Category: Israel

Biden once again tells Israel how to defend itself—by not striking back

April 15, 2024 • 10:00 am

What do you suppose the U.S. would do if, say, Russia launched an attack on the West Coast with several hundred non-nuclear missiles, justifying that attack by saying that the U.S. had given weapons and money to Ukraine to defend itself against Russia?  Imagine further that U.S. planes and anti-missile defenses managed to fend off all the Russian missiles, and then the Russian attack stopped.

Would the U.S. then refrain from all further action, avoiding all retaliation by proclaiming that we had won a “great victory” over Russia? Would we listen to, say, Canada if they told us to avoid retaliating because Russia had stopped attacking and we’d only promote a “wider war”?  I doubt it.  We might not attack Russia with nukes, but you can bet that we would do something, even though we’ve put about as many sanctions on Russia as we can.

But, after Iran’s attack on Israel Saturday night, an attack to which Israel didn’t retaliate (but has contemplated doing so), and an attack in which Israel’s planes did not leave Israeli airspace, Biden has butted in,once again, preventing Israel from retaliating against an attack. It’s reported in this NYT piece (click to read, or find it archived here):

 

An excerpt:

President Biden and his team, hoping to avoid further escalation leading to a wider war in the Middle East, are advising Israel that its successful defense against Iranian airstrikes constituted a major strategic victory that might not require another round of retaliation, U.S. officials said on Sunday.

The interception of nearly all of the more than 300 drones and missiles fired against Israel on Saturday night demonstrated that Israel had come out ahead in its confrontation with Iran and proved to enemies its ability to protect itself along with its American allies, meaning it did not necessarily need to fire back, the officials said.

Whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his government will agree to leave it at that was not yet clear as the country’s war cabinet met for several hours on Sunday to make decisions about its next steps.

The leaders of the Group of 7 major industrial democracies echoed Mr. Biden’s message on Sunday morning, condemning Iran for the attack and warning that it could provoke what they called an “uncontrollable regional escalation” in the Middle East.

“This must be avoided,” the joint statement said. “We will continue to work to stabilize the situation and avoid further escalation.”

Although damage from the attack was relatively light, the scope of the strikes went well beyond the small-bore tit-for-tat shadow war between Iran and Israel in recent years, crossing a red line with the firing of weapons from Iranian territory into Israeli territory. Had defenses not held, scores or hundreds could have been killed.

American officials said it was clear to them that wide-scale death was Iran’s intent, despite the fact that its leadership telegraphed the attack well in advance, publicly and privately. Officials said that even as the attack was underway, Iran’s government sent word through Swiss intermediaries that it considered the matter closed.

As the Elder of Ziyon remarks acidly,

Saying that Israel should regard this as a victory is shortsighted. As others have pointed out, surviving someone shooting at you many times because of your bulletproof vest is not a victory. The shooter can reload and only needs one bullet to make it through. Israel cannot afford to remain in a purely defensive posture forever, especially as Iran has proven that it is now willing to directly attack Israel.

If Iran fired a lot more missiles and drones at once, and Hezbollah launched a gazillion Iranian missiles, which it has, it might overwhelm the Iron dome completely and destroy considerable parts of Israel.

Yes, wide-scale death was Iran’s intent, and if you think it’s going to stop with that one attack, I’d argue that you’re wrong. Iran continues to supply its proxies, including Hezbollah and Yemen, not to mention Hamas, with money, material, and rockets. And of course Iran is developing nuclear weapons, one of which can easily destroy nearly all of Israel. (For some reason the U.S. doesn’t worry about that, though Israel tried to stop the program earlier by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities or assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists.) And yet Biden tells Israel to keep its hands off Iran, which, if there’s such a thing as an “axis of evil” in the Middle East, surely qualifies for the title. Even many Iranians dislike their oppressive theocracy, and there was some celebrating in Iran when its attack on Israel failed.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful to the U.S.—and to Britain, France, and Jordan—for defending Israel against the Iranian attack. And indeed, an Israeli retaliation could destabilize the Middle East and create a wider war—for now. But if I’m not wrong, that wider war is coming anyway. Iran will keep supplying countries who attack Israel, and if you think that its failure has deterred it from further attacks on Israel, all I can say is “I doubt it.” Someday, and it won’t be long now, Iran will have nuclear weapons and a delivery system. Further if war comes from Hezbollah in Lebanon, which might as well be an extension of Iran’s military, that can also be put on Iran. I guess I should add that I am not a big fan of Netanyahu and believe he needs to go as soon he can without his departure hurting Israel’s war effort.

