RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/20/imagine-a-world-without-israel/

Hamas didn’t invade Israel on Oct. 7 for its amusement. The barbaric sneak attack is a part of the pogrom intended to wipe out the Jewish state. It was a crime against humanity, and not just because of its savagery. We would all be worse off if Israel ceased to exist. The same cannot be said for Islamic terrorists.

Israel’s contributions to the modern world are momentous. When not dodging bullets, rockets, and homicide bombers, Israelis have since 1948 developed:

Copaxone and Rebif, drugs that treat multiple sclerosis, and Exelon, which treats mild to moderate dementia in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients.
The PillCam, “a minimally invasive ingestible camera in a capsule that allows visualization of the small bowel.”
The water desalination process.
The Sniffphone, “that can actually ‘sniff out’ diseases.”
And SpineAssist, “​​the first-ever spine robot” that has the “ability to provide real-time intraoperative navigation.”

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, responsible for some of the inventions listed above, has also produced diabetes and flu vaccines, is using T-cells to treat damaged spines, and is a pioneer in industrial — and medical — uses nano materials. 

Other impactful Israeli products include drip irrigation, a revolutionary microprocessor called the 8088, the ​​NIR heart stent, voice-over-internet protocol, the ​​USB flash drive, the Waze navigation app, ReWalk, “a commercial bionic walking assistance system,” and “the first commercially viable firewall software.” 

Our own security has benefited from Israel’s labor and work ethic.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

This week’s positive Israel newsletter highlights that despite the on-going war, Israel’s citizens, its organizations, and its many global friends are steadfast in their desire to recover from tragedy, eradicate evil, and work to make a better world. Michael Ordman

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
62% of Israelis have donated. Nearly two-thirds of the Israeli public donated to various initiatives relating to the war effort during the 3rd week of the Israel-Hamas conflict and gave more money than ever. The joint study by Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Universities reveals the average donation is NIS 458 a week in cash or in kind.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/nearly-two-thirds-of-israelis-giving-weekly-donations-to-war-effort-says-study/
 
Evacuated kids keep learning. Some 80 children who have been evacuated from their homes near the Gaza border are keeping up with their studies. They follow the Sprint EdTech platform from Israel’s MindCET innovation center at its Yeruham HQ in south-east Israel (see here previously).  https://www.mindcet.org/en/
https://nocamels.com/2023/11/for-evacuated-israeli-kids-innovative-studies-keep-minds-sharp/
 
Free respite for rave survivors. Israeli Yoni Kahana, an ex-member of Chabad, is now owner of the Secret Forest retreat center in Paphos, Cyprus. He has assembled a team of trauma experts to provide free 5-day therapeutic retreats for groups of Supernova music party survivors. He is crowdfunding for more groups.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-an-exclusive-cyprus-retreat-center-supernova-rave-survivors-get-help-to-move-on/   https://charidy.com/recovering   https://secretfo.rest/en/
 
Caring for employees. The Israel R&D Center of AT&T has a 6-point plan for looking after its staff during the war. 1. Staying in contact; 2. Discreet mental support; 3. Employee relief fund and charity donation facility; 4. Kids programs; 5. Support for employees in IDF; 6. Volunteering initiatives.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sys0x11r7p
 
Office becomes hotel for evacuees. US-based Varonis converted its Herzliya office’s open space into a huge camp for 250 evacuees from the southern cities of Netivot, Ofakim, and Ashkelon and the northern city Kiryat Shmona. After one week, it moved them to a hotel that its employees paid for by redeeming their vacation days.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/y0lql80z0   https://www.varonis.com/
 
Support for all. Western Galilee Now’s Support Package initiative enables people to send gift boxes to evacuees, soldiers or any loved one in Israel. The boxes are filled with premium products sold by small Galilee and Negev-based businesses who are suffering loss of income due to the war. Backed by JNF-USA.
https://www.israel21c.org/gift-boxes-support-israeli-people-and-businesses-in-wartime/
https://united.westgalil.org.il/product/support-package-for-your-loved-ones/
 
