Category: Palestine

The NYT still slants its news against Israel

January 26, 2025 • 9:30 am

While perusing the Bad Gray Lady this morning, I saw two headlines that, in light of what I knew about events in Gaza and Lebanon, looked dubious. Sure enough, the headlines and the news below them gave a distorted view of the situation. Here’s the first one (click to read, or find article archived here):

Note first the order of events: Israel blacks Gazans from north while accusing Hamas of a cease-fire breach.  The order of events should have been reversed, with the headline saying “Israel accuses Hamas of Cease-Fire Breach, blocks Gazans from North.” That may seem a trivial difference , but I’ve seen too many headlines with Israel identified first as the perp, with the stated reasons for their actions given second.

But the lack of explanation for what’s happening is much more important. The real situation is that Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in which all civilian hostages were to be released first, and, yesterday at noon Israeli time, Hamas was also to provide Israel with a complete list of the hostages they had or knew about, specifying whether they were living or dead.  Hamas did neither; they are still not releasing one civilian woman (she was held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but Hamas is a partner organization and could easily have arranged for the woman’s release). The four women released yesterday were in the IDF. The NYT notes this further down:

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that it would not allow Gazans to head north “until the release of the civilian Arbel Yehud has been arranged,” leaving the timing of the troop withdrawal and the residents’ return unclear.

And here’s another violation described by the Jerusalem Post:

Hamas has not yet provided Israel with the list revealing the status of the hostages held in Gaza captivity, which it was obligated to provide by Saturday under the ceasefire agreement.

According to a Walla report citing Israeli officials, the list was expected to include details on how many of the hostages remaining in Hamas captivity are still alive and how many are deceased.

An Israeli official reportedly said that failure to provide the list by the end of the day would be another violation of the agreement by Hamas.

Hamas could not explain either of these violations of the agreement. It’s clear that they are toying with Israel and playing psychological games that of course are deeply injurious to the hostages’ friends and families. This is why Israel did not withdraw from northern Gaza or allow residents to return home. (Note that Israel still has not fired on bullet.) The “blocking” is Israel’s nonviolent response to the actions of Hamas, the party that first violated the cease-fire.

I don’t think this bodes well for a continuing peace in the region, which, at any rate, I don’t think will be permanent so long as Hamas runs Gaza.

Here is the second headline about doings further north. Click to read, or find it archived here:

And an excerpt (bolding is mine)

At least 15 people were killed and more than 80 injured by Israeli forces on Sunday in southern Lebanon, Lebanese officials said, as the 60-day deadline for both Hezbollah and Israel to withdraw from the south expired and thousands of Lebanese displaced by the war poured onto roads leading south back to their homes.

The agreement, which was signed in November and halted the deadliest war in decades between the two sides, stipulated that both Hezbollah and Israel withdraw, while the Lebanese Army and U.N. peacekeepers would be deployed in force to secure the area. Negotiators had hoped the cease-fire deal would become permanent, returning a measure of calm to a turbulent region.

But as the deadline passed on Sunday, a very different scenario was taking shape.

Israeli forces remained in parts of southern Lebanon in violation of the cease-fire agreement, stoking fears of a sustained Israeli occupation and renewed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. Israeli officials warned Lebanese not to return to their homes in many towns and villages in the south.

“In the near future, we will continue to inform you about the places to which you can return,” Avichai Adraee, the Arabic spokesman of the Israeli military, posted on social media on Sunday morning. “Until further notice, all previously published instructions remain in effect.”

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that those killed and injured on Sunday morning had been trying to enter their villages along the border when they were attacked by Israeli forces. Residents of some southern towns had called for their neighbors to gather early Sunday morning and head to their homes in a convoy, despite the warnings from Israel. The Lebanese military said it was accompanying civilians returning to several border towns to try to ensure their safety. The military said in a statement that a Lebanese soldier was among those killed by Israeli fire.

