Israel's War Against Hamas - Updates

[Sixties Fan]

An analysis in Lebanon24 gives an interesting reason why Iran cannot accept a military loss in Gaza.

The reason? Honor.

As always, it is useful to look at the conflict through the lens of honor/shame.

Iran looks at itself as the ever-growing superpower in the Middle East. Over the years it has gained control of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza, as well as significant influence over Iraq and West Bank cities like Jenin. It has imposed its will on the West. It is now a partner with Russia.

A loss in Gaza would be a tremendous loss of honor. It would symbolize a reversal of fortune for the Iranian "axis." The Muslim world, they believe, would lose respect for Iran since they respect the "strong horse."

As the article says, "The Iranian axis would lose its political discourse forever, and will begin a path of decline at the political and popular levels, not just the military level. "

Moreover, if Gaza is lost - Iran thinks - a voracious Israel would then turn to Lebanon and Syria to defeat Iranian proxies there.

The reason this may turn into a major regional conflict is that Israel cannot afford to lose - and Iran believes, because of "honor," that it cannot afford to lose, either.

One other factor may be Iran's own propaganda. According to polling from the regime, 77% of Iranians support Hamas in the war. Iran's anti-Israel rhetoric has been extreme for decades, and Iranians who believe it are growing up with that hate, and itching to go to war to destroy Israel.

The Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary Guard, Brig.Ali FadwaIn front of a crowd of university students in Tehran, who organized a gathering in support of Gaza, said that “the Resistance Front’s hand is on the trigger, and this country is capable of practical and direct action with the push of a button, after which rockets would rain down on the occupied territories.”

In response to a student’s question about the possibility of Tehran actually participating in Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” he responded, "Some people believe that the practical move is to launch missiles directly towards Haifa. Yes, we will implement that with certainty and freedom if necessary."

Historian Benny Morris wrote in Haaretz that this is Israel's best chance to attack Iran directly. I don't know about that, but the world must recognize that this isn't an Israel/Hamas war - but a war between Israel and Iran. Only Iran can decide to escalate or cool things down, and the Western world must start doing its part diplomatically and politically to make sure Iran knows that if it expands the field, it is not only Israel they are fighting.

One reason Iran will keep opening up new fronts in the war: Honor

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

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[Sixties Fan]

Spoke with
@brikeilarcnn
about the IAF strike in Jabalya that killed a top Hamas commander and why Hamas is to blame for the killing of Palestinian civilians. Israel, I said, gave the Palestinians three weeks to leave northern Gaza before the ground offensive and last I checked, Hamas didn’t extend the same courtesy before butchering over 1,000 Israelis in their homes on October 7.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Every target in Gaza has been assessed in advance to minimise civilian deaths, going through 11 or 12 stages of approval before it was authorised, Israel’s air force chief, Brigadier General Eyal Greenbaum, has told
@thetimes
.He said that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were closely following rules of war that demand the rate of civilian deaths be proportional to the importance of the military target being struck. He said: “Unfortunately, there are a lot of casualties. We try to avoid these casualties. But Hamas-Isis uses civilians to be part of this war. Despite this decision, we try to avoid civilian casualties, but unfortunately sometimes in this war it happens.”All modern militaries use a calculation which sets the risks to civilian life against the importance of a military target. The precise calculations are often closely guarded, but vary between countries.Israel has pointed to the thousands of civilians killed in Mosul and other cities in Syria and Iraq as the United States, UK and other allied air forces helped Iraq drive out Islamic State. Read the interview here:https://thetimes.co.uk/article/e2c8152e-7835-11ee-86e8-a42a2179af55?shareToken=149300fe098d872d9260864ae023ef1b

 

[Sixties Fan]

As a result of the strike, a large number of terrorists who were with Biari were killed, according to the IDF. Underground terror infrastructure embedded beneath the buildings, used by the terrorists, also collapsed after the strike, it noted.

