Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

Cobra Kai and the Jewish State (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

My granddaughter, Shai, told my wife that she should make her a “Cobra Kai” shirt. We were mystified, so she told us to watch the video series and we would understand. It turns out to be a continuation of the plot of the movie “The Karate Kid,” in which (as I see it) the yetzer hara and the yetzer hatov are personified by the competing dojos of Cobra Kai and Miyagi Do respectively. Keep that thought – I’ll come back to it.

In the real world, the struggle between Israel and her enemies is far more bitter and bloody. For several months now tensions have risen, with demonstrations and riots in several cities by Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel over various issues. Violent attacks on Jews by Arabs were followed by violence against Arabs by militant Jewish groups. The conflict reached a peak on Monday, Jerusalem Day, when hundreds of police and Arabs fought each other on and around the Temple Mount, the Arabs throwing rocks and shooting fireworks, while the police responded with teargas and stun grenades. At the same time, Hamas issued an ultimatum that if the police did not leave the Mount by 6:00 PM, they would fire rockets at Jerusalem. The police stayed, and Hamas carried out its threat, launching seven rockets.

Since then the violence has escalated. Israeli Arabs have rioted in various cities and towns in Israel, attacking Jewish citizens and police. In Lod, local Arabs rampaged in Jewish neighborhoods, burning cars and even synagogues, evoking visions of anti-Jewish pogroms. Riots also occurred in Acco, Yafo, and the Arab towns of the “Triangle,” east of Netanya and Haifa. Hamas has been broadcasting incitement for weeks via its imams and social media, including the perennial “Al Aqsa is in danger” line that has been inflaming Palestinian Muslims against Jews for at least 100 years.

Meanwhile, rocket fire from Gaza has reached unprecedented levels. As of Wednesday morning (as I write) more than 1,000 rockets have been launched at Israel from Gaza, reaching as far north as Hadera. At least 850 of them have reached Israel, with 200 falling short into Gaza (keep this in mind when Hamas blames its civilian casualties on Israeli retaliation). Massive barrages hit Ashkelon, setting a strategic gas facility afire, and keeping inhabitants in shelters all night. Naturally the towns and kibbutzim in the south, the usual targets of Hamas rockets, got their portion too. According to Hamas, 130 rockets were launched toward Tel Aviv. Even here in Rehovot, which is usually spared, we were awakened by sirens several times overnight. As of this moment, five Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets, including two Israeli Arabs whose car took a direct hit in Lod. There have been dozens of injuries and much property damage. The Iron Dome systems have intercepted many of the rockets, but due to their sheer volume it has been impossible to stop all of them.

The IDF – air force, artillery, and navy – has been hitting launchers, weapons factories, underground facilities, and some senior Hamas officials since the rocket fire started. A multi-story building that contained Hamas intelligence services was taken down. Hamas claims several dozen civilian casualties, but the IDF says that most of them are either Hamas operatives who were hit while launching rockets, or victims of their own rockets which fell short.

I think that the events of the past weeks have had a significant effect on the attitudes of many ordinary Israeli Jews. The riots in Lod, and the attacks on Jews in Jerusalem have given rise to a feeling that lines have been crossed. How can it be, they think, when they see a 65-year-old rabbi brutally kicked to the ground by Arab assailants, or Torah scrolls burned, that this can happen in the Jewish state? Although there was large-scale rioting by Israeli Arabs in 2000 at the start of the Second Intifada, the way individual Jews and Jewish shops and institutions were targeted this time was new, and evoked comparisons to the antisemitic violence of the 1930s. Although Arab members of the Knesset talked in ways that verged on subversion, it seemed that most of the Arabs in the street were motivated by economics, not nationalism. Either that has changed, or it was not the case in the first place.

The dimensions of the Hamas rocket attack were worrisome. It is clear that we cannot have enough Iron Dome systems to stop all the rockets that our enemies can launch. In the back of everyone’s mind is the knowledge that Hezbollah has far more rockets and better, more accurate and powerful, ones.

It seems that we always act the same: retaliate in a measured way, being very careful to keep civilian damage to a minimum, after which we are pilloried by the UN, the EU, and the “human rights” NGOs, regardless of that fact. We don’t destroy Hamas, we simply “mow the grass” every few years. We keep supplying Gaza with water and electricity.
There will be other escalations like this one. Each time, Hamas seems to have more and better capabilities. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to try to take over the Palestinian Authority, and to incite subversion among the Arab citizens of Israel. Soon Mahmoud Abbas will retire or die; it could happen today. Hamas will then move to take over the PA, which would make the present situation seem like a picnic in the park.

Is this the best our government can do, we ask?

The problem is that we have no real strategy. But it’s not hard to see what it should be. The Palestinians of the territories and even our own Arab citizens have shown us: they act in a Middle Eastern way.

We want to live in the Middle East because that’s where we came from. But we don’t want to act Middle Eastern. We want to live in an imaginary world, where nations actually adhere to the UN charter. We want to be “a villa in the jungle” as somebody said. That doesn’t work. In the Middle East, you defend your honor or you lose all of your property and then your life. In the Middle East, when someone challenges you, you destroy them or they destroy you. You don’t give them a break because they are weaker than you and you feel sorry for them. Tomorrow they may be strong enough to kill you – or they may sneak up on you and kill you, even though they are weaker.

The Palestinian Arabs have challenged us for the ownership of this land. For more than a hundred years they have made it clear to us that they will do anything and everything necessary to get it. We, on the other hand, keep trying to compromise with them. And they respond with bemusement, take anything we give them, and then continue trying to get the rest.
If they win, they will kick us out. Ask them. They’ll tell you. And that is what our strategy has to be: to remove the Palestinian Arabs from the Land of Israel. We need to do whatever is necessary to achieve that aim.

If that is offensive to you, then you can live somewhere else where at least they pretend to operate according to a “better” morality. It’s up to you.