What is not explained: What Israel and Lebanon agreed to was that Israel would occupy the region between their northern border with Lebanon and the Litani River, and then would withdraw back into Israel after the Lebanese Army (note: there is one, and it’s not Hezbollah), in concert with the UN army forces of UNIFIL, would destroy all of Hezbollah’s weapons and facilities between the border with Israel and the Litani River. Until then, villages in that area would be evacuated (Israeli villages south of the border with Lebanon have also been evacuated, displacing 80,000 people).

Of course UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army have done little or nothing, and Hezbollah, despite the agreement, will not withdraw north of the Litani River; armed Hezbollah fighters remain in the forbidden region while UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army does bupkes.  The Israelis fired on a group of people marching back to their homes in violation of the agreement, accompanied by armed people; this was perceived as a threat [see below].

At any rate the bolded text above implies that Israel was violating the cease-fire agreement while Lebanon adhered to it. That is a falsehood. Lebanon first violated the cease-fire agreement big-time, and in response Israel did not withdraw.

From the Times of Israel:

The Lebanese health ministry said 15 people had been killed, including a Lebanese soldier, and some 83 had been wounded by IDF fire in southern Lebanon since the morning.

The crowds appeared to be largely made up of Hezbollah supporters. Hezbollah’s al-Manar television, broadcasting from several locations in the south, showed footage of residents moving toward villages in defiance of Israeli orders, some holding the terror group’s flag and images of Hezbollah fighters killed in the war, as well as slain Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

An Israeli military official told reporters that hundreds of Lebanese, among them Hezbollah operatives, tried to reach villages in southern Lebanon while carrying out “provocations.”

The official said the military had prepared for civilians attempting to reach the border villages at the end of the 60-day truce, despite its warnings.

The IDF said it opened fire on suspects who approached troops still deployed in southern Lebanon and who posed an “imminent threat.” Troops also detained several suspects, according to the military.

Here, from Wikimedia, is a map showing the Litani River and the area south of it before one gets to the Israeli border (dark grey line). That is the region that was subject to the truce agreement.

******

In both cases above, Gaza and then Lebanon violated a cease-fire agreement with Israel, and Israel did not violate that agreement–until the terrorists (and the UN and Lebanon) violated the agreement.  Yet somehow the NYT makes Israel look responsible here rather than terrorists violating a cease-fire agreement. Such is mainstream journalism. In Gaza, for instance, if Hamas would just let the Israelis go as agreed, the cease-fire would be obeyed by Israel, which already has released the hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails per the agreement.

Israeli hostages reportedly held at United Nations “humanitarian” camp as well as hospital in northern Gaza

January 24, 2025 • 11:00 am

Do we really need the UN any more?  For a long time I’ve felt that some parts of it, including UNRWA and the International Court of Justice, both with their obsession against Israel, should be deep-sixed (UNRWA is the only UN refugee agency tasked with “refugees” in one area, and several countries, including the US, have defunded it). Seriously, how much good does the UN really do?

If you need more evidence that parts of the UN are actually complicit in terrorism, have a look at the allegations of the three young Israeli women just released by Hamas.  Yep, they said they were held in a UNRWA-run “humanitarian camp”.  The article below also discusses claims that other hostages were held in Gazan hospitals, hospitals that were raided by the IDF to the loud objections of the rest of the world.  If you think the UNRWA people who ran the camp were totally unaware of the fact that it contained Israeli hostages, well, . . . . . that’s not the way it works in Gaza.

Click below. I’ll give an excerpt from each source (indented). The first is from the think tank FDD, which describes itself as nonpartisan but Wikipedia calls “neoconservative” and was founded as pro-Israeli. But it’s no matter: the three allegations below have appeared on several sites as well.

  • Israeli Hostages Held in UN camp: The three female Israeli hostages released last weekend following the ceasefire in Gaza revealed on January 21 that they were incarcerated in a refugee camp operated by UNRWA — the United Nations agency catering exclusively to the descendants of Palestinian refugees — for part of their time in Hamas captivity, according to Israel’s Channel 13 network. Details as to which of the eight camps run by UNRWA in Gaza were used have not been made available. Following the October 7, 2023, atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel, in which several UNRWA employees participated, Israel accused the agency of actively colluding with the Iran-backed terrorist organization, passing legislation last October barring it from operating in the Jewish state.