What bothers me is not so much as America being a buttinski in this case, but its tendency to be a buttinski about everything that Israel does. And that includes the U.S.’s constant pressure on Israel not to go into Rafah. At best, Israel is told to evacuate its civilians (which it surely will) but then engage in targeted strikes rather than a big attack. (Is the U.S. an expert in that?) The U.S. doesn’t like any civilians being killed, despite the fact that the way Hamas operates is to ensure that Gazan civilians will be killed, for that gains them the world’s sympathy. Those who doubt that are dead wrong.  “Collateral” deaths of Gazan civilians are not on Israel but Hamas. Further, the ratio of Gazan civilians killed to Hamas terrorists killed is on the order of 1.5:1 or even 1:1, and no country has achieved that in modern warfare.  Does that placate the U.S.? Of course not, even though our own ratios are far worse than Israel’s. (Again, I am not by any means celebrating the tragedy of dead Gazan civilians, just noting who bears the responsibility.)

In the end, I can’t help but believe that a huge factor in Biden’s buttinski behavior about Israel involves boosting his own chances of re-election. The Muslim vote may be key in some states like Michigan, and younger Americans are more pro-Palestinian than older ones as well as far less approving about how Biden is dealing with the Israel/Hamas war. Biden needs those young voters.  It seems to me unethical—indeed, reprehensible— to interfere in other countries’ affairs of state so you can buttress your own chances of re-election.  If you imagine that America were in Israel’s shoes, as I tried to in my clumsy scenario above, I seriously doubt that we’d pay attention to other countries who tried to prevent us from defending ourselves.

To quote the learned Elder of Ziyon again:

After all, Iran has to defend its honor. And the US understands that – unlike Israelis, they are irrational Muslims who cannot live with themselves unless they project power and force millions of Israelis into shelters. Risking Israeli lives is a worthwhile bargain to let Iran feel victorious. Then, the bargain goes, the US will stop Israel from responding, because no one died (rumors that the Bedouin girl in the Negev hit with shrapnel died were not true) and Iran is happy.

Iran can announce that its operation is over, vengeance is theirs, they can return to their proxy war through Hezbollah and Syria and Iraq and  Yemen, and warn the US to do its part of the bargain and not allow Israel to do anything against them.

Iran is not deterred in the least.

Any self respecting nation would respond harshly to such an open attack on its territory. Israel should be striking at every drone factory and every missile site in Iran, at the very least, and those attacks should have started as soon as Iranian aircraft crossed Iran;s own borders towards Israel.

At the moment, with the US constraining Israel’s ability to respond, Iran pays no price at all for its blatant aggression. Which means it has a green light to do it again.

The entire Middle East sees that this is what the US means when it says its support for an ally is “ironclad.” Which strengthens Iran a lot more than its drones do.

I still plan to vote for Biden this fall, and of course there’s no way I’d ever vote for the narcissistic disordered personality embodied by Trump. But my enthusiasm for voting at all has waned quite a bit, not only because Biden seems old and out of it, but because of his self-aggrandizing behavior towards Israel. If I didn’t vote at all, Biden would still win this Democratic state and all its electoral votes, so I wouldn’t be helping Trump in the least. We shall see.

A UK lawyer rebuts many misconceptions about Israel

April 14, 2024 • 1:00 pm

Natasha Hausdorff is a British barrister (lawyer) specializing in international law, and also the legal director of the UK Lawyers for Israel. She’s also smart as hell, eloquent, and never loses her cool. I see her as the female equivalent of Douglas Murray: what a team they’d make in a debate over the war in Gaza!  Treat yourself to an hour or so of perusing her videos on YouTube, especially when she’s engaged in a debate and gets heckled because she’s pro-Israel and Jewish.

Here is a ten-minute video on Sky News in which Hausdorff discusses why she refused to sign a letter from UK lawyers, academics, and judges (there are now  1101 signers) asking, among other things, for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The moderator, as she should, asks tough questions, but Hausdorff answers them cooly and accurately. The material about aid trucks, as far as I know, is spot on.

Iran begins attack on Israel—with slow-moving drones

April 13, 2024 • 3:00 pm

The Times of Israel reports that Iran has begun its direct attack on the country, using slow-moving drones. But missiles are sure to follow. There’s a short report from the Times of Israel (click to access; it’s a live blog so you can refresh the site):

The entire content:

Iran has launched an attack against Israel with dozens of drones, according to the Axios news site.

Drones are assessed to take several hours to cover such a distance.

There is no immediate statement from the IDF on the attack.

Iran has threatened to attack Israel over the killing of seven IRGC members, including two generals, in Syria’s Damascus last week

If drones come, missiles will surely be fired soon. And they can come from Lebanon, where Hezbollah has thousands, as well as from Iran. I doubt that the Iron Dome and the new system (I forgot its name) could handle such an onslaught.