Now that we’ve settled the strategy, it’s time to decide on the tactics. And in that connection, I come back to “Cobra Kai.” One of the recurring memes in the show is the motto of the Cobra Kai dojo. I am sure that the writers disapproved of it, but it fits our needs perfectly. Here it is:

STRIKE FIRST
STRIKE HARD
NO MERCY

05/12 Links Pt1: It's Time to End the Small Palestinian Victories; Israel rules out ceasefire after Hamas seeks international mediation

From Ian:

It's Time to End the Small Palestinian Victories

On Friday, Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem chanted on the Temple Mount: "We are all Hamas, waiting for your orders, commander Mohammed Deif. Hamas, shoot a rocket at Tel Aviv tonight."

Palestinians think that Israel does not have the perseverance to be victorious. Possibly, there are even Israelis who are beginning to think this way. This is dangerous because it emboldens the violent rejectionists.

Palestinians think that Israel does not have the perseverance to be victorious.

Victory is obviously not won overnight but by a series of smaller victories that wear out one's opponents. With each small victory, many rejectionist Palestinians see the greater victory at hand.

This is the perception, however wild it might seem, which is being perpetuated. Nonetheless, it can be turned back if Israel decides that it will no longer act as if it is in retreat.

Israel needs to start winning some small victories of its own. It needs to push back against the rejectionist Palestinians. It needs to first assert control, then provide deterrence against those who would seek harm to its citizens and act in favor of security.

In the latest conflict with Hamas in Gaza, "Operation Guarding of the Walls," Israel should massively bombard Gaza and even enter and occupy it until the rocket infrastructure has been completely destroyed. While doing this, it should hermetically seal Gaza, cutting off the supply chain to Hamas and other terrorist organizations. It must do what all nations have and are doing to achieve victory, by beating its enemy into submission.

Israel must convince the average Palestinian that it is here to stay and should be accepted in full.

This would be a significant victory and would change perceptions and switch the momentum against violent Palestinian rejectionism. It would convince the average Palestinian that Israel is here to stay and should be accepted in full. This would have the important goal of bringing peace closer because the more Palestinians accept the legitimacy and permanency of the State of Israel, the more pressure would be put on their leaders to give up on their goals of ending the Jewish state.

This is a victory towards which Israel should be persevering.

These Attacks on Jerusalem are Different

The results of these inversions of the expert-driven conventional wisdom were remarkable.

Our key regional allies—Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE—not only grew stronger, but deepened their collaboration.

The Abraham Accords ushered in the first true, warm peace agreement since the dawn of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

ISIS was crushed and al-Qaeda neutered—with a consequent reduction in Islamist terror in the U.S. and across the West.

Iran was kept off-balance and at bay. For the first time in recent memory, the Middle East seemed to be pointed in a positive direction.

Over the past 100 days, the Biden administration has retreated—hard—towards the now-discredited "experts," their now-disproven assumptions and their long-failing approaches to the region. Unsurprisingly, we have already seen increased Iranian aggression towards U.S. interests, growing brutality in the Yemeni civil war and Islamist terror attacks here at home (perhaps most prominently the King Soopers massacre in Boulder, Colorado).

The current wave of pretextual attacks against Israel are merely par for the course. When the Biden administration announced it would resume unconditional funding to the anti-Israel, terror-supporting Palestinian Authority—almost certainly in violation of U.S. law—it had to have known what to expect. Biden has returned to Obama-era policies; the terrorists have returned to Obama-era behavior.

It's not too late for the Biden team to undo its catastrophic error. Nor is it too late to appreciate the human suffering that walking away from a successful Middle East policy has unleashed throughout the region—and throughout the world.

The current attacks in Jerusalem have put the young Biden administration to the test. We must hope that these are missteps, not malevolence.

Elliott Abrams: Israel Erupts: Cutting through the Misinformation Surrounding Part of This Conflict

Note again this line in the Kohelet analysis: “The litigation has taken several years, and the owners have won at every step.” Israel’s courts, sometimes viewed as too sympathetic to — or indeed part of — the Israeli “Left,” have consistently applied standard property law, as would courts in any Western country, and consistently found that the rights of ownership have not been obliterated just because people moved into these homes when the Jews who lived in them were driven out.

Now let’s return to the paintings forcibly seized from Jews by the Nazis. There is widespread sympathy for the owners of those paintings, and it is visible in newspaper accounts and in court decisions and international conventions. Why is there so little sympathy for those who own the properties in contention in Jerusalem? Why the bias in most accounts of these eviction proceedings? Even media generally sympathetic to Israel have produced tendentious reporting (see this analysis of Fox News’ reporting).

Good questions. Is the criticism of Israel here explained by the bitter old conclusion that the world likes dead Jews (and their paintings) more than living Jews who are fighting for their rights? Is it the context of Arab complaints about the “Judaization of Jerusalem,” as if that city were somehow naturally an Arab capital where all Jewish presence is alien? Is it the Palestinian propaganda, which makes cases like this part of the battle to protect the Al-Aqsa mosque from imagined Israeli depredations?

Here’s a theory: Israel’s critics here don’t care about law and rights. Yesterday, before his meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Jordanian foreign minister spoke of “provocative measures against . . . the peoples of Sheikh Jarrah” to describe court cases in which ownership rights are being asserted. The theory seems to be that the Jews were downtrodden by the Nazis, so the Jews can recover their stolen paintings — but the Palestinians are downtrodden by the Israelis, so the stolen properties cannot be recovered. In other words: forget rights, forget courts.

Blinken, by the way, commended Israel for postponing those court decisions. But they will come, soon enough, and that will be an interesting test for the Biden administration and many other governments. Will they uphold the rule of law and say Israel has every right to enforce a ruling for the owners (if that is the court’s decision)? Or does the rule of law apply only in Europe, when it comes to old Nazi cases where there’s no political risk in siding with the Jews?