  • Trump Halts UNRWA Funding: Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump halted U.S. funding for UNRWA via an executive order on his first day in office on January 20. Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, strongly criticized UNRWA and labeled the United Nations a “den of antisemitism” during her Senate confirmation hearing on January 21.

  • Hamas Kept Hostages in Hospitals: According to an exclusive report from Fox News Digital, Hamas terrorists captured by Israel confessed that Israeli hostages had been imprisoned in the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza at different times during their ordeal. Anas Muhammad Faiz al-Sharif, one of the terrorists in Israeli custody, was quoted as describing the hospital — which was raided by IDF troops on December 28, resulting in the arrest of more than 200 terrorists — as “a safe haven for them because the [Israeli] military cannot directly target it.”

From the Jewish News Service (again, click to read). Note that the UN knows of these allegations and are taking them seriously (see video below).

An excerpt:

Reports that freed Israeli hostages had been held in U.N. shelters in the Gaza Strip amount to “a very serious allegation,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told JNS on Wednesday.

“We call on those who have information on this to share it formally with UNRWA or other parts of the United Nations so that we can investigate it further,” Haq told JNS at the global body’s press conference in New York.

Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher, who were released on Sunday, said Hamas had held them in U.N. camps that the global body created during the war to protect Gazan civilians and to provide them with food and water.

It wasn’t clear from public records and reporting in which camps they were held, when and for how long. Israeli intelligence, taken from captured Hamas terrorists, assessed that several Israeli hostages were held at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Fox News reported.

These are different hostages from the ones released the other day (four more will be released tomorrow), but of course when the IDF raided that hospital because of reports that Hamas was there, they were excoriated for raiding a hospital. The director of the hospital, now in an Israel jail, was a colonel in Hamas, tons of weapons were found, and several captured Palestinian terrorists admitted that the hospital held hostages at one time.

This, of course, needs to be investigated, as the UN official (Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General), says in the video below, but I wouldn’t lightly dismiss the allegations of all three recently-released women hostages that they were held in a UN camp. This video starts at the time when Haq is questioned about the hostages (22:45), and you need listen for only a couple of minutes.

And here’s a report (perhaps a bit superfluous) from Israeli “citizen spokeswoman” Ruth Wasserman Lande, discussing the hostages’ claim of being in an UNRWA,  The sensible thing is to simply dissolve UNRWA, which is, as Lande says, “a Hamas front”, and fold its mission into the existing single UN organization that deals with refugees.

Natasha Hausdorff and the hope for peace

January 22, 2025 • 12:45 pm

Natasha Hausdorff, barrister and legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, discussed the prospects for peace between Israel and Palestine—I don’t say Hamas, because I don’t think either Natasha or I think there will ever be peace between Israel and Hamas—with Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk TV yesterday.  In this seven-minute conversation, Hausdorff believes that the chances for peace, while not solid, have been increased with the new administration.  Trump may do (and is doing) a passel of crazy things, but most friends of Israel think he offers a more salubrious future for the Jewish state than did the Biden administration.  The Forward agrees, though it notes that Rubio’s support for Israel has by no means been sycophantic or 100%.  But it’s surely better than Anthony “There’s a Red Line Around Rafah” Blinken. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates and his ignorant demonization of Israel

December 15, 2024 • 9:30 am

A year before last September, I spent three weeks in Israel, visiting Tel Aviv for a week and Jerusalem for two weeks. I also got two one-day tours, one to Masada and the Dead Sea for sightseeing, and the other a “security tour” of the defensive environs of Jerusalem given by the head of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). While there, I deliberately looked for signs of apartheid within Israel: signs of Israeli Arabs being treated as inferiors by Israeli Jews. I didn’t see any: Arabs and Jews seemed to mix completely in restaurants, trains, and trams. But of course my visit was short, superficial, and there might have been discrimination that I simply didn’t see. In light of that, all I can say is that “I didn’t see any apartheid, but my visit to Israel was short and superficial.”