This is perhaps the most precarious moment for Israel in its history. If missiles come, let us hope that the U.S. fulfills its promise to help Israel defend itself.

I wonder why slow-moving drones would precede fast missiles, though, for it surely alerts Israel that an attack is about to begin, but hours before it begins.

Tablet argues that the Palestinian Authority is just as bad as Hamas, and should not be part of a postwar government

April 12, 2024 • 12:15 pm

Everybody in the Biden administration is all juiced up to reward Hamas for attacking Israel by giving the Palestinians a state, one presumably run by the Palestinian Authority (PA).  People who make this suggestion, who include Biden and his running dog Anthony Blinken, seen to be ignorant of the fact that the PA is a terror-promoting organization that in some ways is even worse than Hamas, for it produces schoolbooks that have brought up generations of Palestinians to hate and want to kill Jews.

If you want to know why neither Hamas nor the PA (nor even a revised version of the PA) should be running Gaza and the West Bank after the war, read the Tablet piece below, which is reasonably short and full of facts. The author, Gaudi Taub, is also a broadcaster, a screenwritere, and a historian.  Click the headline; it’s a free read:

The title of the article is startling, but it is accurate. For the PA has placed a value on the stipend a terrorist will get depending on how many Jews he’s planned to hurt, actually hurt, or killed. And the more Jews you kill, the more money a jailed Palestinian gets, all through the “Martyr’s Fund” described in Wikipedia.  (It’s often called “pay-for-slay”.) I and others have talked about it before, yet many people still seem surprised that it exists. Not only that, but it’s funded in part by American taxpayers (via fungible money we give to NGOs, which becomes extra money for the PA), and, if the terrorist is killed (and becomes a martyr, or shahid), the terrorist’s family gets a stipend for life.

Now if anything is genocide, a program whereby Palestinians are financially rewarded for killing Jews is that.  Imagine if Jews got paid for each Palestinian they killed! The world would be outraged, and it would properly be called “genocide” (which Israel is not committing now).

The Martyr’s Fund takes up a huge portion of the PA;’s budget: about 7%, and according to Tablet ,the PA considers it the most important item in its budget, one that cannot ever be dispensed with. Below is a table of what dead Jews are worth to a jailed Palestinian; monthly stipends to prisoners (or their families) are calculated based on the time a terrorist is sentenced to jail.  (A New Israeli Shekel is worth 27¢ U.S, so divide by about four to get the monthly salary in dollars.

The PA, as I said, also creates and promotes terrorism through its schools, producing materials that are also used in UN (UNRWA) schools:.

Schools are a critical part of the socialization of Palestinian children into this culture. Not only do Palestinian school books contain direct incitement in the form of explicit murderous antisemitic ideology, but also every subject, including grammar and math, drills the same message into children’s brains. Take the following exam questions that Shemesh cites (p. 20):

“Hamas shoots a rocket which weighs 50 kilos in the direction of occupied Tel Rabia [Tel Aviv], which is 90.25 kilometers away. What speed does it need to fly, what would be the maximum height, and how long will it take it get there?”

Or:

“Two people are carrying on their shoulders a coffin weighing 200 Newton in the funeral of a martyr weighing 800 Newton.” The students are asked to calculate the strength the two men would need.

. . . . In other words, the cult of death reigns everywhere you turn. Regardless of how much well-meaning Israelis tried desperately to imagine otherwise over the years, the Palestinian national ethos is built around a genocidal war to ethnically cleanse Palestine, from the river to the sea, of Jewish presence.

Finally, the PA itself not only encourages terrorism, but also practices terrorism:

By now, moreover, we know that PA security forces personnel are directly involved in terror attacks. In fact, even as the press in Israel and in the West tries to ignore it, PA officials brag about their complicity in terrorism in Arabic to their own people. They cannot stand to lose their competition with Hamas in the national Jew-killing contest.

A Palestinian Media Watch report published in February, titled “Terrorists in Uniform,” quoted a PA spokesperson bragging that “roughly 63-65% of the number of Martyrs in the West Bank … are members of the Fatah Movement. And most of them are members of the [PA] Security Forces or their sons.” The police forces Israel armed and the U.S. military trains are active participants in the terror they were supposed to stop. Using the guns we gave them to stop terror, they instead kill Jews—in the process securing the livelihoods of their families.

There’s more, but just these three aspects of PA-induced terrorism should make Americans very wary of trying to have the organization help run a postwar government in Gaza—or any government ruling entities created in the now-impossible “two state solution. One of the morons who’s been roped into PA corral is Thomas Friedman of the NYT, who seems to have ignored this:

Regardless of this bloody track record, the White House and the State Department, along with pro-Democratic Party Israeli think tanks, former IDF generals nurtured on a woke ideological diet in American universities, and the Israeli press, are careful to maintain a conceptual barrier between Hamas as a terror organization, and the PA. The latter, they maintain, is a crucial partner in the fight against terrorism—the same PA that, in reality, glorifies and incentivizes terrorism.

