Israel, and its neighbors

[Crafty_Dog]

 I cannot say the man does not have a point.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-hostages-families-should-have-been-jailed-to-shut-them-up-says-former-us-citizen-who-was-an-israeli-spy/ar-AA1ktxTD?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=e06b8ae0ac4e44ffb74ee32e608061f6&ei=11

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/hamas-made-in-the-u-s-a/?bypass_key=S2YxRFQ0K2dtOTFGWGRzczZkRWphUT09OjpNVE53V2xGTlRHbHBMMWh1YW5GelNHMUVMMjk1WnowOQ%3D%3D

[Crafty_Dog]

second

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world?fbclid=IwAR3qam_MERErnsgbSq2pS5o56pj95MZxEIEOCtcQSu7QDpWaWldo0vMaKNE

[ccp]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/jewish-professor-usc-criticized-hamas-110018138.html

[ccp]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/jewish-professor-usc-criticized-hamas-110018138.html

but wait, Hamas are murderers who have sworn not to stop until they kill all Jews in Israel or force them out.

no difference.

moral in equivalance denied.   All are the same - when their not.

[Crafty_Dog]

Whoa! 

Please post in either/and the Antisemitism thread and the Politics of Education thread.

[ccp]

more lies from propaganda outlets:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-obama-divide-over-closely-120041308.html

he still supports Iran
still supports Hamas indirectly
pressuring Israel to cease fires vs holding military aid;  pressuring Israel (behind the scenes) to stop

all the same

[ccp]

https://nypost.com/2023/11/29/metro/pro-palestinian-protesters-swarm-nyc-to-derail-rockefeller-center-christmas-tree-lighting/

time to arrest for hate crimes and levy  fines

this is more then just "freedom of speech"

or "disturbing the peace"

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/the-aborted-war-in-israel/?bypass_key=OHpVZzlwNno0RllUbDd4bWRUWllLZz09OjpaaXRwYW1oTU1WVlBibmRFTWxGRWVpODVPRzF4UVQwOQ%3D%3D


The Aborted War in Israel

Members of the Israeli military operate near the border with Gaza during a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas, in southern Israel, November 29, 2023. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
November 29, 2023 2:28 PM
Even if it were politically and psychologically possible to resume a war under the circumstances, how could Israel realistically win?
Iwish I could be optimistic about Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas in the aborted war, but I am more pessimistic than ever.

I’ve been a pessimist from the start. As Rich Lowry and I have discussed on the podcast, that’s because I’ve never believed Israel’s stated war aims were either politically feasible or reflective of on-the-ground reality — which is much worse than Israel or the Biden administration is willing to acknowledge.

Israel’s principal stated objective is to destroy Hamas. It has analogized this to the Trump-era American objective of destroying ISIS. There is something to this comparison. Contrary to his extravagant rhetoric, Trump did not actually destroy ISIS — it still exists and is a menace wherever it rears its head. Trump did, however, eviscerate ISIS’s capacity to hold territory as a de facto sovereign. This was a significant achievement. (Whether it was accomplished constitutionally is an interesting question.) Yet we shouldn’t overstate the achievement, because (a) terrorist organizations are more effective in pursuing their core competencies of insurgency and sneak attacks than in trying to govern territory, and (b) ISIS is a rebel sect broken off from al-Qaeda, which remains a major challenge, so ISIS would inevitably either fold back into al-Qaeda or rebrand as some new terrorist group — since what catalyzes jihad is the regional predominance of sharia-supremacist ideology, not any particular, transient organization.

The situation with Hamas is similar, and in some ways more vexing.

It was never going to be possible for Israel to “destroy” Hamas. Its leadership flits between Qatar and Turkey. Even if we assume that Israel will hunt down these leaders, as it did the terrorists who killed its athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, that will take a very long time; plus, assassinations carried out in foreign countries (especially hostile ones, such as Qatar and Turkey) would trigger their own perilous consequences.

More to the point, Hamas is not Israel’s main opponent. It is, instead, a proxy of Iran that enjoys effective alliances with Erdogan’s regime in Turkey (our “NATO ally,” which continues threatening to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza) and Qatar (our “major non-NATO ally,” which is a Muslim Brotherhood regime and thus a lifeline for Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch). Wiping out Hamas in Gaza would only marginally and temporarily reduce the Iranian threat on Israel’s Gazan border (and there is always the danger that it could intensify the threats on Israel’s borders with Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank — in the latter, the Palestinian prisoners Israel has released in exchange for hostages are already stirring up trouble).

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Furthermore, Hamas won’t be that hard to replace. This is where Biden’s delusional portrayal of the Palestinian territories (and the administration’s mulish insistence on a “two-state solution” that the Palestinians reject and thus Israel cannot abide) rears its head. The notion that the Palestinians are a peace-loving people who should not be conflated with Hamas is laughable. Hamas is less a ruler than a reflection of the Palestinians — a young population marinated in Brotherhood indoctrination and all the scripturally rooted Jew-hatred that implies.

As I’ve recently outlined (e.g., here and here), Hamas was established during the First Intifada and instantly became successful because it was closer to Palestinian sensibilities than the Arafat-led PLO and its Fatah party. Hamas was elected, not imposed on Gaza, and it would be elected in the West Bank if Arafat’s successor, “President” Mahmoud Abbas, allowed elections. It is silly for commentators to suggest that Hamas is unpopular with Palestinians when, right before our eyes in Western cities and campuses, we see unabashed Hamas support — not just “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations but agitators sporting Hamas regalia as they chant Intifada slogans. Hamas has been strongly backed by the international Brotherhood since 1987. It has always had a deep pool of young male supporters to draw on.

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My point here is not to dismiss Israel’s combat operations as inconsequential. At least in northern Gaza, the IDF has destroyed the physical infrastructure on which the jihadists depend to carry out their eliminationist war. Israel’s warriors have killed thousands of trained Hamas fighters (it is impossible to say with precision how many). It is not easy to replace trained and vital fixed assets. Israel has deeply damaged Hamas’s current capacity to hold territory as a ruling regime. The jihadists’ state sponsors will not, any time soon, be able to reconstitute what’s been lost — even allowing for their above-discussed capacity to raise the threat level at other flashpoints on and within Israel’s borders.

But will Israel even be able to realize the aim of eliminating Hamas as a ruling regime? Here’s the New York Times yesterday:

American officials have told the Israelis that any coming military operations should not hamper the flow of power and water or impede the work of humanitarian sites such as hospitals and U.N.-supported shelters in south and central Gaza.

Obviously, President Biden knows that Hamas commandeers international-aid deliveries and conducts its operations in and under humanitarian sites, including hospitals. Hamas’s cooperative relationships with U.N. officials are notorious. How can Israel conceivably root out Hamas if the Biden administration is going to micromanage, and undermine, its capacity to fight Hamas where Hamas is? And after Biden officials pressured Israel to refrain from commencing combat operations in northern Gaza until corridors could be set up to move non-combatants to the south, is the administration really now going to take the position that Israel must avoid attacks that could cause population displacements?

None of this makes strategic sense. But it makes perfect, if cynical, political sense.

For all the right things Biden has said (more in the immediate aftermath of October 7 than recently), he has not been willing to face down his base’s robust, raucous opposition to Israel (especially as October 7 recedes in time). For Biden, then, Hamas’s barbaric taking of hostages — including toddlers, women, and the elderly — has been a focus-shifting godsend.

From a military standpoint, Israel should have been able to pound its enemy until the hostages were unconditionally released. But for emotional reasons (and influenced by Jewish history and mores), the possibility of recovering at least some of the hostages has been permitted to supplant military objectives. This was a political boon for Biden: It gave him an opportunity to push for ever-lengthening pauses in Israel’s military campaign, which has tamped down the grousing from pro-Hamas Democrats. As Biden has seen the domestic political benefits of this as we head into an election year, his administration’s rhetoric (and, consequently, the media coverage) has evolved: Now, the uber-objective is the return of the hostages; fading into the mists of diminishing memory are who took the hostages, the savagery that attended these abductions, and the fact that Israel is paying for innocents — at a 3-to-1 premium — by freeing convicted Palestinian terrorists and violent criminals.

Now, when the president and his advisers speak hopefully, it is about whether they can pull off a grand deal that could result in the release of all the hostages and a permanent ceasefire. In fact, toward that end, Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, has been in Qatar for talks with Hamas’s patrons since Tuesday, and he will soon by joined by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The Times reports that the Biden administration’s goal is a ceasefire “until all of the hostages are released.” According to Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, there are currently about 161 hostages (146 Israelis, mostly men, and 15 other nationals — including as many as eight or nine Americans).

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ISRAEL AT WAR
 

163
Consider the logic of this. If there is to be a ceasefire until Hamas decides to release the last of the hostages whom it kidnapped (often after raping and killing their relatives), then it is Hamas, not Israel, which gets to decide when fighting will resume. Meantime, every day Israel’s combat ops are suspended, the Biden administration — urged on by congressional Democrats who are feeling their base’s heat — puts more conditions on how Israel must conduct itself if it wants to maintain American support. Simultaneously, Israel must continue springing three Palestinian fighters to go back to the jihad for every hostage Hamas deigns to release. In the interim, Hamas is given more time to set traps for Israeli soldiers and fortify its positions in the humanitarian sites that Biden has admonished Israel to avoid hitting.