Unfortunately, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose visit to Israel and Palestine was much shorter than mine (10 days total) does not refrain from making sweeping pronouncements. And that is because he clearly went to the area (sponsored and guided by anti-Israeli groups) with a preconception: he wanted to show that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is closely analogous to American’s treatment of blacks, even during slavery.  His visit was thus tendentious and what he wrote about it (the last of four essays in the book below) is incomplete, misguided, and, to be honest, shameful.

Below is Coates’s new the book of essays; click on it to go to the Amazon site.  I read only the last (but most talked-about) essay, “The Gigantic Dream,” 117 pages long.  If you know anything about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and the history thereof, you will spot immediately how tendentious, erroneous, and damaging to Israel Coates’s essay is. And some reviewers have called him out for it, though of course the Israel-haters defend him.

Using the four categories of lies that Francis Collins lays out in his own new book The Road to Wisdom, I would say that Coates’s dilations on Israel fall between “delusions” and “bullshit.” That is, he is not intentionally lying, but I think his view is warped by his immersion in American racism, and I believe he knows that there is far more to the story than he’s telling. In fact, he has been corrected by both interviewers and reviewers about his distortions, but he hasn’t changed his mind.

The theme of his book could be summarized by saying, à la Orwell, “Israel bad, Palestine good.”  To arrive at this theme, he has to completely neglect anything bad ever done by the Palestinians and anything good ever done by Israel. But I’m getting ahead of myself:

There are the usual accusations of genocide and apartheid on Israel’s part (the apartheid is supposed to occur within Israel, with Jews oppressing Israeli Arabs), but the most obvious omissions are those of Palestinian terrorism and of Israel’s repeated offers of a state to Palestine.

What, for example, do you make of Coates’s repeated beefing about having to wait for long periods at checkpoints, or about Israeli soldiers at those checkpoints glaring at him?  Could the plethora of checkpoints have something to do with Palestinian terrorism and an attempt to keep murderers out of Israel? You won’t hear that from Coates. Nor does he mention the First and Second Intifada.  Will you hear that Palestine won’t allow a single Jew to live in Gaza or the Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank (areas A and B)? Isn’t that apartheid? If not, why not? Remember that fully 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, like the one in the first video below.

If you didn’t know about the Palestinian terrorism that’s killed Israelis ever since the seventh century (with two big pogroms in 1929 and 1936), you wouldn’t realize the context of much of Coates’s complaints. But he has a point to make: the treatment of Israel towards Palestinians—or, indeed, of its own Arab citizens—is precisely analogous to Americans’ treatment of slaves and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  But you’d have to squint pretty hard to see Israel doing anything in Israeli that resembles even slightly the purchase and use of slaves, or of forcing Israeli Arabs to bow and kowtow to Israeli Jews.

Coates mentions the two-state solution, floated by one person he met, but he doesn’t mention that such a solution has been offered to the Israelis four or five times, and every time it has been rejected—by the Palestinians.  If there is apartheid and genocide to be seen, simply look at the first charter of Hamas, as well as its behavior and the statements of Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and many other Arab groups sworn to extirpate Israel. There is of course no mention of the events of October 7, 2023, but the book came out on October 1, 2024, and perhaps, given that there’s about a year’s lead time on publishing many books, Coates couldn’t fit that event in. But I don’t believe Coates would have mentioned it anyway (not even one inserted footnote?), for the butchery of that day spoils his narrative. Would Coates admit now the truth that Hamas, proud of that day, has sworn to repeat it over and over again? Remember, Coates says not one word about Palestinian terrorism.