The last sentence—the “solution” that Thomas Friedman, Biden, and Blinken love so much—is risible. No, the PA will never be “a crucial partner in the fight against terrorism”, for it is an explicit promoter of terrorism.  If you hear somebody touting the PA as a “nicer” version of Hamas, one that can work with America, remember the things above, especially the pay-for-slay program.

 

The Tablet article ends eloquently:

Less than two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, the PA’s Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs included an infamous Hadith—a saying attributed in the tradition to the messenger of Islam—in its official guidelines that provided imams with talking points to use in their Oct. 20 Friday sermon in Palestinian mosques. The Hadith says that judgment day will only come after the believers have exterminated the Jews. On that day, it says, even rocks and trees will help in the cause of jihad. They will say, “Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him.”

This horrific image, nature itself partaking in ridding the world of the unnatural Jewish scourge, is even more jarring against the backdrop of the Oct. 7 attack on the Nova nature festival, where partygoers attempted to hide behind rocks and bushes in the Negev desert to escape the slaughter.

The PA, the U.S. partner that Washington wants to put in charge of Gaza, has since added the families of the “martyrs,” the terrorists who were killed while committing the horrors of that terrible Shabbat morning, to the list of pay-for-slay beneficiaries.

Yes, the trees all say to come and kill the hiding Jews.

Israel pulls out of southern Gaza for no apparent reason, loses war

April 7, 2024 • 7:43 am

Well, the headline is a bit hyperbolic, at least as far as losing the war is concerned, but it may not be far off. This hasn’t seemed to be announced in the MSM I read, but it’s all over the Israeli papers, like the Jersalem Post (click to read):

An excerpt:

The IDF on Sunday announced that it had concluded the active invasion stage of the war for now while leaving open the possibility of a future new invasion of Rafah in deep southern Gaza.

In terms of IDF soldiers, this means that the IDF has withdrawn all of Division 98 from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza while maintaining one plus brigades – the Nahal brigade and portions of Brigade 401 – in northern and central Gaza.

Although a top IDF official said that this change had nothing to do with US pressure, the timing was unmistakable in coming right after the IDF’s disastrous mistaken killing of seven humanitarian aid workers last week.

The decision also came less than two days after Israel opened the Erez Crossing and Ashdod port to transfer humanitarian aid, decisions made under threat by the US of potentially losing weapons support after Jerusalem had refused these requests from Washington for months.

Critically, this means that Palestinians can, on one hand, move freely within southern Gaza and Khan Yunis and that there is a complete vacuum for preventing a return of Hamas governance, but the IDF is keeping northern and central Gaza cut off from the south.

What this means, of course is that will be no invasion of Rafah, regardless of “the possibility of a future new invasion of Rafah in deep southern Gaza”.  This decision—which must have been made by Netanyahu, who has consistently and adamantly maintained that the goal of Israel was to destroy Hamas, and that couldn’t be done without taking Rafah—is baffling, and, I hear, has also baffled the Israeli people.  It means that Hamas, which has four brigades (and most hostages) sequestered in southern Gaza, has “a complete vacuum” for returning to power, at least in the south. It means that the most powerful leaders of Hamas, either in southern Gaza or Egypt (or some other country) remain alive to revitalize their terrorist organization.

And if Hamas returns to power in southern Gaza (can northern Gaza be far behind?), then Israel has lost the war. As one Israeli leader said (I can’t remember who), “there is no use in putting out three-quarters of a fire.” But that’s exactly what Israel has done.

Why did this happen? I have pondered the possibility that it may be a trick, but I don’t believe it. It almost surely results from pressure coming from the U.S., and if that’s the case, then America has achieved what I always said Biden wanted: for Israel to lose its ability to defend itself, and to remain surrounded by terrorists. He’d prefer to win an election than to lose Israel.

Any pressure from the U.S. surely intensified after the killing of seven humanitarian aid workers (though the U.S. killed far more innocents via “friendly fire”), and after the world, predictably, took the side of Palestine. I suspect Biden threatened Netanyahu with a complete cessation of future aid, and a severance of Israeli/US relations would be an absolute disaster for Israel.

What about the hostages? Who knows? They are undoubtedly with the Hamas leadership, and an attack to rescue them would be disastrous. But if Israel is this timorous, it will likely exchange thousands of jailed Palestinian terrorists, many of whom are in prison for killing Israelis, for a fraction of the remaining hostages, many of whom are now dead.  Hamas will keep others (the soldiers, young people, and younger men) to use as future bargaining chips.

