RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://themessenger.com/opinion/hamas-attack-israel-critics-palestinians-middle-east-myths

With 1,300 Israeli Jews slaughtered and nearly 200 taken hostage, what’s more infuriating: that critics presume to tell Jerusalem how to conduct a war and run its government or that their views are shaped by blind ignorance and naïve hope?

To its critics in America, Israel’s next steps are straightforward. Yes, hunt down Hamas, but don’t let innocent Palestinians die, shelve a judicial reform plan that offends us, and make peace with the Palestinians.

The right path must seem obvious to those who don’t recall (or weren’t alive) when 3,000 deaths on 9/11 shook us to our core, uniting us amid calls across the political spectrum that Washington do whatever it must (with no caveats attached) to prevent another attack. And that call to action came after just one attack from afar — and not, as in Israel, after relentless attacks across the border since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas seized control of it from the Palestinian Authority in a violent coup in 2007.

The right path must seem even more obvious now that we Americans no longer fear another 9/11 — and that, unlike Israel, we don’t live with genocidal terrorist groups on two borders; a nearby regime (in Tehran) that funds, arms, and directs them; other nations in a turbulent region that remain at war with us; and a global community that focuses undue attention on our imperfections.

Critics concede that “Israel has a right to defend itself” (words that demean the Jewish state because they’re simply assumed about other countries rather than having to be voiced), but they also say in defending itself, Israel should take only “proportionate” action, lest it ignite another “cycle of violence” — i.e., anti-Israeli terror for which critics will later blame Jerusalem for responding.

Do Israel’s knee-jerk critics have open minds? Are they willing to view the slaughter of October 7 and Jerusalem’s response in the context of larger realities? If so, here are three myths for them to revisit:

https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-guilty-until-proven-innocent?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The blood libel heard ’round the world: So let us get this straight: terrorists burst across the border of Israel, slaughtered innocents, raped women, took captives—including toddlers who remain in their hands—then accidentally exploded a rocket in their own Gaza hospital parking lot, and somehow, in all of this, Israel is still the bad guy. 

Let’s start with the rocket. As soon as it went off, Hamas blamed Israel, which in turn said it needed a minute to verify what happened. Do you know who doesn’t need a minute? The mainstream American press. Reuters, The Washington Post, and The New York Times blindly ran with the Hamas account: an Israeli strike, a hospital, hundreds of deaths—500, according to the Times. (A great collection of those headlines can be found here.) The Times even ran an image of a blown-up building—but it wasn’t the hospital. The news ricocheted around the world, leading to attacks on synagogues and marches on embassies. It is the dominant narrative now and likely forever. Even though it is a lie. In the information war, this was a spectacular win for Hamas. 

After Biden announced that U.S. intelligence confirmed the Israeli government account—it was a failed rocket from within Gaza—there were no apologies, no corrections, just subtle headline changes to make it slightly factual-ish. (Just compare this to the uproar after Tom Cotton’s op-ed, which led to the firing of the paper’s opinion editor.) And so it was a bit of an awakening for me. This is the week I realized that the adults I thought were flawed but trying are actually on meth and don’t care. Or maybe it’s even worse: they know it’s a lie.

Of note: one of the NYT reporters doing the liveblog on the Israel-Hamas war was an intern for Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. And Rashida? Even after the facts came out and her own government said the bomb was Hamas’s, Rashida was leading a rally, citing the much too useful blood libel: “I continue to watch people think it’s okay to bomb a hospital with children.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-mourns-and-prepares-for-war-hamas-terrorism-gaza-9dbb21bf?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Kfar Aza, Israel

By the time I enter this community adjacent to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army has removed most of the bodies. I am with a unit of the rescue organization Zaka, whose job is to retrieve parts missing from the bodies of the dead so that they can be made whole and given a proper Jewish burial.

The unit consists of civilians and military personnel, secular and Orthodox Jews. On a coffee break, they sit in a circle on plastic chairs on the patio of a sacked farm that serves as the unit’s headquarters. Some complain about their government’s negligence. One counters that no government can stop the madness of a mob.