Even if it were politically and psychologically possible to resume a war under those circumstances — a war that many of Israel’s erstwhile, post–October 7 sympathizers would blame Israel for if crushing combat resumed after a long pause — how could Israel realistically win under these strictures?

I ask the question to remind us that, unless and until Israel’s enemies are decisively defeated, the thrum of eliminationist war and the periodic surges of jihadist terror will continue.

[Crafty_Dog]

U.S. Sends Israel 2,000-Pound Bunker Buster Bombs for Gaza War
After sending massive bombs, artillery shells, U.S. also urges Israel to limit civilian casualties
By
Jared Malsin
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 and
Nancy A. Youssef
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Dec. 1, 2023 12:52 pm ET





The U.S. has provided Israel with large bunker buster bombs, among tens of thousands of other weapons and artillery shells, to help dislodge Hamas from Gaza, U.S. officials said.

The surge of arms, including roughly 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells, began shortly after the Oct. 7 attack and has continued in recent days, the officials said. The U.S. hasn’t previously disclosed the total number of weapons it sent to Israel nor the transfer of 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs.

The airlift of hundreds of millions of dollars in munitions, primarily on C-17 military cargo planes flying from the U.S. to Tel Aviv, shows the diplomatic challenge facing the Biden administration. The U.S. is urging its top ally in the region to consider preventing large-scale civilian casualties while supplying many of the munitions deployed.

“I made clear that after a pause, it was imperative that Israel put in place clear protections for civilians, and for sustaining humanitarian assistance going forward,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Dubai on Friday.

Some security analysts say the weapons transfers could undercut the administration’s pressure on Israel to protect civilians.

“It seems inconsistent with reported exhortations from Secretary Blinken and others to use smaller-diameter bombs,” said Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the nonprofit International Crisis Group, and a former attorney-advisor at the State Department.

Unlike in Ukraine where the U.S. has published regular updates on some of the weapons it has provided to support Kyiv’s fight against the Russian invasion, Washington has disclosed little about how many and what types of weapons it has sent to Israel during the current conflict. U.S. officials say the lack of disclosure is a result partly of the fact that Israel’s weapons come through a different mechanism, including military sales. Israel also is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid, receiving $3.8 billion every year.

Israel resumed its offensive in Gaza on Friday after negotiations to extend a weeklong cease-fire broke down. Israeli officials have said repeatedly that they planned to resume the war at the end of the truce, which began on Nov. 24 with an agreement that freed dozens of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

The arsenal of artillery, bombs and other weapons and military gear have been used by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Libya, among other places, usually to target large groups of gathered enemy forces. In Gaza, by contrast, Israel is battling militants who are among civilians in dense urban environments.

“They are kind of the weapons of choice for the fights we had in Afghanistan and Syria in open, non-urban areas,” said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps and C.I.A. “The U.S. may use them in more urban areas, but first it would do a lot of target analysis to make sure the attack was proportional and based on military necessity.”

The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Defense didn’t respond to a request for comment on the weapons transfers. The White House National Security Council didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘Maximum damage’
President Biden initially expressed full support for Israel and its military campaign to destroy Hamas after the Oct. 7 attack, but the soaring civilian death toll in Gaza has caused the administration to shift in recent days.

Israel’s military says it already takes precautions to protect civilians, though in the initial days of the war its air force also said its strikes were causing “maximum damage.” Israeli officials have also said they have a limited capacity for precision strikes because its forces are stretched thin.

More than 15,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to the authorities in the Hamas-controlled enclave. The number doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, during the Oct. 7 attack.

Among the munitions the U.S. has transferred to Israel are more than 5,000 Mk82 unguided or “dumb” bombs, more than 5,400 Mk84 2,000 pound warhead bombs, around 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs, and approximately 3,000 JDAMs, which turn unguided bombs into guided “smart” bombs, according to an internal U.S. government list of the weapons described to The Wall Street Journal by U.S. officials.

The BLU-109 bunker buster carries a 2,000 pound warhead and is designed to penetrate a concrete shelter. The U.S. military also used the bombs in the Gulf war and the war in Afghanistan.

Military analysts say the transfer of large bombs to Israel illustrates the choices facing the Israeli military as it attempts to wipe out Hamas in Gaza, a tiny, densely populated ribbon of land that is home to more than two million Palestinians. Israel urged more than a million civilians to leave the northern part of the Gaza Strip to give its military a freer hand there, but tens if not hundreds of thousands of civilians have remained in the area.

In Gaza, Hamas’s military wing also uses a vast network of underground tunnels, which Israel could attempt to strike with the bunker busters, analysts say. The tunnels however lie beneath Gaza’s urban landscape of apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, and other civilian buildings.

[ccp]

" 2,000-Pound Bunker Buster Bombs "

are these different then the  2K bombs dropped from B 52s?

or ground bunker penetrating

everyone think what I am thinking?

[Crafty_Dog]

No doubt it is just a coincidence that this leaked , , ,

[ccp]

" No doubt it is just a coincidence that this leaked , , ,"

Biden Administration supports Israel 100% !

[DougMacG]

Billions of people around the globe are about to gather to celebrate the birthday of a Jewish man born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, but don't think Jews lived there before 1948.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/the-week-in-pictures-smackdown-edition.php

[Crafty_Dog]

Israel Faces Pressure to Yield to the ‘Terrorist Veto’
The strategic consequence of any pause, truce or cease-fire is to increase Hamas’s odds of survival.
By John Bolton
Dec. 1, 2023 5:59 pm ET


There is a tension between Israel’s two objectives of eliminating Hamas as a political and military force and recovering the innocent civilians kidnapped on Oct. 7. Weighing these competing priorities, Israel decided to pause its anti-Hamas military campaign in exchange for the return of some hostages. This policy’s wisdom is debatable.

A greater hazard, however, imperils Israel’s legitimate right to self-defense. I call it the “terrorist veto,” and with every passing day, Israel’s chances of escaping it diminish, notwithstanding Friday’s resumption of hostilities. For many people, the not-so-hidden goal of the hostage negotiations is to focus international attention—and emotions—on pausing hostilities indefinitely and tying Israel’s hands militarily. Whether labeled a pause, truce or cease-fire, the strategic consequences are objectively pro-Hamas. Using human bargaining chips and fellow Gazans as shields, Hamas seeks to prevent Israel from eliminating its terrorist threat.

Success for Hamas means merely surviving with a limited presence in Gaza, particularly a Gaza rebuilt as it was before Oct. 7. This result is a terrorist veto, even if military-pause supporters resist this painful but accurate term.

If the Hamas veto succeeds, other barbarians such as Hezbollah and Tehran’s mullahs (the ultimate enemy here) can insulate themselves from the consequences of their terrorism. Even worse, the terrorist veto can be copied by barbaric nation-states, with victims of aggression rendered unable to vindicate their sovereignty and territorial integrity. Ukraine and Taiwan come to mind as potential victims of this new paradigm.

President Biden and others deny trying to block further military action, but that is precisely the effect of their policies. On Wednesday CNN said Mr. Biden’s policy rests on three pillars: releasing the hostages, stepping up aid into Gaza, and figuring out what happens after the war. No mention of eliminating Hamas. Meantime, some Democratic senators are pressing for conditions on aid to Israel to restrict its military operations, to which Mr. Biden has alluded positively.

However the arguments for prolonging the initial or subsequent pauses are made, Israel will face three potentially debilitating consequences if it ceases or limits its military campaign. First, despite strong statements by many Israelis, in government and out, the country’s resolve is weakening. Right after Oct. 7, Jerusalem perhaps was prepared to hear U.S. military advisers caution that subduing resistance in Mosul and Fallujah took between nine months and a year. Then, Israelis might have been committed to a long struggle, but it seems unlikely they still are after this initial pause. Declining Israeli resolve guarantees that Hamas won’t be eliminated.

Cease-fire advocates argue that because Israel persuaded a million Gazans to move south before its initial campaign, Gazan “civilian” casualties in further operations in the south will dwarf previous casualties. Although Hamas and Iran initially placed Gazans in harm’s way, international recrimination will unfairly fall on Israelis, further sapping their resolve.

Second, because Hamas, Iran and their allies likely gain more militarily from the pause than Israel, the human costs to Israeli’s military will rise, as will domestic opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s objectives. It may be impossible to count incremental Israel Defense Forces casualties due to the pause, but the tally could exceed the number of hostages released.

Third, the greater the pauses or limitations, the more time Hamas’s surrogates worldwide have to increase anti-Israel pressure on their governments. In turn, many governments will lean on Israel to accept less, probably far less, than Mr. Netanyahu’s stated objectives.

The White House is urging, post-hostilities, turning over responsibility for Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. That utterly ignores its dismal performance in the West Bank, where the authority has been ineffective, corrupt and covertly supportive of terrorism. By some accounts Hamas is now more popular in the West Bank than Gaza. Extending Palestinian Authority control would put Israel back under the threat that surged on Oct. 7. The only long-term solution is to deny Hamas access to concentrated, hereditary refugee populations by resettling Gazans in places where they can enjoy normal lives.