In other words, in the War Cabinet’s own assessment of what it means to “win” this war, Israel has lost.  I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think Israel would lie about what it’s doing.

Melanie Phillips on America’s war with Israel

March 22, 2024 • 9:45 am

If you’re an American who supports Israel in its war against Hamas, you’re subject not only to a barrage of bizarre and untenable claims, but also must ride an emotional roller coaster controlled by Biden and Blinken. These B brothers seem determined to control Israel’s behavior in the war, going back and forth in what they dictate to the Jewish country.  We are told that the war must stop because too many Gazan civilians have been killed in proportion to dead terrorists, yet the ratio is by all rational accounts roughly 1.5:1—one of the lowest ratios of civilians/combatants killed in modern warfare.  (And of course the media always use the dubious figures presented by Hamas as if they were accurate!)

We see Blinken telling Israel that they must hold an election now to get rid of Netanyahu—a reprehensible interference in democratic politics, and during wartime!   (I’m not a big fan of Netanyahu, and am sure he’ll be deposed in the next election, but now he’s part of a three-person war cabinet that, with help from the Israeli military is directing the fighting. And two of those members are, unlike Netanyahu, from the Israeli Left).

We see the world, including America, issuing dire warnings that Israel must not invade Rafah, despite the fact that that is where the Hamas leadership and a large proportion of its fighters have holed up, and despite Israel having plans to evacuate civilians. Without going into Rafah, Hamas will not be destroyed, and of course will not voluntarily give up power. Keeping Israel out of Rafah is, as all pro-Palestinians realize, a recipe for keeping Hamas in power.

We see the American administration broaching the idea that the Palestinian Authority should rule postwar Gaza, despite the fact that Gazans despise the PA. And the PA is a corrupt, terror-promoting organization that pays Palestinians who kill Jews in its odious “pay for slay” program (or, as Wikipedia calls it, the “Martyrs’ Fund“). What kind of moron would suggest that the PA take over running Gaza? And if any remnants of Hamas remain, they won’t be allowed to.

And now the ultimate insult: the U.S. will propose today a UN Security Council resolution that will call for a ceasefire and release of hostages.  The details are hazy, but the resolution is aimed not at Hamas but at Israel, for, given the details, it could lead to the resurrection of Hamas and its attendant terror attacks.  Realize that since October 7 there has been not one UN resolution, be it in the General Assembly or the more important Security Council, that has condemned what Hamas has done and told it to lay down its arms, release the hostages, and surrender.

One gets the impression that for a very brief time after October 7 the West was on the side of Israel, but that didn’t last long.  Now, it seems, the West, including the U.S., wants Hamas to win—or at least Israel to vanish. Why? Well, of course Biden is sweating bullets over winning a close election in November, and he needs the votes of Muslims and young people who don’t favor Israel.  Further, the casualty ratio is too high for most people, who don’t seem to realize that it’s an extraordinarily low ratio of civilians killed to terrorists killed, especially for urban warfare in close quarters.

Will the Security Council resolution pass? Yes, of course, since the U.S., which has been the only veto in the Council’s resolutions against Israel so far, is actually proposing this resolution. And that bodes very ill for Israel.

We also see bizarre claims (viz., from Thomas “I am Dumb” Friedman) that creating a two-state situation will somehow miraculously bring about lasting peace, even when we know that neither Palestinians nor Israelis favor that situation, that it can’t work, and that polls show that most Palestinians, whether they be in Gaza or the West Bank, still favor Hamas.  Here are results from a poll taken between March 5 and 10 from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research:

Finally, there’s the world’s accusation that Israel is preventing humanitarian aid to Gazans, despite all evidence that Israel is allowing and facilitating that aid, while Hamas takes the lion’s share of it while also ensuring that more civilians are killed—its strategy from the beginning. In fact, Israel has even proposed using IDF soldiers to guard the aid-bearing trucks to prevent them from being hijacked buy Hamas.

Yes, it looks to a pro-Israeli American that the Western world has lost its collective mind, taking steps that will ensure a victory of Hamas, a barbaric, Jew-hating organization that not only oppresses its own people, but is sworn to kill all Jews and eliminate Israel. This is the organization that, apparently, the West is loath to dismantle.

This is my view, but it appears to be one shared by the former Guardian writer Melanie Phillips in a recent column. Phillips, once a liberal, left the Guardian and moved towards the center-right, for which of course she’s been damned. It’s even worse for “progressives” because she’s Jewish favors Israel in the war. But her latest Substack column (also in the Jewish News Service), which you can read by clicking the headline below, rings true.  In fact, she speaks of a “war” between the U.S. and Israel, though of course it’s a war of wills, not of weapons.

