COMMENTARY / OPINION
Israel’s War on Hamas is the Least Deadly War in the Region by Daniel Greenfield
February 4, 2024 at 4:30 am
- The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis in WWII did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the American Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths, and neither is any other.
- A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war: only one of the two sides was engaged in a total war of extermination.
- On October 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.
- Morality is defined by intent, not statistics.
The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II”.
The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”
That’s all the more impressive since, even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children) as the media does, this is still probably one of the least violent conflicts in the region.
Mengele’s final murder? The mysterious death of an Israeli Nazi hunter in Argentina By Itai Amikam
02-02-2024 14:08 – In March 1961, the body of a woman was found in a forest near the picturesque town of Bariloche in Argentina. Her name was Nurit Eldad, a 59-year-old Israeli who had joined a group of young Jewish hikers on a trip. More than 60 years later, the mystery still surrounds the circumstances of her death: Was it an accident, as the authorities claimed, or was she on a covert mission to track down the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele? New information has recently transpired.
4:31 PM · Feb 3, 2024 – A few other things you probably don’t know: illegals in America can get bank loans, mortgages, insurance, driver’s licenses, free healthcare (California & New York) and in-state college tuition.
What’s the point of being a citizen if an illegal gets all the benefits, but doesn’t pay taxes or do jury duty?
US conduct in Gaza war ‘would be completely different’ under Trump, Ben-Gvir tells WSJ [4:05]
Minister Benny Gantz calls Ben-Gvir’s interview “a direct attack on Israel’s international status” and urges Netanyahu “to restrain him.”
02-04-2024 10:54 – National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir gave his first foreign media interview since the governing coalition came together in late 2022, during which he made contentious remarks on the war in Gaza and US support.
The backdrop of the interview was a ceasefire and hostage return deal, following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in which over 1,200 Israelis died and over 240 were abducted back to Gaza, but Ben-Gvir thinks the negotiations put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “at a crossroads.”
Allies and Arab countries involved in the negotiations want to end the war that erupted after Oct. 7, with some pushing the creation of a Palestinian state as a solution to the multifaceted crisis. Ben-Gvir, on the other hand, suggested repopulating Gaza with Israeli settlements and said Netanyahu “has to choose in what direction he’ll go.”
The far-right minister, who gained popularity in Israel since the Oct. 7 attack, repeatedly voiced opposition to ending the war before Hamas was fully defeated and incapable of carrying out such massacres again, as well as being against freeing thousands of Palestinians imprisoned for terrorism in exchange for the return of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.
Instead, Ben-Gvir suggested a plan to “encourage Gazans to voluntarily emigrate to places around the world” by offering cash incentives, which would be “the real humanitarian” option, based on his own discussions with Palestinians in the West Bank and “intelligence material.”
He also expressed rare public criticism of a sitting US president, “Instead of giving us his full backing, Biden is busy with giving humanitarian aid and fuel [to Gaza], which goes to Hamas.”
“If Trump was in power, the US conduct would be completely different,” Ben-Gvir said, referring to the former president Donald Trump who is currently seeking a second term as the Republican frontrunner in the 2024 elections.
Israel’s crippling dependence By Gidon Ben-Zvi
Instead of destroying the terrorist threat faced by over nine million Israeli citizens, and freeing the hostages, Israel’s strategy now is to fight a limited war until Washington, Doha, Cairo, and Hamas iron out a final ceasefire agreement that will end the latest round of violence and prevent it from spreading across the region.
02-02-2024 09:01 – How addicted is Jerusalem to Washington’s military aid? Israel’s planned preemptive strike against Hezbollah on October 11 was narrowly averted after President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand down, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
While Netanyahu dismissed this claim, members of his own Likud party are increasingly speaking out against what appears to be the outsourcing of Israel’s security to wider US geopolitical interests. Economy Minister Nir Barkat stated in a recent cabinet meeting that “The number of air force bombardments has fallen dramatically. Soldiers are being sent to booby-trapped buildings like [sitting] ducks.”
Netanyahu’s reaction to Barkat’s accusation is revealing: “There are countries [whose positions] we have to take into account. If we don’t do that, eventually there’ll be a UN decision to impose a blockade on us. The whole world will be against us.”
The United States rapidly supplied Israel with over 3,000 tons of weapons and munitions in the days following Hamas’s invasion on October 7, when the terrorist organization killed around 1,200 people, and took another 240 hostages into Gaza.