Hamas' own videos show rockets falling in Gaza (updates)

Hamas has been publishing lots of videos showing them shoot volleys of rocket to Israel.

But some of them also show rockets falling short - in Gaza.

Here's one from last night:

And this one from yesterday shows a smoke trail that reveals a corkscrewing rocket:

And here's one more with at least 3 rockets falling short (smoke trail of one or two and two rocket lights going down)

These aren't the small rockets of years past. These are very large missiles that can reach Tel Aviv.

When they fall in Gaza, they will cause damage, injuries and death.

And they have. Plenty of Gazans have been killed over the years from errant Hamas rockets, even much smaller ones.

The IDF estimates as many as 30% of rockets are falling short in Gaza.

When the media parrots the Gaza Health Ministry - Hamas- claims of civilian victims of Israeli rockets, keep in mind that they are very possibly from Hamas rockets.

But they will never admit that.

UPDATE: From the IDF:

WATCH as a Hamas rocket aimed at Israel misfires and falls back into Gaza.

But this isn't the 1st time—Hamas misfired 350 rockets in the last 3 days.

These rockets result in the deaths of innocent Gazan civilians.

It's time for the world to hold Hamas accountable. pic.twitter.com/vmhmXTZrl6
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 13, 2021

Social media has been filled with anti-Israel statements from people who say that their expertise in morality and the Middle East comes because they are Jews by an accident of birth.

Pew Research just released a huge, 248-page report about American Jews that explains this.

A large number of American Jews are Jews in name only.

Fully 27% of Jews do not call themselves Jewish by religion - and the number increases to 40% for those under 30.

Nearly 50% of US Jews hardly ever do anything associated with Jewishness.

25% of US Jews say they have hardly any Jewish friends.

Only 11% of Jews who don't identify with Judaism as a religion give charity to Jewish causes.

Not surprisingly, the Jews who have the least to do with Judaism are the ones who hate Israel the most. 18% of "Jews of no religion" support BDS, far more than the average.

Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask what levels of Jewish education Jews in America had. It seems obvious that those who know the least about their own religion and history are the ones who are the most likely to hate Israel now, and many of those get a thrill out of identifying "as a Jew" to buttress their ignorant opinions of Israel.

The survey is sad. It shows an American Jewish community that has utterly failed at attracting and keeping young people (with the exception of Orthodoxy.) Although most Jews still strongly support the Jewish state, the survey shows a growing disconnect between American Jews and Israel.

It shows exactly where the "As a Jews" are coming from.

I don't think it is going to happen. The people of Lebanon would not tolerate a Hezbollah starting a war now when they are in such bad shape from COVID and the country being on the brink of bankruptcy. They are still upset over the 2006 war.

But Hezbollah follows the orders of Iran's Supreme Leader, and Iranian media has been talking for weeks about how weak Israel is and how it will be destroyed soon. They wrote lots of stories about the Syrian anti-aircraft missile that ended up near Dimona, about a chemical factory fire in Haifa. Iranian media is following the events in Israel on a minute by minute basis. The Ayatollah Khamenei has been tweeting a lot about Israel.

Hezbollah rockets are much more powerful and accurate than Hamas rockets. And they have 150,000 of them, of varying types.

Hassan Nasrallah can invent an excuse to start shooting and claiming that Israel started it. Only last week he warned Israel not to make any aggressive moves.

Let's hope this doesn't happen, but if Israel is too cautious in confronting Hezbollah, Khamenei might interpret that as weakness and think he has an opportunity.

Hamas media: In Arabic, bloodthirsty celebrations of death. In English, liberal rhetoric and victimhood.

This is what the autotranslated Arabic version of Hamas mouthpiece Al Resalah looks like for its Arab audience:

Articles extolling rocket fire, celebrating dead Israelis, exhorting Israeli Arabs to start an uprising, promises for more bloodshed.

Here's the English version, directed at the Western anti-Israel, primarily leftist audience:

Here, the emphasis is on victimhood, quoting Ilhan Omar and Tayyip Erdogan on how awful Israel is, and "defending" Al Aqsa.

The two messages are exactly opposite. And the West insists on believing what Palestinians say in English without realizing that everything is propaganda - in both languages.

05/11 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: Washington's agenda is completely wrong – and incendiary; America's Jewish communities are under attack — Here are 3 things Congress can do

From Ian:

Michael Doran: The Realignment

It is impossible to exaggerate the value to the United States of a full-blown Saudi-Israeli peace agreement or even of significant steps in that direction. The 9/11 attacks announced that a doctrine of radical intolerance had taken deeper root inside the Muslim world than we had realized—a doctrine that seeks to wall off Muslim societies from non-Muslim influences. The Emiratis, the lead players in the Abraham Accords, see peace with Israel as part of a multipronged effort to refute this intolerant view of Islam and Muslim history. Saudi Arabia is the most powerful Arab country and, thanks to its guardianship of Mecca and Medina, one of the most influential countries in the entire Muslim world. It has also long been the fortress of conservative Islamic jurisprudence and Quranic literalism. If the country toward which all Muslims pray five times a day, and to which some 2 million make annual pilgrimages, develops openly friendly relations with the Jewish state, the implications for relations between Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere would be profound.

Yet the Biden administration has forbidden its officials from even using the term “Abraham Accords,” which, under the influence of the Realignment, it abhors. Because the accords are politically popular, even in Democratic circles, the administration will refrain from expressing its abhorrence frankly, and will look for every opportunity to claim that it looks favorably on the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

In reality, however, the Biden team has no intention to expand the Abraham Accords, whose very existence is a blot on the Democrats’ record. It refutes the dogma preached by the Obama administration that peace between Israel and the Arab world must begin with a Palestinian-Israeli agreement.

