Sunday, September 01, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
Mrs. Elder and I are taking a much needed break.
Sunday, September 01, 2024
From Ian:
John Podhoretz: The Hostage Murders and the New Threat
John Podhoretz: The Hostage Murders and the New Threat
Hamas is the evil here. America is not responsible for the deaths of anyone in Gaza, and anyone who says otherwise is a moral idiot—just like those deranged people who seem determined to blame Bibi Netanyahu for not surrendering to Hamas, as though the hostage deals of the past, like the one that freed Hamas mastermind Yahya Sinwar in 2011, weren’t among the root causes of this horrible conflict.Caroline Glick: Sinwar’s Israeli accomplices
But we American are morally liable for our role in our backseat-driving in this war, for screaming at the Israelis at the wheel, unnerving them as they were trying to keep their eye on the road ahead.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin was 23 years old. There are two babies there, somewhere, in those tunnels that Kamala Harris said Israel should not go into. At her convention, Rachel and Jon spoke. America wept. Then Kamala Harris gave her speech and said Israel had the right to defend herself BUT there was too much killing and we needed a ceasefire and a hostage deal and a two-state solution and for the oceans to turn to lemonade, which is about as likely in the foreseeable future as a two-state solution.
And Hamas saw her, and saw Biden, and was so terrified by what they saw, so fearful of America’s martial response to their evil, that they killed Hersh and the five others whose bodies were found—and who knows who else yet.
This is a dangerous moment. This monstrous act of villainy will not quiet the campuses as the anniversary of October 7 approaches. No, it will embolden the very monsters who have been psychologically torturing Jewish students—and assaulting them in some cases—over the past year. The stories we’ve read in the past two days about the report of Columbia University’s anti-Semitism task force chill the blood. “Hillel Go to Hell,” read a banner at a Baruch College demonstration this week, in case you were wondering if things were going to quiet down.
The threats were real then and they are going to be even more real now, as those who support the destruction of the Jewish state and the crushing of the spirit and the freedom of American Jews make their moves over the next month. Their intention is to take over the anniversary of the massacre and turn it into a tribute, as they plan to do at the University of Maryland.
We don’t need to read Joe Biden issuing statements of outrage about Hersh. We need to see that things are going to be done to protect America’s Jews from the evil that might be visited upon us as we tick down the days until it’s been a year since Jews were plunged into this existential battle designed to destabilize the Jewish state and drive American Jews underground.
Joe Biden was sitting on the beach this afternoon as the Israelis recovered the bodies. He is a spent force, a quartered roasted duck. So what are you going to do about it, Ms. Harris? What are you going to do?
The discourse in Israel isn’t simply removed from reality because it is based on a false presentation of the U.S. position by the security brass. The entire domestic debate is taking place while Hamas isn’t even participating in the negotiations. For the generals, for Gallant and their comrades in the Knesset, the media and on the streets, the only one responsible for anything is Netanyahu.Ruthie Blum: Kamala’s push for Palestinian statehood
In other words, Gallant, the generals, the left’s political leaders and the rioters in the streets are all playing the roles Sinwar assigned them.
This reality played out starkly during Thursday night’s Security Cabinet meeting.
From leaks of the supposedly secret deliberations that can be traced directly to Gallant, we learned that Gallant presented his fellow ministers with an ultimatum that might as well have been written by Sinwar. Gallant said that if they don’t agree to withdraw from the Gaza-Egypt border (temporarily), the hostages will be killed.
Netanyahu reportedly exploded at Gallant and explained that there is no such thing as a temporary withdrawal from the border zone, because of the actual U.S. position opposing a reinstatement of hostilities. Gallant responded to this dose of reality with a total meltdown. He said that Netanyahu was effectively calling for the hostages to be murdered.
Netanyahu responded by presenting a draft Security Cabinet decision to reject any concessions on Israel’s control over the Gaza-Egypt border in any hostage talks. It passed with one nay vote—Gallant’s.
Then on Saturday night, the news began percolating that the hostages were executed and the IDF retrieved the bodies.
As Tal Gilboa, whose nephew Guy Gilboa-Dalal remains hostage in Gaza, wrote on her X account on Sunday morning, “If the formula is ‘dead hostages = shutting down the country,’ … what would you do if you were Sinwar?”
Gallant responded to the news of their executions by publishing a statement on X demanding that the Security Cabinet reconvene and cancel its decision on the Gaza-Egypt border from Thursday night.
Towards noon on Sunday, Netanyahu issued his first response to the news that that the hostages had been executed. He explained that Hamas stopped carrying out serious negotiations with Israel last December. Sinwar rejected the U.S. ceasefire for hostages deals in May and August—both of which Israel accepted. Netanyahu concluded by noting that the execution of the six hostages makes clear, yet again, that Hamas doesn’t want a deal.
Given past experience, in all likelihood the left’s current calls for mass riots will indeed lead to unrest. But they won’t bring down the government. All the same, as Gilboa inferred, they will place the rest of the hostages in even greater peril.
Israel needs to win this terrible war. It has no choice. Just as the Jibril deal paved the way for 20 years of escalating terror warfare against Israel, and just as Oct. 7 was born with the Shalit deal, so events far more terrible than that one-day holocaust will happen if we dare to play by Sinwar’s rules. It is shocking, and frankly unforgiveable, that Israel’s left, led to his disgrace by Gallant, insists on doing so.
The news of the six bodies of murdered hostages found by Israeli troops on Saturday night in the tunnels of Rafah makes such remarks especially repugnant. In the first place, one of the captives held by Hamas terrorists with the help of “innocent” Gazan collaborators—and killed in cold blood in recent days—was American citizen Hersh Golberg-Polin.
The only appropriate response on the part of the Biden-Harris crew to this travesty would be to hang their heads in shame for enabling Iranian proxies, in this case a group of rapist thugs with machetes and mortars, to dance rings around what is supposed to be the world’s greatest super-power. Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken eulogized Goldberg-Polin on X by calling him a “hero” and resuming his efforts to secure a “ceasefire”—a euphemism for a Hamas victory over Israel.
Secondly, if the incompetents in D.C. hadn’t been trying to court Hamas-supporting constituents—on the grounds, as Biden said at the Democratic National Convention, that “they have a point”—they might have behaved like the allies of Israel that they’ve been professing to be since Oct. 7. Yes, had they not kept trying to block it from entering Rafah, or withholding weapons shipments as leverage, Goldberg-Polin and many others might well have been rescued by now.
This brings us back to Harris, who made sure, in her inarticulate fashion, to stress that she’ll toe the party line on Gaza: nodding slightly to the Jewish community by purporting to back Israel’s right to be upset about the atrocities of Oct. 7, while attempting to appeal to progressive antisemites.
“We have got to get a deal done,” she told Bash. “We were in Doha [the capital of Qatar, where some of the ceasefire negotiations were held]. We have to get a deal done. This war must end. And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out. I’ve met with the families of the American hostages. Let’s get the hostages out. Let’s get the ceasefire done.”
Bash interjected, “But no change in policy in terms of arms so forth?”