The atmosphere of brotherhood contrasts with the recent months of civil struggle. Now, the only thing that counts is the holy task of combing through houses to recover a piece of blackened flesh, an intact foot still in its shoe, a trace of DNA, a bloodstain.

We freeze suddenly when someone finds the body of a jihadist that we fear may be booby-trapped. Then comes a moment of panic because it seems two terrorists might have just entered through a new breach in the security fence nearby, or the old one but now enlarged—no one knows.

We spot a drone in the sky, like a sparrow hawk. Mingling with its wasp-like buzzing are the sounds of dull explosions. A combat unit in assault gear emerges and takes its position. Some soldiers kneel; others climb to the roofs; still others move to the severed security barrier, from which appears a shower of sparks.

I am led into a house with shattered windows. Its inhabitants were murdered, their hands tied behind their backs, shot and in some cases finished off with a knife. I remain for two hours with nothing to do but listen to a surviving neighbor recount the attack. Over and over, he leads me through the rooms of this theater of torture.

The plaster ceilings chipped by shooting. The bullet-riddled walls. The beige sofa that an explosion raised off the ground and sent flying into the broken bay window. The parents’ room, with its unmade bed, hair curlers, worn slippers. The children’s room, with an open coloring book and a battery-powered cat meowing periodically. In the kitchen, an intact bowl of hot chocolate, a toaster, a bottle of cough syrup, a plush toy, an overturned laundry basket. And, at the end of a right-angled hallway, the safe room that the attackers opened by blowing it up with a grenade, leaving nothing but chunks of concrete, bloodied iron reinforcing and empty hinges opening and closing on nothing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-iran-and-the-awful-arithmetic/

In response to the savage mayhem wrought by Hamas on Israeli citizens, Israel has called up 300,000 reserves and begun punitive operations in Gaza. Their mission is to make good on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grim statement, “Every Hamas terrorist is a dead man,” and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s pledge “we will wipe them off the face of the Earth.”

Leftist activists in the U.S. and Europe, of course, have been trying to undermine the resolve of Israel and its allies. The functionally anti-Semitic UN has declared that Israel’s attempt to save Gazans’ lives by evacuating them is illegal under international law. Meanwhile  Israel’s enemies deploy duplicitous clichés like “disproportionate response” and “war crimes,” and call for “restraint,” while displaying a concern for the aggressor’s civilian casualties and misery brought on by Hamas’ depredations—a concern seldom shown for the Israeli dead, except when making the equally despicable claims of moral equivalence between the victims with their murderers, thus ignoring the question of who is responsible for the conflict.

Expect these rhetorical attacks on Israel’s morale to become more frequent and strident as the operation continues and gets more violent. In this age of hypersensitive “snowflakes,” incontinent “virtue-signalers,” and “safe spaces,” such efforts can bear fruit that poisons resolve. That’s why the West needs to stiffen its realist spine, and accept the tragic “awful arithmetic” necessary in war.

This phrase is attributed to Abraham Lincoln in 1862 during a string of victories by smaller Confederate forces. Lincoln believed that Union generals were too protective of their men and too risk-averse. He needed a general who understood the “awful arithmetic”: given the North’s big advantage in manpower, it could lose a third more men than the Confederates and still prevail over a passionate enemy that would not surrender easily. Lincoln found that general in Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1864 relentlessly marched to Richmond and victory, all the way fighting grisly and costly battles like Cold Harbor, which cost 1844 Union dead to the South’s 83.

In World War II, the “awful arithmetic” was even more tragic, as it included whole cities filled with women and children who were killed in the area bombings of Germany and Japan––between 700,000 and 1.2 million. Today many historians argue that such slaughter was unnecessary, just as no doubt many Northerners believed was the waste of their sons’, husbands’, and fathers’ lives by the “butcher” Grant.

We’ll never know if the fanatical, murderous regimes in Germany and Japan could have been neutralized any other way, or if the Allied soldiers and citizens who had to fight the sadistic racist enemy would have been willing to sacrifice many more thousands of their own people’s lives in order to spare the enemies’ non-combatants. What we do know is that Germany and Japan were utterly defeated, and have been good, peaceful global citizens for the last 75 years.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20067/hamas-hypocrisy-arab-muslim-leaders

Notably, some of the Arab and Muslim states and their leaders who are pointing the finger of blame at Israel have not hesitated to take punitive measures against Hamas when they themselves felt threatened… In the eyes of these rulers, it is fine for Arabs to punish Hamas, but it is not fine for Israel to respond to the worst atrocity ever committed against its citizens.