Her thesis:

As some of us have long feared and has now become undeniable, Israel is fighting not one but two wars of defence against a malevolent foe.

The first is against the axis of Iran and its proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen. The second is against America.

The Biden administration is to construct a pier off the Gaza shore to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. This week, Israeli TV’s Channel 14 reported that, astoundingly, the Americans have handed over the financing and management of this pier to Qatar, the founder, funder and protector of Hamas and therefore the godfather of the October 7 pogrom.

Channel 14 said the Qataris demanded that the new pier be built by a Gaza company named Al Hissi, which is controlled by Hamas.

Giving Qatar control of this pier would ensure Hamas continues to exist, enrich itself and attack Israel with an open route into Gaza. As Yigal Carmon, the founder of MEMRI, has written in horror: “The US has flipped sides, from Israel to Qatar.”

America could end this war tomorrow by telling the Qataris that unless they instruct Hamas to surrender and release the hostages, Qatar will forfeit its preferential treatment by the United States and will henceforth be treated instead as an international pariah.

Instead, America is feeding Israel into the Qatari jaws. The outcome, writes Carmon, will be escalation into a total regional war by Iran not only against Israel but America.

America’s action is so preposterous it’s hard to believe. Yet in any event, the Biden administration has already pivoted from supporting the destruction of Hamas to working for its ultimate victory.

The administration has been relentlessly pressuring Israel to admit more and more aid into Gaza, accusing it falsely of stopping the trucks and ignoring the fact that most of this aid is being stolen by Hamas to enable it to survive at the expense of the needy civilian population.

The United States is determined to impose rule in post-war Gaza by the Palestinian Authority, despite the fact that the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party, Fatah, has exulted at the October 7 pogrom and declared that it will continue such attacks.

The administration is determined to impose upon Israel a Palestine state, even though this would become another “Hamastan” and place central Israel in grave danger of October 7-style attacks on steroids.

And with Israel now poised to attack the last redoubt of Hamas in Rafah, which is key to the defeat of this genocidal enemy, America is subjecting Israel to intense pressure to abandon this final front of the war.

While many, including me, have imputed America’s waning support for Israel to Biden’s drive to get re-elected, Phillips thinks that the desire to depose Netanyahu is a stronger motivation.  She may be right, but that motivation is misguided. Right now Israel is in an existential battle, and the war is being prosecuted by not only military experts, but by a war cabinet that includes right-wing Netanyahu but also two left-wing Israelis (Ganz and Gallant), who were generals in the IDF. Netanyahu fought too, and acquitted himself well in battle, taking part in many actions and being wounded many times, though he never made general. At any rate, now is not the time to call for regime change in Israel, even if you think that the U.S. has the right to tell the Israeli people when and how to hold elections.

Chuck Schumer, who pretends to be a Jew who has Israel’s best interests at heart, also comes in for his share of Phillipsian opprobrium. Beside calling for Israel to depose Netanyahu, Phillips adds this:

Far worse, Schumer parroted the blood libels being used to demonise Israel by its enemies. Claiming to be one of the Jews who “love Israel in our bones,” he stated in the next breath: “I’m anguished that the Israeli war campaign has killed so many innocent Palestinians. I know that my fellow Jewish Americans feel the same anguish when they see the images of dead and starving children — and destroyed homes.”

Every civilian death in wartime is tragic. But “so many innocents” is based on Hamas casualty figures that inflate the numbers and totally omit the Hamas forces they include.

Even more nauseatingly, Schumer smeared Israel still further by intoning: “We must be better than our enemies, lest we become them.”

The suggestion that Israel is no better than Hamas is a pernicious lie spread by those who want Israel gone. In fact, Israel’s ratio of civilians to combatants killed is fewer than 1.5 civilians for every one combatant, far better than any other country’s army has ever achieved.

That ratio, the focus of the world’s ire, should actually dampen its ire. The ratio is astoundingly low, but of course although using it to indict Israel makes no sense, it supports The Narrative, which in the end sees Israeli Jews as white colonialist oppressors and Gazans and Hamas as oppressed people of color who are simply battling colonialism, occupation, and oppression. Phillips:

Israel is not just fighting to defend itself against genocide. It is on the front line of the west’s defence against its enemies and the defence of civilisation against barbarism.

Western liberals can’t acknowledge this because they can’t allow their unchallengeable orthodoxies of Palestinian powerlessness, “peace processes” and western iniquity to be destroyed. So they have turned on the Jews. Jewish suffering has to be erased because it gets in the way of the narrative.