Harris said a perfunctory “no,” repeating, “I—we—have to get a deal done. Dana, we have to get a deal done. When you look at the significance of this to the families, to the people who are living in that region, a deal is not only the right thing to do to end this war, but will unlock so much of what must happen next.”
Not a mention of Hamas’s refusal to accept any deal that doesn’t guarantee its continued reign, nor of the inconvenient fact that it never agreed to release all the hostages.
“I remain committed, since I’ve been on Oct. 8, to what we must do to work toward a two-state solution,” Harris declared. “Where Israel is secure and in equal measure the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”
There you have it.
Harris was admitting that, from the day after Palestinian terrorists committed the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust—before Israeli boots even touched the ground in Gaza, but while rockets continued to be launched from the Strip into the south, and Hezbollah in Lebanon fired missile barrages on the north—Team Biden was promoting a narrative of moral equivalence between perpetrator and victim.
We all must keep this in mind as Israel lays more hostages to rest and buries additional brave soldiers who fell in the battle to bring them home and beat their monstrous captors.
Sunday, September 01, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
One of the many bogus statistics we've been following from Gaza is the number of missing people buried under rubble.
As we've noted, between November and May, Hamas regularly reported - and the UN regularly repeated - 7,000 missing people under the rubble in Gaza. Then, sddenly, on May 3, that number jumped to 10,000 people missing.
Does anyone have the names of these missing people? Do we know what methodology was used to estimate their numbers?
Of course not. Because Hamas made them all up. And that's good enough for the UN.
Right now, the number of supposedly missing people has remained steady at exactly 10,000 for four months. The UN keeps publishing that number, crediting the Gaza Government Media Office, which is Hamas.
So not one person has been discovered under the rubble since May? Or maybe some have been discovered, but are equaled out with the number newly buried?
The number is fiction, like all of Hamas numbers. But NGOs and the UN need to publish the highest, most absurd numbers because that gives the sense of urgency that they demand for their anti-Israel political purposes.
- Sunday, September 01, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Turkish antisemitism
Turkish magazine Baran Dergisi was very happy upon hearing that rumor:
There is no longer any place for Jews in the world!Six Jews were attacked in a hotel in Taba, Egypt. The occupying Jews, who gained the hatred of the world with the massacre they carried out in Gaza, are being destroyed on sight....Jews must learn that from October 7th onwards the Jewish world will be narrow and they will not be able to find comfort anywhere. They will be destroyed wherever they are seen.
As we've been seeing lately, Turkish media is much less reluctant to spread pure Jew hatred than even most Arab media.
The same magazine had a recent article interviewing author Peren Birsaygılı Mut who said that "after October 7, Jews lost more blood than ever before, and in order for them to weaken them even more, we need to know our enemy and their propaganda methods well and fight. For example, it is essential that studies are conducted in academia on the invalidity of the concept of anti-Semitism."
Another article about a secular Turk who is critical of Islamism and supports Israel gives him the ultimate insult: it calls him a "crypto-Jew." himself. It ends off by asking "How long will Turkey shelter Jewish dogs?"
Similarly, it attacks the secular CHP party of Turkey as "Jewish-friendly."
There are about 14,500 Jews living in Turkey. I hope they wake up soon.
Saturday, August 31, 2024
From Ian:
Martin Sherman: America 2024: Is antisemitism “the point?”
Martin Sherman: America 2024: Is antisemitism “the point?”
Antisemitism as “a point”Richard Kemp: The US should sanction the ICC
Thus, while it is true that the Convention did not permit a Palestinian Arab speaker to address the Convention, this was overshadowed entirely by the fact that the Jewish members were compelled to assemble in hiding to conduct Jewish-related affairs for fear of disruption by anti-Jewish mobs.
One can only wonder in troubled bewilderment what departing president, Joe Biden, had in mind when he conceded that the pro-Hamas hooligans, demonstrating outside the Convention hall, “had a point”—as they raucously expressed their “outrage” at the IDF response to the murder and mutilation, the ravages and rapes of seniors and of infants, of men and of women that comprised the peaceful population of the towns, villages and agricultural communities in the Gaza Envelope.
Indeed, two aspects underscore the gravity of the unfolding metamorphosis: The one is the timing; the other is the substance.
With regard to the timing, this shift in sentiment seems particularly incongruous, coming as it does when the Palestinian Arabs seem more worthy than ever of censure and sanction, rather than support and sympathy. Indeed, this is all the more astounding since this emerging hostility comes hard on the heels, not only of the unspeakable barbarity and brutality on the part of the Gazan Arabs, but also the joyous embrace with which the appalling atrocities were celebrated by the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs, in general.
Crucible, not victim
Moreover, it is difficult to separate out between the moral culpability of the general populace in Gaza and their elected leadership. Indeed, contrary to popular belief, the overall population in Gaza is not the hapless victim of its radical Hamas leaders. Rather, it is the crucible in which Hamas was forged and the incubator from which it emerged.
Thus, Hamas is not an unwelcome imposition on an otherwise placid population, but an authentic reflection of the innermost desires of an inherently savage horde.
But rather than side unreservedly with Israel, the Democratic party and the Biden administration have chosen to take unprecedented measures against the elected government of a friendly nation.
Thus, with unspeakable impudence, and cynical exploitation of his Jewish origins, Democratic Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, purported to know better than the Israeli electorate itself what is good for it. In a desperate attempt to kowtow to his party’s increasingly assertive radical wing, he accused the elected Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of being an “obstacle to peace”, calling for new elections to replace him—despite the fact that, even today, he is the most popular politician in the country. This, of course, is something Schumer would never have presumed to do with any other democratic ally of the US - or even any non-democratic adversary. Thus, somehow, Schumer found no reason to urge the removal of any member of the brutal Iranian regime in Tehran. Go figure.
Pompous pretentiousness
Arguably even more perturbing is the initiative by the Biden State Department to impose punitive sanctions on rightwing Israeli citizens—and to threaten sanctions on duly-elected senior ministers(Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir). Stunningly, none of the sanctioned individuals or organizations have been accused—never mind, convicted--of any current transgressions by Israeli law-enforcement agencies. With unmatched audacity, the Administration pompously proclaimed: "The United States remains deeply concerned about [Jewish] extremist violence and instability in the 'West Bank', which undermines Israel’s own security” neglecting of course any mention of how Arab extremism might impact Israel’s security.
Then, with breathtaking arrogance, it announced that if Israel does not act in accordance with its wishes, the US will take it upon itself to deal with “recalcitrant” Israeli citizens—with no commensurate intentions regarding lawless Arabs, who regularly stone, firebomb, and shoot at Israeli citizens: "We strongly encourage the government of Israel to take immediate steps to hold these individuals and entities accountable. In the absence of such steps, we will continue to impose our own accountability measures."
One can only imagine the outcry that would ensue should Washington threaten to intervene and supersede the functioning of the national law enforcement authority in any other country—especially if US citizens were not directly impacted by the action or inaction of that authority within the area of its jurisdiction.