The spirit of volunteerism. nearly 4,000 of the 5,700 young Jewish adults (aged 18-30) from abroad on the Masa Israel Journey program ended up staying in Israel during the war and many who left are returning. This article features one participant who came to teach English and is now a volunteer chef for the IDF.
https://www.jns.org/the-indomitable-spirit-of-volunteerism-in-wartime/
 
Volunteers on the farm. Many foreign farm workers left Israel at the start of the war. Charities Hashomer HaHadash, Achim Lemeshek, and Zav 8 have been recruiting Israeli volunteers to replace them.  30 volunteers are currently working at the Ben Saadon farm and packing plant in Be’er Ganim, near Ashkelon.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/agriculture-ministry-seeking-to-lure-out-of-work-israelis-to-take-up-jobs-on-farms/   https://www.jns.org/volunteers-give-first-aid-to-israeli-agriculture/
 
Israel can count on its math department. The mathematics faculty at Israel’s Technion is helping Israel’s war effort. Many are in the IDF reserves and on the home front. Others are harvesting vegetables, preparing shelters, delivering food & clothing to the IDF, and assisting evacuees from border towns.
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2023/11/the-math-department-helps-in-a-big-way-on-the-war-and-home-fronts/
 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/11/foreign-minister-wongs-slip-is-showing/

I see that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has turned to Christianity from atheism and before that Islam. From the misconceived to the muddleheaded to the way, the truth and the life. Of the three, let me pick up on the truth. Truth and God are indivisible. And as part of giving mankind the best civilisation the world has seen or will ever see, Christianity gave and gives us an appreciation of the centrality of truth. The truth is always under attack by those with an agenda (leftists, Islamists, assorted barbarians) who wish to tear down our civilisation.

Where am I going with this morality tale about truth? To Gaza, actually, and to Penny Wong. “And we call on Israel to cease attacking hospitals,” she reportedly said. The archetypal lie by insinuation. Apropos, have you stopped beating your wife? Either through ignorance or commission, truth has taken a hike. She either has not studied the rules of war and, therefore, as Foreign Minister, is recklessly derelict, or she has read them and was being duplicitous in implying that Israel was in breach of them.

Any number of reports last week described fighting around Gaza’s largest hospital al-Shifa. Ms Wong should pay attention. Exactly who were Israeli forces fighting near to the hospital? Hardly unarmed doctors, nurses and patients. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that Hamas terrorists were stationed in, around and underneath the hospital in contravention of the rules of war.

Israel in conforming with the rules of war must be “proportionate.” While this civilising rule or principle is fraught with subjectivity in the heat of conflict, as I argue here, there is no circumstance which allows it to be deliberately flouted. (See, for example, Military Ethics by Stephen Coleman.) Unfortunately, most commentators, and I see that Teal MP Zoe Daniels has joined the misinformed throng, seem to have no idea what proportionality means. To be clear, it does not mean tit-for-tat. It does not proscribe Israel’s defence forces from attacking Hamas terrorists inside and near to a hospital, provided the military objective is adjudged important enough and provided that harm to doctors, nurses and patients is kept to an absolute minimum in achieving the military objective.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20154/neutrality-immoral-israel-hamas

While many the world over had the integrity to condemn “the hideous crime, naming its perpetrators and acknowledging Israel’s basic right to defend itself against the atrocity,” the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches were unable to muster up such moral clarity.

While the IDF goes out of its way to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups do their utmost to maximize them — not only by indiscriminately murdering Israelis, but also by hiding among their own civilian population and using them as human shields, resulting in disproportionately high numbers of Palestinian casualties, caused — deliberately — by Hamas.

If there is an “occupation” problem in Gaza, the occupier is Hamas, not Israel.

In this war, Christians — and all of us — have a moral responsibility to support a civilized nation’s fight against barbarism. Israel must eradicate a terrorist group, Hamas, just as we confronted ISIS. Then all of us need to contain the real mastermind behind such groups, the genocidal regime of Iran. Unfortunately, there is no other viable solution if we wish to preserve the West.