That’s why the eruption of Palestinianism throughout the west is so shattering. People wonder why the forests of Palestinian flags at the incendiary anti-Israel demonstrations are in themselves so intimidating.

It’s because the Palestine cause is not two states side by side. Palestinian identity consists entirely of the intention to eradicate Israel by the hijack and appropriation of Jewish history. Palestinianism stands for the erasure of Jewish national identity and wiping the Jewish people out of their own historic homeland.

Perhaps the last paragraph is a bit hyperbolic, but not overly so given the Jew hatred taught to Palestinian children and the repeated rejection by Palestinians of a “two state solution.” However, I’m sure that there are decent Palestinians who merely want to live in peace with Israeli neighbors, and live in a prosperous country with a decent government. Unfortunately, Hamas won’t permit that.

And, apparently, neither will the United States.

**************

UPDATE: I’ve just learned that, against all expectations, the U.S.’s Security Council resolution at the UN did NOT pass—it was vetoed by Russia and China but of course the U.S. voted “yea”.

France will work with Jordan and the United Arab Emirates to convince Russia and China to back a resolution at the United Nations for a ceasefire in Gaza after the two big powers blocked a text by the United States, French President Emmanuel Macron says.

“Following the Russian and Chinese veto a few minutes ago, we are going to resume work on the basis of the French draft resolution in the Security Council and work with our American, European and Arab partners to reach an agreement,” Macron says at the end of a European Union leaders’ summit in Brussels.

France’s foreign ministry said on Thursday it had started drafting a resolution with diplomats, saying they would put a draft forward if the US resolution did not pass.

Earlier, the UN Security Council failed to pass a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza as part of a hostage deal, the first time the US has backed such language.

The resolution called for an “immediate and sustained ceasefire” lasting roughly six weeks that would protect civilians and allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

I’m not sure why Russia and China voted “no”, unless it’s simply because they don’t like the U.S. and wanted to oppose its resolution.

Thought for the day: the war

March 19, 2024 • 9:30 am

First, a quote:

“Just consider how absurd it would be to reverse the logic of human shields in this case: Imagine the Israelis using their own women and children as human shields against Hamas. Recognize how unthinkable this would be, not just for the Israelis to treat their own civilians in this way, but for them to expect that their enemies could be deterred by such a tactic, given who their enemies actually are.

Again, it is easy to lose sight of the moral distance here—which is strange. It’s like losing sight of the Grand Canyon when you are standing right on the edge of it. Take a moment to actually do the cognitive work: Imagine the Jews of Israel using their own women and children as human shields. And then imagine how Hamas, or Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda, or ISIS, or any other jihadist group would respond. The image you should now have in your mind is a masterpiece of moral surrealism. It is preposterous. It is a Monty Python sketch where all the Jews die.

Do you see what this asymmetry means? Can you see how deep it runs? Do you see what it tells you about the ethical difference between these two cultures?” —Sam Harris  \(audio is here)

***********************

Now, here is a simple question—or rather questions—prompted by my reading the readers’ thoughts in the discussion yesterday, “What does the U.S. want with Israel?”

How come no country in the world, save Israel, is calling for Hamas to surrender, lay down its arms, and release the hostages? That is the simplest way to end the war: no more Hamas, no more civilians killed, no more soldiers of the IDF killed, the hostages get to go home, and so on. It’s not complicated! (Of course how to run Gaza afterwards is complex and vexing, but first the war has to come to and end, and with a victory for Israel.)

And why is only Israel asking for this solution given that Hamas is a terrorist organization sworn to extirpate Israel and kill Jews, given that Hamas started this whole mess, and given that Hamas is even promoting the killing of more Palestinians, as well as members of NGOs, as a tactic to raise the world’s ire against Israel? How come the UN, the EU, and other Western governments aren’t pressuring Hamas? It is only Israel who gets pressured—to the extent that America is now telling Israel how to run the war, how to run its elections, and for heaven’t sake do not under any condition go into Rafah.

The answer to these questions is simple: Biden has become spineless and wants to win reelection, which he thinks he can’t do if he wholeheartedly supports Israel. And for the rest of the world, they simply want Israel to disappear, but except for some Muslim states they can’t say that out loud. (I’m not saying they want all the Jews killed, only that they don’t want Israel to exist.)

What a pity that Israel is in this largely on its own, while the rest of the world kowtows and grovels before Hamas! Yahweh knows, Israel is not perfect. But it’s a far sight better than Hamas and, as Sam Harris has emphasized, who you support in this conflict is a clear-cut moral question. Sadly, the world seems to have lost its moral compass.

Discussion question: What does the U.S. want with Israel?

March 18, 2024 • 11:38 am

It’s one of those weeks when I don’t really have a lot to say based on what’s happening, nor any juicy articles to analyze or criticize. Instead, I’d like to start a discussion.