Perverse and paradoxical
Furthermore, in terms of substance, Democratic support for the Palestinian Arab cause seems highly incongruous. After all, for anyone who ostensibly embraces progressive liberal values, there should be little attraction in the establishment of any Palestinian entity, especially a theocratic tyranny, such as a Hamas-ruled enclave in Gaza. Indeed, why would the party endorse establishing (yet another) homophobic, misogynistic Muslim-majority tyranny, whose hallmarks would be the suppression of women, the oppression of homosexuals, and the repression of non-Muslims and political opponents?
Clearly then, there is nothing that corresponds with the values to which the Democratic party professes to subscribe and the support for gender discrimination, gay persecution, religious intolerance, and political oppression that would characterize any self-governing Palestinian political entity.
So, if the new surge of support for Hamas and Gaza is antithetical to values allegedly dear to the Democratic party, but is manifestly detrimental to the Jewish state and by association, Jews who identify with it, what could be the motivation behind this malign shift?
Antisemitism certainly seems a highly plausible answer.
We know of no other country that has been treated anything like this. For example Australia and the UK conducted war crimes investigations that took many years and were not plagued with intervention by the ICC. Israel, though, must apparently be subjected to special treatment. Arrest warrants were demanded by Khan seven months after the start of the conflict which triggered his intervention.Debunking the myth: Inside the IDF's efforts to minimize civilian casualties
An ICC inquiry is one thing. Issuing arrest warrants against national leaders is something entirely different. In his latest submission to the ICC, Khan justifies his request solely on the basis that arresting Netanyahu and Gallant ‘could avert further harm to the victims who remain in Gaza and to those who were forced to leave but continue to suffer physical and mental harm’. That is manifestly absurd and Khan’s application should be immediately dismissed on that ground alone.
Does he expect Israel will arrest and hand over its Prime Minister and Defence Minister because he says so? Or perhaps he thinks the ministers will travel to the territory of a member state that will incarcerate them and send them into his clutches. Obviously neither would happen, but if it did, does Khan actually believe their replacements would end the war (read: surrender to Hamas)?
Khan must know none of this is realistic, and therefore his so-called justification is entirely without merit. The truth is that his arrest warrants are nothing other than a performative charade, intended to insult Israel and undermine its sovereignty and legitimacy.
We said earlier that this whole episode is not just a danger to Israel but to the world. Of course the inclusion of Hamas terrorists in Khan’s warrant application is yet more theatre, intended to pretend to the world that the ICC is ‘even-handed’. No extremist group or despotic regime has ever been or is ever going to be in any way deterred by the grandly-gowned justices at The Hague. Quite the reverse. Hamas and its kind will be emboldened by the knowledge that their enemies are vulnerable to legal action by the ICC while by definition they themselves remain inviolate. Khan pretty much confirmed this by not even bothering to adduce any justification for the Hamas arrest warrants, such as preventing further atrocities against Israel.
Like it or not, the only way to deal with such bloodthirsty terrorist gangs is by military force, not by lawsuits handed down with fanfare by the ICC. Paradoxically, Khan’s ill-judged machinations serve to deny effective military action by intimidating democratic national leaders who need to use force for the legitimate defence of their countries.
If the ICC’s ironically unaccountable judges succumb to Khan’s demand, we will have further confirmation that they are driven by a political agenda lacking legal logic or reason. Only the US can do anything about that. President Biden and Secretary Blinken both condemned Khan’s arrest bid in May but seem unwilling to go beyond words. Previously, the US sanctioned ICC officials for attempting to bring their countrymen before the court. In June, the US House of Representatives voted to pass legislation sanctioning the ICC for its action against Israel. Negotiations with the Senate to get that bill passed should be renewed with urgency. As with so much else in this anti-western political warfare campaign, Israel is the canary in the coal mine. If this precedent is allowed to stand, US political and military leaders will be back on the ICC’s menu and the world will be a more dangerous place.
The Israeli Air Force was a pioneer in integrating computers into bombers, drastically improving the precision of airstrikes. By the 1990s, these computers became small enough to be installed directly into bombs, leading to the development of precision-guided munitions (PGMs). The IDF has increasingly adopted this technology, particularly since the mid-1990s, to minimize collateral damage. For instance, during the First Gulf War in 1991, the U.S. used smart weapons in just 8% of strikes, but by later conflicts like 2008's Operation Cast Lead, nearly 100% of the munitions used were smart bombs. In the current war, Israel has not only employed smart bombs to target terrorists embedded within civilian populations—a Hamas war crime in itself—but has also integrated new technologies to enhance the accuracy of ground troops and artillery.
One such innovation is the Dagger sight by Smart Shooter, which uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to ensure that every shot is precise, effectively turning each soldier into a sniper and significantly reducing the risk of hitting unintended targets.
Another game-changing technology is the Iron Sting mortar, developed by Elbit. Unlike conventional mortars, which are generally imprecise, the Iron Sting is accurate to within meters. It relies on inputted coordinates rather than electro-optical imaging, significantly reducing collateral damage and the likelihood of civilian casualties.
Throughout the war, there were several well-known instances where Israel targeted terrorists in schools, with international media echoing Hamas propaganda by claiming that Israel killed many civilians during these strikes.
For example, on August 10, Israel targeted terrorists at Tabeen School. The Guardian reported: “At least 80 people have been killed in Israeli missile strikes on a school compound in Gaza City, according to the territory’s civil defense service.” In reality, the IDF targeted 20 terrorists, causing minimal damage to the school, and provided evidence demonstrating that the inflated number of casualties was highly unlikely. The IDF even posted the names and photos of those killed in the attack.
The Tabeen School strike is just one example of numerous propaganda attempts by Hamas and their allies to tarnish Israel’s image and further their strategy of maximizing civilian casualties to pressure Israel on the world stage.
A comparative perspective
These practices have enabled the IDF to achieve remarkable success on the battlefield while minimizing civilian casualties. The IDF reports that it has eliminated over 14,300 terrorists. Even if we accept the inflated figures from the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which are based on numbers provided by Hamas, the civilian death toll would be around 24,000. This results in a ratio of approximately 1.5 civilians killed for every one combatant. In comparison, the Soviet-Afghan War had a ratio of 10 to 1, and the Biafran War had a ratio of 15 to 1.
When we consider the total civilian death toll, which stands at around 26,000 (including Israeli civilians), this conflict is far less deadly for civilians than other recent wars. For example, the war in Yemen has resulted in over 367,000 civilian deaths, the Syrian Civil War has claimed over 617,000 lives and the Liberian Civil War left more than 200,000 civilians dead.
The IDF's efforts to avoid civilian casualties stand in stark contrast to these conflicts, demonstrating a commitment to minimizing harm even in the midst of intense warfare.