More importantly, the accords are also a threat to the Realignment itself. The Saudi-Israeli thaw resulted in part from the sense of threat they share about the rise of Iran, and the increasing unreliability of the American security guarantee. A strong partnership between Riyadh and Jerusalem would inevitably become the primary node of opposition to the Realignment from within the American alliance system. A desire to end any unsupervised discussion of expanding the Abraham Accords is probably an additional reason why the Biden administration devoted its first days in office to publicly disparaging Mohammed bin Salman and privately pressing him to kowtow to Tehran. “Do not dare assist Israel” was another implicit command that the Khashoggi values barrage delivered to Riyadh.

When Biden took office, he faced a fork in the road. On one path stood a multilateral alliance designed to contain Iran. It had a proven track record of success and plans of even better things to come, as the recent act of sabotage at Natanz demonstrated. The alliance’s leading members were beckoning Biden to work against a common foe, but also to promote greater cooperation and possibly even an official peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. On the other path stood the Islamic Republic, hated by its own people and, indeed, by most people in the Middle East. It offered nothing but the same vile message it had always espoused. Standing with it were all of the most malignant forces in the Middle East, who either look directly to Tehran for leadership or thrive on the chaos it sows.

Biden chose Iran, fracturing the U.S. alliance system and setting back the cause of peace. His choice also delivered a victory to China and Russia, who are working with Iran, each in its own way, toward America’s undoing. In a perverse effort to liberate itself from its allies, the United States is soiling its own nest.

Caroline Glick: Washington's agenda is completely wrong – and incendiary

As Israel Hayom's Ariel Kahana reported, Ben-Shabbat didn't take Sullivan's hostile dressing down in silence. He responded appropriately, "As the sovereign, Israel is handing the events responsibly and in a measured way despite the provocations."

Ben-Shabbat added, "International intervention serves as a prize to the rioters and their dispatchers that had hoped that international pressure would be exerted against Israel."

Less than 24 hours after their phone call, Hamas proved Ben-Shabbat was right. With a tailwind from the White House, Hamas gave Israel an ultimatum: Remove your security forces from the Temple Mount and Sheikh Jarrah by 6 p.m. or you'll live to regret it. In other words: Give up your sovereignty over Jerusalem by six or else.

Lo and behold, shortly after 6 p.m., the air raid sirens sounded throughout Jerusalem and its environs as Hamas attacked the capital with rockets from Gaza. As the evening progressed Arab Israelis in Ramle and Lod and other mixed cities carried out what can only be called a pogrom against their Jewish neighbors. They burned yeshivot, schools and apartment buildings and beat and tried to lynch Jews that fell in their paths. After they were done, they went to the local hospital emergency room, threw rocks at the medical staff and patients and tried to kill the Arab Israeli doctors and nurses on the scene for "collaboration" with the Jews.

The medical staff had to evacuate with the patients to protected areas while the police dispersed the attackers with stun grenades – in the ER.

The official readout of Biden's national security adviser concluded by mentioning that Sullivan, "expressed the Administration's commitment to Israel's security."

A bit more "commitment" like this and Israel will find itself in short order fighting a regional war.

Emily Schrader: How Palestinians lost Jerusalem to Israel - opinion

Since Israel’s establishment, Palestinian leaders have missed countless opportunities to make peace and secure a state because of their rejectionist attitude. From a purely political standpoint, their adamant refusal to accept Israel costs them more in negotiating power every year. For example, the negotiating standpoint after the UN’s Partition Plan would have been far more advantageous for the Palestinians than where it stands today – and in almost every single subsequent peace offer, the Palestinians chose to sabotage their own future in terms of land, self-determination, cooperation with Israel and, yes, Jerusalem.

While the Palestinians never had Jerusalem – even east Jerusalem, which was under occupation by Jordan – their actions today demonstrate why they never will. For that, they have only themselves to blame.

The recent uptick in violence began at the start of Ramadan with a disturbing TikTok trend of Arabs assaulting Jews and filming it. The response was an equally disturbing pushback of far-right Israeli Jews who rioted in Jerusalem, even chanting “death to Arabs.” But neither of these activities came from nowhere. The Kahanist Right in Israel has been emboldened by vile racist leaders like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who maneuvered their way into the Knesset to the great shame of our entire nation.

Yet on the other side, we have entire generations raised on glorifying violence against Jews. Most recently, we see Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority all ramping up their incitement to violence, with the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, Iran, dousing the entire situation with kerosene and lighting the match.

Iran-allied Palestinians even recently put up billboards with Iran’s slogan for Jerusalem Day at the entrance to Kalandiya in the West Bank. This is far from the first time Palestinians have promoted Iranian propaganda, but it is a clear and continued indicator of where Palestinian alliances lie – and they aren’t with their fellow Arab states.

The Palestinian war to feel relevant

The PA prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh is very happy that people are dying, because that has "returned the Palestinian issue to the agenda of the world's priorities."

This is important to understand. Since the Abraham Accords, Palestinians have been feeling irrelevant - the worst feeling for them.

They felt that the world no longer cared about them - which is largely true since they couldn't even fix their own issues and kept blaming everything on Israel. The Arab world has been sick and tired of the Palestinian issue for years, unless it helps their own political agendas.

Instead of working towards peace, the Palestinian Authority wanted to feel important, to be cover stories in Time magazine and the New York Times.

As Palestinian Media Watch has documented, the PA has worked to incite violence in Jerusalem for weeks before Ramadan. TV music videos glorified martyrdom. They know this stuff works on heir people. Sure enough, it did - starting with the TikTok attacks on religious Jews.

So they again started the "cycle of violence," quite consciously. And this led up to rockets and bombing Gaza - which, interestingly, doesn't hurt the Palestinian Authority one bit.

Now that they easily manipulated the anti-Israel media and politicians to condemn Israel for imagined crimes of "ethnic cleansing #SheikhJarrah" and "targeting civilians in Gaza," they are ecstatic.

How does it help them?

It doesn't. But Palestinians live in a zero sum game world, and they literally believe that anything that hurts Israel helps them.

