Anything Goes Since Winning Is Foreign!

Apparently Hamas is beginnng to realize they are in deep doo doo! To date, Hamas has failed to accomplish much by way of effective international pressure.

A few miscreant led rallies, the usual bashing from certain U.N.nations but nothing has actually deterred Israel from again doing the world a favor and even Gazan Palestinians - though that is a difficult sell.

Even, as I wrote earlier, the press, which Israel pretty much excluded from the battle area, has been somewhat more balanced and objective.

Though it remains premature to assume a cease fire with teeth will be worked out the terms of the one being seriously discussed has some possibility of being enacted.

What is most interesting is that Hezballah, Iran's proxy terrorist organization that egged Hamas on, has to date turned out to be a 'you be lets' crowd and perhaps, as reported earlier, Iran really comes out the winner because they were able to take the spotlight off themselves for a while but at the cost of another of Iran's surrogates, Hamas, getting bloodied and hammered.

Only in the Middle East do losers claim to be victorious and no doubt Hamas will do so pointing to their ability to continue rocketing Israel.

Even today, Egypt celebrates their brief incursion into Israel during the Yom Kippur War as a national holiday, ignoring their eventual wipe out and loss of their entire air force. I guess Arabs have little to celebrate in terms of recent history so they seemingly opt for an 'anything goes' approach since winning is beyond their grasp.

Since Arabs consistently lose on the ground all that seems left for them is to win the hearts and minds of those they dupe through propaganda and there the opportunities remain fertile. However, this has not worked as well this time. Though, Hamas might choose to fold its hand for the time being, they will regroup and re-arm because, lamentably we have learned from experience even radiated cancers can eventually metastasize.

Perhaps one day the world will become fed up with tolerating organized Islamic terrorism and will eliminate this scourge but I doubt we have reached that stage so 'hudnas' seem to be the option du jour! (See 1 below.)

Conversely, Herb Keinon sees press, media and world public mood beginning to turn negative towards Israel.

What's new Herb? Negativism towards Israel will always be there because the zanies take to the street and the more rational and objective have better things to do and remain silent. That is and always will be human nature. How many times have I ever participated in a counter march? - very seldom. (See 1a below.)

Israel announces partial accommodation. (See 2 below.)

A nurse looks in to the incoming administration's bed pan and is concerned. (See 3 below.)

Marc Sheppard is correct in his linking analysis but I do not draw the same conclusion. Anti-semitism always is there lurking beneath the skin of the body politic and it does take an event to cause an eruption but the eruptions are beginning to get tiresome, come from the same sources, and though viral and dangerous, their hypocrisy is also beginning to sink in and boomerang. (See 4 below.)

Lets hear it from 'Honest Reporting." Ever vigilant, Honest Reporting continues to make inroads in challenging the media and press's veracity by issuing a primer on the war for any who wish to view it through more objective lens. (See 5 and 5a below.)

Daniel Pipes proposes a 'back to the future' solution but it too will not fly because Arab states have proven time and again they do not want Palestinians living amongst them. They tend to cause problems and foment civil unrest. Jordan's former king wiped out a large number of Palestinians many years ago in a week long massacre. Though Palestinians currently comprise a large part of Jordan's population their activities are constantly watched and monitored.

Mubarak fears, and probably justifiably so, a large influx of Palestinians would strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood terrorists already residing in his nation and it was born there.

Israelis can be moved forcibly, as they were ,from Gaza but the idea of imposing something comparable upon Palestinians is unthinkable - again double standards prevent solutions. Neighboring Arabs don't give a fig about their so called Palestinian brothers and never have. Even Hamas uses their own as shields. (See 6 below.)

Anne Applebaum writes about pointless peace proposals because diplomats are missing the point. She writes Hamas is delusional because they believe they can rocket Israel out of existence and Israel believes their only recourse is a state of war response. Quiet behind the scene diplomacy is the more effective route in her view as opposed to front page calls for meaningless cease fires. (See 7 below.)

You decide what you think about these four articles.