But this assistance has come with serious strings attached. Barkat’s statement was in response to the fact that since the weeklong ceasefire with Hamas ended on November 30, there has been a noticeable drop in the amount and scope of Israeli Air Force strikes in southern Gaza.
Instead of destroying the terrorist threat faced by over nine million Israeli citizens, and freeing the hostages, Israel’s strategy now is to fight a limited war until Washington, Doha, Cairo, and Hamas iron out a final ceasefire agreement that will end the latest round of violence and prevent it from spreading across the region.
This shift in Israeli operational tactics came mere days after Biden had warned that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza. Washington continues to regard a two-state solution as “the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people.” Israel’s sustained military response to Hamas is viewed by the Biden Administration as an obstacle to this proposed framework becoming a reality.
But Washington’s push for a two-state solution is in open contradiction to Jerusalem’s post-war plans. While Netanyahu insists that Israel would permit neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority to rule Gaza, the Biden Administration continues to bank on the PA as a viable alternative to Hamas rule. This is even though the Palestinian Authority has little support from either West Bank Palestinians or Gazans. Since the October 7 massacre, Hamas’s popularity among people ruled by the PA in the West Bank has soared.
Dennis Ross is blaming Israel again By Moshe Phillips
This former US State Department official is treated as if his past involvement in Mideast diplomacy makes him an expert on how to make peace today.
02-04-2024 08:23 – Former US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross just can’t stop blaming Israel.
Speaking via Zoom for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy on Jan. 31, Ross offered some expected, perfunctory criticism of Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah. But again and again, he managed to bring in one-sided and unfair criticism of Israel.
Referring to Israel’s counter-terrorism actions in Judea and Samaria, Ross said: “West Bank violence [by Arabs] is not disconnected from Israel’s policies in the West Bank.”
That’s just absurd. The terrorists are not responding to Israeli policies. They were murdering Jews long before there were any settlements or so-called occupied territories. They oppose Israel’s existence, not its borders. It’s these terrorists who are the aggressors, and Israelis must respond to them.
Regarding Gaza, Ross said: “The Israelis haven’t done everything they could to spare civilians in Gaza.” Is he kidding? The Israelis have refrained from striking terrorist targets where there are civilians. They have personally warned civilians to evacuate, again and again, through leaflets and phone calls and public announcements. They have risked the lives of their own soldiers by going house to house, instead of just bombing from the air. What else can they possibly do?
Ross also commented on the recent ruling by the International Court of Justice – the ruling that failed to condemn Hamas and demanded that Israel give more aid to Palestinians in Gaza. He said the ruling was “not irresponsible” and that it was provoked by “extreme statements by Israeli politicians.” That’s simply nonsense. The statement that the court cited most prominently was made by Israel’s left-leaning president, Isaac Herzog, who said that many ordinary Gazans supported the Hamas massacre, which was a perfectly reasonable statement of fact.
The practice of saying a few perfunctory crucial words about terrorists and then “balancing” it with criticism of Israel is typical of the grotesque “even-handedness” that Ross and his colleagues pushed during his many years at the US State Department.
That approach was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. There can be no “balance” between good and evil. Israel and the Palestinian Authority are not on the same moral level. Israel is America’s loyal, reliable, democratic ally. The PA is a terror-sponsoring, hate-mongering dictatorship.
Pity the Palestinian Arabs? Gimme a break! Barry Shaw
Gaza is a potential paradise that Gazans turned into a deadly terrorist hell. And now they find themselves suffering the results of their own deeds. Op-ed
Feb 3, 2024, 6:54 PM (GMT+2) – Here is my horrible un-Progressive thought of the day for those who continue to champion the Palestinian Arab cause, and those who accuse Israel of being cruel to poor suffering Palestinians:
-If they are suffering, it is because they chose the wrong leaders and the wrong direction.
-If they are suffering, it is because not one said or did anything to protest while they helped these leaders prepare for the invasion of Israel.
And all that is born out of their medieval attitude to Jews, their primitive envy of Jews who advance as individuals and as a society while they remain rooted in poverty and envy.
Poverty of thought. Poverty of positive personal advancement in education and individual skills.
Poverty of morality and humanity.