Biari was killed in the same attack in which the Hamas Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip claimed earlier that at least 50 people had been killed; it later increased that number to an estimated 400 killed and injured, though search and rescue efforts had just begun. Biari was in the building that was attacked, and the IDF and the Shin Bet say that minutes before the bombing, a warning was sent to the occupants of the building to get out.

Jabaliya is a fairly crowded refugee camp, and apparently many residents have remained there despite the IDF's call for civilians to evacuate to the south of the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, the IDF spokesman announced that IDF forces under the command of the Givati Brigade took control of a Hamas military stronghold in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip, and that in Tuesday's ground operations, approximately 50 terrorists were eliminated.

The captured stronghold is located in western Jabaliya and was used by the commander of Hamas’ Jabaliya Battalion for training and the execution of terror activities, according to the IDF. The area contains firing positions, terror tunnels used by terror operatives as a passageway to the coast, and a large stock of weapons used by the terrorists, the IDF said in a statement.
During the activity in the military stronghold, the soldiers killed a number of terrorists in the course of combat, and an IDF aircraft killed additional terrorists. The forces in the area destroyed entrances to terror tunnels, weapons, and military equipment. In addition, the soldiers located intelligence documents in the compound. At the end of the activity, the forces secured the compound, according to the IDF.


(full article online)

Battles in Jabaliya: This is the senior Hamas commander killed by the IDF

Ibrahim Biari, killed by an IDF airstrike using Shin Bet intelligence, was one of the leaders of the October 7 massacre

www.ynetnews.com

 

[P F Tinmore]

During the interview, Awwad told viewers that the conflict with Israel goes further back than Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack, stating that “One of the main misconceptions is that this is something that started on oct 7, when in fact this started in 1948, with the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians from their ancestral lands.”

With her statement, Awwad made clear to the public that in her opinion, the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not any Israeli government policy, but the very existence of the Jewish State.

This remarkable admission, which was not challenged by CP24’s interviewer, demonstrates in no uncertain terms that despite claims often made to the contrary, the true hostility to Israel among many anti-Israel activists will not be satisfied by anything less than the destruction of Israel in its entirety.

Awwad’s allegations are not only hateful in nature, by denying the Jewish People their fundamental right to self-determination in their historical homeland, but entirely historical revisionist in nature

In 1948, after Israel declared its independence, its Arab neighbours soon declared war on the newly reborn country, seeking to invade and destroy it. Consequently, many Arab leaders, both within Israel and outside, actively encouraged – or threatened – the country’s Arabs to leave, “lest their inhabitants ‘treacherously’ acquiesce in Israeli rule or hamper Arab military deployments.”

Awwad continued her diatribe by alleging that “the violence and ethnic cleansing directed at the Palestinians at the hands of the state of Israel has not ended, and has been ongoing.”

This brazen claim, which once again went unchallenged by her interviewer, is little more than a drive-by slander by Awwad, and cannot stand up to event the most fundamental scrutiny.

The population of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Judea & Samaria (often called the “West Bank” by news media outlets) has grown to roughly five million people, representing an enormous 60 percent jump from 1997, when the population was estimated to be about 2.9 million people.

No serious observer, in the face of such overwhelming and definite statistics, could reasonably claim that anything resembling “ethnic cleansing” has taken place to the Palestinians.

To see what real ethnic cleansing looks like, one only need look at Jews from Arab lands, who prior to 1948 numbered some 800,000. Thanks to state-sponsored persecution, pogroms and threats, today that number has shrunk by roughly 98 percent.

CP24 also interviewed Dalia Awwad on October 25 when the Palestinian Youth Movement held a ‘Glory To Our Martyrs’ vigil at Queens Park, where she not only justified the murder of 1,400 innocent civilians by Hamas terrorists but also falsely accused the Jewish state of genocide, settler-colonialism, and ethnic cleansing.

The organization represented by Awwad, the Palestinian Youth Movement, has long been documented for spreading hateful antisemitism, and has been unrepentant about its view that Israel has no right to exist.

