RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wages-of-conspicuous-compassion/

One of the most feckless acts of “compassion” for the victims of a conflict has been the West’s decades-long provision of food, medicines, and other aid to Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza Strip. These in-kind and cash donations come with an enormous moral hazard.

By now everyone knows that indeed the bulk of such aid is stolen by Hamas terrorists, who sell the goods and use the money to line the pockets of Hamas officials, pay their fighters, reward their “martyrs” killed while slaughtering mostly civilian Israelis, and buy weapons and missiles fired indiscriminately at civilian targets.  These funds are on top of the billions provided by the UN–– nearly $4.5 billion just from 2014 to 2020––and billions more from EU and Muslim nations.

Given that moral hazard, Israel is planning to let the U.S. Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the IDF distribute the aid, removing Hamas and the UN from participating. In a display of their hatred of Israel, the Wall Street Journal reports, “Canada, the U.K. and France threatened Israel on Monday with ‘concrete actions’ unless it halts military operations and facilitates more aid, which ‘must include engaging with the UN’”––which recently spread the blood libel that Israel is preparing to starve to death 14000 babies in Gaza. Hamas sent Turtle Bay and the three “liberal democracies” a note of thanks.

This spectacle of Western nations libeling and browbeating Israelis into financing an enemy sworn to their destruction, and who ruthlessly targets civilians, including children, is another shameful marker of the decline of the West, especially the Europeans who morally preen about their “conspicuous compassion,” as Alan Bloom called such self-serving actions.

But in fact, such displays are morally idiotic camouflage for Europe’s failure of nerve and despicable political hatred of the region’s only free democracy. The “international community” has treated Israel like a pariah for 77 years––especially the UN, which has formally condemned Israel more than all the world’s nations combined.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/409027

Although wars are destructive, they are also often unavoidable and even necessary; in addition, they are also sources of new technologies, innovations, and, of course, political changes.

As a result of wars between Britain and the American colonies in 1776 and 1812, for example, the groundwork was laid for a new nation and a new political identity.

Similarly, the Mexican-American War of 1847-1849 was the basis for America’s continental expansion and it reaffirmed its national identity, as well as its economic, military and technological power.

The American Civil War (1861-65) ended the institution of slavery and opened a massive expansion westward with newly-formed states. America became coast-to-coast.

In 1898, when Spain attacked American ships, it led to the Spanish-American War. As a result, the United States conquered the islands of Puerto Rico; the territory has been under U.S. sovereignty ever since. Although not a state, its inhabitants were given US citizenship.

The First and Second World Wars confirmed America’s dominant position. As a result of these wars, the USA became the greatest democracy in the world.

For Israel, and for Hamas/Palestinian Arabs, the war in Gaza is also definitional. It is a way of clarifying who the sides are and what they represent. In that sense, Israel’s war against terrorism, and the war in Gaza are existential.

The nation-state of Israel has been fighting for its survival since its establishment in 1948. It won its War of Independence against five Arab countries in 1949, and against some of them again in 1956, 1967, and 1973. However, because many countries and organizations support Palestinianism and Palestinian Arab terrorist groups, that war and the current war in Gaza continue.

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A “senior official” of the Israel Defense Forces says Israel is on the way to a “decisive victory” in Gaza.

Military plans indicate that in two months Hamas will control only about 30% of Gaza, down from 40% in recent days. [In the current phase,] the IDF is destroying infrastructure both above and below ground.

The IDF assesses that Hamas

is in severe distress both militarily and civilian-wise. It has lost its command chain and is in a deadlock. Cracks are forming in the population’s dependency on the group, and pressure is mounting—but a full breakdown has not yet occurred. That collapse, they believe, may come through intensified military pressure and control over aid delivery.

Some say Israel can’t afford to keep fighting in Gaza because the situation of the twenty-or-so remaining live hostages is too dire, and Israel urgently has to make a deal for their release. The problem is that according to reports from Doha, Hamas—despite its own dismal situation—keeps stonewalling such a deal.

US envoy Steve Witkoff, who has been pushing hard for a deal in Doha, says: “What I have seen from Hamas is disappointing and completely unacceptable.”

Some in the Israeli security establishment have been saying all along that the hostages are so precious to Hamas as leverage over Israel that Hamas will never agree—unless compelled—to give all of them up.

As the above-quoted senior IDF official put it:

“Hamas will not return all the hostages at once—they’ll play a game and always keep some in their hands…. What drives Hamas to a deal is military pressure— that’s what has brought hostages back so far.”

… Asked what a military victory over Hamas would look like, the official outlined the following phases: destruction of Hamas’s military wing, dismantling of its governing capabilities, capture and retention of territory, and control over humanitarian aid while cutting Hamas off from it.

Hamas is in dire financial straits, too—“the worst…in its history, with government employees in Gaza receiving just 900 shekels (approximately $250) a month for the past four months.”

https://www.jns.org/yechiel-leiters-refreshing-undiplomatic-candor/

The Foreign Ministry announced on Sunday that its director general, Eden Bar Tal, was summoning Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter for a hearing, in accordance with “the directive of the senior director of the disciplinary division at the Civil Service Commission.”  

The anticipated wrist-slapping is over remarks that Leiter made in an interview last week on the conservative PragerU podcast, “Real Talk with Marissa Streit.”

During the course of the one-on-one—an articulate and comprehensive discussion about the war in Gaza; the death of his son, Moshe, who was killed last year fighting Hamas; U.S.-Israel relations; normalization with Saudi Arabia; the Iranian nuclear threat; and predictions for the future of the Middle East—Leiter committed what the Foreign Ministry considers a diplomatic faux pas.

This consisted of his spending six out of the 66-minute tete-a-tete defending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against demonization. The passage in question begins with his referring to the “accusations on the international stage to call our prime minister a war criminal?! What is that? That’s insane.”

He goes on to point out that “there’s no way you can really fight antisemitism until you remove the stain of Cain” from Netanyahu. Because, he explains, “if you call the Number One Jew in the world a war criminal, well, Jews are responsible; they’re like their prime minister. They’re war criminals, right? Jews who identify with Israel identify with a war criminal. So, why shouldn’t there be antisemitism?”

Yet then he’s asked by Streit about the claim—“made not just by antisemites; also by Israelis”—that Netanyahu is prolonging the war in Gaza in order to “keep him[self] out of political trouble or from going to jail.”

And here’s the section that spurred the ostensible need to “discipline” the relatively new diplomat, who’s been in his post for a mere four months: “Political opposition sometimes is a horrible thing, but they go too far. There is nothing more malicious and malevolent than to level such charges at the prime minister. I know the prime minister for 40 years. He’s a sensitive man who cares about people. Prolong a war? What kind of insanity is that? How dare they say something as malicious as that?