Instead, they constantly lapse into envy, resentment and violence, taking out their feeble condition on the Jew, not themselves, not their life forming bad decisions, not their poor choice of leadership.
This has been the fate of the Jew for centuries. Suffering the rage of their raging, impotent, neighbors.
Why should this age be any different?
The cry “Palestine will be free” demands of them to question why they refuse to turn the areas they govern into the prosperous paradise it could have been with the multi billion dollars that’s been pumped into their miserable societies for decades?
Gaza is a perfect example of the point I am making.
A potential paradise. Now a deadly hell.
All you Palestinian Gazans could have been living prosperous middle class lives today. (IDF soldiers in Khan Yunis and Gaza City were surprised to reveal that many of the homes there are spacious and well furnished, that even in “refugee” camps, the homes are presentable. They were built by using donated funds – and instead of developing industry, farming and exports with the rest so as to become an independently successful country, they invested in terror tunnels.)
Gaza could have been an agricultural and tourism paradise. But you screwed up big time with your hatred of us and envy of what we are achieving with our constructive advanced lives.
My anger comes not only from 7 October and what these Palestinians did to us, but from the news I received that the parents of 19 year-old, Adir Tahar, who just buried their son for a second time.
The first time, his body was returned from Gaza by our IDF who found it, but without his head.
Then, weeks later, another unit of our army found Adir’s head in a freezer in an ice cream parlor in Gaza where the Palestinian Arab owner had been trying to sell it for $10,000.
That’s Palestinian enterprise for you, 2024 style.
Why do so many young Americans hate Israel? Jeff Dunetz
Too many young people choose to base their views on misleading Instagram photos, biased college professors, and radical ideologies that falsely paint Israel as a “white supremacist” state. it is not the first time. Op-ed.
Feb 3, 2024, 11:15 PM (GMT+2) – Young Americans are turning against Israel, and that’s Israel’s fault, says New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. Is he right?
In a significant January 27 op-ed, Klein pointed to a recent poll showing only 27% of Americans aged 18 to 29—known as “Gen Z”—are more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinian Arabs, as compared to 63% of Americans who are 65 or older. According to Klein, that’s because of the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since young Americans “know only Netanyahu’s Israel.”
Does that mean all Gen Zers were pro-Israel when the left-of-center Yair Lapid was prime minister fourteen months ago? Hardly.
The real reason for hostility toward Israel among that age bracket is their ignorance of the history and facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not the specific policies of a particular prime minister. Israel is not to blame if many young people choose to base their views on misleading Instagram photos, biased college professors, and radical ideologies that falsely paint Israel as a “white supremacist” state.
[Ed.: It’s not only that age bracket – Americans of all age brackets that hate Israel is also ignorance.]
American Military Expert John Spencer on the IDF BY HUGH FITZGERALD
FEB 2, 2024 2:00 PM – We have often heard from British Colonel Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, who has explained in detail why he considers the IDF to be “the most moral army in the world.” Now John Spencer, an American military expert who teaches at West Point, recently posted on X (formerly Twitter) his own observations on the IDF in Gaza that offer further support for Colonel Kemp’s conclusion. His remarks deserve wide dissemination. More on John Spencer’s observations can be found here: “Israel minimizes civilian casualties more than anyone in history – expert,” [Emphasis added] Jerusalem Post, January 30, 2024:
“Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza than any other known army in the world has, John Spencer, who is both chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and a retired US military officer, argued in an extensive thread posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday.
In the thread, Spencer provided multiple examples of precautions that the IDF takes that he argued other armies do not, at least not to the same extent, or even at all. One of the most well-recognized instances of this that he mentioned is the way in which the IDF implements various methods of warning before commencing with an assault against Hamas.
He referred to this in his numerous replies to commentators on his thread. “In some cases, the IDF will call, text, and drop small munitions on the roof of a building,” [the “knock-on-the-roof technique] he explained.
He even addressed some measures that the IDF took at the cost of its tactical advantage to save lives. The army will “provide [a] warning and evacuate urban areas/cities before the full combined air and ground attack begins. While the tactic does alert the enemy defender and provide them the military advantage to prepare further, it is one of the best ways to prevent civilian casualties,” he said.