October 7, 2023: Another day that will live in infamy: Israel’s Pearl Harbor. Israel’s 9/11. The quiet Shabbat morning of Simchat Torah, concluding the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, suddenly turned into a bloodbath. Under the cover of heavy rocket fire, thousands of Hamas terrorists attacked Israel’s southern communities and left behind them a path of carnage and devastation, ambushing army bases and motorists, murdering some 364 people at a music festival, slaughtering families in their beds, raping women, executing children and Holocaust survivors, burning civilians alive, and kidnapping 244 people in Israel to Gaza. With at least 1,200 people murdered, it was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The barbarity of the Hamas attack was so unprecedented that even the world was brutally — if briefly — jolted out of its usual apathy and left reeling in horror.

The outrage, however, was short-lived. As soon as Israel began its military response to Hamas’s act of war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations erupted across the world, many of them quickly turning into anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate fests. Some even denied that the October 7 slaughter had taken place, despite the many eyewitness stories of survivors.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4311098-dont-look-to-the-palestinian-authority-for-good-governance/

The Oct. 7 terrorist massacre in southern Israel made it all too clear that Hamas must go. But after it is gone, who will take the helm in Gaza? 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken commented that Gaza’s administration “must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.” Secretary Blinken and the Biden administration should think again.

Over the course of 11 days from May into June 2023, I spent hours in conversation with Palestinian Authority leaders. I had been selected to join a group of 30 undergraduates from Yale and West Point on a trip to Israel and the West Bank, part of the schools’ joint Peace and Dialogue Leadership Initiative. Trips like these offer Palestinian leaders an opportunity to court impressionable, young American students. The presentations from Palestinian Authority officials were as revealing as the living conditions we saw throughout the West Bank. The Palestinian people are being used as pawns by the Palestinian Authority. The U.S. must proceed with caution or risk substituting one corrupt authority with another.

Many Palestinians live in appalling conditions. In Bethlehem, I watched a little girl weave through moving cars to get to school — no crosswalks or traffic lights in sight. Even in areas that seem economically secure, infrastructure is severely lacking. Walking down an alley in Ramallah, I saw plastic tubing cracking along the side of an apartment building, causing precious water to gush onto the dusty road. 

I pressed the political leaders with whom we met to understand how this could be the reality for many Palestinians. The authorities who acted as our hosts emphasized the misfortunes of their people, but they took no responsibility themselves. In fact, the extent of their seeming indifference is astonishing. 

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that between 1994 and 2020, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has received more than $40 billion in international aid. The Biden administration dedicated $316 million just last year to supporting Palestinians. When I asked a Palestinian Authority official in Ramallah where American funding for the PA goes, he responded by saying that the U.S. does not provide any support at all. Algeria, he claimed, is the only country that offers financial aid. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-the-moral-rehabilitation-of-gaza/

As the war between Israel and Gaza rages on, some inevitable questions must be raised. If Hamas, an indisputable rogue organization that governs a region which exists more like a plot of land in a state of nature than as a civilized geographic entity, is not totally obliterated (which, with sentimental calls for ceasefires and daily pauses in aerial bombings and ground incursions on Israel’s part, seems unlikely), then can Hamas be politically rehabilitated? What would such rehabilitation look like? Or should we be thinking of more robust and radical solutions such as global incarceration whereby a country is evicted from the community of nations and radically contained militarily?

The most draconian form of global incarceration of a state or region is the permanent disbandment of a state into regional disembodiments, sedimentary fragments chiseled into the mortar bodies of larger states with no chance of it ever recovering its political solvency. It is the absolute disappearance of a state without necessarily terminating the lives of its former citizens. It includes but is not limited to the deracination of its political culture, the destruction of its political institutions and its mores, customs, and norms. Radical assimilation and/or extreme containment are the political concomitants and the direct corollaries of this mandate. Global incarceration of a state or region is the death of its political life and its capacity to generate and regenerate life as it was once capable of doing. An incarcerated state or region is not just a neutralized state – it is a neutered state.