As for myself, I believe Finkelstein is wrong in that Israel does not ask or need to be defended. The world needs to defend itself against terrorism per Netanyahu's comments. But, even Netanyahu might as well be talking to 'The Wall' because the world is tired of wars and Israel is not Britain. Israel is deemed a nation formed to assuage the world's guilt and is a runt whereas, Britain is one of the world's former great powers. As for Freedland he writes for The Guardian so I rest my case. (See 8, 8a, 8b and 8c below.)

Dick

1)US, Egypt, Jordan, Germany and Israel are working together on Gaza ceasefire package


Washington sources disclose that Washington, Cairo, Amman and Jerusalem are hammering out the lines of a ceasefire deal that will be contingent on the state of combat in the Gaza Strip. Jerusalem accepts the proposition that the ceasefire lines will follow the lines of combat reached in the Gaza Strip in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Egyptian and Jordanian forces will then enter the Gaza Strip.

Prime minister Ehud Olmert told visiting European Union ministers Monday, Jan. 5, that diplomacy is in progress to find an "international blanket for damping down the blaze in Gaza." He did not elaborate, but, according to our sources in Washington, he was referring to Egypt as the prime mover in a ceasefire solution – not the US.

Alongside the overt diplomatic drive for a ceasefire, Washington is quietly moving ahead on a package in conjunction with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt – which is managing the Hamas track – and German chancellor Angela Merkel. Israel will hold the lines established on the day the ceasefire went into effect for a two-three month trial period. Egyptian and Jordanian units will remain in the enclave until a pre-set date. An international mechanism will prevent Hamas from rearming.

Egyptian intelligence minister Gen. Omar Suleiman outlined this deal for the Hamas delegation, headed by operations chief, Imad Al Alami, which arrived in Cairo Monday night, after finally agreeing to discuss a truce. It was clear to both sides that he was dictating honorable terms for a Hamas capitulation, as Israeli forces entered the third and most dangerous phase of their Gaza offensive, the entry into Gaza's densely built-up areas.

Tuesday saw heavy Israeli-Hamas street battles in Gaza City after a night of heavy Israeli aerial and naval bombardment. Israel forces engaged Hamas in Khan Younis in the south and hit the southern arms smuggling tunnels of the Philadelphi route and Rafah by air and land.

Hamas attacked the Israeli troops holding the Netzarim belt cutting Gaza City off from the south at Deir al Balakh.

This phase of Israel's Operation Cast Lead follows Phase 1, the heavy aerial bombardment of Hamas military and government infrastructure, and Phase 2, the ground, tank and artillery incursion on Jan. 1, which split the 360-sq km Gaza Strip into three segments.

The outcome of the toughest challenge of the ongoing Phase 3 for flushing out Hamas operatives mingling with urban populations and reducing their rocket-firing capabilities will determine the ceasefire lines for ending the conflict. Meanwhile Hamas was still able to keep up its constant rocket and missile fire by Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 6.

Our diplomatic sources report that the German chancellor's involvement in the US initiative has left French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his 48-hour humanitarian ceasefire proposal more or less standing. In any case, it was rejected by Israel except for his proposal to open a corridor for wounded Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment.

The next UN Security Council meeting on the Gaza crisis is also likely to break up for a second time without accord on a ceasefire resolution.

Sarkozy continues his whirlwind Middle East tour in Damascus and Beirut Tuesday.

1a) 'Shouldn't Israel be ashamed of itself?'
Herb Keinon

Israel's position in the world right now is "not good" and getting worse with each passing day of Operation Cast Lead, a senior official in the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

The official was referring primarily to Europe - not to the position of governments, but rather to overall public mood as reflected in the media and by numerous demonstrations.

For instance, when an Irish radio station interviewed Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor on Saturday, the presenter asked the following question: "Shouldn't Israel be ashamed of itself?"

Palmor's response, that a country does not have to be ashamed of itself for defending itself, is beside the point. What is significant is the tone and tenor of the question, and the mood it reflects.

Ireland, according to foreign ministry officials, is currently one of the European countries most antagonistic to Israel, and a country where the hostility of the press is matched by the tone of the government.