The thread addresses common criticisms of the IDF’s methodology
Spencer then wrote about the unique complexities of warfare in the Gaza Strip, saying, “No military in modern history has faced 30,000 defenders embedded in more than seven cities, using human shields and hundreds of miles of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites while holding hundreds of hostages and launching over 12,000 rockets at the attacking military’s civilians’ areas.”…
Spencer concluded his post with the following statement: “Again, Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in the history of war. While some have argued Israel could have waited longer, used different munitions, or not conducted the war at all – [they] all [failed] to acknowledge the context of Israel’s war… [they are overlooking] the hostages, rockets, tunnels, existential threat of Hamas, and more.”…
British Colonel Kemp has been studying the IDF’s performance for years, and has been in Israel, and Gaza, since just after October 7. He reiterates, based on this recent experience, his previous conclusion that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.”
Now the American John Spencer, a former military officer and now the chair of the department for the study of urban warfare at the Modern War Institute at West Point, explains that “Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in the history of war.” Who should we believe better comprehends the IDF’s remarkable performance in Gaza — Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders, and Antonio Guterres, or Colonel Richard Kemp and Professor John Spencer?
Did Iranian Agent Serving as Pentagon Chief of Staff Cause Death of 3 Soldiers? by Daniel Greenfield
How were terrorists able to perfectly time their drone attack without inside information?
February 2, 2024 – In September 2023, Pentagon Chief of Staff Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian immigrant, was accused of having worked as an agent of the Tehran regime. Dissident media outlets produced emails that allegedly showed that Tabatabai had joined an initiative by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to coordinate operations and that she had even run her congressional testimony on Iran’s nuclear program past the head of an Iranian Foreign Ministry think tank.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center and Front Page Magazine had been among those to take the lead in warning about the potential danger posed by her and enemy agents in the Pentagon.
Tabatabai had served under Robert Malley, Biden’s Iran Envoy, who had been suspended from the Obama campaign for his backchannel contacts with Hamas, and has been under investigation for mishandling classified documents. But the emails appeared to show that she had personally worked for Iran and its influence operations aimed at the U.S. government.
Despite that she continued to be promoted until she is now the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC).
In January 2024, Iranian-backed terrorists launched their most successful single attack against an American base to date. The target was the living quarters where U.S military personnel were stationed on an obscure support base in the Jordanian desert known as Tower 22.
While the drone attack would normally have been intercepted, the Iranian-backed terrorists had precisely timed the arrival of their drone to match that of an American drone returning home.
In the confusion, the Islamic terrorist drone was not intercepted and 3 American military personnel were killed and over 30 more were wounded. And it could have been worse.
[Ed.: Diversity and inclusion includes putting our enemies in charge of our military now-a-days...]
The Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started By Paul Schnee
February 1, 2024 – I wish I could say that I’m surprised by the content of this article.
It is clear that Israel is in a fight for her very existence of which the war in Gaza is just a part. She stands alone. No other power is going to send its troops to help her overwhelm a determined enemy even if its apocalyptic ideology really threatens us all. The Biden government, if it can be called that, does not even have the political will to maintain law and order in America’s cities or repel a massive invasion of illegal aliens.
This chilling and sinking realization must compel Israel to kill and crush the enemy without compunction and destroy its military as a fighting force. Left undone, life in Israel will not be worth living and the rest of us will be left wondering where and when the terrorists will strike at us. Any agreements with them are worth less than the paper upon which they are written.
The Iranian regime from whence a cascading fountain of unending lethal aggression flows must be removed from power if an enduring peace is ever to be established. This must be accomplished BEFORE the grisly ayatollahs get their blood-drenched hands on a nuclear weapon. Once done, this will derange all the calculations of every terrorist organization they finance and control as well as their calcified belief that they are in possession of a celestial warrant to terrorize, subjugate and kill the rest of us simply because we do not subscribe to the preposterous tenets of Islam with all of its ferocious hatreds as convincingly demonstrated on October 7th.
Matti Friedman: What If the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started? By Matti Friedman,
Take the current war with Hamas and multiply it by ten. That’s what war with Hezbollah would look like. And Israelis are not asking if it will begin, but when.
January 28, 2024 – SHLOMI, Israel — The undercurrents of Israeli life at this moment are darker than I’ve ever seen them: the daily photos of smiling young people, taken at some happy moment before their deaths in combat; glimpses of Israeli girls buried alive in Palestinian tunnels, a short drive from our border and utterly out of reach; a geriatric Israeli leadership uninspiring at best, deceitful at worst; devastation in Gaza; a wall of hate in the Middle East and in growing parts of the West.