Coates dwells heavily on the nakba, or “catastrophe,” originally seen as the humiliation suffered by five Arab armies (and volunteers from two other Arab states) who invaded Israel right after independence but was routed by a lowly army of Jews.  The nakba was subsequently reconceived by Arafat to mean the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel” after the invasion.  Coates implies repeatedly that, without provocation, the Jewish military simply slaughtered Arabs wholesale after their invasion.  This is not the case: many Arabs fled because they were frightened, many other because Arab countries ordered them to leave so the Jews could be destroyed before Arabs could return, and some fled because they started trying to kill Jews and were driven out militarily or destroyed.

The Arab invasion of Israel, beginning on its day of independence in 1948, was certainly not a genocide of Palestinians. Coates discusses the “massacre” by Israeli soldiers of the Arab village of Deir Yassin (an event badly distorted by Wikipedia, which repeatedly mentions rapes that never happened), but he doesn’t note that the attack was prompted by the infiltration of the village by Arabs who fired on Israelis. About hundred people died and, unfortunately, some non-combatants were bystanders in the line of fire.

To see another view of this battle (one that Coates, not interested in hearing all sides, neglects), read The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (and a review of that book in the Middle East Quarterly).

As for Coates’s writing, one petulant reviewer (the reviews are mixed) called Coates a “narcissist”. When I saw that after reading the essay myself, I said, “Precisely right.” Not only is there Coates’s hubris of assessing a messy, complex, and historically convoluted conflict after only a ten-day visit, but his writing is deeply self-absorbed. Coates is far more interested in his own reactions than in talking to people on both sides. A soldier glares at him, and he’s off to the races.

But Coates’s mission is not to talk to Israelis and Palestinians, but to show that Israel’s racism parallels that of America’s. It’s as if he needs to fill in a jigsaw puzzle, and is looking for just the right pieces to unite Israel and American segregationism.  I won’t dwell on the folly of such comparisons, except to say that Coates has a bill to sell. He seems to have been prompted in this solipsism by the success of his famous Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations”—a good piece of writing—an article that he brings up repeatedly.

And since Coates is tendentious, let me just give the other side, but in the words of other people.  First, how is Israel enacting apartheid against its own people? (I am construing this accusation as one of intra-Israel apartheid, not the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine.) I have tried to find laws in which Arab Israelis are discriminated against by Jewish Israelis. I could find only one discriminatory law, and it discriminates in favor of Arabs: they are not required to serve three years in the IDF unless they want to. There are also laws that discriminate among Jews themselves, with—until recently—Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews being exempt from military service as well, though that is supposed to end in a few years.  It is curious that those who level accusations of apartheid against Israel Israeli Arabs never come up with tangible examples.

If you want to dig deeper into the apartheid accusation, here are two videos, one long and one short. In the first short one (ten minutes), an Israeli Arab who served in the IDF fields a number of hard questions about whether he experienced discrimination. The answer was “no”:

. . . and here is the stupendous Natasha Hausdorff discussing the “apartheid” accusation with an American professor Professor Orde Kittrie from Arizona State. Kittrie is a specialist in international and criminal law, and, as I’m presenting this as a palliative to the ignorance of Coates. You will hear Kittrie’s opinion that the apartheid accusation is baseless. (At 31 minutes in, Natasha gives some viewers’ questions—and some of her own—that Kittrie answers.)

Here are the YouTube notes:

Chair: Natasha Hausdorff

A new UN Commission of Inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is poised to accuse Israel of apartheid.

Professor Kittrie discusses this Inquiry and its mandate, and the potential relationship with prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The mandate’s reference to apartheid was apparently inspired by a lengthy report, accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid, published by Human Rights Watch (HRW). However this report is based on a definition of “apartheid” which is not found in the ICC’s Statute or the International Convention on Apartheid. Professor Kittrie discusses the different definitions of apartheid, reasons why the apartheid charge is wrong even under HRW’s definition, and options for responding.

