attack on October 7 (in French, not Arabic), and how other Moroccan writers condemned him in turn.

It turns out another Moroccan citizen and proponent of the Abraham Accords, Ahmed Charai, had written an article on October 7 itself at the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune (which is part of a large Moroccan and international media conglomerate that he owns.)

The title is "We are all Israelis."

Excerpts:

The 1973 Yom Kippur War began as a surprise attack on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. On October 7, 2023, history has repeated itself.

Earlier today, Hamas, an Iran-backed terror group, launched a surprise attack by land, water, and air – including glider assaults and more than 5,000 rocket strikes in the first 20 minutes. On the ground, Hamas terrorists punched through the border fence and drove through two checkpoints that Israel keeps open for humanitarian supplies. They attacked armored vehicles, and waged gun battles with police and Israeli reservists for hours. Neighborhoods became battlefields. Dozens of civilians and soldiers have been taken hostage. Updated reports say 500 Israeli civilians were murdered....

Today is Simchat Torah, a holy day of celebration, which translates as “joy of the Torah.” On this day, observant Jews do not work, drive, write, or turn on electronic devices. A perfect day to attack a quietly celebrating democratic nation.

Already, social media is polluted by those trying to justify the unprovoked barbarity of the surprise attacks. Some said that Israel should give land for peace. This ignores that Hamas planned these attacks from the Gaza Strip, which Israel handed over in 2006 to make peace. Others talked of the “humiliation” of having to show their identification at the border fence, just as millions do at border-crossings and airports all over the world. Still others talk about self-determination—forgetting that Palestinians elected their own leaders in the Gaza Strip and those leaders ordered these attacks.

And all this babble ignores the human view: wives who watched their husbands die outside their homes, children lost in rocket attacks or slain by stray machine-gun rounds. The suffering by the many, who have no part in politics, is immense.

If we tolerate extremism, it will erode the rock of security and ultimately destroy all US efforts to stabilize the Middle East.

Hamas’ leader, Ismail Haniyeh, should no longer be received as a hero in Arab capitals. The US Treasury must sanction Haniyeh and his loved ones and deprive them of travel and international payments.

It is also not normal that Hamas continues to be supported by a series of non-state initiatives and foundations, some of which are based in Europe.

When the smoke clears, it is likely that American citizens will be among the dead and wounded. Hamas is now a threat to America’s national security and its attempts to bring peace to the region.

Keep in mind that this article was written on the day of the massacre, before any real Israeli military action. Yet even so, there were very angry responses to this article in Morocco, condemning Charai for saying anything negative about Hamas.

The head of Morocco's Islamist Justice and Development Party wrote his own "We Are All Palestinians" response, invoking the Al Aqsa Mosque as a reason for Hamas' massacre.

Journalist Omar Labchirit considered the article to be treason, saying that no one should write anything that is against Moroccan foreign policy. (As far as I know, Morocco did not issue any pro-Hamas statements.) He considered this article to be “blackmail and pressure on the position of the Moroccan state for the benefit of the outside.”

Writer Idris Al-Kanbouri considered the article a gross insult to Morocco, saying it "goes beyond the state’s position and harms Morocco and desecrates its reputation.”

Perhaps the best description of antisemitic Moroccan reaction to the article comes from this article summarizing the incident, where the author says, "The public also expressed its deep sadness and anger to hear this opinion from an Arab citizen of Moroccan nationality and from Arab countries, and that we all carry the Arab identity and we should express our Arab .identity and stand with the Arabs in all places." Honor demands a single unified position towards Israel, and there is nothing Hamas can do that is too heinous to not be supported as long as it is against Jews. All in the name of Arab solidarity.

At least that is more honest. But not honest enough.

Because Charai's critics tried to discredit him immediately when they started spreading what they consider a damning photo of Charai - standing next to a religious Jew.

Which proves the real issue here isn't support for Hamas but hate for Jews.

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!

Egypt's Youm7 has an article about a 20th century Egyptian geographer, Gamal Hamdan.

While he had written a number of books about Egyptian history and geography, this article doesn't concern itself with that. They concentrate on his insistence on the fantasy that today's Ashkenazic Jews had descended from Khazars.

Apparently, he claimed to have proven that Jews who had lived in Europe were not related to the original Jews of the Bible because of the shapes of their eyes, hair color, and - especially - the shapes of their heads.