Winston Churchill’s observation that “without victory, there is no survival” directly applies to Israel’s crisis. Victory for Israel means achieving its self-defense goal of eliminating Hamas. Anything less means continuing life under threat, with Tehran and its terrorist surrogates confident that when Westerners say “never again” they don’t really mean it.

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06

[Crafty_Dog]

second

Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago
A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings.

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Several men holding rifles sit and ride in an olive green military vehicle driving down a dusty road.
Hamas-led gunmen seized an Israeli military vehicle after infiltrating areas of southern Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks. A blueprint for similar attacks was circulating among Israeli leaders long before Hamas struck.Credit...Ahmed Zakot/Reuters


Nov. 30, 2023

Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing.  The latest news about the conflict. Get it sent to your inbox.
Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.

The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.


Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.

“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.

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Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.


Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.

The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.

Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”

Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.


The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.


Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”

The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.

One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.

Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.

The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.

Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.

But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.


In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”

The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.

Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.


Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.

But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.

On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.

“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.

While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.

The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.

“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”

[ccp]

last night on Levin for those who did not see

General Jack Keane I think said only ~20 % of Hamas destroyed
and both agree many moved south to blend in and shield themselves with "civilians"

I am not sure what is a "non-combatant" or "civilian" is in this case
as most Palestinians support Hamas

even the children are radicalized.

[DougMacG]

Too bad Biden snubbed Saudi in its fateful turn to Iran Hamas.  Once again we need Saudi's help.

https://www.newsweek.com/will-saudi-prince-mbs-become-biden-partner-containing-mideast-conflict-1849094

[ccp]

"Too bad Biden snubbed Saudi in its fateful turn to Iran Hamas.  Once again we need Saudi's help."

yes.

I notice Biden Blinken are not criticized in the leftist rag Newsweek is about this.

Why it just dawned on them to consider SA might be a valuable partner (Iran is also carefully not mentioned in the article either).

The notorious Thomas Friedman of Newsweek notoriety did not write the article apparently.

[Crafty_Dog]

Have not watched this yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l3EbRiDATE

[Crafty_Dog]

second

Revive Trump’s ‘Vision’ for Israeli-Palestinian Peace
Palestinians rejected this two-state solution that’s the only proposal Israelis might accept.
By Michael Oren and Jason Greenblatt
Dec. 3, 2023 5:35 pm ET




By agreeing to exchange a multiday cease-fire for the release of hostages, Israel is likely to come under mounting pressure to accept a more permanent truce. This would enable Hamas to get away with one mass murder while actively preparing for the next. Nevertheless, some policy makers viewed the agreement as a way to end the war, secure the remaining hostages’ freedom and alleviate the Palestinians’ suffering. President Biden has signaled his opposition to a complete pause—but that opposition may not be so steadfast. The White House is reportedly asking Israel to allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and agree to a “day after” plan that includes a so-called two-state solution.

Israel can expand aid shipments to Gaza, but it should unequivocally reject the creation of a Palestinian state while Hamas rules Gaza and a corrupt Palestinian Authority controls large parts of the West Bank. A Nov. 14 survey found that 75% of the public in the West Bank and Gaza supports the atrocities of Oct. 7 and wants to eliminate Israel entirely.

Yet if speaking about peace is helpful to Mr. Biden, it’s vital to recall that a U.S. proposal for a realistic two-state solution already exists and was approved by a previous Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The proposal is called “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People”—or simply the vision. Presented by the Trump administration in 2020, it called for the establishment of a Palestinian state similar in size to the pre-1967 area of the West Bank and Gaza, with unprecedented investment in the Palestinian economy. The vision estimated that within a decade a million new jobs would be created, doubling Palestinian gross domestic product and significantly reducing the poverty rate. The vision provided for the integration of Palestinians into the regional and global economy and for major development projects in Gaza.

Israel, for its part, would receive the security provisions it needs to prevent attacks akin to Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault. Neither Jews nor Palestinians would be forced out of their homes, and both would be given access to their holy sites. Jerusalem would remain united under Israeli sovereignty with a capital created for the Palestinians in its eastern suburbs.

The vision also called for the construction of a high-speed rail line between the West Bank and Gaza, as well as a system of bridges, roads and tunnels between noncontiguous Palestinian territories in the West Bank. The Palestinians would have their own port in Gaza as well as access to Israeli ports, and designated roads would connect the Palestinians to Jordan and the broader Arab world. Under the vision, Palestinians would be able to chart their own destiny, supported by massive sums of money.

Mr. Netanyahu hailed the plan as an opportunity “Israel will not miss,” but Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected it with “a thousand no’s.” The vision, he claimed, would give the Palestinians less land than previous proposals would have and prohibit the Palestinian Authority from paying stipends to reward Palestinian terrorists who attacked or murdered Israelis. Today, in the 19th year of his four-year term, Mr. Abbas opposes the vision’s requirements for democratization.

The Palestinians weren’t alone in rejecting the proposal. Most of the media denounced it as too pro-Israel, despite its several territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Many commentators likewise overlooked that right-wing Israelis rejected the vision precisely because it would result in a Palestinian state—albeit one without full sovereignty and subject to overriding Israeli security control.

Mr. Biden has no doubt satisfied his party’s progressive base by abandoning many of his predecessor’s initiatives. Yet his administration continues to maintain the Abraham Accords, which Mr. Trump forged, and hopes to expand it by creating peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. He ought to extend similar sympathy, and exert equal political capital, to advance the vision.

Talking about peace while Hamas continues to hold more than a hundred people hostage strikes many as tone-deaf. But at least 20 Democratic senators think otherwise and may seek to revive a failed two-state formula. To give Mr. Biden the backing he needs to maintain his principled opposition to a total pause—and provide time and space for Israel to defeat Hamas—the U.S. should renew the vision, at least as the basis for future negotiations. It is the only proposal Israelis might approve if and when the time is right, and it is an opportunity the Palestinians would be wise not to miss.



Mr. Oren has served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., a Knesset member and deputy minister in the prime minister’s office. Mr. Greenblatt is director of Arab-Israel diplomacy for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and author of “In the Path of Abraham.” He served as White House Middle East envoy, 2016-19.

[Crafty_Dog]

Israel Weighs Plan to Flood Gaza Tunnels With Seawater
Move could drive out Hamas fighters but threatens to foul Gaza’s freshwater supply and damage infrastructure
By
Nancy A. Youssef
Follow
,
Warren P. Strobel
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 and
Gordon Lubold
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Dec. 4, 2023 5:08 pm ET




WASHINGTON—Israel has assembled a system of large pumps it could use to flood Hamas’s vast network of tunnels under the Gaza Strip with seawater, a tactic that could destroy the tunnels and drive the fighters from their underground refuge but also threaten Gaza’s water supply, U.S. officials said.

The Israel Defense Forces finished assembling large seawater pumps roughly one mile north of the Al-Shati refugee camp around the middle of last month. Each of at least five pumps can draw water from the Mediterranean Sea and move thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into the tunnels, flooding them within weeks.

Israel first informed the U.S. of the option early last month, prompting a discussion weighing its feasibility and effect on the environment against the military value of disabling the tunnels, officials said.

U.S. officials said they didn’t know how close the Israeli government was to carrying out the plan. Israel hasn’t made a final decision to move ahead, nor has it ruled the plan out, officials said.

Sentiment inside the U.S. was mixed. Some U.S. officials privately expressed concern about the plan, while other officials said the U.S. supports the disabling of the tunnels and said there wasn’t necessarily any U.S. opposition to the plan. The Israelis have identified about 800 tunnels so far, though they acknowledge the network is bigger than that.


An Israeli soldier in an underground tunnel underneath a hospital in Gaza City in November. Israel says that Hamas militants used the tunnel. It isn’t known whether this tunnel would be flooded under the plan being considered by Israel. PHOTO: VICTOR R. CAIVANO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The weekslong process of flooding the tunnels would enable Hamas fighters, and potentially hostages, to move out, a person familiar with the plan said. It isn’t clear whether Israel would even consider using the pumps before all the hostages are released from Gaza. The Palestinian militants who attacked Israel on Oct. 7 took more than 200 hostages and brought them back to the Gaza Strip.

“We are not sure how successful pumping will be since nobody knows the details of the tunnels and the ground around them,” the person said. “It’s impossible to know if that will be effective because we don’t know how seawater will drain in tunnels no one has been in before.”

The deliberation over the plan to flood the tunnels illustrates the balance Israel’s forces must make between pursuing their war aims and the intense international pressure they face to protect civilians. The Israeli military campaign has flattened neighborhoods and the fighting has displaced more than a million Gazans from their homes in the crowded strip of territory.

An Israel Defense Forces official declined to comment on the flooding plan, but said: “The IDF is operating to dismantle Hamas’s terror capabilities in various ways, using different military and technological tools.”


A water desalination plant in Gaza City in 2021. PHOTO: OMAR ASHTAWY/ZUMA PRESS
Hamas has used the extensive tunnel system to hide, move undetected between houses in Gaza and hold hostages. Some of the more sophisticated tunnels were built with reinforced concrete, contain power and communication lines, and are tall enough for an average-size man to stand up in them.