On the slim chance that a heavily compromised, Hamas-governed Gaza exists, what might it look like, and how would it come about?

Here it might be helpful to look to history for political and moral guidance. Japan and Germany in World War II were countries that went through political rehabilitation and, with the aid of the United States, had their entire identities reconstituted. In the case of Japan, a heavily influenced U.S Constitution was foisted on it with great success, albeit via warfare. Sometimes rehabilitation requires war. Sometimes it requires firm diplomacy, or economic sanctions, or military intervention, or absolute regime change. What is essential about rehabilitation in the political sense is that there is adaptation to a code of normative behavior to which the rogue state must adhere. The rogue entity adapts to the norms of a civilizational order.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hamas-big-fish-who-got-away-79184d1a?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden warned Israel not to be “consumed by rage,” even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” against Hamas. But revenge isn’t the only anger at play, or even the most corrosive. The fury that’s eating Israel’s war cabinet is regret. No matter how the military responds, there’s a sense that it’s too late.

“We blew it,” Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant, now Israel’s defense minister, told me following a Sept. 6, 2003, airstrike on Hamas leadership. (I was a Washington Post reporter.) Eight senior Hamas commanders, including bomb makers and developers of Qassam rockets, had met for lunch on the ground floor of a Gaza home. It was a rare daylight appearance of Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s shadowy military leader.

“The terrorist dream team” is how Avi Dichter, then head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, described the guest list at the time. Mr. Dichter, Gen. Gallant and other Israeli security officials in the 2003 war room plunged into hours of debate about what size bomb to drop in Gaza, weighing the risks of civilian casualties.

Palestinian children were playing outside the home. It was “a tragic dilemma,” one general said, a lose-lose decision of the sort they had argued and anguished over many times before. Mr. Dichter advocated for an all-out assault. The defense minister at the time called it “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” In the long run, several argued, it would save Israeli and Palestinian lives.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/16/when-has-war-even-been-proportional/

Proportionality in war is a synonym for lethal stalemate, if not defeat.

When two sides go at it with roughly equal forces, weapons, and strategies, the result is often a horrific deadlock—like the four years of toxic trench warfare on the Western Front of World War I that resulted in 12 million fatalities.

The purpose of war is to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible with the least number of causalities—and thereby achieve political ends.

So, every side aims to find superior strategies, tactics, weapons, and manpower to ensure as great a disproportionate advantage as possible.

Hamas is no exception.

Its savage precivilizational strategy to defeat Israel hinged on doing disproportionate things Israel either cannot or will not do.

First, Hamas spent a year planning a preemptive butchery spree inside Israel. Its ruthless murdering focused on “soft targets” like unarmed elderly, women, children, and infants, mostly asleep at a time of peace and holiday.

Second, it sought to collectively shock Israel into paralysis by the sheer horror of decapitating civilians, burning babies, mass raping, and mutilating bodies.

Another apparent aim of such premodern barbarity was to blame Israel’s “occupation” for turning Gazans into veritable monsters, with hopes of derailing the renewed Abraham Accords.

Third, the gunmen took more than 240 hostages back with them to Gaza.

Again, that was a disproportionate tactic designed to meter out the release of captives in exchange for “pauses” and “cease-fires” to save Hamas.

Additionally, Hamas made implicit threats of gruesome executions of captives unless Israel ceased their retaliation for October 7.

Fourth, all the while Hamas shot rockets into Israel, more than 7,000 in total, and all aimed at civilians.

Not one launch was preceded by dropping leaflets or sending text messages to Israeli civilians to vacate the intended target areas—a protocol often used by the Israel Defense Forces.

The unapologetic aim was to kill thousands of Israelis at random and disproportionately.

In fact, in just the last few four weeks, Hamas has launched more than twice as many rockets into Israel as Nazi Germany managed to launch V-2s into Britain in five months.