In an anti-Israel rally in Montreal earlier in 2023, a representative from the group claimed that Zionism – the Jewish People’s movement of self-determination – was a “slow-moving genocide,” and that “we must fight Zionism here.”

In promotional materials for a Vancouver rally, the group made reference to “75 years of Zionist occupation in Palestine,” an explicit statement delegitimizing Israel’s existence.

Even a cursory search of the Palestinian Youth Movement on CP24’s part would have unveiled an organization that – like the terrorist group Hamas – denies Israel’s right to exist, making Awwad’s false statements entirely unsurprising.

Regardless of Awwad’s promotion of anti-Israel disinformation during her interview, it was the failure of her interviewer to challenge any of her allegations that represented the true violation of journalistic standards.


[Sign the petition online)

https://honestreporting.ca/petitions/cp24-interviews-anti-israel-activist-accusing-country-of-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestinians/?utm_source=Honest+Reporting+Canada&utm_campaign=c446c23337-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_01_01_06_22_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-c2395b4f14-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

Thanks for the link. Good post.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Anti-Zionism at Harvard University escalated to apparent antisemitic harassment when a mob of anti-Israel activists — including Ibrahim Bharmal, editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review — followed, surrounded, and intimidated a Jewish student on campus, according to new videos that went viral across social media.

“Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!” the crush of people screamed in a call-and-response chant into the ears of the student who —as seen in the footage — was forced to duck and dash the crowd to free himself from the cluster of bodies that encircled him.

No one appeared to intervene to stop the altercation, which circulated social media on Wednesday. The Algemeiner could not immediately confirm the exact date of the incident.

The video showed the mob of people encircle and attempt to trap the Jewish student, shoving keffiyehs — traditional headdresses worn by men in the Middle East that in some circles have come to symbolize Palestinian nationalism — in his face. After the video went viral, Bharmal was identified by antisemitism watchdog groups and other sources on social media as part of the crowd.



(full article online)

Video: Jewish Student Harassed by Harvard Law Review Editor, Anti-Israel Mob on Campus - Algemeiner.com

Anti-Zionism at Harvard University escalated to apparent antisemitic harassment when a mob of anti-Israel activists — including Ibrahim Bharmal, editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review — followed, surrounded, and intimidated a Jewish student on campus, according to new videos that went...

www.algemeiner.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

The IDF on Wednesday night released a recording of a conversation between a Hamas commander and a Gazan citizen revealing how Hamas takes fuel from hospitals in the Gaza Strip.

In the conversation, the commander of the West Jabaliya Brigade of Hamas speaks with the head of the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza as well as another Gazan citizen.

"I'm here with Dr. A'ataf on speaker," said the Hamas commander. We went to fill up the diesel. The thousand liters that you talked about."

"Yes?" replied the citizen.

"They told me, Abu Hassan, there's no diesel."

"This is at the Indonesian Hospital?" asked the Gazan.

The commander confirmed that he was at the hospital with Dr. A'ataf.

"He is the doctor who told you there was no diesel? They told me to fill up [diesel] from the Indonesian Hospital!"

At this point, the commander hands the phone to the doctor, who asks, "What?"

The citizen responds: "Yesterday, Abu Ahmad spoke with me and told me to fill up [diesel] from the Indonesian [Hospital]."

"Who is Abu Ahmad?"

"From the Economy Ministry."

"Yesterday [Hamas] came to fill up diesel," the doctor replied.

The two have a back-and-forth about the process of the hospital receiving the fuel and Hamas coming to take it. The Gazan citizen, exasperated, tries to understand what time of day will be best for him to get fuel before Hamas does.

"If we were to come get the fuel at night, would it make a difference?"

At that point, the Hamas commander says, "Let's settle this issue of the diesel." With that, the recording ends.

IDF releases proof of Hamas stealing gas from Gazan hospitals

"Fill it up now, people are depending on us! They're about to shoot us they're so anxious [to get fuel]. For the love of God."

www.jpost.com

 

[Ringo]

Why did you blow up the refugee camp?
-We were trying to catch the head of Hamas!
Was he there?
-Where else would he be?
Was he killed?
-We don't know.