Most Gazans don’t currently have access to clean water. Among the sources for drinking water in Gaza are purification plants that have been recently disabled. Before Oct. 7, three Israeli pipelines sent water into Gaza. Of those, one has shut down and the other two operate at sharply reduced levels.

At its peak, the system provided 83 liters of water per person a day. Now Palestinians receive no more than three liters a day, according to the United Nations. The U.N. says the minimum should be 15 liters a day.

Tunnel system in Gaza strip

Gaza

ISRAEL

Tunnels

destroyed

GAZA STRIP

Known tunnels

inside Gaza

N

Khan Yunis

Rafah

Area of

detail

ISRAEL

EGYPT

JORD.

EGY.

1 mile

Note:  As of 2014

Source: Israel Defense Forces
Carl Churchill/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Because it isn’t clear how permeable the tunnels are or how much seawater would seep into the soil and to what effect, it is hard to fully assess the impact of pumping seawater into the tunnels, said Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s hard to tell what pumping seawater will do to the existing water and sewage infrastructure. It is hard to tell what it will do to groundwater reserves. And it’s hard to tell the impact on the stability of nearby buildings,” Alterman said.

Former U.S. officials familiar with the issue confirmed that Israeli and U.S. officials had discussed flooding the tunnels with seawater but said they didn’t know the current status of the plan.

The former officials acknowledged such an operation would put the Biden administration in a tough position and perhaps bring global condemnation, but said it was one of the few effective options for permanently disabling a Hamas tunnel system estimated to stretch for about 300 miles.

One of the former officials said Gaza’s water and sanitation systems are badly damaged and heavily polluted, and would need to be reconstructed with international assistance after the war.

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Wim Zwijnenburg, who has studied the impact of war on the environment in the Middle East, said that assuming that about one-third of the tunnel network is already damaged, Israel would have to pump roughly 1 million cubic meters of seawater to disable the rest.

Gaza’s aquifer, from which the population draws for drinking water and other uses, is already becoming saltier with a rise in the sea level, requiring more energy to fuel the desalination plants on which the population depends, said Zwijnenburg, who works for PAX, a Netherlands-based peace organization.

Flooding could affect Gaza’s already polluted soil, and hazardous substances stored in the tunnels could seep into the ground, he said in an email.

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Egypt in 2015 used seawater to flood tunnels operated by smugglers under the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, prompting complaints from nearby farmers about damaged crops.

Typically, militaries charged with clearing tunnels, including Israel, use dogs and robots to check for threats or to search for hostages before sending ground troops in, said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps and CIA.

“Dogs are most effective,” he said, but need to be followed by troops to clear the tunnels. “Robots move slow and break. And using humans is risky.”

Using water over a long period would force Hamas fighters out, Mulroy said.

But “if you salted the water, it could compound the humanitarian crisis,” he said.

[ccp]

https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2023/12/08/idf-large-numbers-of-hamas-terrorists-are-surrendering/

It is not like you put them in prison camp and when war is over you send them back and that is the end of it.

You send them back and is back to square 1.
They battle for now is over but the war continues for eternity as long as they are alive.

[Crafty_Dog]

Good question.

[Crafty_Dog]

Israel’s Message in Gaza to Iran and Hezbollah
Jerusalem, no longer afraid of taking the offensive, shows it is willing to go to the mat if pushed too far.
By Yonah Jeremy Bob
Dec. 10, 2023 5:17 pm ET


Northern Gaza has been flattened. It isn’t just another combat zone. The area will need years of rebuilding before Palestinian civilians can live there.

I saw the fallout from the war between Israel and Hamas during a recent trip with Israel Defense Forces to Gaza City, including the vast network of tunnels around Al-Shifa Hospital, one of the terror group’s unofficial capitals. I moved around the area aboard one of the IDF’s Namer armored personnel carriers.

What happened in Gaza, and particularly at Al-Shifa, will reshape the Middle East, including for Hezbollah and Iran, over the next decade and possibly beyond. While the Mossad blocked Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons for more than 20 years, questions persisted about whether Israel would actually launch a major strike against Tehran if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to break out a nuclear weapon. My visit to Gaza answered that question.

But first, what has emerged from the war and the IDF’s taking over Al-Shifa Hospital and Hamas’s underground tunnels there? What paradigms have been shattered?

For the past 16 years, with Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip, Al-Shifa was untouchable. After the 50-day Gaza conflict in mid-2014, many Israeli defense officials said if they could take out the tunnels under Al-Shifa, they could end Hamas or cripple its leadership hiding there. At the same time, the IDF warned that Hamas was storing weapons and running command-and-control operations from Gaza hospitals. Al-Shifa, the pinnacle of those activities, is no longer untouchable. No part of Gaza is.

Hamas’s officials lost their precious underground network at Al-Shifa. They had sent forces and messages through the tunnels and sneaked commanders throughout Gaza City, with Israel’s mighty air force and technological sensors unable to track any of it.

Israel showed Hamas that after the Oct. 7 massacre, it has the power and the will to rout the terror group from even sensitive civilian locations. For years Israel feared using its military advantage against weaker adversaries. Why? Because of the damage rockets could do to the Jewish state’s home front, the cost in Israeli soldier casualties and worries about global legitimacy. With tools such as the Iron Dome missile defense system, Jerusalem avoided playing offense. Now Israel has proved—at least to anyone who sees Hamas’s stockpiles of guns, grenades, drones and other materiel found at Al-Shifa—that it was right all along about the terror group’s abuse of civilian locations.

The U.S. government took Israel’s side when it took over the hospital—something Jerusalem wouldn’t take for granted. This will have implications for any effort by the International Criminal Court to go after the IDF for alleged war crimes.

What Israeli forces didn’t do at Al-Shifa was defeat Hamas completely. Rather, the IDF appears to have let Hamas, including about 200 fighters, escape to southern Gaza. This may have been either to avoid a bloodbath inside the hospital or preserve the possibility of what turned out to be a weeklong cease-fire in which dozens of Israeli hostages were returned. Since the Dec. 4 invasion of Khan Younis, the IDF has been confronting Hamas in a more definitive fashion, with most of the terror group’s fighters and leaders fleeing south.

Israel expects an insurgency in Gaza even after it defeats Hamas. According to the United Nations, 60% of housing in northern Gaza has been destroyed. The extent of the destruction means civilians won’t be able to return quickly. An insurgency could last longer than the six to nine months that defense officials have predicted. The staggering cost to rebuild will make it harder to manage the region after the war and the insurgency, no matter whom Israel puts in charge.

The flattening of northern Gaza also sends a message to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to Tehran and to Iranian proxies in Syria: Mess with us and expect the same. Israelis are now more inclined to believe their country will use force against Hezbollah and Iran if necessary. The Lebanese terror group is far more dangerous than Hamas, given its special forces, mortars and precision rockets. Jerusalem has lived in fear of Hezbollah for well over a decade. What I saw in Gaza City is probably in part why Hezbollah has fired “only” 1,000 times on Israel since Oct. 7 and “only” in the north. The group now believes Israel’s threats of what it would do if Hezbollah crosses certain lines. So does Tehran.

That won’t end the violence against Israel in the Middle East, but it will shift the balance of power. Israel has shown it is willing to go to the mat when pushed too far.

Mr. Bob is senior military analyst for the Jerusalem Post and a co-author of “Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination—and Secret Diplomacy—to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East.”

[Crafty_Dog]

"In the months following the end of the war, 'wild' expulsions happened from May until August 1945. Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš on 28 October 1945 called for the 'final solution of the German question' which would have to be solved by deportation of the ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia. More than 3 million Sudeten Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945 following Germany's defeat in the Second World War, in an officially ordered act of ethnic cleansing supposedly justified by Hitler's aggression and permitted by war-time allies Britain, the US and the Soviet Union. Not all Germans were expelled; estimates for the total number of non-expulsions range from approximately 160,000 to 250,000."

[Crafty_Dog]

second

Hamas’s Oct. 7 Attack Made Israel Stronger
The terror group managed to shock the Jewish state out of its disunity and complacency.
Walter Russell Mead
WSJ
Dec. 11, 2023 6:15 pm ET

Tel Aviv

The Jewish state, and the Zionist movement that sustains it, is emerging from this crisis stronger than before. That’s my conclusion after a week in Israel, traveling to the combat zones in the north and south, touring the Gaza-area kibbutzim that were occupied by Hamas, and meeting with Israelis ranging from senior government officials to survivors of the Oct. 7 attacks struggling to put their lives back together. Israel is more united, its citizens are more determined to fight for their state, and Jews around the world have renewed their commitment to the Zionist cause.

I spoke to Israelis across the political spectrum. From leaders of the pre-Oct. 7 protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to senior officials in the war cabinet, I heard only commitment to supporting the government through the war. Politics isn’t dead in Israel. Protests demanding Mr. Netanyahu’s resignation have resumed, and profound disagreements bubble below the surface. But none of this affects the country’s determination to prosecute the war. Israelis from all political camps are determined to put national security first when the war ends.