The Palestinian Authority (PA)… appears to have forgotten about the violent and bloody coup Hamas carried out in the summer of 2007. Then, Hamas killed and injured hundreds of PA loyalists, some of whom were tossed from rooftops of buildings throughout the Gaza Strip.

This is the same Abbas who is now afraid, or unwilling, to hold Hamas responsible for the outbreak of the war…. Abbas has good reason to avoid overt criticism of Hamas. He is aware of the pro-Hamas demonstrations in the West Bank… where demonstrators chanted slogans calling for toppling the Palestinian Authority leadership.

The Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians, who are now condemning Israel for targeting Hamas, have not hesitated to confront Hamas when it threatened their national security.

In 2014, an Egyptian court declared Hamas, an off-shoot of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood organization, a “terrorist organization.”

In 1999, Jordan, whose leaders have also refrained from denouncing Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis, expelled the terror group’s political leaders from the country.

These rulers now find it awkward to come out against the same terrorists with whom they have been meeting.

None of these rulers has ever taken a single step to help the Palestinians get relief from Hamas’s human rights violations against the people living under their brutal rule in the Gaza Strip….. When these rulers were unhappy with Hamas, they expelled its leaders, shut their offices and outlawed its armed wing.

Now that Hamas has brought down hell on two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, perhaps these Arab and Muslim rulers will finally decide whose side are they on. Will they continue to embrace the very Hamas they have targeted for threatening them and their regimes, or will stand with those who — on their behalf as well — are defending themselves against Iran and its proxies?

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-my-phone-says-2023?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

My smartphone says it’s October 2023, but in Israel it feels like 1948. 

That was the year this country was established as 600,000 Jews fought the combined might of the Arab world three years after the genocide in Europe. You can still feel that war in the air and underbrush of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek in northern Israel, where I traveled this week, passing trucks carrying tanks and armored bulldozers south toward the battle zone around Gaza.  

For Israelis, the name Mishmar Ha’emek evokes 1948—an equivalent of Valley Forge, perhaps, or Gettysburg. The kibbutz is famous for holding out against the superior forces of the Arab Liberation Army in April 1948, helping create the fighting ethos of Israel’s military and the Zionist principle that Jews will never again abandon their homes. On one edge of the kibbutz is a historic site commemorating the Palmach, the militia that helped decide the battle. Amid the trees and bushes of the peaceful cemetery here are graves of people like Moshe Formansky, 41, and Rafael Altberg, 21, killed 75 years ago in the war that created a Jewish state, and then never really ended.  

I’d come here not to revisit history, but to speak to members of another kibbutz, Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border a few hours’ drive to the south—those members, that is, who weren’t killed or kidnapped by Hamas in the massacre of October 7. The evacuees have relocated here, and the locals are doing their best to house and entertain them. When I arrived, the children of Nahal Oz were indoors, squealing at a snake show arranged by volunteers. Outside, their hollow-eyed parents walked the paths. Across a lawn, a few dozen people sat shiva for a friend, Ilan Fiorentino, killed in the assault. 

At first I thought the historical reference for the current horror in Israel would be the Yom Kippur War, which began 50 years earlier almost to the day, on October 6, 1973. In that war Israel was surprised by Egypt and Syria on a Jewish holiday, as was the case last week. But the year that keeps cropping up is 1948.

The slaughter and arson in Nahal Oz and elsewhere, one evacuee told me, was an attempt to “do to us what they think we did to them in 1948”—a reference to the flight of Palestinian refugees from territories that became our state. Amir Tibon, a colleague from the newspaper Haaretz, who was trapped with his wife and children in their home as Hamas soldiers tried to break in and kill them, wrote that the initial defense of the kibbutz by a handful of Border Police troops facing dozens of Hamas fighters was “the few against the many, like 1948.”