The fool burned down the barn. A mouse must have gotten in there.
And these are the new rulers of the world?

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

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[Sixties Fan]

3/ Ahed Tamimi danced at the wedding of her cousin Nizar Tamimi, who was involved in the murder of Haim Mizrahi, to Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas terrorist who aided the suicide bombing of a pizzeria in Jerusalem in 2001, killing 15 people including 2 Americans.

4/ Ahed had many role models. Her aunt Manal Tamimi called for the murder of Jews, or “vampire Zionists.” The UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine
@MichaelLynk5
had listed Manal as a "human rights defender." Later, he was shamed into deleting this.

5/ Amnesty said the Tamimis were human rights heroes. “The Tamimi clan became internationally renowned thanks to Amnesty International. But their supposed advocacy of non-violence is a dangerous myth; all along, they’ve been working for a third intifada.”

6/ Founded in 1961, Amnesty built a reputation for supporting prisoners of conscience. Many of its members still do good work. But sadly it has lost direction, often supporting Iranian regime-backed antisemites, misogynists, homophobes and terrorists.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Failzero]

IDF Casualties much lower than expected , and the taking and holding of vast swaths of Northern Gaza have increased their resolve .

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

The writer who coined the term “decolonization” thought he was talking to “the wretched of the earth.” Instead, his work was read by elites—to disastrous effect.
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“In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives,” Fanon wrote. “For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists.”

These protagonists, in Fanon’s worldview, are the colonized and the colonists. Colonized people, Fanon correctly observed, are subjected to violence to keep them in line with the exploitation of their native land. They are tortured. They are beaten. They are jailed. As Fanon writes of the colonized: “As soon as they are born it is obvious to them that their cramped world, riddled with taboos, can only be challenged by out and out violence.”

Fanon wrote this book for the peasants, the class of people that he believed were the true representatives of the native lands conquered by European powers. From the time he arrived in Algeria in 1953, Fanon took treks into the countryside to meet with poor farmers. He was fascinated by them. He wrote about how they viewed insanity, for example, as a person possessed by demons.

An irony is that even though Fanon wrote his book for the wretched of the earth, it was far more influential with the planet’s elites, and in particular European and then American intellectuals.

And here one sees the influence of Fanon’s most important patron at the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre. At the time of publication of The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre was one of the most powerful cultural figures in Europe. He would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 only to decline it because he refused to be considered an “institution.”

Sartre’s introduction to the first edition of The Wretched of the Earth is the seed of the moral illiteracy that leads so many intellectuals in 2023 to cheer or rationalize the October 7 Hamas atrocities. In this sense, Sartre uses Fanon in his introductory essay as a weapon to shame his fellow French citizens. The context here is important. In 1961 Algeria was still a French colony. Algeria would not win its independence until 1962.

Sartre skewers his liberal neighbors who abhor both the violence of the FLN and the French army. “Our victims know us by their wounds and shackles: that is what makes their testimony irrefutable,” he writes. He then goes on to tap into the guilt many French citizens felt about Algeria on the eve of its independence.

But, you will say once again, ‘we live in the metropolis, and we disapprove of extremes.’ It’s true, you are not colonists, but you are not much better. They were your pioneers, you sent them overseas, they made you rich. You warned them: if they shed too much blood you would pretend to disown them; the same way a State—no matter which one—maintains a mob of agitators, provocateurs, and spies abroad whom it disowns once they are caught. You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.

This is important because Sartre, who at times professed to be a humanist, is making the same mistake so many twentieth-century intellectuals made by negating the individual and speaking only of abstract groups. One has no right to take moral comfort in dissenting from his state’s violence if he still benefits from it.

Frantz Fanon, Oracle of Decolonization

The writer who coined the term “decolonization” thought he was talking to “the wretched of the earth.” Instead, his work was read by elites—to disastrous effect.

www.thefp.com