Israeli military experts, including critics of the government, think the war is going reasonably well. Casualties are significant, and there is hard slogging ahead, but Israel is on course to inflict defeat on the deranged and misguided Hamas movement. It also is headed toward deeper integration into the Middle East. Arab leaders, who are moving the Arab and Islamic worlds into a brighter future than the fanatics can imagine, appreciate as never before the value of a strong Israel to their own security and prosperity.

Much can still go awry. Iran and its proxies have a vote in what happens next. America’s Middle East policy remains muddled, and the global struggle of revisionist powers against the American-led world system can intersect explosively with Middle East politics. But for now, Israel has rallied from the shock of Oct. 7 and is on track to re-establish deterrence.

This isn’t the first time that the enemies of the Jews have unintentionally contributed to the rise of the Jewish state. The founder of modern Zionism was a secular and assimilated Austrian Jew named Theodor Herzl (1860-1904). He was driven to embrace his Jewish identity and the idea of Zionism by the realization that the irrational evil of Jew-hatred was an ineradicable force in modern Europe. Only when Jews built a state of their own could they be safe, Herzl reasoned. As he contemplated the factionalism that plagued Zionism from its beginning, he took comfort in the belief that the hatred of their opponents would bind the fractious Jews into a united people.

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Jews in liberal Western countries initially scoffed at Herzl’s Zionism, but the grim course of 20th-century history vindicated his insights and recruited brilliant disciples and able campaigners into the Zionist camp. Decisions in the U.S. and elsewhere to slam the door on desperate Jewish refugees from the Nazis further strengthened the appeal of Zionism to the world’s Jews. Such decisions also brought to Palestine the committed Zionist recruits without whom the Jewish community there could never have won its independence or built a state. In perhaps the greatest instance of Jew-haters shooting themselves in the foot, vindictive Middle Eastern mobs and governments forced some 850,000 Jews to flee to Israel in the aftermath of its War of Independence. Those immigrants and their descendants feel no guilt for Palestinian dispossession and are skeptical of Arab intentions. They are a plurality of Israeli Jews today, and without them Israel could never have grown into the powerful state it is.

For Israel, bad Palestinian strategy is the gift that keeps on giving. Over the decades, Palestinian resistance movements have consistently been too weak and fragmented to threaten Israel’s survival. Nevertheless, their constant low-level threat led Israelis to develop the first-class defense and technology capabilities that make it an indispensable partner for countries all over the world.

The unspeakable barbarity of the Hamas attacks has again united and strengthened Israel while accomplishing nothing for the Palestinian people. The Jew-haters who overshadowed more peaceful and responsible demonstrators across U.S. streets and campuses have deeply damaged the Palestinian cause with centrist opinion. Such displays remind Americans that anti-Jewish bigotry and the ignorance it fosters threaten the foundations of American life. Based on what they hear from friends and relatives overseas, many Israelis believe that hundreds of thousands of new Jewish immigrants may head their way soon, migrants who will strengthen Israel’s Jewish demographic base and pull its politics to the right.

For all this, Israel’s worst enemies have only themselves to thank. The haters continue to build the Jewish state even as their barbarism frustrates the hopes of thoughtful Palestinians and those who wish them well.

[ccp]

not new
but getting worse:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/israel-losing-support-biden-says-185717915.html

[Crafty_Dog]

By: Geopolitical Futures
Potential deal. Israel's defense minister said his country was open to a deal with Hezbollah if it included the establishment of a safe zone along the border and other security guarantees. According to an Al Hadath report, Israel agreed to have Hezbollah maintain some joint monitoring sites with the Lebanese and French armies in southern Lebanon. The deal would require that weapons be confined to the Lebanese army in the area south of the Litani River. It also includes an American guarantee that Israel will not carry out any operations in southern Lebanon. The possibility of U.S. forces being deployed on the Israeli side of the border was also raised.

======================

December 13, 2023
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Hezbollah’s Last Stand
The Israel-Hamas war could be the end of the Lebanese group.
By: Hilal Khashan
When Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah celebrated the event as a liberation. It later became a national holiday. When the two went to war six years later, the fighting lasted only about a month, largely because Israel was uninterested in reoccupying southern Lebanon. Hezbollah celebrated the result as a divine victory. Since then, the group has bragged about its military advancements, adding long-range surface-to-surface missiles that could reach the far southern Israeli city of Eilat – a move Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah justified by saying a balance of power was essential to defend Lebanon's national interests and to deter Israeli encroachment.

Describing itself as the eminent anti-Israel resistance movement, Hezbollah has continuously said it would support the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel. When Hamas launched its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Hezbollah found itself compelled to show token solidarity, immediately embarking on low-grade attacks on Israeli positions in the upper Galilee. Hezbollah failed to realize that it caught Israel at a moment of an unprecedented breach of national security. Thousands of Israeli residents near the border with Lebanon fled their houses, insisting that they would not return until Hezbollah was evicted from the border area.

Israel tolerated Hezbollah's violations of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war. The resolution required Hezbollah to abandon the south Litani River, from where it used to launch attacks into northern Israel. The quiet that prevailed for 17 years gave Israel the impression that its military posts and settlements were secure and that Hezbollah had learned its lesson. Hezbollah's limited attacks that started on Oct. 8 focused on a 19-square-mile (49-square-kilometer) contested area that it promised to liberate after Israel left southern Lebanon. It even justified maintaining its military component after 2000 to free the area from Israeli occupation. Hezbollah did not anticipate Israel's insistence that it abide by Resolution 1701, and it rejected it outright. Four weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, and before Israel's demand that Hezbollah leave southern Lebanon, Nasrallah announced that now was not the time for the great war against the Jewish state. Hezbollah's expulsion from the border area, forcibly or diplomatically, spells its demise as a self-described resistance movement, ending its hegemony in Lebanon and its political system.

Why Southern Lebanon Matters to Hezbollah

Hezbollah is an offspring of war. It was created by Iran during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon to evict the Palestine Liberation Organization. It had no future in the semi-arid north Bekaa, where impoverished Shiite clans ran amok outside state jurisdiction. Hezbollah maintained a stronghold in the area, but starting in 1985, it focused its activities on Israeli-occupied territory in southern Lebanon. By 1987, it monopolized the fight against Israel. It soon emerged as the dominant local force in the south, taking the Amal Movement, leftist movements and Palestinian organizations under its wing.

Hezbollah led the fight against Israel and its South Lebanon Army surrogate in a low-intensity conflict punctuated by two prominent Israeli retaliatory air campaigns, Operation Accountability in July 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in April 1996. The five-nation committee to monitor the cease-fire agreement (comprising the U.S., France, Israel, Syria and Lebanon) ended the second operation. It recognized Hezbollah as a resistance movement but regulated its war activities to avoid inflicting civilian casualties. Hezbollah’s resistance won it recognition and acclaim, not only among Shiites but also among Sunnis and Christians. However, Israel's withdrawal from the south in 2000 pressured Hezbollah to disarm like all other sectarian militias as per the 1989 Taif Agreement that ended the civil war.

Hezbollah resisted this pressure, insisting that its task – countering Israel – was unfinished and presenting itself as the defender of Lebanon's territorial integrity. It proposed the introduction of a national defense strategy based on the “people, army, resistance” thesis that it forced on all new Cabinets as a precondition for granting them a vote of confidence. For Hezbollah, to pull out from south Litani would be to renounce its anti-Israel mission, surrender its domestic political power, and accept disarmament. In other words, Hezbollah cannot retreat, and its refusal to do so will inevitably lead to war, regardless of the outcome. It seems that Hamas' Oct. 7 attack will seal not only its fate but also that of Hezbollah, whose underestimation of Israel's response gave it the cause for war.

Push for Normalization

Contrary to some commentators' concern that the war in Gaza has stalled the peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the truth is that it might expedite them. The Saudi position on the war did not go beyond demanding a cease-fire and accelerating the supply of aid to Gazans. The battle between Israel and Hamas did not occupy significant coverage in the Saudi press, which focused its attention on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's meetings with foreign delegations, Riyadh’s growing cultural role, and economic development projects. Saudi Arabia, like most Arab countries, views Hamas as a terrorist organization, and it is eager to see Israel eliminate it. If Israel's war against Hamas ends inconclusively, it will be a victory not only for Hamas but also for all radical Islamic movements, giving impetus to a new wave of Arab uprisings and reviving the slogan that Islam is the solution.

Since Oct. 7, U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have been reiterating their support for establishing a Palestinian state after the war's end. It might be challenging to take their statements at face value, given their prewar announcements that Palestinian statehood is a complicated matter and is not achievable in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, advocating Palestinian statehood, regardless of its chances of success, will give a boost to Saudi-Israeli peace talks, which are strategically compelling for the two countries. Even though Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani boycotted the proceedings of the U.N. Climate Conference held recently in Dubai, he still took the time to shake hands and chat with Israeli President Isaac Herzog – despite the fact that Qatari state media criticizes Israel and praises Hamas. Qatar's Israel policy is typical of the dichotomy between Arab public demeanor and actual policy.

