Israel's War Against Hamas - Updates

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Well at least Keir Starmer is supporting the right of Israel to defend itself against those who want to destroy it, and get back the hostages. Watching him on TV now.

 

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• Rather than taking tangible steps towards peace, [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas has done nothing but bypass and evade bilateral negotiations with Israel, while taking extremely tangible steps toward terrorism – from rewarding terrorists, or the families of those who murder Jews, with "$345-$1200" a month for life, to repeating that terrorist murderers are "heroes" -- all the while admitting that Palestinians are not the indigenous people there.
• As for Schumer's "two-state solution," 64% of Palestinians said they are opposed to the idea. Those polled would like a one-state solution: a Palestinian state with no "Israel" anywhere in sight. More than 60% also expressed support for an "armed struggle" against Israel.
• "[T]he only thing we should be focused on is changing the regime in Gaza, bringing down the terrorist regime of Hamas, and not the duly elected government of Israel." — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Fox News, March 17, 2024,
• The reason [the Palestinians] just keep "saying no" is because they do not want a Palestinian State next to Israel, they want a Palestinian State instead of Israel.
• Schumer, by signaling to Hamas and other terrorists that the Americans are on their side against Netanyahu and the Israeli government, has painstakingly emboldened them.
• Many Arabs understand -- unlike Schumer and many in the Biden administration -- that the real problem is the Iranian regime and its terror proxies.

(full article online)

The Gaza War: The Real Problem

Rather than taking tangible steps towards peace, [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas has done nothing but bypass and evade bilateral negotiations with Israel, while taking extremely tangible steps toward terrorism – from rewarding terrorists,

www.gatestoneinstitute.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Adi Schwartz and I had just exited another frustrating meeting with a smug European diplomat. Turning to an exasperated me, Adi — co-author of our book The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace — offered an odd sort of comfort by pointing out that, at a minimum, we are trying to demolish an edifice of lies that was carefully constructed over seven decades. More likely, we are contending with lies that have been built up over centuries.

In 1892, Ahad Ha’am took “half solace” (as he termed his essay “Chatzi Nechama”) in the fact that the original blood libel — Jews using the blood of Gentiles for their ritual food and drink — was so clearly false. Why did the legendary journalist and cultural (as opposed to political) Zionist find comfort in this? Given that Jews know they cannot and will not drink blood, certainly not human blood, he believed they would thereby know, by extension, that it is indeed possible for the whole world to be wrong and for the Jews to be right.

That Jews should be confident in this knowledge was particularly important for Ahad Ha’am as he was deeply worried that, precisely because Jews were becoming more engaged with the outside society, they were far more susceptible to internalizing the litany of evils of which they were collectively accused — and to believe that they were indeed “the worst of the world’s nations.” He was especially appalled by the possibility that the evil “Jew of the imagination” would become the internalized Jewish understanding of what it meant to be a Jew.

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In the 130 years since “Half Solace” was published, the blood libels that Ahad Ha’am encountered in tsarist Russia were updated by its Soviet heirs to fit an age of greater literacy and sophistication. These refurbished libels were then exported to the West, where they flourish today, creating the same dangerous dynamic that alarmed Ahad Ha’am. Too many Jews, especially those who are most engaged with the society around them, have come to believe that they, or their brethren, are indeed involved and complicit in the greatest crimes against humanity.

As in the 19th century, the mechanism by which doubt is instilled in Jews about our supposedly evil nature is generated by creating an environment that Ahad Ha’am called “general agreement.” That is, the broad society in which Jews live, and from which, as a result of emancipation, they are no longer separated, engages in a “general agreement” on the evil qualities and deeds of the Jews. It leads Jews to wonder: “Could the whole world be wrong?” This powerful mechanism of instilling doubt leads many Jews to buckle under the weight of the accusations and their broad acceptance.

This mechanism of creating “general agreement” begins, as with every act of creation, whether good or evil, with words.

In the first step, words such as “Palestine,” “colonialism,” “refugee,” “return,” “justice,” “Semites,” “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” are chosen for their current associations and significations, either with Jews or with evil. These words are then emptied of any of their original, specific meanings and imbued with new and unique interpretations that either invert the original association or simply become removed from it. Typically, this involves taking the words out of their historical context and putting them into a new decontextualized and ahistorical world. The words are then used for the singular purpose of portraying collective Jews, especially those among them who dared seek sovereignty in their homeland or who support that enterprise, as uniquely evil.