It is a caveman mentality. The UAE doesn't have it, but many Arabs do - when Israel looks bad, somehow that helps its enemies.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh actually bragged that his rockets managed to disrupt some Yom Yerushalayim celebrations.

It would be a pathetic joke if it didn’t mean that Hamas and other Palestinian groups want to kill Jews to feel relevant. Much better to feel important than to feel impotent.

There are no winners in such a worldview. And until Palestinians realize that Israelis feeling secure is a prerequisite to peace, there will be none.

As news came that two women in Ashkelon had been murdered as a result of direct hits to their homes, my son wrote the following on our family Whatsapp group in the Hebrish shorthand typical of my 12 EFL children: “A jeep full of an Arab family just drove by the bus stop blaring their horn, fingers in v shape out the window.”

“Where was this?” I asked.

It was on a main thoroughfare in Jerusalem, on Derech Hevron, in broad daylight. And it’s not the first time this has happened, but something that happens whenever they managed to pick off one or more of us: They cheer when we die. They cheer when we die and we do nothing to deter them.

While my son was writing this to me, a friend in Ashkelon was sharing phone footage and voice recordings from a female friend, describing the devastation surrounding her. Two 20-story buildings on either side of her building had taken direct hits. Every window of every car, up and down her street, had been shattered from the impact of the twin blasts. The footage she recorded with her phone showed a man down on the ground, shaking uncontrollably, with obliterated buildings and the rubble of what was once a hardware store, surrounding him.*

As my friend was sharing these items with me, he was debating whether or not to travel to a suburb of Jerusalem for a bar mitzvah. The decision was made for him almost immediately when the residents of Ashkelon received a notice from the mayor of that town, telling people to stay home. My friend gave up on traveling to the bar mitzvah, but thought he’d go to the mom and pop grocery store to pick up some fruit and vegetables. Just then, the sirens began to wail once more. And then more sirens.

Some of us become inured. We figure whatever happens, happens. So after a few minutes of mulling it over, my friend wrote, “If I'm not back in half an hour, you can have the scoop.”

What could I do but laugh at that, and yes, gallows humor is a necessary coping mechanism. And also, for some of us, it remains a bit surreal until such time as it becomes all too real, and perhaps a person won’t survive to know that, God forbid. But yeah, if a missile has one’s name on it, God forbid, there isn’t much you can do.

My friend, in fact, moved from Jerusalem to Ashkelon during one of the heavier barrages of missiles not too many years ago. He wanted to be with our people in the periphery, who suffer the most from our “cousins” in Gaza. This was a way he could contribute, just by being there, one of them, strengthening our Jewish presence in that part of the country. I admire that, and I wish others would emulate him.

But here I am in Gush Etzion, another important part of our country, a place that deserves to be strengthened with a greater Jewish presence. Even at this distance, I heard the booms when the missiles hit Jerusalem and its environs, some ten miles away from us. Had I not heard those booms, it would not matter. The attacks affect us all in many ways, no matter where in Israel we live. Whatsapp is a lifeline for our family, and every morning and evening, we are checking on our children in the south, our children in Jerusalem. We worry. We worry what will happen. We are all, to one degree or another, hyper-vigilant.

And so I wonder, and wonder some more, each time this happens: What is the solution?

We cannot turn the clock back to before Ariel Sharon did the unthinkable and expelled thousands of Jews from their homes, though he promised not to, though we the people, voted against the move. Ariel Sharon empowered the Arabs, and now they cannot be deterred, short of turning Gaza into a parking lot. And if we were to do so, the fallout on world Jewry could potentially be very bad, at this time of burgeoning antisemitism.

Meantime, the world is not on our side.

What is the solution? Do we do it anyway? Would our government have the chops to order it done?

My friend, the one in Ashkelon, suggested we bomb the fancy malls, restaurants, and shopping centers in Gaza, so the before and after photos get shared in the media, so that at last the world can see that Gaza is NOT, contrary to popular world belief, a concentration camp. But it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter. They will show the dead Arab children, the dead Arab pregnant women, and not our own. They will present the facts in the wrong order: “Israel Bombs Gaza in Retaliation for Rocket Attacks,” and not “Gaza Shoots Missiles into Israel, Israel Retaliates.”

They hate us. They hate us because we are Jews. They back the people who are murdering us, who send colorful balloons with attached incendiary devices to tempt our children so that they might be blown to smithereens. Our children are not children to them, but vermin. Because our children are Jewish. And that makes us subhuman to them. And so our murderers, those who rise up to kill us in every generation and at every chance they get, are lionized by the world.

They are apparently sorry that Hitler, yemach shmo, did not finish the job. Biden shows it when he restores funding to UNRWA and the PA and even tops it up some more by the millions. He shows it when he begs Iran—desperately—to let him give them more money so that the mullahs can obliterate us with the weapons they will build with America’s help. And American Jews voted for this--they voted for these things when they overwhelmingly voted for Biden.

As I write this, the IDF has coined a new name for the newest in a long line of operations meant only to stop the rockets until the next time. Because everyone knows they can’t be stopped for good unless we take the ultimate step of obliterating Gaza. That new name is Operation Guardian of the Walls, a clear reference to the walls that surround the Old City of Jerusalem, the supposed center of our current conflagration. In a nutshell, Arab tenants refused to pay rent to their Jewish landlords, and after many years of hashing it out in court, they’re being evicted.

In the last 24 hours, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have launched continuous attacks on Israel from Gaza.

The IDF is operating in response to these attacks by striking terror targets and operatives in Gaza.

This is Operation Guardian of the Walls. pic.twitter.com/sa9UwYfIcV
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 11, 2021

It’s how it is everywhere. You don’t pay rent, you get booted out. Nowhere else in the world would you have world condemnation for the lawful, rightful eviction of BUMS who refuse to pay the rent.