Iran’s “axis of resistance” is the only remaining obstacle to normalizing ties between Israel and the Arab-Islamic world. Iran arms Iraq’s militias, Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemen's Houthis. Gulf Arabs see Iran as an existential threat. They ringed themselves with Western bases to keep Iran at bay (and to keep from being dominated by any fellow Gulf Cooperation Council member states). The turbulence in the region has painted Israel as a beacon of stability and hope for achieving economic development. Arab countries have concluded that they must coexist with Iran but contain its regional Shiite proxies and eliminate its beleaguered Sunni allies, including Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Iranian Conundrum

The Israel-Hamas war has demonstrated Iran's power deficiency, limited to verbal bellicosity and condemnation of Israel – and, by extension, of U.S. support for its war machine. Its empty rhetoric has exposed it not only to adversaries but also to Shiite allies. Hezbollah's partisans know that Iran will not rescue them in times of distress. Given the turn of events, Iran increasingly sees Hezbollah as a liability. For the ayatollahs, Hezbollah has achieved its objective of making Iran a regional power and a player in the Arab-Israeli conflict after Arab countries extricated themselves from it. Iran's meddling in the military conflict is coming to an end, and its focus now is on the more numerous Iraqi Shiite militias that are situated north of the Arabian Peninsula and on the Houthis south of it.

Iran is starved for regional recognition. Its meddling in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has run its course, and it now faces the dilemma of resolving its standoff with the U.S. over its nuclear program. It realizes that short of a breakthrough on this vital issue, it will not manage to lift the crippling sanctions to reconstruct its aging economic infrastructure and improve the standard of living of the Iranian people. Iran’s struggle to establish regional parity with Israel will shift from outright hostility to soft power competition. It is time for Hezbollah to come to terms with Iran’s realpolitik and become a local political actor, not a strategic adversary of Israel.

[Crafty_Dog]

Second

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/12/opinion/israel-gaza-saudi-arabia.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Fk0.VoIH.5aSRxlap1ftA&hpgrp=ar-abar&smid=em-share

[Crafty_Dog]

third

Waning support. The U.N. General Assembly voted on Tuesday in favor of a resolution to demand a cease-fire in Gaza. The United States and Israel were among just 10 countries that voted against the proposal. U.S. President Joe Biden warned ahead of the vote that Israel was losing international support due to its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, the U.S. is reportedly looking to form a naval task force to secure passage through the Red Sea. Yemen’s Houthi rebels have launched several missile strikes at targets in the sea since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Maritime insecurity. Relatedly, revenue at Israel’s port of Eilat fell by 80 percent over the past month amid the rising threat from the Houthi rebels, who have targeted the port in several attacks. According to Israeli daily the Calcalist, the general director of the port said ships are afraid to pass through the area and have instead turned to an alternate route that extends transport time by about 20 days.

[ccp]

Thomas Friedman being Thomas Friedman

yes

he always winds up being a liberal blow hard
anti Netanyahu through and through.

never offers any solutions other then Israel has to do this has to do that.

always it is up to Israel when in fact the problem is Hamas and its supporters and the Arab world that supports them.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-w2cJSYbqI&t=142s

[ccp]

Did anyone see on Newsmax Brooke Goldstein of the Lawfare project last night?

She is on the right track but in narrow scope with regards fighting lawfare used against Jews and Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooke_Goldstein

https://www.thelawfareproject.org/

[Crafty_Dog]

President Biden made headlines by declaring on Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has to change.” As is typical with the President, his subsequent remarks were hard to follow, but many heard them as a call for a new Israeli government coalition willing to jump-start a two-state solution.


It isn’t Mr. Biden’s place to pick Israel’s leaders. Instead, he could try listening to Israelis about the risks of empowering a Palestinian Authority (PA) that has refused to condemn the Hamas massacre. Or he could listen to Palestinians, 72% of whom believe Hamas was right to launch its Oct. 7 attack, according to a new poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. That figure rises to 82% among West Bank Palestinians, who are ruled by the PA, not Hamas.

Mohammad Shtayyeh, the prime minister of the PA, said Sunday that “Hamas is an integral part of the Palestinian mosaic.” The problem is that this is true. That’s why no one in his right mind in Israel thinks of creating a Palestinian state today. Hamas doesn’t want a two-state solution; it wants the final solution.

Israelis are focused on defeating Hamas, a goal the U.S. shares. Mr. Biden was right to say Tuesday that “nobody on God’s green Earth can justify what Hamas did. They’re a brutal, ugly, inhumane people, and they have to be eliminated.” He was also right to stand up for Israel at the United Nations, where the international herd demands a cease-fire.

Israel fights on because it has no other choice if it wants to survive as a state. But many nations see these U.N. votes as consequence-free gestures for peace or solidarity. That a cease-fire now would mean a Hamas victory and the death of Israeli deterrence, bringing on the next massacre and the next war, doesn’t concern them.

Israelis know Mr. Biden is under pressure from the Democratic Party left to stop Israel’s Gaza operation, and they are making sacrifices to satisfy him. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that the Israeli campaign “we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south,” and Israel has complied. It is now telegraphing its attacks to the enemy so civilians can flee, and it is using a smaller force with less reliance on air power and artillery.

As a result, Israel is taking more casualties. Ten soldiers were killed Tuesday. That follows five Monday and seven Sunday for a total of 445, including Oct. 7.

The rising fatality rate is noticed in Israel, if nowhere else. In a video making the rounds, an infantry officer protests in Hebrew: “How can it be that an area isn’t cleared from the air before allowing our soldiers to enter?” Israel did that earlier in the war, he says, but now “our fire power is being restrained because our leaders may have started prioritizing the enemy’s lives over the lives of our soldiers.” A petition by soldiers’ mothers makes a similar point.

Israel gets little credit for its sacrifices. Mr. Biden even criticized it Tuesday for “indiscriminate bombing,” a slander so belied by the evidence that the White House tried to walk it back. Civilian casualties in Gaza are tragic, but they are mainly a result of Hamas’s way of embedding in what should be safe civilian spaces. The U.S. military also couldn’t avoid civilian casualties against ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, or other post-9/11 engagements. The U.S. doesn’t bomb indiscriminately either.

Facilitating the transfer of fuel and aid to Gaza also hasn’t stopped U.S. criticism. On Oct. 18 Mr. Biden said, “If Hamas diverts or steals the assistance, they will have demonstrated once again that they have no concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people, and it will end.” Really? Hamas theft, some of it caught on video, is so blatant and pervasive that Gazans denounce it publicly. Still, Israel keeps aid flowing, and the U.S. has pressured it to open another crossing to let in even more.

Israel has no good choices here, but America does. The President can focus on supporting a U.S. ally in vanquishing a genocidal enemy.

[Crafty_Dog]

By: Geopolitical Futures
Israel and Hezbollah. In talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly said the U.S. would support Israel in a war with Hezbollah if efforts to forge a diplomatic settlement fail. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly told Sullivan that Israel is ready to fight Hezbollah if no political solution is reached. Meanwhile, Israel’s home front commander, Maj. Gen. Rafi Milo, said a war with Hezbollah is inevitable. According to Milo, the situation in the north is much worse than in the south, and the Israeli army is preparing for an armed confrontation with the militant group.

[ccp]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/friedman-israel-cannot-win-while-netanyahu-denies-two-state-solution/vi-AA1lB3Bg?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=e7ab1732789347fd8a2422365fa633cf&ei=20

thinks Israel made a mistake going into GAZA and Netanyahu is the problem.

I think he lives in never never land, like most libs

[Crafty_Dog]

December 16, 2023
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Hezbollah Mobilizes
By: Geopolitical Futures
Hezbollah is mobilizing its forces in the south Litani area in preparation for a full-scale war with Israel. That the group will not voluntarily evacuate the border area has made conflict inevitable. The mood in Lebanon is sullen; nobody wants war, and the images coming out of Gaza have made Lebanese residents fear what could happen to them.

The mobilization does not mean war will break out tomorrow. But Hezbollah wants to be ready.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/half-of-young-americans-say-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas-poll/ar-AA1lDlBV?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=29eaf9a5a30445d88b2615355dec1c97&ei=29

[ccp]

just think what tiktok is doing to their mindset, their brains

DEI CRT BLM LBGTQ+

did I miss any?

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/12/obama-admin-sent-taxpayer-money-oust-netanyahu/?fbclid=IwAR0v3DbQsarcBDdSuxfCjjdfEH69nqYCw-I0BrJA1XcfvX2dn84fYDqFw2Y

[Crafty_Dog]

Stop Lecturing Us on Palestinian Civilians
Who's really responsible for civilian casualties?
December 13, 2023 by Alan Joseph Bauer 25 Comments

Newsletter

A day does not go by without some politician or talking head demanding that Israel worry about killing fewer Palestinian civilians. Sorry, while we do not wish for human suffering, the Palestinians have brought upon themselves everything they are currently suffering.

You live in Chicago and you’re in the kitchen making a steak. The TV in the background is blurting out the news. Suddenly, there is a news flash. “A jumbo jet with over 300 people has crashed into multiple residential buildings. Details to come.” You stop what you’re doing and wait for the report to continue. Let’s imagine two scenarios:

1. The crash was in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.

2. The crash was in Chicago, a few blocks from your kids’ school.

In the first instance, you would feel bad for those killed and wounded, but you would probably go back to making dinner and think no more about the event. In the second case, you would frantically start making phone calls and probably rush out of the house to see if your kids are okay and if anyone you know was harmed.