Let me begin with the foundational word on which all other accusations rest: “Palestine,” a subject I examined in depth a decade ago with the scholar Shany Mor for the journal Fathom. The land “from the river to the sea,” to use the now-ubiquitous slogan, has been known as Palestine only twice before. First, the Roman Emperor Hadrian used “Palestina” as a way of suppressing Jewish resistance to his imperial rule. Second, it was used under the British Mandate, which was entrusted to Britain with the purpose of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

In both cases, it was understood that “Palestine” simply denoted the territory where there had been, or would be, a Jewish homeland. This is why the League of Nations, in establishing the Mandate, did so to “give recognition to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine,” thereby forming “the grounds for reconstituting the Jewish people’s national home in that country.” This is also why local organizations at the time freely used the word “Palestine” in connection to entirely Jewish entities: The Palestine Post, for instance, which later became The Jerusalem Post, or the Palestine Philharmonic, later the Israel Philharmonic. Football associations with players bearing names such as Kastenbaum, Friedmann, Nudelman, and Kraus, as well as coins, bore the name Palestine (but always with a mention of “Eretz Israel,” the Land of Israel).

Nor was that all. The Mandate gave Britain the option to separate the territory east of the River Jordan out of the area mandated for a Jewish home. What became Transjordan, and later Jordan, was forbidden to Jewish settlement. The remaining areas are, fantastically, now called “historic Palestine.” As Shany and I observed, “they are ‘historic’ only insofar as they lasted for barely three decades, were governed by a European superpower, and delimited as the future national home for the Jewish people.”

With independence, the Jewish people then did what every self-respecting nation that achieved independence did in the world at the same time. They shed the colonial name given to their territory (Siam, Gold Coast, Ceylon, Rhodesia, and, yes, Palestine) and replaced it with one rooted in its own culture, geography, and history: Israel.

It was only after Israel declared independence, and especially in the 1960s and ’70s, that the Arabs of the land increasingly appropriated the name Palestine to indicate an Arab identity that possesses the sole exclusive “indigenous” claim to any land controlled by sovereign Jews. In doing so, they inverted and erased two millennia of customary association of the land with the Jews and their history, thereby turning the Jews, whose continuous historical, cultural, and religious connection to the land was never previously questioned, into the “foreign interlopers” in an Arab land to which they have no connection. At the end of this process, the associated meanings of the word “Palestine,” of a history and connection of one people to one land (the Jews to Eretz Israel) were thereby transferred to those who have newly taken the name: the Arabs.


(full article online)

The Palestine Propaganda Complex | SAPIR Journal

Adi Schwartz and I had just exited another frustrating meeting with a smug European diplomat. Turning to an exasperated me, Adi — co-...

sapirjournal.org

 

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Have a number?

218,000 TONS of food. TONS!

That’s how much Israel has sent into Gaza since October 7th, the day that the government of Gaza along with thousands and thousands of citizens murdered, raped, beheaded, and burned over 1,400 Israelis.

How much aid did Russia send into Ukraine?

How much food did America send into Afghanistan?

How much aid was sent into Nazi Germany?

Only Israel is expected to send aid into an enemy state while that state continues to attack innocent Israelis and hold hundreds of hostages.

Said simply, the double standard is INSANE! Israel is sending and allowing humanitarian aid to enter Gaza from the ground, the sea, and the air. Israel is not limiting how much aid enters Gaza.

Read that sentence again. If countries want to send in a zillion tons of aid, Israel is not stopping them.

Other countries continue to send in aid and the only thing preventing that aid from getting to Gazans is Hamas; not Israel.

Some more numbers for you.

Israel has sent in 17,400 trucks loaded with humanitarian aid since 10/7.

Just for context, before October 7th, the number of trucks that entered Gaza to deliver aid was 70.

On average, the number of trucks that entered Gaza since October 7th? Over 125. That’s an increase of 80%.

There were days on which over 300 trucks full of humanitarian aid stood at the checkpoint after being checked by Israel, but the UN was not equipped to distribute them. Israel allowed them in, the UN failed to deliver them.

Israeli officials have said that the claim that there is starvation in Gaza is 100% false.

In southern Gaza, there is absolutely zero starvation and in the north, there are specific places in which there is hunger, but that’s not because of Israel. It’s because the UN and other international organizations have not increased their capabilities to distribute the aid.

Israel is checking and clearing the aid to enter Gaza faster than the UN can distribute it.

Once that aid enters Gaza, it is either violently stolen by Hamas or looted by crowds of Gazans who have, on multiple occasions trampled each other to death (which of course is used as propaganda to blame Israel).

These are the facts. Everything else you read on the topic is propaganda that was made up by Hamas and spread by Hamas’ allies in the media.

Don’t believe the lies.

Israel has done more for the citizens of Gaza than their own leaders have.

By far! The IDF has done more to minimize civilian death than any army in the world and that is an indisputable fact.

And I’ll just add one more thing. If there really was starvation and genocide in Gaza, the Pro-Palestinian crowd wouldn’t have to use dolls and images from Syria to prove their point.

They keep getting caught lying because their whole narrative is one big fabrication that has no basis in reality.

 

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