Friday, August 30, 2024
From Ian:
The Nazification of anti-Zionism
The Nazification of anti-Zionism
Of course, there are significant differences between then and now, the most obvious being that during the Nazi era, antisemitism was a state-driven policy, whereas today it’s a civil society phenomenon in Western countries. Still, there are two overlaps that are worth pointing out.Ruthie Blum: The high cost to the hostages of ‘enlightened’ hypocrisy
Firstly, while Western governments aren’t actively discriminating against their Jewish populations, many of them are feeding antisemitic sentiments. This is certainly true of those countries in the European Union, such as Spain and the Republic of Ireland, which have pushed for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state and advocated for sanctions against members of the current Israeli government. These politicians have essentially blessed the notion that Israel is a rogue state committing war crimes and therefore deserving of anger—anger that all too often gets directed at Jewish communities. As Arfi pointed out, “We all live with the idea that some people consider Jews to be legitimate targets for a battle happening 4,000 kilometers away.”
Secondly, many of the tactics and methods supported by the Hamas acolytes mirror the anti-Jewish measures introduced by the Nazi regime. A particularly shocking example emerged last week when the ultra-left New Communist Party in Italy published a blacklist of institutions and individuals who “support or promote the Zionist state in Italy.” In essence, this was an electronic version of the Nazi boycott campaign of Jewish-owned stores and businesses in Germany during the 1930s that helped give rise to the Holocaust a few years later.
In tandem with that is the rewriting of Jewish history and the caricaturing of Jewish theology. Social-media platforms like X (Twitter) and Instagram have been flooded with content that mocks the link between the land of Israel and the Jewish people, casting Israelis as Ashkenazi colonists who have willfully stolen Arab territories. The feed of Richard Medhurst—an Anglo-Syrian propagandist whose unhinged ravings are published by Iran’s Press TV and Russia’s RT—is replete with disparaging references to Ashkenazi Jews, to give one example. Medhurst’s co-thinkers, like Scott Ritter, an American former U.N. weapons inspector and convicted pedophile, and Mary Kostakidis, an Australian reporter who has enthusiastically embraced Medhurst’s own hatred of Zionism, form a reliable echo chamber for this theme and others, such as the slander that Jewish “chosenness”—a purely religious notion about the Jewish relationship with God—is actually an ideology of racial and national superiority. All these outpourings are designed to make their audiences despise all Jews, everywhere; in Israel, where they occupy and persecute the “indigenous” Palestinian Arabs, and outside, where the vast majority of Jews who support Israel, and have family and friends there, are framed as inherently suspect.
As I’ve argued before—and here is the link between the antisemitism of the last century and that in this one—anti-Zionism has morphed into “antizionism.” Freed from its hyphen, what remains is an ornate, multi-layered conspiracy theory with pretensions to be a revelatory, liberating and compelling explanation for why the world is in a rotten state.
For that reason, I think we can now reasonably speak of the “Nazification” of anti-Zionism. As the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, citing the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, declared from its masthead: “The Jews are our misfortune.” For their inheritors, it’s the “Zionists” who play the same nefarious role, but for all intents and purposes, there is no practical distinction between these two categories. If we are to educate non-Jews about the evils of antisemitism, we are obliged to demonstrate its consistencies across different historical periods. The core message is, after all, evolving in the same way as the trajectory of antisemitism through the ages: You have no right to live among us as Zionists; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live.
The argument over whether there’s such a thing as too high a price to pay for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza continues to rage in Israel unabated. And “rage” is the right word to describe what is rarely a serious discussion on the part of the “Bring Them All Home Now” advocates.As a lifelong Jewish Democrat, it pains me to say this
Those whose family members are still languishing in the Strip can be forgiven for seeing the issue from a prism of personal pain. Still, not all the captives’ loved ones agree with their more vociferous counterparts that the government should cave in to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s demands in order to seal a deal that would put an end to the 11-month nightmare.
The latter group grasps that it’s not so simple. In the first place, Sinwar hasn’t consented to free all the hostages, including if Israel withdraws all troops from Gaza and leaves him in power to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 “again and again and again,” as his henchmen have vowed to do.
Second, the hundreds of bereaved families of soldiers who fell in this war to defeat Hamas and rescue the hostages are desperate not to have all that loss be in vain. Ditto for the men and women in uniform risking their lives every day in the same pursuit.
The people who deserve no sympathy are the ones who’ve been exploiting everyone’s devastation to fan the flames of the pre-Oct. 7 protests aimed at ousting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition. Indeed, their cynical abuse of the hostage crisis to further a political agenda that got upstaged by the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is nothing short of despicable.
Since the bulk of the Hebrew media has been complicit in this effort, it’s often difficult for members of the public to make a distinction between rational debate and “anybody but Bibi” hysteria. Occasionally, though, the disingenuousness gets exposed—and it’s a doozy.
I have requested anonymity for this essay because there is intense social pressure on American Jews to be anti-Israel, especially on campuses. I am a professor at a liberal arts college where there is intense hostility toward Israel; my Zionism has already caused me to become a pariah on my campus.
If I was to publicly take the next logical step — conclude that drastic political changes are required to stem the public tide of Jew-hatred, even as drastic as supporting the presidential candidate “they” all uniformly despise — I sincerely believe my personal safety would be in question. That is why this essay both needs to be published and to be anonymous. The situation is that dire.
That somber moment when the flight attendant says, “Though we do not anticipate a change in cabin pressure,” so heavy with portent (at least for those of us with darker dispositions), and then the sage advice: “If you’re traveling with someone who may need assistance, put your own oxygen mask on first.”
Sage, if perhaps unnecessary, given the normal human instinct for self-preservation. I am reminded of the “Seinfeld” episode in which a fire breaks out at a children’s birthday party and George knocks children and elderly out of the way in order to escape. A moment of levity back then, the final calm, perhaps, before the storm, back when being Jewish was still somewhat cool.
This may just be my darker disposition speaking, but I believe the cabin pressure has changed.
If you do not already know this, or perhaps have been out of the United States — or off the planet — for the past year, a brief survey should catch you up. Franklin Foer summed it up back in March with his article in The Atlantic titled, “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” That title, though perhaps optimistic in using the present continuous rather than past perfect, nails it.
Combine it with Jacob Savage’s 2023 article, “The Vanishing: The Erasure of Jews From American Life,” documenting the disappearance — a euphemism for “exclusion” — of Jews from academia, from all sorts of leadership positions, cultural institutions, activist organizations, legal positions such as judgeships, prestigious fellowships like Guggenheims and MacArthurs, and so on.
An article from just last week by Joshua Hoffman is entitled, “American Jews are increasingly excluded from leadership positions — because they are Jewish.” Being Jewish is also increasingly uncomfortable (another euphemism) in medical schools, law schools, and (anecdotally, though not yet well-documented) business schools.
The vanishing is complete in the public university system of New York City, once extraordinarily friendly to Jews in the American city with the largest Jewish population, now the largest urban university system in the country with some 25 campuses and approximately 230,000 people — where “of the top 80 senior leadership positions including campus presidents, as of April 2023, there were zero Jews remaining.”1
Five years ago the ever-prescient Liel Leibovitz urged Jews to “get out” of the elite American university system, where they were so clearly unwelcome; well that call has been heeded, if not by the Jews themselves then by the administrators and admissions officers who have kept them out, as the percentages of Jews in the Ivy League has plummeted over the last decade or two.