But we are Jews. And the world hates Jews. They don’t think we have a right to our lawful property in our indigenous territory. They don’t think we have a right to be in Jerusalem, our holy city for thousands of years. And actually, it’s not that they don’t think we have the right to these things. It’s that they hate us so much that they want us to be without shelter, without homes, without any sort of life at all. They want us dead. And they want to give the spoils to those who shoot missiles at us and cut us down in the streets.

By the time this goes into print, a lot will have happened. But it is all fairly predictable. The Israeli government will retaliate because now they have to, because Israeli citizens have been killed. But the actions we take will fall way short of solving the problem. Because everyone knows we won’t turn Gaza into a parking lot. And the ones who are most keenly aware of this are the Arabs themselves—the ones shooting missiles into Jerusalem, those sending balloons to burn our crops and hurt our children, the ones cheering and flashing the victory sign in broad daylight on major Jerusalem thoroughfares to ordinary Jewish Israelis waiting to take the bus home after a long day of work.

It grinds my gut. And I know I am not the only one. We wait and wait and wait some more. We wait for the government that will solve this problem.

We wait for God.

*Note that I did not share these privately shared phone items here. If it’s not approved by government censors, I don’t share it, because “Loose lips sink ships.” No desire to help the enemy improve its aim. (The clips I did share here have been cleared for publication.)

05/11 Links Pt1: The "Al-Aqsa Is in Danger" Lie that Sets Jerusalem Alight; Israel MFA: Palestinian Rocket Attacks on Israel Are War Crimes

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: What you won't read in western media about the Jerusalem riots

As I write here in Jerusalem, sirens have sounded and explosions have been heard. It appears that rockets were fired by Hamas at the city. I am posting this now before finding out what is happening.

Further to my piece here yesterday about the Jerusalem riots, here’s some more information you won’t read in the venomously slanted media coverage which continues to obscure the Palestinian Arabs’ incitement and attacks that sparked these disturbances and which continues falsely to blame Israel instead for its behaviour. In this twisted reporting, much of the British and American media continue to parrot the Palestinians’ narrative which, as always, seeks to obscure their own murderous and bigoted aggression by pretending that their Israeli victims are the aggressors while the Arabs are merely defending themselves.

While the Israeli police have struggled to contain the continued Arab rioting, as you can read in these accounts here and here, this is what the senior Hamas Official Fathi Hammad tweeted:
People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it here and just cut off (their heads). It costs just five shekels. With those five shekels, you will humiliate the Jewish state. You shall find the strongest in enmity towards the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists. The Jews have spread corruption and have acted with arrogance, and their moment of reckoning has come. The moment of their destruction at your hands has arrived.

Anyone spot the little word here that the British and American media somehow always miss? Yup, he’s inciting against the Jews. Not Israelis — Jews. Because the Palestinian Arabs’ war against Israel is a war against the Jews, as it has been for the past hundred years. This is something that liberal media and politicians simply refuse to acknowledge or report. When they refer to Palestinian “resistance”, they are describing Palestinian Jew-hatred; and when they talk about Israel’s “disproportionate” responses, they are describing Israel’s determination to defend its people against the intended mass murder of Jews.

The "Al-Aqsa Is in Danger" Lie that Sets Jerusalem Alight

In the riots on the Temple Mount, everything is coordinated: The ideological line is that of the Muslim Brotherhood. The operation on the ground and the incitement is handled by Hamas, the Islamic Movement, and some Arabs in eastern Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority, as usual, is along for the ride. The goal is to move the conflict onto religious lines after the nationalist issue turned out to be insufficient for a conflagration. The way to do this is through the same old lie, "Al-Aqsa is in danger."

This claim has served as the catalyst for terrorist attacks, rioting, and now a semi-uprising whose purpose is to weaken Israel's hold on and sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The discourse that radical Islam drags the world into focuses almost entirely on the Temple Mount's holy status for Muslims. No one mentions that the state of the Jewish people, which recaptured the holiest place in Judaism in 1967, then placed it in the hands of a competing religion, Islam, for which it is only the third-holiest site. There is no example of another concession like this in interfaith relations anywhere in the world.

Yisrael Medad: The Roots of the ‘Al Aqsa is in Danger’ Myth: Alfred Mond and a Speech Distorted

Introduction

Today, one often hears the false charge that Israel is ‘building tunnels under the Temple Mount‘, or that, ‘The Al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger of being bombed and destroyed. This is a true and serious Zionist threat’. There are dire warnings about how the ‘Jews invade the Mosque’ and even that Jews are ‘injecting chemical substances into the walls of the mosque in order to cause its corrosion’. This article examines one of the lesser-known origins of these myths and legends: remarks of the British politician Alfred Mond in 1921 which, though he subsequently clarified them, were purposefully distorted by the Arab leadership as a justification for violence for decades after. Who was Alfred Mond?
Sir Alfred Moritz Mond (1868 – 1930), industrialist, plutocrat, politician and philanthropist, knighted as the 1st Baron Melchett, was born to parents who had immigrated to Great Britain from Germany. Although both his parents were born of Jewish parents, they did not consider themselves practicing Jews and he was not raised as a Jew. His wife, Violet (sister of the Foreign Office muralist Sigismund Christian Hubert Goetze), was also of Jewish heritage but her parents had converted. They were married in the Anglican Church and the children were raised as Christians.

Mond’s father, Ludwig, was a chemist and had emigrated from Germany to England in 1862. He developed a process for processing soda ash and later, another for extracting nickel. After founding a chemical engineering firm he became extremely wealthy in that he discovered that adding 3.5 per cent nickel to steel greatly increased its strength. Alfred was a director in his father’s businesses and expanded them. In 1926, he brought about the merger of four separate companies to form Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), one of the world’s largest industrial corporations at the time and became its first chairman. He was one of the wealthiest Englishmen at the time.