Here’s the question, which could be phrased in several ways: “Does America want Israel to lose the war with Hamas?” Or, “Does the U.S. care much if Israel loses the war?” or, perhaps the least debatable question: “Is the U.S. doing things that will help Hamas win the war?”  (I think the answer to the last question is “of course,” though the U.S. may not be doing it with that intention.)

One thing is for sure: if Israel is to win, Hamas must be eliminated and there can be no cease-fire long enough to enable them to resume power.  You don’t win a war with terrorists without destroying their organization,

Yet here’s what we see (or rather, what I see)::

  • Chuck Schumer is calling for elections to depose Netanyahu, right in the middle of a war. This is us interfering with a democracy, and is inappropriate. I believe Netanyahu, now that the war has begun, is doing a pretty good job. I’m pretty sure he’ll be deposed when the war is over, and I’m not a big fan of his. But to call for his replacement now?
  • Israel is allowing as much humanitarian aid into Gaza as arrives; it’s certainly not stopping humanitarian aid. But of course the world thinks otherwise. I’ve never seen a country act this way; certainly during Vietnam the public didn’t demand that we provide humanitarian aid to the North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese civilians fighting us.  And in that case the U.S. did very little to avoid killing civilians; indeed, they wiped out whole villages of civilians indiscriminately.
  • Biden and many others are demanding that the IDF do not take Rafah (remember, Israel does have a plan to evacuate civilians there). But if Israel doesn’t take Rafah, then Hamas will stay in power for sure.
  • During last night in Gaza, the IDF attacked Al-Shifa hospital. Hamas had returned there to resume its occupancy, and fired on Israelis approaching the hospital.  During the ensuing fight, many terrorists were killed as well as one IDF soldier, but no civilians were killed. The IDF even brought doctors in case patients needed extra care. Yet the world is baying at what Israel did.  How dare they go back into a hospital. Apparently the IDF should have let Hamas take over the hospital, but of course Hamas, in doing so, was committing a war crime. Nobody worries about Hamas’s war crimes, though; once again Israel is held accountable.
  • Blinken has proclaimed that it should be Israel’s highest priority to ensure the safety of Palestinian civilians.  That’s not what you say to an ally prosecuting a war and already trying to kill as few civilians as possible.
  • The death tolls provided all come from Hamas, which doesn’t distinguish between terrorists and real civilians. And “children”, to Hamas, are anybody under 18, which can and does include many members of Hamas. Yet these figures are all taken to represent “civilians.”  I suspect, but don’t know, that they include many more terrorists than the media implies.
  • The U.S. has blown hot and cold on a ceasefire. If there is a permanent ceasefire now, Israel has lost, for Hamas will regroup, recoup, and take up power in Gaza again, as well as continuing to steal aid sent for humanitarian reasons
  • The U.S. has floated the idea that postwar Gaza should be governed by the Palestinian Authority, one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever heard. The P.A. is a corrupt, Jew-hating, and terrorist-promoting organization, still handing out money to terrorists who kill Jews—the “pay for slay” program.
  • Americans are touting the two-state idea as a “solution.” It is not a solution—at least not right now. It is a recipe for more enmity and killing. Palestine never wanted it (it wants one state run by Arabs), and now Israel doesn’t want it, either. Only the addle-brained thinks that this will bring peace.

And, of course, we hear little from anybody about the war crimes or perfidies of Hamas.  Americans seem willing to exchange 1,000 Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails for what must be now only about 100 hostages. Does anybody think about whether that’s a fair deal? Further, all the news about casualties we read in the news comes from Hamas, but is presented as “the facts.”

These matters make me wonder what the deuce the U.S. intends by behaving this way. What does it want? You may respond that Israel, on its side, has no plan for how to deal with postwar Gaza, and perhaps that’s true, though I’m pretty sure this is an object of serious discussion in the war cabinet. But Job One is for Israel to win the war, and it can do that only by taking Rafah and, as it does so, kill as few civilians as possible. (Of course we see little in the media about the Hamas strategy of trying to get Palestinians killed to sway world opinion. People who think that Hamas is desperate to prevent the killing of Palestinian civilians are simply wrong. Part of Hamas’s strategy is to gain the world’s sympathy by getting its own civilians killed and then calling attention to that.)

In the end, does the U.S. not want Israel to win this war, or achieve only a partial victory, if that’s even possible?  Sure, Biden, conscious of the votes he needs from young pro-Palestinian Americans as well as Muslim-Americans, is constantly hedging his bets, but all the points above have not only baffled me, but, as someone on Israel’s side, produced a real emotional and political roller-coaster ride.

Discuss!