As Armin Rosen’s article last year put it, we have witnessed an “Ivy League exodus.” Professor of politics Eric Kaufmann found that just four percent of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish (compared to 21 percent of boomers).2 The steep decline of Jewish editors at the “Harvard Law Review” (down roughly 50 percent in less than 10 years) could be the subject of its own law review article.
Put it all together and we have seen what can only be called a purge: a purge of Jews from public life, from leadership, from elite institutions, and, most forebodingly of all, from the pipeline itself. If Jews are being hounded out of medical, law, and business schools, the next generation of physicians, lawyers, and businesspeople will be sparse with Jews.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Correcting the ‘Escalation’ Nonsense
Seth Mandel: Correcting the ‘Escalation’ Nonsense
Let’s take as an example the New York Times article on Israel’s antiterror raids in the West Bank this week. “It was a significant escalation after months of raids that have unfolded alongside the war in Gaza,” we’re told. We then learn this: “The operation followed months of escalating Israeli raids in the occupied territory.”A step back
Sounds like a lot of escalations! But what does that mean, exactly? Is it an escalation when Israel sends a numerically greater amount of troops than it did in last week’s or last month’s counterterror operation? Is it an escalation if Israel used a piece of equipment, like an unmanned drone, that it didn’t use last time? What about the number of military vehicles—how many jeeps make an escalation?
Much like its equally annoying cousin “disproportionate,” the term “escalation” appears to be a synonym for “Israeli self-defense.”
“Escalation of war has come to mean an increase in scope or violence of a conflict,” the U.S. Naval Institute offers. Thus what happened in the West Bank this week might truly count as an escalation—but if so, it is not Israel that escalated.
More from the Times: “The raid comes as U.S., Israeli and Iranian officials have said that Tehran is operating a clandestine smuggling route across the Middle East to deliver weapons to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territory. The goal, as described by three Iranian officials, has been to foment unrest against Israel by flooding the enclave with as many weapons as it can, The New York Times reported in April.”
Ah, a clue. Let’s head on over to what the Times reported in April:
Iran is operating a clandestine smuggling route across the Middle East, employing intelligence operatives, militants and criminal gangs, to deliver weapons to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to officials from the United States, Israel and Iran.
The goal, as described by three Iranian officials, is to foment unrest against Israel by flooding the enclave with as many weapons as it can.
The covert operation is now heightening concerns that Tehran is seeking to turn the West Bank into the next flashpoint in the long-simmering shadow war between Israel and Iran.
So what we’ve learned, definitively, is the following: Iran has been escalating the conflict for months, and Israel’s response to this escalation was an attempt to de-escalate—that is, to prevent Iran’s escalation from coming to full fruition. As the Times itself reports, Iran has increased the scope of the conflict, in an attempt to increase the violence of the conflict. If what just happened this week does count as an escalation, it is definitionally Iran’s escalation.
That is also true of Israel’s preemptive strikes on Hezbollah rocket launchers in Lebanon. Using Lebanon as a base of attack on Israel in response to Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza is quite literally increasing the scope of conflict. Israel’s response has been to take actions that, if further escalation takes place, will limit the damage and destructiveness of that escalation. The other goal of Israel’s actions is to prevent that escalation from happening at all.
Words have meanings. Israel is working to de-escalate conflict while being accused of doing the opposite. That’s the reality, and it isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
Not long ago, I wrote an article titled, “Hostage Talks Won’t Work; Winning the War Will.” A retired American military officer wrote to ask, “What is the definition of winning? What does winning look like?” He wasn’t questioning Israel’s capability; he added, “I am quite sure the IDF can deliver whatever is directed or defined.”Ministers to Netanyahu: No Red Cross visits to Nukhba terrorists without hostage checks first
To be clear, an American military officer knows what winning looks like; he was checking on me. That made me nervous, but I also realized that people are projecting different end games on Israel. The Biden-Harris administration, for example, is pushing for a ceasefire and “de-escalation.” (U.S. President Joe Biden told Israel in mid-April to “pocket the win” after Iran fired 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles at Israel and succeeded in killing only one person. Odd definition of a win.)
So, I took a shot.
“Winning” is achieving your war objectives. Israel had three clear objectives announced in October.
Secure the border and the people of Israel. Previous ground and rocket attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah resulted in “ceasefires” that left the timing and scope of the next attack up to Israel’s enemies. There was a ceasefire in place on Oct. 6, and Hamas broke it in the most horrific manner. This time, the Israeli government said, “We don’t want another ceasefire, or a better ceasefire, or a longer ceasefire.”
The goal is to secure the border.
The United States settled for a ceasefire in Korea. And when the minuses outweighed the plusses in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we went home. We put 6,000 or 10,000 miles between us and them. We ignored the mess, the refugees, the killings we left in our wake. For Israel, there is no going home; Israelis are home. If a secure border means a buffer along the Negev and Israeli forces in the Philadelphi Corridor, so be it.
Take away Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. It doesn’t mean “kill them all” or “get a formal surrender.” It means removing the weapons and tunnels already inside Gaza, along with securing the borders so Hamas can’t import more. The tunnels at Rafah tell you that Egypt was a smuggling partner of Hamas. Israel, perhaps naively, assumed Egypt would live up to the agreements it signed in 1982 when Israel withdrew from Sinai and 2005 when Israel withdrew from Gaza. But no, so now Israel has to be in control.
Without military power, Hamas’s governing power wanes. If you believe, as some people do, that the Palestinians aren’t all Hamas themselves or that they don’t support Hamas, but they know Hamas will kill them if they rebel (Hamas has killed many Palestinian civilians since Israel’s invasion, including people trying to get to the “safe zones”), then you have to want the Hamas boot off their necks. The only way to do that for them is by removing the weapons Hamas uses to enforce its will, i.e., to kill them. Or, if you believe, as some people do, that Palestinian civilians do, in fact, support the genocidal program of Hamas, then Israel has to remove as much of the weaponry as possible from the space.
Eleven government ministers joined Minister Orit Strock's call on Thursday not to allow visits by representatives of the Red Cross to the Nukhba terrorists imprisoned in Israel.
The Red Cross would visit the terrorists without having visited the hostages held in Gaza and providing them with medication first.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the political and security cabinet were presented with the call, which they were expected to discuss on Thursday night.
Earlier this week, the High Court of Justice issued a conditional order according to which the state must explain why visits by the Red Cross's representatives to Israeli prisons should be prevented. The ministers demand that this position be the state's answer to the High Court.
Minister Orit Strock led the call and was joined by Amichai Eliyahu, Uriel Busso, Yitzhak Goldknopf, Miki Zohar, Amichai Chikli, Idit Silman, Ya’acov Margi, Ofir Sofer, and May Golan.
Authorized Nukhba visits
Last April, politicians and various organizations strongly criticized the decision of the War Cabinet to authorize visits to Nukhba prisoners.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed approving the visits, which was supported by most cabinet ministers, as opposed to ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who opposed it.
- Friday, August 30, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Temple University Students for Justice in Palestine held a protest outside the Hillel Jewish student building, cementing their status as antisemites. They waved the flag of the PFLP terror group.