But a central part of the dread in Israel is the possibility that the real war hasn’t even started.
Since October 7, most eyes have been on Israel’s south, but as the prophecy from the Book of Jeremiah reads, “the evil will come from the north.” The north means Lebanon, a beautiful, tragic shell of a country under the sway of Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” a fanatic Shia army funded and trained by Iran. This is the northern link of the Iranian encirclement of Israel, a strategy that often escapes Western news consumers accustomed to the fiction that the conflict here is “Israeli-Palestinian.”
When I spoke to one veteran military observer of the northern front, he used the term 10X—by which he meant that to imagine an all-out war with Hezbollah, take the current war with Hamas and multiply it by ten.
The Hezbollah strike force, known as Radwan, is bigger, better trained, and better equipped than the Hamas equivalent, the Nukhba, which was responsible for the carnage of October 7. If the Palestinians have fired 9,000 rockets since the beginning of the war, Hezbollah is thought to have an arsenal of 140,000—not including drones and mortars—with all of Israel in range. The army expects more than 4,000 launches a day, a scale Israeli civilians have never experienced. While this is going on, much of Lebanon will be laid waste by our air force and artillery. “If people truly understood what the war with Hezbollah will mean,” one officer told me this week, “everyone would be doing every possible thing in their power to find a diplomatic solution.”
Hezbollah has already lost more than 170 men in cross-border fighting since October 7, compared to 15 fatalities on the Israeli side. But what Hezbollah has already achieved, even without a full-scale war, becomes clear if you drive up to the border.
There’s more, much more, go, read the whole thing…..
It’s Biden who’s playing politics with the Gaza war, not Bibi Jonathan S. Tobin
Netanyahu is trying to defeat Hamas. The administration’s efforts—and its fictional “doctrine”—seek to depose the Israeli prime minister and re-elect the president.
(February 2, 2024 / JNS) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a master political schemer and a cynical seeker of power is so deeply embedded in the public consciousness that there is literally nothing he can do without being accused of acting only to seek some sort of advantage over his opponents. Yet in the current crisis as he seeks to lead his wobbly unity government to achieve what may well be two mutually exclusive objectives—the elimination of Hamas and the freeing of the remaining hostages still being kept captive in Gaza—while being besieged by criticism at home and abroad, it may be that Netanyahu is not the one who is really playing politics.
While no one should ever underestimate the prime minister’s capacity for maneuvering even at a time when, after the Oct. 7 disaster, the end of his career would seem to be in sight, it’s not he who is cynically using the hostage negotiations or the talk about what would follow the end of the war in Gaza to score political points. Whatever one may think of Netanyahu’s character or policies, or whether he should be forced out of office because of the catastrophe that occurred on his watch, the person who is playing politics with the security of Israel and the fate of its citizens is President Joe Biden.
[Ed.: With friends like the US, who needs enemies?
US’ Middle East policy defied by Middle East reality Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger
February 2, 2024 – *For the last 45 years, the US has attempted to pacify the anti-US Iran’s Ayatollahs, via dramatic financial and diplomatic gestures, to advance the cause of human rights and democracy in Iran, and to promote peaceful coexistence between Iran and its Sunni Arab neighbors. In fact, the 45-year-old US diplomatic option toward the Ayatollahs, has downplayed the centrality of the Ayatollahs’ ideology and their track record, assuming that “money talks.” The US expected that dramatic financial and diplomatic gestures would induce the Ayatollahs to abandon their 1,400-year-old fanatical vision and become a constructive member of the global community.
However, as expected, Iran’s Ayatollahs would not allow financial and diplomatic temptations to transcend their imperialistic violent ideology. Moreover, they have leveraged the lavish US gestures, intensifying domestic oppression and persecution, and boosting their determination to humiliate and defeat “the Great American Satan,” expanding anti-US global terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced weaponry, increasingly in Latin America from Chile’ to the US-Mexico border.
Furthermore, the US’ eagerness to conclude another agreement with the anti-US Iran, the courting of the anti-US Moslem Brotherhood (the largest Sunni terror organization), and delisting the anti-US Houthis from the terror list, while pressuring the pro-US Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, has pushed these countries closer to China and Russia, militarily and commercially.