Yes, he based his theories on the pseudoscience of phrenology, which had already been discredited a century before.

But the article says:

All of these facts that Hamdan was able to prove angered Zionism, so he died under dire circumstances. It was said that his tragic death in a fire that consumed his apartment on April 17, 1993, was surrounded by many doubts on the part of his family and disciples, as they thought it came from the hand of the Israeli Mossad, which was tainted with the blood of many scholars and writers around the world who oppose Zionist ideas.

That's it. He espoused a ridiculous theory that had been popular among many for over a hundred years, and he died in a fire many years later.

That's enough to publish a conspiracy theory that the Jews killed him because they didn't want people to talk about the Khazar theory.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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12/04 Links Pt2: Kissinger’s Final Interview: Forget a Palestinian State, Let Jordan Rule; Israeli Arabs vs. the ‘Pro-Palestinian’ West

From Ian:

Kissinger’s Final Interview: Forget a Palestinian State, Let Jordan Rule

The late Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who passed away last week at the age of 100, gave a recent interview in which he suggested that Hamas’s terror attack October 7 had killed the two-state solution, and Jordan should rule the West Bank.

The October 18 interview, published by Politico on Saturday, is thought possibly to be Kissinger’s last. It includes the following:

I am in favor of a peaceful outcome. I don’t see a peaceful outcome with Hamas involved in the conflict. I would favor negotiations between the Arab world and Israel. I do not see, especially after these events, that direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are very fruitful.

A formal peace doesn’t guarantee a lasting peace. The difficulty of the two-state solution is shown by the experience of Hamas. Gaza was made quasi-independent by [former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in order to test the possibility of a two-state solution. It has led, in fact, to a much more complex situation. It has become so much worse in the last two years than it has been in 2005. So the two-state solution doesn’t guarantee that what we saw in the last weeks won’t happen again.

I believe the West Bank should be put under Jordanian control rather than aim for a two-state solution which leaves one of the two territories determined to overthrow Israel. Egypt has moved closer to the Arab side, so Israel will have a very difficult time going forward. I hope that at the end of it there will be a negotiation, as I had the privilege to conduct at the end of the Yom Kippur War. At that time, Israel was stronger relative to the surrounding powers. Nowadays, it requires a greater involvement of America to prevent a continuation of the conflict.

Kissinger was referring to the “disengagement” by Israel from Gaza in 2005, when it pulled out all of its soldiers and civilians.

Instead of turning Gaza into a viable state, despite generous promises of international aid, the Palestinians turned it into a staging ground for terror attacks and rocket fire against Israel. Hamas aso seized power from the Palestinian Authority in a 2007 coup, making the problems of the Gaza Strip even worse and giving Iran a foothold in the area, leading to several conflicts with Israel.

The “Jordanian option” has long been favored by the Israeli right, though it has been, until now taboo in foreign policy circles.

Seth Mandel: Israeli Arabs vs. the ‘Pro-Palestinian’ West

The truth is more complicated but also more rewarding for anyone who wants to understand the conflict. Israeli columnist Nadav Eyal points to a new study, which finds a decrease in Arabs’ description of their “most important identity factor” as Arab and an increase in those “who say the most important part of their identity is Israeli citizenship, which now stands at over 33%, surpassing all other factors (religious affiliation, Palestinian identity, and Arab identity).”

Israeli was the top choice for the most important facet of Arab-Israeli identity. The least popular choice? Palestinian, with 8 percent. That certainly counts as “many” people if, say, you’re stuck in an elevator with all them.

It’s not too difficult to understand the trend. After all, on October 7, a foreign army invaded their state and butchered Jews and Arabs alike. A similar poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found a marked increase in Arabs who feel part of the state. A few months ago, Tamar Sternthal and Gilead Ini surveyed previous polling:
A 2019 Israel Democracy Institute report found that only 13 percent of those surveyed identify as Palestinian (“Jews and Arabs: Conditional Partnership”). Other surveys have similar findings. For example, a 2017 study by Arik Rudnitzky and Itamar Radai found that only 8.9 percent of Israeli Arabs identify as “Palestinian in Israel/Palestinian citizen in Israel” and 15.4 percent identify as “Palestinian” (“Citizenship, Identity and Political Participation… ” p. 22). A third study, conducted in 2020 by Camille Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, found only 7 percent of non-Jewish people in Israel identify as Palestinian. Similar findings are apparent in the 2017 Shaharit survey.