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And here is part of their speech on why they protested Hillel.
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No room for an ethnostate in the Middle East!
Except that every Arab state is an ethnostate by any definition.
The constitution of the "State of Palestine" says it explicitly in Article 1:
Palestine is part of the larger Arab world, and the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation. Arab unity is an objective that the Palestinian people shall work to achieve.
Sounds like an ethnostate to me! Essentially every Arab nation defines itself specifically as an Arab nation.
So why do they choose Israel as the worst example of an "ethnostate" when the Middle East has nothing but ethnostates that are almost all much larger and less tolerant of minorities?
Could it possibly have anything to do with Israel being the Jewish state?
- Friday, August 30, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Norwegian site VG reports that a Norwegian citizen named Wissam Khazem was killed this morning in Jenin.
The family in Norway claims Wissam was not a militant or Hamas member:"My son was not a terrorist. He was an ordinary person who worked in a construction company. He tried to get his wife to Norway, but was refused three times. That's why he moved back to the West Bank," says his father, who lives in Skien.
Too bas Hamas itself called him one of their commanders:
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, announced the martyrdom of the Qassam commander Wissam Ayman Khazem from Jenin camp, who ascended to heaven as a martyr this morning as a result of an airstrike that he was subjected to along with his resistance brothers: the martyr Mujahid Maysara Al-Masharqa and the martyr Mujahid Arafat Al-Amer, following their clash with the undercover forces in the village of Al-Zababdeh, east of Jenin.
Here was his Instagram image, according to VG.
And to make the link with Hamas complete, he's wearing their headband along with his "construction worker" buddies.
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- Friday, August 30, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
The head of the polling institute says it is "highly unlikely" that this happened, since he trusts his Gaza team, but he will investigate.
The IDF published two translated documents from Hamas. (The translations appear accurate from the Arabic.) One of them is a three page general description by Hamas of its influence operations including survey manipulation, and the other was specifically about how they changed the poll numbers from Gaza for the PCPSR March survey.
The first document also detailed other influence operations. And that is the real story that everyone is missing.
Hamas' influence operations are much more sophisticated than one would expect. They have control of social media accounts with over a million followers, they claim to have been able to take down pages and accounts of anti-Hamas and pro-Fatah activists, they have contacts at Al Jazeera who do what they ask (they mention Tamer Almisshal specifically,) they silence opponents by "canceling" them and getting others to threaten them.
There is no published date on the first document. The second one, about the March poll, was certainly recent.
Analyzing the poll data and comparing them to the published PCPSR poll from March, they are claiming to only influence the Gaza numbers of the survey, not the West Bank stats.
Corroborating evidence for the manipulation comes from comparing a similar question between the PCPSR poll and an AWRAD poll, asking Gaza residents who they want to control the Gaza Strip after the war. PCPSR says 52% want Hamas. the leaked document claims the real number was 32%, while AWRAD a couple of months later says only 6% of Gazans prefer a Hamas led government.
If we accept that these are legitimate documents and that Hamas has a massive influence operation with hundreds of employees (they claim 160 employee on Internet operations alone), then what other information is Hamas manipulating?
Let's review the claims of famine in Gaza.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) says that as of June, 342,000 Gazans were in Phase 5 famine conditions, and they predicted that nearly half a million would be there in September. They base these definitions on measuring households with an extreme lack of food, percentage of children facing acute malnutrition and mortality rates.
That is a huge disconnect between the three, and it indicates that the other statistics that IPC is basing its analysis on are flawed.
If Hamas manipulates surveys of public opinion, wouldn't they also manipulate surveys of household access to food? The only way to measure that is ...surveys! And wouldn't they try to manipulate the reported numbers of children with malnutrition and even the results of upper arm circumference tests?
Qualitatively speaking, there are very few photos of starving children in Gaza. The media publishes the same couple of children over and over again while their parents and siblings appear well fed. We are not seeing photos that resemble those of famine stricken areas elsewhere worldwide. But according to IPC, the only place in the world with more people in Phase 5 than Gaza is Sudan.
Does this make any sense?
Given that the charge of "famine" generates headlines worldwide, wouldn't there be a huge effort by Hamas to threaten, cajole, or bribe the people gathering data, or those reporting data? And many of them might be Hamas members already, since no one gets a public health job in Gaza without Hamas approval.
We've already seen how much Hamas is willing to lie on casualty counts. This document indicates that their propaganda operations are far more extensive than anyone has reported. If the document is real, and nothing indicates it is not, then it is entirely possible that even the statistics gathered by third parties which rely on Gaza residents for accuracy are in fact not real to begin with.
I'm not saying PCPSR is corrupt or that IPC is corrupt. I'm saying that they all assume a level of trustworthiness from those that they must rely on to gather their data, and that model of trust completely falls apart when dealing with a genocidal terror group that controls the government and the population.
We are being lied to at a scale that no one has even imagined.
- Friday, August 30, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
His speech advocated violence - and yet it sounded exactly like "progressive" students on campus.
His main points were:
* Palestinians must return to suicide terrorism. “We want to return to suicide attacks, this situation cannot be fixed with anything other than an open struggle."
* All Muslims must join in the fight. “Today, after 11 months, we are discussing our duties as an ummah, it is not enough to boast about our resistance, what is wanted is to actively participate in the Flood of Al-Aqsa."
* Students must continue what he calls the "Campus Intifada" and an increaseing global protests.
* But everyone must fight: "Jihadi organizations, movements, groups and everyone must make a historic decision. Every responsible person must decide today, before tomorrow, to make the decision to actually participate in the Al-Aqsa Flood from a practical military-jihadi position. "
In short, all Palestinians, all Muslims and all people worldwide should do what Hamas did on October 7.
Which presumably includes rape,
(h/t Debra)
Thursday, August 29, 2024
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips: The moral cowardice of European Christian leaders
Melanie Phillips: The moral cowardice of European Christian leaders
The outspoken chief rabbi of South Africa, Dr. Warren Goldstein, has once again given voice to crucial truths that others have shamefully ignored.Macron’s stand against the far-left a relief to French Jewry
He accused both Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, of being indifferent to the murder of black Christians in Africa and the terrorism threat in Europe while being “outright hostile” to Israel’s attempts to battle jihadi forces led by Iran.
“The world is locked in a civilizational battle of values, threatened by terrorism and violent jihad,” said Goldstein. “At a time when Europe’s very future hangs in the balance, its two most senior Christian leaders have abandoned their most sacred duty to protect and defend the values of the Bible. Their cowardice and lack of moral clarity threaten the free world.”
Goldstein’s blistering accusations were on the mark.
Christians in Africa have been subjected to barbaric slaughter and persecution by Islamists for decades. Two years ago, Open Doors, an organization that supports persecuted Christians, observed: “In truth, there are very few Muslim countries—or countries with large Muslim populations—where Christians can avoid intimidation, harassment or violence.”
In January 2024, a report for Genocide Watch confirmed that, since 2000, 62,000 Christians in Nigeria have been murdered by Islamist groups in an ongoing attempt to exterminate Christianity. In addition, more than 32,000 moderate black Nigerian Muslims and non-faith individuals have been massacred.