Finally, here’s an article from Fathom taking apart Amnesty International’s 2022 accusation that Israel was an “apartheid state.”   Click to read:

Read, watch, and judge for yourself. In my view, Coates, while his writings on American racism may be good (I’ve read only the Atlantic article), his piece on Israel and Palestine is reprehensible, misguided, full of distortions, and, in the end, is pretty much racist, if not antisemitic. If you read it, please do so with some knowledge of the politics and history of the region.

h/t: Malgorzata

Another pro-Israeli speaker at the Oxford Union, this time with the audience uncensored

December 9, 2024 • 12:53 pm

Eventually I will post all the talks, pro and con, at the Oxford Union’s debate on November 28, whose topic was this:

“This House Believes Israel Is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.”

Speaking against the motion here is Jonathan Sacerdoti, identified by Wikipedia as

“a British broadcaster, journalist, and TV producer. He covers stories relating to the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as terrorism and extremism stories, race relations, Middle East analysis and the British royal family.  He is also a campaigner against antisemitism.”

His father was a survivor of the Holocaust.

I wanted to put this speech up now because it is uncensored, showing the abuse to which the pro-Israel speakers were subject, an abuse not evident in what was apparently a censored clip of Natasha Hausdorff’s speech the other day. I think it likely that this clip will be taken down, for it makes the Oxford Union look really really bad. 

This video, complete with unceasing shouts and attacks on the speaker, shows how shameful the audience really was, a shame that also devolves upon the Union’s moderators, who were clearly on the side of the proposition although they are supposed to be neutral. They do very little to quell the audience’s despicable treatment of the speakers.  Should not repeated abusers be ejected?

As you know, the proposition passed by a large proportion, with the audience packed with those who hate Israel, and with Jewish students apparently afraid to attend.

Sacerdoti’s arguments are good, and similar to Hausdorff’s, but of course he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell with an audience like that.

Have a listen, even if you don’t care much about the arguments, for this is, after all, supposed to be one of the most well-run and respected groups at Oxford University.

msn quotes Hausdorff on the abuse dished out in Arabic:

She detailed how Arab speakers on her team were subjected to abuse in Arabic, which she only learned about after the event.

“They were called ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators’,” she said. “One of the speakers confided in me that the nature of that abuse and the threats have him flashbacks to a time he was targeted for being a collaborator in the West Bank.”

Natasha Hausdorff gives better than she gets at the Oxford Union debates

December 6, 2024 • 11:30 am

The most recent Oxford Union debate was both odious and raucous, and you can read about it in a piece by Niall Ferguson at The Free Press (archived here).  An excerpt:

Something is rotten in the state of Britain. It was epitomized by a recent [Nov. 28] event at the Oxford Union, the 201-year-old debating society that is such a distinctive and admirable part of Oxford life. It was at the Union that, 40 years ago, I spoke as freely (and indeed as irresponsibly) as I ever have, discovering in the process that I was not cut out for politics. It was there that I saw great debaters of the past, present, and future.

But I never saw anything like the events of November 28.

The motion for debate was in itself a provocation: “This House Believes Israel Is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” But what was truly shocking was the conduct of the president of the Union, an Egyptian student named Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, who appears to have abused his position by openly siding with those proposing the motion and treating the opposing speakers with contempt.

According to the broadcaster, Jonathan Sacerdoti, who was arguing for Israel’s side, Osman-Mowafy canceled the traditional pre-debate group photographs, but posed alone for private photos with the anti-Israel team. During the debate, the pro-Israel speakers were repeatedly heckled by the crowd. At one point, a young woman stood up and screamed at Sacerdoti: “Liar! Fuck you, the genocidal motherfucker!”

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a senior Hamas leader who defected to Israel, who was arguing alongside Sacerdoti, was met with jeering derision and cries of “traitor” and “prostitute” (in Arabic). Yousef asked the audience to indicate by a show of hands how many of them would have reported prior knowledge of the October 7, 2023, atrocities to Israel. Not even a quarter of the crowd raised their hands.

For the other side, Miko Peled, an Israeli general’s son turned radical anti-Zionist, described the murders, rapes, and kidnappings of October 7 as “acts of heroism.” The Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, who has equated Zionism with genocide, began his speech by announcing that there was “no room for debate” and ended it by walking out of the chamber. The motion passed by 278 in favor to 59 against.