None of this means the Palestinian cause isn’t important to Israeli Arabs. The point is that much of the Western media and activist class sees Israel’s Arabs as their own personal agents of destruction within Israeli society, while Israelis of all stripes view them as citizens. Deep Western antipathy toward coexistence in the Middle East isn’t helping anyone. It is also, thankfully, unrepresentative of the people these activists claim to speak for.

Nick Cohen: Why the far left sides with Hamas

The great fault of the global left is not that it supports Hamas. For how could western left-wing movements or left-inclining charities or academic bodies truly support Hamas if they were serious about their politics?

No one outside the most reactionary quarters of Islam shares Hamas’s aim of forcing the people of the world to accept ‘the sovereignty of Islam’ or face ‘carnage, displacement and terror’ if they refuse. You cannot be a progressive and campaign for a state that executes gay men. An American left, which includes in its ranks the Queers for Palestine campaign group, cannot seriously endorse lethal homophobia in its own country. Their kind will turn a blind eye in Palestine, but not in New York or Chicago. No left-wing organisation proudly honours the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the fascist tradition Hamas embraces, although in a sign of a decay that has been building on the left for more than a generation, many will promulgate left-wing conspiracy theories which are as insane as their fascist counterparts.

No, the problem with the global left is that it is not serious. It ‘fellow travels’ with radical Islam rather than supports it. The concept of ‘fellow travelling’, with its suggestions of tourism, dilettantism, and privilege, is well worth reviving. The phrase comes from the Bolsheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 they looked with appreciation on westerners who supported them without ever endorsing communism. Artists, writers, and academics who were disgusted with the West, often for good reason, I should add, were quite happy to justify Soviet communism and cover up its crimes without ever becoming communists themselves.

Leon Trotsky put it best when he said of fellow travellers that the question was always how far they would go. As long as they did not have live under the control of communists in the 1920s or the control of Islamists in the 2020s, the answer appears to be: a very long way indeed. W. H. Auden said, as he looked back with some contempt on his fellow travelling past, if Britain or the United States or any country he and his friends knew were taken over by a ‘successful communist revolution with the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc., we would have screamed our heads off’. But as communism happened in backward Russia ‘a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment’, they could ignore its crimes in the interests of seeing the capitalist enemy defeated.

I usually don't bother reading Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, mostly because he rarely has anything intelligent to say - and he says it as if he is a genius.

But I just saw an Arabic article quoting him, so I verified that, yes, he indeed did write this stupidity:

The reason I was so wary about Israel invading Gaza with the aim of totally eliminating Hamas was certainly not out of any sympathy for Hamas, which has been a curse on the Palestinian people even more than on Israel. It was out of a deep concern that Israel was acting out of blind rage, aiming at an unattainable goal — wiping Hamas from the face of the earth as one of its ministers advocated — and with no plan for the morning after.

I'm only going to pick on the "blind rage" part because a great deal of criticism of Israel is based on a complete misunderstanding of how large organizations work.

The Israeli government, and its army, are large bureaucracies. Bureaucracies don't operate by "blind rage." They couldn't survive that way.

Unless either a country or a company are run by a dictator or majority-shareholder owner, their decisions have to be vetted by many people on many levels. This double and triple and quadruple checking is built in to the process.

No one can imagine IBM or Exxon turning on a dime and choosing to attack a competitor with no regard to consequences. It couldn't happen because they have to answer to others - the board, shareholders, whomever. And mature nations have voters, a parliament, the cabinet, the media, all ready to say their own opinions.

Yet when it comes to Israel, too many people anthropomorphize the Jewish state as if it is acting like an angry toddler.

Israel has really smart people who aren't afraid to speak their minds. It doesn't make hasty decisions. And allowing Hamas to exist after 10/7 is not an option even - and especially - after sober analysis. Forcing Israelis to live under threat of kidnapping and rocket fire - from the South and the North - is not acceptable, and it is unacceptable for any state. Israel's mistake was not taking Hamas seriously enough for the past 15 years, not taking it too seriously now.

The problem isn't Israel's goals. The problem is blowhards like Friedman or know-it-alls from any country telling Israel how unrealistic the goal is. While I wish Israel did a better job debunking all the really stupid rumors and Pallywood accusations we are seeing every day, but it has a job to do.