According to a report in 2020 by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Christians in Myanmar, China, Eritrea, India, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Vietnam are being persecuted.
These facts were reported in June by Peter Baum for The Daily Blitz. Yet the mainstream media all but ignore these atrocities. There are no marches in Western cities to accuse these countries of facilitating crimes against humanity. There are no NGO-inspired petitions to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare these countries and groups guilty of genocide.
Instead, the media and Western elites demonize Israel as the pariah of the world for defending itself against these genocidal Islamists. This unique and egregious double standard is the hallmark of classic antisemitism.
The attitude of the church leaders is even more astonishing. The hundreds of thousands of victims of this persecution are their flock. The goal of this onslaught is the wholesale destruction of the faith they lead.
Yet from Welby and the pope have emerged little more than occasional expressions of measured concern. And even then, they usually refuse to call out what’s happening by its proper name—the Islamist war to eradicate Christianity and destroy the West.
French President Emmanuel Macron is resisting pressure to appoint a left-wing prime minister, as the political deadlock plaguing the country since its parliamentary election in July continues.No, James Carville, Israelis Are Not Whiter Than Palestinians
By keeping a left-wing alliance out of government, Macron has blocked from power the far-left France Unbowed (LFI), a party that 92% of French Jews think is antisemitic, according to a recent survey by the American Jewish Committee Europe.
The French president is tasked with choosing a prime minister and a cabinet following a parliamentary election, and that government is then put to a vote in the National Assembly. In last month’s legislative election, the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) coalition won a 190-seat plurality of the National Assembly’s 577 seats — far short of a working majority. Centrist and right-wing parties said they would vote against an NFP government.
NFP is made up of LFI, socialists, communists and Greens who came together ahead of this year’s election to form an alliance meant to block the far-right National Rally from taking power.
Macron said on Monday that choosing a cabinet led by NFP would threaten “institutional stability,” and would be blocked by the other factions making up a majority of parliament. LFI leaders called Macron’s remarks an “anti-democratic coup” and vowed to impeach him.
American Jewish Committee Europe Managing Director Simone Rodan-Benzaquen said that Macron’s leverage is a result of NFP lacking a legislative majority.
“Any government involving LFI or even just relying on their support would be quickly brought down,” she said.
It was, to put it mildly, foolish of the veteran Democratic party strategist James Carville to say the other day, when asked about the pro-Israel position of the great majority of Republican voters, “It’s really about the racism that drives the thing. . . . The reason I suspect that most of these people describe themselves as pro-Israel is because the Jews [in Israel] are whiter than the Palestinians.”
As was pointed out in the wake of Carville’s remarks, Israelis are not demonstrably “whiter than Palestinians”; nor, since both groups vary greatly in skin color, would it be feasible to come up with a metric that might enable a comparison to be made. There are light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Palestinian Arabs, and light-skinned, darker-skinned, and dark-skinned Israeli Jews—and while Israelis and Palestinians can usually tell at a glance which of the two groups one of them belongs to, they do not do so on the basis of skin color. What they instinctively look for are other indicators, such as body language, facial expression, hair style, clothing, and head garb, and sometimes they guess wrong.
It is commonplace to observe that, when applied to skin color, white and black are as much sociological as physical categories. Many so-called whites are far from white; many blacks are not at all black. Nor does it necessarily have to do with ancestry. As we all know, Barack Obama’s mother was white and Kamala Harris’s was a native of India. If both Obama and Harris are considered, and consider themselves, black, this is because they identify with the African American community and because this seems natural to most Americans. As the Columbia University linguist and New York Times language columnist John McWhorter noted in a recent column:
Imagine how strange it would be if someone called [Obama] white. Imagine how strange it would be if he called himself white. . . . My maternal grandfather was light enough that he could easily have passed for white. My mother was quite light-skinned, too. Yet I have never considered myself anything but Black, nor did my grandfather or my mother. To look at photos of the three of us and see three “Black” people makes perfect sense to me because I have never known anything else.
True, many younger Americans with histories like Obama’s or Harris’s prefer to call themselves biracial, a relatively recent usage that was not an option in the past. (My 1955 Oxford Universal Dictionary, for example, reprinted with “corrections and revised addenda” from an original 1933 edition, does not even list “biracial” as a word.) The growing popularity of the word biracial reflects profound changes in attitude toward race and racial background in the United States, since traditionally, Americans of mixed ancestry have been expected to identify with the racial affiliation of either one set of their ancestors or the other; moreover, racist attitudes dictated that even in cases of white appearance, such as that of John McWhorter’s grandfather, a single known black forebear was enough to classify the person in question as black (or “Negro” or “colored” at a time when these words were still admissible).
From Ian:
Strangling Iran: What holds true in the West Bank, holds in Gaza
Strangling Iran: What holds true in the West Bank, holds in Gaza
The IDF’s actions on Wednesday in Jenin, Tulkarm, Tubas, and the Far’a refugee camp in the Jordan Valley indicate that it has learned that lesson. The failed suicide bombing attack last week in Tel Aviv was the catalyst for implementing this lesson.Revealed: Dozens of Palestinian diplomats celebrated October 7
A terrorist believed to be from Nablus, identified as Jafar Muna, carried an 8 kg. bomb outside of a crowded synagogue when the device exploded – apparently a “work accident” – killing him and injuring a passerby. The country heaved a sigh of relief at its good fortune for this miracle, at having averted a mass-casualty incident.
But it was a wake-up call. That an explosive device of this magnitude was smuggled into Israel showed that the country needed to take the growing terrorist infrastructure developing in Judea and Samaria quite seriously. It also needs to take threats from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which took responsibility for the bomber, seriously as well.
Iran, which successfully identifies areas of weak governance around Israel to set up proxies to lash out at the Jewish state, has been making serious inroads into the West Bank for the last decade, smuggling weapons to a myriad of different terrorist groups there through Lebanon and Jordan.
Last August, after a 42-year-old mother of three, Batsheva Nigri, was murdered near Hebron in a shooting attack on her car, both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant pointed fingers at Iran.
“We are in the middle of a terrorist onslaught that is encouraged, guided, and funded by Iran and its proxies,” Netanyahu said. Gallant added that the wave of terror at the time, two months before October 7, was “guided by Iran, which is looking for any way to harm Israeli citizens.”
Both Palestinian terrorists and Iranian officials have also acknowledged Iran’s involvement. Since October 7, Iran has stepped up these efforts, hoping to ignite another front against Israel.
In July of 2023, senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk was quoted in the Iranian press saying Iran is actually fighting alongside “the resistance in Palestine” through its generous support. An editorial published by the Iranian Tasnim News Agency that same month said Iran’s successful arming of the West Bank would sink the “leaking ship of Israel.”
Automatic weapons and crude pipe bombs have been replaced in the hands of terrorists by powerful improvised explosive devices (IEDs) used against troops conducting counter-terror actions in the West Bank. These IEDs, including the one that Muna wanted to explode in Tel Aviv, reveal a terrorist infrastructure developing – including IED manufacturing labs – directly under Israel’s nose that Iran could use as yet another pressure point against the country.