He involved himself in politics and sat as Liberal Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1923, becoming a member of David Lloyd George’s government as First Commissioner of Works from 1916 to 1921 and Minister of Health (with a seat in the cabinet) from 1921 to 1922. He then switched party and sat in Parliament from 1924 to 1928. Upon his death the obituary of The Times noted he had triumphed over ‘a bad voice, a bad delivery, and a presence unimpressive to all but the caricaturists’.

Although not identifying as Jewish, nevertheless, Mond was frequently the victim of antisemitic attacks in Parliament. T.S. Elliot’s poem, ‘A Cooking Egg‘, published in 1920, includes these lines: ‘I shall not want Capital in Heaven, For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond: We two shall lie together, lapt / In a five per cent Exchequer Bond,’ and he was targeted by Henry Hamilton Beamish (an early promoter of the Madagascar Plan for Jewish deportation to that island of the east coast of Africa) and his The Britons group which, in a poster, ‘The Jews’ Whose Who’, attacked Mond as a traitor to England.

Palestinians achieve unity: Fatah bragging of firing missiles at civilians along with Islamic Jihad and Hamas

The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, part of Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement, proudly lists its rocket attacks for Monday:

1: The bombardment of the usurped Majdal (Ashkelon) with 4 missiles.
2: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) with 3 missiles.
3: Shelling the Zionist settlements inside our occupied lands with rockets and mortar shells from all the governorates of the Gaza Strip.
4: Shelling the usurped Majdal with 3 missiles
5: The bombing of the usurped Sderot with 6 missiles.
6: The usurped Kissufim was bombed with 5 mortar shells.
7: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with 5 mortar shells.
8: Shelling Nahal Oz with 3 mortar shells.
9: Shelling the usurped Kissufim with 3 missiles.
10: The usurped Sderot was bombed with a missile
11: The bombing of the third eye (?) with 4 missiles
12: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with two mortar shells
13: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with two mortar shells
It is a revolution until victory

These are the "moderates" that the world says is ready for peace with Israel.

Note that they call all Israeli towns "settlements."

Here's the photo-illustration on their site, proudly portraying lots of rockets dropping on an Israeli civilian community while residents - who are all soldiers - flee:

Meanwhile, Hamas has abandoned its pretense of only attacking "military sites" when they shoot rockets. They made up that excuse once when the UN lightly chided them for indiscriminately attacking civilians, so for years they claimed that their rockets were only aimed at "military sites" in Sderot or Ashkelon. Now they proudly admit they are targeting civilians, as this press release from this morning shows:

* 05:30 Al-Qassam Brigades launch a large missile strike on the occupied city of Ashkelon.
* 04:17 Al-Qassam Brigades fire a missile burst at the Zionist Yad Morkhai usurped
* . 02:35 Al-Qassam Brigades bombard usurped Miflasim with two heavy mortar shells
* 01: 00 Al-Qassam Brigades bomb Sderot with two rocket-propelled grenades
* Between 23:30 and 00:00, Al-Qassam Brigades bombed the usurped Zionist Sderot with two missiles.

Hamas also said they will "make Ashkelon a living hell."

Islamic Jihad's press releases of each rocket attack look practically the same.

There is no difference between Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Just because two are explicitly Islamist and one is more secular, they all agree that attacking civilians is perfectly fine.

Yesterday, a missile hit the house of the Masri family in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, killing at least seven including three children.

Israeli TV reported that the IDF confirmed that the missile was an errant Hamas rocket that fell short in Gaza.

USA Today reported:

(The article has been updated and no longer has this section.)

Ashraf has no idea if his family was killed by Israel or Hamas. He just wants to bury them.

But the New York Times later interviewed another relative, Bashir. He is convinced it was an Israeli missile, and Israel is solely responsible for all suffering:

But as the conflict expanded and the airstrikes began, it quickly became deadly.

In Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, the Masri family was grieving for two young boys who were killed on Monday evening. Ibrahim, 11, and Marwan, 7, had been playing outside their home when a missile struck, according to their uncle, Bashir al-Masri, 25.

For Mr. Masri, the attack showed that Israel had no concern for civilian life.

“They target buildings with children, they target ambulances, they target schools,” he said by telephone. “And all the world, beginning with America, says that people in Gaza are terrorists. But we are not terrorists. We just want to live in peace.”

He also called on Israel to end a blockade on Gaza that has placed heavy restrictions on goods and materials, lest they be used to make weaponry. The blockade, coupled with similar restrictions by Egypt, has crippled Gaza’s economy and led to high unemployment.

“God knows how we live in Gaza — and the number one reason is the Israeli siege,” said Mr. Masri, who is one of the roughly 50 percent of Gazans without work. “They want to kill us. But they cannot.”

Suddenly, the media switches from a grieving relative with no idea how his family was killed into another who is practically a Hamas spokesperson repeating anti-Israel talking points word for word who is certain he knows Israel is behind it.

Hamas makes a point of letting Gazans know that they cannot say anything outside the party line.

It is also possible that the Gaza stringer for the NYT, Iyad Abuheweila, gave him leading questions like "What do you think about the inhuman Israeli blockade?" The New York Times reporters could not enter Gaza so they fully relied on the local stringer to get the quotes.

Either way, there is intense pressure from Gaza officials to control the narrative, and threatening residents happens often.

If the New York Times was truly interested in reporting the truth, they would have mentioned the IDF denial of shooting that rocket, and that many Gaza rockets have killed Gaza kids over the years, and that the other Mr. Masri had no idea where the missile came from. Instead they gave him a platform to propagandize on behalf of those who killed his family.

(CORRECTION: originally I thought both newspapers interviewed the same person. h/t Israellycool.)

Yom Hevron is not as well known as Yom Yerushalayim, but perhaps it should be.

The Six Day War didn't only liberate the holiest city for Jews, but it also liberated the second holiest city - and the city that has the third holiest site as well.

Hebron has been sacred to Jews even longer than Jerusalem was, ever since Abraham buried Sarah there.