And Israel has not changed its policy of adhering to international law, to minimize damage to civilians. It did change the proportionality calculation that it had self-imposed in previous wars, because this is not a war like previous wars - but it is still well within what other major Western democracies would do under similar circumstances.

Israel, as a large organization, has plans on the shelf for hundreds or thousands of scenarios, so it never has to fly by the seat of its pants. The specific plan on how to fight Hamas has been written years ago, and probably updated several times, way before 10/7. Because that is how things work if you ever worked in a large organization or a government or a professional army.

Professionals plan.

This is why a high percentage of people who actually have military or government experience are supporting Israel, while its critics are those - like Friedman - who have very little exposure to the machinations of large organizations. (He is not a grunt at the NYT but a superstar who stays above the fray for the most part.) The same goes for all the pundits - academics or freelance writers or students who simply do not know how the real world works.

Watching people like Friedman make pronouncements about how they know what's better for Israel than Israel itself is like watching a schoolkid confidently explain why Superman is more powerful than Santa Claus. He doesn't even know how little he knows, and his vapid self-confidence is enough to keep him employed.

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 Palestinian economy is being wrecked by the Gaza war. But good luck finding any articles about it in Palestinian media.

Western observers simply cannot fathom how much self-censorship exists among Palestinians, both in its media and among its people talking to the media. The honor/shame dynamic ensures that no one will say anything to outsiders that make them look vulnerable or weak. Palestinians tell themselves that they are strong, that they have "sumud" (steadfastness). Reality itself must be denied to maintain that fiction.

Obviously Gaza's economy is in shambles. Before the war, the unemployment rate was slowly going down, some 19,000 Gazans had obtained permission to work in Israel at much higher wages than they could get inside Gaza, the number of imports and exports from Gaza had risen to higher than the levels before Hamas' takeover and Israel's restrictions on the sector. Hamas chose to throw all Gazans under the bus in their zeal to murder Jews, and most Gazans still support that goal.

The International Labour Organization estimated in early November that Gaza lost 182,000 jobs from the war so far, and that additionally some 208,000 West Bank Palestinians have lost their jobs as well, most of them from losing their jobs in Israel - which pay more than double the average local wages. Others have lost because tourism has gone down to almost zero.

Yet you will not find any of the hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed West Bank Palestinians complaining in the media about their loss of livelihood because of Hamas. That stoicness is their idea of sumud - supporting even the most heinous acts against Israel in the interest of appearing unified to the world.

And even if they do complain, the Palestinian media will not report it.

Outside the Palestinian areas, however, you will find articles about the impact to their economy - in places like Sky News Arabia or China's Arabic News.

And in English, the UN Development Program warned about the economic impact of the war last month:

The rapid assessment of economic consequences of the Gaza war released Thursday by the U.N. Development Program and the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for West Asia was the first U.N. report showing the devastating impact of the conflict especially on the Palestinians.

If the war continues for a second month, the U.N. projects that the Palestinian GDP, which was $20.4 billion before the war began, will drop by 8.4% — a loss of $1.7 billion. And if the conflict lasts a third month, Palestinian GDP will drop by 12%, with losses of $2.5 billion and more than 660,000 people pushed into poverty, it projects.

U.N. Development Program Assistant Secretary-General Abdallah Al Dardari told a news conference that a 12% GDP loss at the end of the year would be “massive and unprecedented.” By comparison, he said, the Syrian economy used to lose 1% of its GDP per month at the height of its conflict, and it took Ukraine a year and a half of fighting to lose 30% of its GDP, an average of about 1.6% a month.

If the local media is not reporting on these issues of supreme concern to local residents, then what purpose does it serve?

Propaganda.

While Palestinian media isn't mentioning the economic losses to their own people, they are gleefully reporting on the war's economic impact to Israel.

Palestinian media wants to give the impression to its customers that it is winning. This is the message that their leaders insist the media pushes, but they don't need incentive - it is now baked in to how they think. And every time a foreign reporter or NGO speaks to a Palestinian, they don't realize that nearly every answer they get is tainted by this refusal to discuss reality in front of outsiders.

This twists world coverage of the conflict.

But it is the rare reporter who bothers to go beyond the sloganeering and self-deception to report the real story of how Palestinians truly feel about Hamas destroying their livelihoods and their lives. And when they do, they won't blame Hamas - but Israel.

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!