Such a reaction is normal. Professor Mike Sandel of Harvard is a bigshot. When I had his course on Moral Reasoning 40 years ago, he was an assistant professor. Professor Sandel had a theory of “justice” that involved a person having concentric rings of interests and connections: family, job, country, religion, etc. These rings move according to the situation at hand. An example he brought forth back in the day was Mujaheddin from Afghanistan asking you if you were a freedom-loving person. The response was ‘Yes, I am.’ He’d then counter, ‘So come fight with us against the Soviets!’ But the natural response was, ‘Well, my family, country and job come before my ring for foreign freedom lovers, so sorry guys.’

We all feel closer to some than to others. And sometimes a religious obligation trumps work, or work trumps a family event. That is normal. But every night for the past six weeks we have been treated to some news host, or even Kamala Harris, demanding that Israel be more careful and invent bullets and bombs that can only kill card-carrying Hamas members. I will not deny that the Palestinian people in Gaza are suffering. One can see the destroyed buildings, their moving south with their belongings and the taking apart of aid trucks out of desperation. The IDF today estimated 2 civilian shields killed for every Hamas terrorist. While the Palestinians are suffering, they alone are responsible for their plight:

1. Hamas started the war. I think that Colin Powell called it “the Pottery Barn Rules”. You break it, you pay for it. Everything that happens in Gaza is on them. Everything.

2. The Palestinian population was and is ecstatic about Jewish suffering. Remember the Palestinian civilians (including the old guy with a walker) shown on CCTV coming into Israeli settlements to steal, rape and take captives? Remember their wild reception in Gaza of Hamas barbarians and the raped women they brought back in their trucks?

People here in Israel generally feel towards the Palestinians EXACTLY what the latter feel towards Israelis. No, Israelis do not hand out candies when Palestinians are killed en masse, but the Palestinian suffering is something of their own making. If Israeli tanks and planes for no apparent reason on 10/7 simply went into Gaza to kill civilians, I hope that I would be at the front of any protest, demanding an end to the killing. But details matter, and Hamas started the war, and those Palestinians with the mule-carts are the same ones who spit on the Israeli women abused by Hamas psychos.

The media and politicians often like to leave out or bend details, as they can then push forward whatever agenda they have. I remember during the Trump presidency Forbes touting immigrants who had been super-successful and had made it big in the US. Their list included Sergei Brin of Google and Jan Koum of WhatsApp. Wonderful. Those immigrants were LEGAL immigrants who filled out the forms, paid the fees, stood in line, and completed the legal process to enter the US. They have nothing to do with the millions illegally entering the US with few skills and little education.

An Israeli-Russian captive succeeded in escaping his Hamas handlers and was hiding for four days. He reported after his release that Palestinian citizens turned him over to Hamas. A UNRWA teacher held a captive in his house. A woman with a gunshot wound was treated by a veterinarian. The Palestinians started the war and were enthralled with the killing, raping, and plundering. Now that Hamas is receiving its comeuppance, the world demands that Israel treat Palestinian human shields with kid gloves. Sorry. As Kurt Schlichter always writes, if the Palestinians want to protect their citizens, then let Hamas put down its weapons and stop fighting.

Those demanding so much from Israel are antisemites. Why? Because when Syrian civilians were being slaughtered by the Assad government or Uyghurs were being abused by Chinese authorities, they said nothing. They did not form some BDS movement or demand a halt to the killing and torture. But when they can stick it to the Jews and demand that Israel fight an impossible war against a cowardly enemy that hides in population centers, then they are marching endlessly.

Israel does not kill civilians. It actually puts its soldiers into harm’s way to reduce civilian deaths. But civilians will continue to suffer and die as long as Hamas is still around. So blame Hamas and not Israel. It will make the war end more quickly when the murderers realize that they have lost their fans in the West.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.museumoftolerance.com/.../annual-4-chapter-17...
> this article talks about how Britain prevented jews from emigrating before (and after) the war
> Britain was not allied with the Arabs, but they were united in their anti-jewish policies
> and I seem to remember they were buying oil from them
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/british-restrictions...


, , ,

"If I recall my history, early Zionists were able to make a deal with the Nazi's that allowed something like 50,000 German/Austrian Jews to immigrate to then Palestine. At the time Germany was aware that their treatment of Jews was looked down upon by the West. Cooperating with Jewish Zionists accomplished two things. One they got rid of Jews, and it helped push back on anti German feeling present in the US and Europe.

"Several years ago an historian found a document that was sent by someone in the British government to his German counterpart complaining about Germany dumping Jews in Palestine. Britain at the time was trying to restrict immigration of Jews from Europe to what is now Israel. Eventually there was a conference in 1938 in Evian, France led by the US. While everyone complained about German treatment of Jews, almost every nation in attendance had an excuse why they just couldn't allow Jewish refugees. This doomed European Jewry, a fact that means while the West could have taken in Jews they didn't. Which means that they bear some responsibility for the holocaust. Several factors determined the ebb and flow of emigration of Jews from Germany. These included the degree of pressure placed on the Jewish community in Germany and the willingness of other countries to admit Jewish immigrants. However, in the face of increasing legal repression and physical violence, many Jews fled Germany. Until October 1941, German policy officially encouraged Jewish emigration. Gradually, however, the Nazis sought to deprive Jews fleeing Germany of their property by levying an increasingly heavy emigration tax and by restricting the amount of money that could be transferred abroad from German banks.

"By September 1939, approximately 282,000 Jews had left Germany and 117,000 from annexed Austria. Of these, some 95,000 emigrated to the United States, 60,000 to Palestine, 40,000 to Great Britain, and about 75,000 to Central and South America, with the largest numbers entering Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Bolivia. More than 18,000 Jews from the German Reich were also able to find refuge in Shanghai, in Japanese-occupied China.

"At the end of 1939, about 202,000 Jews remained in Germany and 57,000 in annexed Austria, many of them elderly. By October 1941, when Jewish emigration was officially forbidden, the number of Jews in Germany had declined to 163,000. By the end of the war for all intents and purposes Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe were free of Jews."

[Crafty_Dog]

Hamas Sees Peace as Weakness
It destabilizes the Mideast with terrorism each time Arabs try to normalize relations with Israel.
By Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
Dec. 18, 2023 5:52 pm ET


I was 12 and living in Gaza City on March 27, 2002, when a Hamas suicide bomber from the West Bank blew himself up in a hotel in Netanya, Israel, killing 30 Israelis and injuring 140 others. This attack became known as the Passover Massacre. It was the deadliest incident involving Israeli civilians during the second intifada. I vividly remember the glee with which Hamas leaders, supporters, religious clerics and enthusiasts in Gaza celebrated this horrendous and unprecedented attack.


The attack, which sent shock waves through Israeli society, occurred a day before the unveiling of the Arab Peace Initiative by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at the Arab League Summit in Beirut. The proposal, which Hamas, and initially Israel, rejected, offered the normalization of relations between the Arab world and Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Palestinian and Arab territories to pre-June 1967 borders.

After the Passover Massacre, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, the largest military campaign in Palestinian territories since the 1967 war, which resulted in the current occupation of a large part of the West Bank. The Israeli government also constructed a security barrier, often called the separation wall, along its border with the West Bank, which isolated and effectively annexed some Palestinian towns and villages.

In the 1990s and during the second intifada, Hamas’s attacks put the Palestinian Authority in a difficult position. The Oslo Accords gave it a monopoly on the use of violence, especially to prevent terrorist attacks. Hamas’s attacks undermined the Palestinian Authority and prolonged the conflict, preventing the establishment of a secular Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. The massacre overshadowed the fragile peace initiative and provided extremist Israeli political parties an opportunity to sideline the peace process and expand Israel’s West Bank settlements.

Hamas had accomplished its goal of sabotaging nonviolent political solutions to the conflict. Additionally, the group’s propaganda, which I experienced firsthand in Gaza, glorified its terrorism and demonized the word “peace,” claiming it was equivalent to betrayal, weakness, surrender and the embrace of Jews. It also focused on Islamizing Palestinian society, which had historically been secular.

I remember signing up for a summer camp in 2002, thinking it would be full of fun recreational activities. Though I hadn’t realized it, this camp was organized by Hamas propagandists who proselytized the virtues of armed resistance and being a good Muslim. I told my mom that I wouldn’t be attending the rest of the boring weeklong camp. Even as a child I saw through its cheap propaganda.

Through its indoctrination and Islamization of Gaza’s youth, Hamas was breeding future generations of radicalized Palestinians. I remember the “protests” that Hamas regularly organized: They took students out of class, bused them to border checkpoints and Israeli military positions, and had them throw stones at soldiers. These field trips would often end up with young Palestinian children being maimed by Israel Defense Forces fire. Hamas wanted scenes of dead Palestinians for its recruitment efforts and propaganda and to undermine the Palestinian Authority-led peace process.

The second intifada was an opportunity for Hamas to sow chaos. The group used Gazans as tools to undermine any political resolution of the conflict in pursuit of an unrealistic, maximalist goal to liberate all of Palestine and somehow expel all Jews from the region.