Judea and Samaria are filled with places that Jews (and some Christians) are familiar with from childhood. It has far more Biblical sites than Israel within the Green Line.

Bethlehem is where Rachel is buried. Shiloh is where the tabernacle (the portable proto-Temple) was kept for 369 years. Bet El is where Jacob had his famous dream.

All of these sites, which had been Judenfrei during the 19 years of Arab rule, became available for Jews to visit and live, all soon after Jerusalem was liberated.

It is something to celebrate - especially since much of the world wants to take them all away again.

05/10 Links Pt2: Natan Sharansky: A Hero for All Seasons; Dermer suggests Israel should prioritize support of evangelicals over US Jews; Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky: A Hero for All Seasons

Sharansky reasons that until there is a fundamental internal transformation of Palestinian Arab society that embraces democracy, there can be no realistic negotiations. He roundly condemns Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a terrorist. He views his successor Mahmoud Abbas as a pale and equally corrupt reflection of his predecessor. Sharansky is under no illusions about Palestinian leaders. He believes that they still are wedded to the goal of Israel's elimination. Sharansky underscores his point by quoting Soviet dissident and creator of the USSR's hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov: "Never trust a government more than it trusts its own people."

Sharansky comes down hard on the Iranian regime as ideologically the most dangerous of enemies, claiming that he is in agreement with prominent Iranian analysts such as, Uri Lubrani, the last Israeli unofficial ambassador to Iran; Dr. Bernard Lewis, the most accomplished western Islamic scholar, and Ron Dermer, the long-serving Israeli ambassador to the US. Sharansky has sharp words of condemnation for Barack Obama; he accuses the former US President of having abandoned Iran's dissidents by his refusal to offer even verbal support for anti-regime demonstrators during their nationwide protests in 2009.

Sharansky... is a fierce critic of the "new" campus-based anti-Semitism, and catalogues several programs that Israeli and some American Jews have developed to lend courage to Jewish-American youths to defend, fight back, and celebrate their Jewish identity in the face of radical Jew-haters as well as self-hating American Jews who serve as a poisonous brew that eventually destroy both the institutions of democracy and the freedoms of individual liberty.

Dermer suggests Israel should prioritize support of evangelicals over US Jews

Former Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer suggested Sunday that Israel should prioritize the “passionate and unequivocal” support of evangelical Christians over that of American Jews, who he said are “disproportionately among our critics.”

“People have to understand that the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians. It’s true because of numbers and also because of their passionate and unequivocal support for Israel,” Dermer said in an onstage interview at a conference organized by Makor Rishon, a news outlet affiliated with the national religious community

The interview marked Dermer’s first public remarks since he ended a marathon seven-year term in January as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, where he became known for having the ear and “brain” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Dermer was lauded for using that relationship to play a key role in advancing several pro-Israel decisions taken by the Trump administration. However, the premier and his ambassador were accused of undermining Israel’s traditional bipartisan support in Washington by cozying up to the Republican party where the ideological differences of opinion on Israel are minimal, while alienating Democrats — the party supported by the vast majority of American Jews and whose last president Barak Obama sparred regularly with Jerusalem on a number of key issues.

In a wide-ranging interview, the former envoy was pressed on whether Netanyahu had placed too much emphasis on evangelical Christians in the US.

Dermer dismissed the suggestion and argued that Israel actually hasn’t designated enough time in engaging with evangelical Christians.

My friend, former Ambassador Ron Dermer, is 100% correct. I am someone who saw things for 3 years from the inside-way, way in the inside. From my perspective, Israel does indeed have a lot to be grateful for as a result of the leadership of @Netanyahu. https://t.co/bJTrMegad7
— Jason D. Greenblatt جيسن غرينبلات (@GreenblattJD) May 10, 2021

Nikki Haley: Ex-UN Ambassador: What Countries Say Behind Closed Doors | Rubin Report

18 far left radicals have signed onto a bill vilifying the Jewish state, threatening to pull aid.

Why?

Because Israel is enforcing her laws attempting to stop rioters from burning down Jerusalem.

Embarrassing this is where we are in America.#HR2590 pic.twitter.com/dgVL5bb4Yz
— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) May 10, 2021

Hamas tacitly admits that Israel is only hitting military targets

The official PA Wafa news agency claims at 7:22 PM:

20 civilians, including 9 children, were killed this evening, Monday, in an Israeli raid on Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip.

Local sources told Wafa that the occupation planes held two bombing raids east of Beit Hanoun, and continued targeting our people in the Gaza Strip, which led to the death of 20 civilians, including 9 children, in addition to the injury of about 65 citizens, 3 of whom were seriously wounded, and were transferred to the Beit Hanoun and Indonesian Hospitals. In the northern Gaza Strip, some of them were transferred to Al-Shifa Hospital due to the seriousness of their injuries.

Our correspondent reported that violent raids by the Israeli warplanes targeted homes and civilian properties in different areas of the Gaza Strip, during which dozens of rockets and missiles were fired.

He confirmed that the raids targeted a group of citizens, a vehicle, a motorbike, and two homes in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip, in addition to an Israeli missile strike in a yard behind the Al-Omari Mosque in the town of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, and a shell fell on a house for the Abdul Nabi family in the Al-Jarn area of the town, and the Al-Kashef land in its east was targeted.

Wow - it sounds like the IAF is only hitting civilians and civilian targets!

But then read this from Hamas at 9 PM:

Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, warned the Zionist enemy of a "strong, painful and above expectations" response if it bombed civilian facilities.

Abu Ubaidah, the Qassam spokesman, said in a tweet: "We warn the Zionist enemy that if they bomb civilian installations or homes for our people in Gaza, our response will be strong, painful and beyond the enemy's expectations."

Sounds like Israel has only hit military targets!

Just more proof that Palestinian media lie, all the time.

The IDF has confirmed that 3 children that Hamas blamed on Israel was in fact from an errant Hamas rocket, according to Times of Israel.