I have been looking for videos of this debate online, but the bad news is that so far only one short segment has appeared. The good news, though, is that it features the eloquent, brave, and whip-smart Natasha Hausdorff, lawyer and legal director of the UK Lawyers for Israel.

Reader “Bat” sent me the link, but also his take on the video below, which you should watch. His words:

The future Mrs PCC(E) really gave them what for at that shameful Oxford Union debate last week. Here is a video of her full 21-minute speech during which she shows no intimidation and, with a light wave of the hand in several instances, ignores the catcalls of the heavily anti-Israel audience. Though originally scheduled for 15 minutes, she makes it explicitly clear that she will take an extra five minutes as the anti-Israel speakers did when also ignoring the house rules earlier. She ignores the gavel of the Union debate judge several times and speaks for a full 21 minutes. A lovely performance in very hostile territory. 

It is clear that Hausdorff is passionate and terribly angry at the views of her opponents, but her anger is manifested only in her manner of speech, for she keeps decorum throughout. Pity that the same can’t be said of the audience or the judge.

I will add one personal comment, directed at those who on these shores also accuse Israel of “genocide”.  If Israel wanted to kill off all the Gazans—and there are two million of them—it would already be a fait accompli. All it would take would be a series of massive airstrikes and heavy-handed urban warfare directly targeting civilians.  But that is not happening

Instead, Israel has taken care, as far as possible, to avoid killing noncombatants. It warns civilians of airstrikes in advance, sets up humanitarian zones, sends in thousands of tons of food, and, at risk to IDF soldiers’ own lives, tries to target only members of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  Is this the act of people bent on genocide?

Since the terrorists use civilians as human shields (Hamas boasts of this!), a large toll of noncombatants is the sad but inevitable result of the terrorists’ cynical tactics.  What about those tunnels under hospitals and schools? Nobody can deny this—except for those who want the state of Israel gone, and its Jews with it.

Those miscreants who accuse Israel of genocide also, and inevitably, fail to mention the explicit genocide of Palestinian terrorists. The first Hamas charter, the teaching of martyrdom and Jew-killing to Palestinian children, and, of course, the endless terrorism enacted against Israeli citizens since 1948—all of these speak of the terrorists’ desire to make the Middle East Judenrein.

No, the real genocide is never mentioned, for it is seen in both the words and actions of Palestinian terrorists and their sympathizers. Instead, the accusation of genocide gets turned against its very victims: the Israelis and now the Jews of other countries (the latest incident was in Australia). I have nothing but contempt for those who ignore these facts.

But I fear I am just repeating what Ms. Hausdorff said above. Listen for yourself.

Senator Dick Durbin responds to my critique about his views on the Gaza war, but is taken apart by Malgorzata

December 5, 2024 • 8:30 am

As I reported on November 22, I was shocked to find that, on a list of 18 U.S. Senators who voted to move forward with Bernie Sanders’s bill to block a $20 billion sale of weapons to Israel, was one of my own Senators, Democrat Dick Durbin. Here’s the whole list:

The measure failed miserably on the Senate floor, with none of its three provisions garnering more than 19 votes. But of course I wrote to Senator Durbin, expressing my dissatisfaction as a constituent, and chastising him for giving succor to Israel’s enemies and impeding the self-defense of Jewish state in its attempt to root out Hamas.

Yesterday I got this weaselly response from Durbin:

December 4, 2024
MY ADDRESS REDACTED

Dear Dr. Coyne:

Thank you for contacting me about measures to block weapons shipments to Israel.  I appreciate hearing from you.