More than two decades after the Passover Massacre, Hamas launched an even deadlier attack on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and provoking an Israeli counterattack that has thus far killed over 19,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Hamas planned this attack to derail another pending political evolution: Saudi Arabia’s normalization of relations with Israel, which would have legitimized broader peace initiatives with Arab states.

The slaughter on Oct. 7 was meant to destabilize the region and fulfill the destructive aspirations of Hamas and its backers. The group counted on an overwhelmingly violent Israeli reaction to reinvigorate the spirit of resistance born out of Palestinian suffering. Hamas sought to hide its failures and inability to produce any progress in Gaza behind this brutal attack. Hamas counted on international sympathy for the unbearable civilian casualties—including dozens of my own family members—resulting from the Israeli offensive. Hamas bet that these deaths would shield it from criticism.

Many Palestinians and their allies, particularly outside Gaza, aren’t willing to condemn Hamas and acknowledge its undeniable role in the suffering of Gazans. Hamas has been a disaster to Palestinian aspirations for freedom and self-determination. It must be ruthlessly criticized and rejected, especially because it is serving the goals and interests of anti-peace Israeli factions.

How can Hamas claim to be a resistance group seeking the liberation of Palestinians when its Passover Massacre resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and its Oct. 7 attack will result in the full destruction and reoccupation of the Gaza Strip?

Weakening Hamas begins with normalizing criticisms of its ideology, its violent agenda and its subjugation of the Palestinian people.

Mr. Alkhatib is a nonprofit administrator and a writer on Middle East issues based in the San Francisco Bay Area

[Crafty_Dog]

third

Jerusalem

Travel is educational, and a week in Israel taught me two things. First, the conventional Beltway wisdom about Israeli politics is deeply flawed. Second, the gap between the Biden administration and Israel on the Palestinian question may be more manageable than most observers understand.

In Washington, almost every conversation about Israeli politics starts with two big ideas: that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a dead man walking, and that his fall from power will bring someone more amenable to two-state negotiations with the Palestinians.

Israelis scoff at both notions. Even Mr. Netanyahu’s harshest domestic critics aren’t sure that his career is over. The Oct. 7 attacks wounded him badly, but he’s pulled enough rabbits out of enough hats over the years that few are ready to write him off. The common view seems to be that Mr. Netanyahu, like Westley in “The Princess Bride,” is only “mostly dead,” and that his government has at least six to 12 months to run.

As to the policies of his potential successors, there is no pro-“peace process” movement in Israeli politics today. With the Oct. 7 attacks still reverberating, no serious Israeli politician would dream of running on a platform of facilitating the emergence of a Palestinian state.

That said, the Beltway chatter about “the day after” in Gaza and the future of the Palestinians overstates the difference between the Israeli and American positions. There is a narrow path for progress here.

There is consensus in Israel not only that Hamas lacks the will (and the human decency) to be an interlocutor for a future Palestinian state, but also that the terminally corrupt and exhausted Fatah movement now in power in the West Bank is too ineffective and unpopular to survive the hard compromises that peace would require. The Fatah leadership would be too vulnerable to being overthrown by more-radical Palestinian movements for Israelis to trust it as a security partner. The chance of Israelis seriously engaging with an unreformed Palestinian movement on the old Oslo peace agenda is zero. On this point, Mr. Netanyahu and his rivals agree.

But what if there was a deep reform in Palestinian governance? What if, with significant financial and political support from the Gulf Arabs, a new generation of pragmatic Palestinian leaders bent on stability and economic development replaced the tired old guard and rejected the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in favor of more-effective institutions, stopped financial payments to the families of terrorists in Israeli prisons, and introduced real educational reforms to stop radicalizing young Palestinians?


Neither Saudi Arabia nor the United Arab Emirates has experience with or interest in building democracy. But both have been successful at addressing extremism and improving governance. There are pragmatic Palestinians all over the world who have turned their backs on the hollow radicalism and stale rhetoric of official Palestinian politics and become successful in business and other fields. Bringing these parties together with like-minded Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza could start a new era of better Palestinian governance and pragmatism toward Israel.

If that happened, over time Israelis could come to trust Palestinians again. Peace with a weak and unstable entity like the Palestinian Authority in its current form is impossible. Peace with a time-tested, stable and competent Palestinian Authority backed by the Gulf Arabs would be another proposition.

The Gulf Arabs badly want new and better Palestinian leadership to emerge. That is partially because they want regional stability and partially because they genuinely want a better future for the Palestinians. The Biden administration could launch a process of political reconstruction among Palestinians by helping the Gulf Arabs, the Israelis and a mix of new and old Palestinian leaders develop an interim program for the rehabilitation of Gaza, serious change on the West Bank, and a growing role for a reformed Palestinian Authority.

The negotiations wouldn’t be easy, and like many other hopeful initiatives in the history of this tragic conflict, this attempt could fail. But the opportunity is real. Israel needs American support and would like to deepen its relations with Arab neighbors. Team Biden wants stability and a foreign-policy success. Palestinian politics have reached a dead end both in the West Bank and Gaza. The Gulf Arabs want détente in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to block Iran’s effort to legitimate its regional ambitions by appearing as the chief supporter of the Palestinian movement.

The old Oslo peace process is dead, but President Biden has a chance to initiate a new kind of peace process that could at long last lay the foundation of a peaceful future for both peoples.

[DougMacG]

Who knew the inspiration for world peace would come from the movie Princess Bride? 

Seriously he identifies the first and only path to world peace with a simple what if.

What if we quit radicalizing our youth as well?

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20240/palestinians-inconvenient-truths

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.timesofisrael.com/if-the-generals-are-counting-tunnels-it-suggests-things-are-not-going-well/?fbclid=IwAR0xe7ZxJE1Lqi9qcavp5aJJQZnsdP_I_KFUA3bItvVo4-n0y0U-w72LoWs

[ccp]

 This author's head is up his ass.  We have been hearing endless criticism coming from WH, media , SOS,
DOD etc.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/opinion-us-should-rethink-its-uncritical-loyalty-to-israel/ar-AA1m3mnf?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=b125d504ef6f4a5889f25cf8cb253656&ei=22

of course, speaking of the author:

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2023/05/05/central-commands-top-spokesman-under-inspector-general-investigation/

[Crafty_Dog]

Why Hamas Won’t Release Hostages
As pressure builds on Israel, the terror group now thinks it can win.
By
The Editorial Board
Follow
Dec. 27, 2023 6:42 pm ET


Deal or no deal? In the early days of Israel’s counteroffensive against Hamas, the terrorist group begged for a breather. It released 105 hostages for a seven-day pause and some low-level prisoners. But Hamas has since turned down two offers for a pause in the fighting, each one more generous than the last. What changed?

After the terrorist group brushed aside an Egyptian proposal over Christmas weekend, Hamas Politburo member Izzat al Rishq explained, “There can be no negotiations without a complete stop to the aggression”—an end to the war. On Dec. 20, in rejecting an Israeli offer, Politburo member Ghazi Hamad said Hamas is no longer interested in “a pause here and there, for one week, two weeks, three weeks,” even though Israel was ready to release senior Hamas terrorists as well.

A sobering explanation is offered by Meir Ben Shabbat, Israel’s national security adviser from 2017 to 2021. He writes that Hamas now “feels confident enough” to reject any deal that doesn’t deliver it victory outright. That confidence may be misguided, but it isn’t unfounded.

“While the conditions under which our forces operate are more difficult than in the past,” Mr. Ben Shabbat explains, “for Hamas fighters, things have improved.” Under Biden Administration pressure, Israel is now using less firepower to prepare its advances on the ground. This leaves more opportunities for Hamas to ambush Israeli soldiers.

In between hit-and-run attacks, the terrorists hide in well-stocked tunnels. “Hamas gets to have de facto control over most of the aid entering the strip,” Mr. Ben Shabbat writes. Again under Biden Administration pressure, Israel has allowed an increase in the flow of fuel to Gaza, which Hamas needs to stay underground.

Three political trends may also encourage Hamas. One is a growing campaign by Israeli journalists to free the hostages at any cost, even leaving Hamas in power. The accidental killing of three hostages dealt a political blow to the belief that Israel’s war effort will bring its people home.

Second, U.S. behavior reveals an overriding desire to de-escalate the larger fight with Iran’s proxies. Attacks by Yemen’s Houthis go unanswered. Iraqi militias get away with hitting U.S. bases. While Hezbollah’s daily barrage has displaced about 100,000 Israelis from their homes, Washington urges Jerusalem to keep its response to a minimum.

Third, while the White House supports the Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza, its focus is now on scaling it back. Reports emerge almost daily of senior U.S. officials urging Israel to “transition to the next phase of operations”—low-intensity fighting with raids from the border. Israel says it needs more time to flush out Hamas, but rising military casualties take a toll.

This is Hamas’s path to survival and victory: a premature shift of Israel’s war effort to meet Mr. Biden’s political timetable. Why give up your hostage bargaining chips if you need only hold out for another few weeks?

The flaw in this Hamas analysis may be that it assumes Israel will follow Mr. Biden’s advice all the way to defeat. After Oct. 7, don’t count on it. Israeli troops are still advancing, expanding operations in some areas and focusing them in others. Israel has no choice but to press on until it destroys Hamas.