This is something that Israel cannot allow, and last week’s attempted suicide bombing set alarm bells ringing regarding how far Iran’s program had advanced and convincing policymakers of the need now to quash it.
The IDF’s action on Wednesday was reportedly the most significant military maneuver in the West Bank since Operation Defensive Shield which began in March of 2002, following the Netanya Park Hotel Passover Eve massacre where a suicide bombing attack killed 30 people at a Passover seder.
Up until then, the IDF – under the Oslo Agreements – stayed out of the large Palestinian cities, thereby enabling a terrorist infrastructure to thrive, one that included labs for manufacturing bombs for suicide attacks.
The Park Hotel bombing was the trigger for bringing the IDF back into the Palestinian cities. It took several years of intense military action throughout Judea and Samaria, but these actions did lead to an end to the Second Intifada and significantly degrade terrorist capabilities, leading to a precipitous drop in the number of Israelis killed in terrorist attacks: from 457 fatalities in 2002 to 9 in 2019.
Just as some of the lessons learned from Gaza on October 7 can be applied to the West Bank, the reverse is also true: lessons learned over the years fighting terror in Judea and Samaria can be applied in Gaza. For instance, the operation currently underway in northern Samaria is an indication of what the future holds in Gaza.
The 42-day Operation Defensive Shield that began in March of 2002 was a turning point, and Israel did degrade terrorist capabilities. But this was not a one-off deal, with Israel just leaving the territory after the operation.
Rather, it takes continuous work to ensure that the terrorist infrastructure does not reappear, what security officials continuously refer to as “mowing the lawn.” What this predicts is that when the intense fighting stops in Gaza, the continuous war against terrorists – preventing the resurrection of a terrorist infrastructure there – will continue for years, if not decades.
Just look at Judea and Samaria. Twenty-two years after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield, it is still “mowing the lawn” there and trying to prevent the re-emergence of a vast terrorist infrastructure. It is endless labor, with no clear finish line. What holds true in Judea and Samaria will certainly be the case in Gaza as well.
Scores of Palestinian diplomats at the United Nations, across Europe and around the world celebrated the attack on Israel on October 7, compared Israel to the Nazis or made other disturbing statements, the JC can reveal.Sullivan: Israel-Hamas truce talks down to ‘nitty-gritty’
The findings raise serious questions about the legitimacy of Palestinian Authority (PA) officials on the world stage. The PA is increasingly expected to participate in governing Gaza after the war and help build a two-state solution.
A dossier of evidence compiled by investigators from the GnasherJew group uncovered troubling details from the social media activity of ambassadors, other officials and even embassy accounts.
The analysis of hundreds of posts from more than 30 profiles found senior diplomats smearing Israeli troops as Nazis, supporting the actions of Hamas and advocating the erasure of Israel.
The most disturbing statements began on October 7 itself. Hassan Albalawi, the deputy head of the Palestine mission to the EU, reacted by celebrating Hamas as “heroic”, while Adel Atieh, the Palestinian ambassador to the EU, described the terrorists as “the people of the mighty”. Meanwhile, Khuloussi Bsaiso, a Palestinian diplomat at the UN, shared a map of the Middle East without Israel. “Palestine as it should be,” he commented.
When questioned by the JC, Bsaiso claimed that his social media posts were not shared in a professional capacity, adding: “For your information we the Palestinians are Jews, Christians and Muslims.”
In Britain, meanwhile, Rana Abuayyash, consul at the Palestinian mission to London, shared a post on November 3 showing the Israeli flag morphing into Hitler and reposted a TikTok video of Netanyahu underneath the Nazi dictator. There are dozens of similar examples.
As the war in Gaza continues to rage, many of those named in the dossier are regarded as moral authorities in their host countries, invited to discuss the conflict on television and posting to thousands of followers on social media.
U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Thursday that Gaza ceasefire-and-hostages-for-terrorist-prisoner talks were making progress.
“The negotiators are bearing down on the details, meaning that we have advanced the discussions to a point where it’s in the nitty-gritty, and that is a positive sign of progress,” Sullivan told reporters in Beijing, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
On the Gaza issue, officials from the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Israel met in Doha on Wednesday to follow up on talks that took place in Cairo over the weekend and extended to Monday.
Jerusalem’s delegation—composed of officials from the Israel Defense Forces, the Mossad and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet)—had returned on Tuesday from the round of negotiations in Cairo.
The high-level Cairo talks ended on Sunday without a deal, but discussions continued on Monday with lower-level officials to attempt to bridge the remaining gaps.
“In Doha, the delegation is expected to meet with representatives of Egypt, Qatar and the United States who are continuing the negotiations and work with Israel and Hamas,” according to Israel’s Channel 12.
U.S. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk held talks on Tuesday in Doha with senior Qatari leaders ahead of Wednesday’s negotiations, the Associated Press reported, citing a U.S. official.
While American officials have expressed optimism about closing a deal, Hamas has publicly rejected the terms on the table and is accusing the United States of supporting Israeli demands. Egyptian officials have also expressed skepticism.
- Thursday, August 29, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
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Persian Satrap Hits Reply-All On Haman's Proclamation To 127 Provinces
King Ahashverosh's seal adorned official missives to the one hundred twenty-seven provinces of the kingdom, apprising the administrators of each province, and the cities and towns therein, to prepare for a special day of reckoning regarding the Jews among them, to take place as this coming winter transitions into spring, the thirteenth day of the month of Adar. The 127 couriers carrying 127 copies, plus several spare scrolls, made their way to each provincial capital. Then the governor of the territory of Sarmatia decided to request more information, but accidentally selected Reply All and soon he, too, had sent 127 couriers with 127 copies of his letter not just to the king, as intended, but to all of the governors, satraps, and other high officials of the empire.
The resulting confusion snarled communications throughout the realm for weeks. Witnesses reported that the use of so many couriers strained the supply for other important communications, on top of which at least two dozen irate governors of other provinces saw fit to reply-all in kind to berate the Sarmatian prince, compounding the problem further.
Exhausted couriers recalled hauling satchels full of scrolls containing invective and ridicule that could make a Greek blush. They did not desire to deliver any such epistles, but performed that duty nevertheless.
"I'm pretty sure the admonition not to kill the messenger hasn't been widely adopted yet," observed a nervous rider of the swift camels. "I hope this hubbub dies down before I do."
The impetus for the decree remains unclear. Rumors point to Royal Vizier Haman's resentment that a prominent Jew named Mordechai refused to bow to him, and that personal insult drove Haman to find some pretext to get rid of Mordechai and the metaphorical horse he rode in on, i.e. Jews and Jewish culture. Haman then presented his case to the king as a pressing concern for the unity and stability of the empire, rather than as a petty, self-absorbed scheme to seek disproportionate vengeance against the only person in the kingdom not to bow to him, which he could have shrugged off and dismissed as unimportant in light of all the other honor and power he enjoys, but no, he let it consume him, like the fruit of the one forbidden tree in a vast, sumptuous garden of delights.
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