On September 25, 2024, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced six measures that would block a proposed $20 billion in arms sales to Israel.  These sales include joint direct attack munitions and launchers, mortar and tank cartridges, F-15s, and other defense articles.  Under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (P.L. 87-195) and the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-329), the president must notify Congress of a pending arms sale.  These statutes also give Congress the authority to suspend such a sale by passing a joint resolution of disapproval through both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  All six of these measures were referred to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

On November 20, 2024, the Senate considered whether to discharge three of Senator Sanders’ joint resolutions of disapproval, S.J. Res. 111, S.J. Res. 113, and S.J. Res. 115, from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.  While I voted in favor of discharging these three measures from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, all three of these measures were rejected by the Senate.  S.J. Res. 111 was rejected by a vote of 18-79, S.J. Res. 113 was rejected by a vote of 19-78, and S.J. Res. 115 was rejected by a vote of 17-80.

My reason for supporting these measures is straightforward.  More than 43,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and 60 percent of them have been women, children, and elderly.  The denial of humanitarian aid to Gaza threatens the lives of so many more.

I believe that Israel has not only the right to exist, but the right to defend itself in the face of threats such as from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.  I consistently have voted for security assistance to Israel throughout my career to protect it from these threats.  But this war must end.  I will stand by Israel, but I will not support the devastation of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

For too long, this protracted conflict has inflicted untold suffering on innocent Israelis and Palestinians alike.  I hope out of the ashes and pain of this current crisis that there can be a renewed focus on a two-state solution.

Thank you again for contacting me.  Please feel free to keep in touch.

Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator

I sent this response to Malgorzata, and when I woke up this morning she had written a response, one that I reproduce here with permission. Durbin is apparently as dumb and uninformed about the Gaza conflict as many Americans.

Malgorzata’s response is indented.

Durbin’s figures are taken directly from Hamas, figures that have been debunked many times.

Hamas doesn’t count combatants and civilians separately. In this fictitious number of dead are the non-existent 500 people allegedly killed in a strike on the hospital Al-Ahli. As was discovered and confirmed by independent authorities (and admitted by the real perpetrator: Palestinian Islamic Jihad), it was a misfired PIJ rocket that fell short, creating the strike. Instead of killing Israeli civilians, the rocket fell on the hospital’s parking lot (NOT THE HOSPITAL). It killed several people, but far less than 100—not to mention 500.

How many other Palestinian civilians killed by rockets from PIJ and Hamas rockets have been counted by Hamas’s Ministry of Health as having been killed by Israel? After previous wars between Gaza and Israel, when there was really time to count the dead and ascertain their identities, it always turned out that Hamas had counted everybody (including combatants killed in war as well as people who died in Gaza of natural causes) in their earlier communicates about people “killed by Israel”.

The percentages of women, children, and elderly given by Durbin (and Hamas) are also false. According to the IDF, up to 19,000 Hamas combatants were killed. Moreover, both Hamas and PIJ use teenagers as fighters. Everybody killed when he/she is under 18 is counted as a child. A 17-year-old fighter killed when shooting a rocket at Israelis is counted as a child. Even if you accept the false numbers given by Hamas, the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths is the lowest ever achieved in urban warfare by any army.

Further, not one person in Gaza would have been killed by the IDF if Hamas and PIJ didn’t invade Israel on October 7, 2023, didn’t kill, rape, torture, and burn 1200 Israeli women, men, children and the elderly, and didn’t take 252 hostages, including women, children and the elderly. There are still 101 hostages somewhere in the dungeons of Hamas, among them baby Kfir (9 months old at the moment of kidnapping) and his older brother Ariel (4 years at the moment of kidnapping).

From Jerry. I would add this.  Besides credulously adopting Hamas’s misleading figures that count dead combatants as “innocent Palestinians”, Durbin implicitly calls for a cease-fire and explicitly for a “two-state solution,” something that, if implemented now, would be a disaster for Israel.

We already know that the ratio of civilians killed to combatants killed is far lower than seen in other conflicts in which the U.S. has engaged, including World War II and the more recent battles in the Middle East. Durbin of course ignores that, just as he ignores what happened on October 7 of last year.  In his attempt to look evenhanded, Durbin has proven himself a useful asset for Hamas. And I will communicate this to the misguided Senator.