An example of the toxic environment in Ireland is a letter published in the Irish Times on Monday by Irish politician Chris Andrews calling Israel's action state terrorism and calling for the expulsion of Israel's ambassador to Ireland.

According to Foreign Ministry assessments, the mood is similar in Spain, where a hostile press is also reflected in a government line that is extremely critical.

The other European countries that fall into this category are Greece and Cyprus.

The situation is somewhat better in England, where some of the media coverage has been blatantly anti-Israel - like the Guardian - while other media have taken a more balanced approach.

Sources in the Foreign Ministry, who have never shied away from criticizing the BBC coverage in the past, have said that this time the BBC showed an effort at airing Israel's side of the story fairly.

There are also no complaints that Israeli speakers are not getting on the air, or not getting equal air time.

Britain has been the site of some high-profile demonstrations against the operation, including one on Saturday featuring singer Annie Lennox and Bianca Jagger.

According to government officials, the vast majority of the protests abroad, some 80 percent of them, have been organized by Arab or Muslim organizations and are attended mostly by Arabs and Muslims.

As such, their impact on government policy is not that great, although celebrity attendance at these events creates a "buzz" and does set a certain public tone.

One Foreign Ministry official said that the focus of the media attention when covering the operation right now was primarily on the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the civilian casualties.

And as much as Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni may say that there is no humanitarian crisis inside Gaza, when a spokesman of a UN agency gets on the air and says that this claim is absurd, this is given more credibility because the UN spokesman is perceived as an objective observer.

Israel's situation is also becoming more difficult, officials said, because it is viewed as the party that is refusing to accept a cease-fire.

Another problem facing Israel, according to Foreign Ministry sources, is that while the world is being fed dramatic pictures from Gaza, there are few dramatic pictures from Israel, and gaping holes in apartment buildings hit by Grad rockets can't compete with footage from Gaza of crying children splattered in blood.

The assessment in the Foreign Ministry is that the situation facing Israel has become worse over the last week, and is bound to get even worse now that Europe is returning from its Christmas/New Year's break, as foreign journalists flood into Israel to cover the story, and as the news programs return to their regular schedule.

The picture of Israel's situation abroad, however, is not completely bleak.

Ministry officials say that the coverage in France, Germany and Italy is balanced, meaning that the media is allotting sufficient space for Israel to air its case.

And the countries where the public mood is most understanding are in Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Baltic countries.

In general, Foreign Ministry assessments show, there is a great deal of public appreciation in these countries for Israel's right to defend itself.

But even in some of these countries, according to the assessments, the media is beginning to "fall into line" with the Western European media in emphasizing the number of civilian Palestinian casualties and focusing on Palestinian suffering.



2)Israel declares unilateral daily three-hour ceasefire for humanitarian corrid

Military sources report Israel announced Wednesday, Jan. 7 a three-hour daily halt in military operations from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. as a goodwill gesture for the passage of humanitarian aid. Israel will suspend attacks in certain areas – though not the entire territory - to allow people to get supplies. The measure took immediate effect. Ashkelon took 4 rockets as the Israeli pause began.

Hamas' missile fire continued. More food, medicines and fuel supplies entered Gaza from Israel Wednesday.

The Israeli Gaza offensive has cut by half the daily missiles/ rocket level from Gaza by wiping out 60 percent of Hamas' missile stocks, demolishing its production facilities and knocking out of action the Philadelphi smuggling tunnels on the Egyptian border. However, military sources also report Hamas appears to have preserved an unused stock of Iran-made Fajr rockets capable of hitting central Israeli towns, such as Rehovot and Rishon Lezion, 16 km short of Tel Aviv.

And if the Israeli assaults on the Philadelphi border route were to be halted at this point, Hamas could restore part of its supply network within 3-6 weeks.

Tuesday, Jan. 5, Rehovot mayor Shuky Furer assured his town it was out of Hamas' rocket range. Military sources are less confident. Whereas the Homeland Command decided to leave the town out of its emergency planning, intelligence sources do not rule out the possibility that Hamas has kept hidden in one of its bunkers long-range rockets with ranges of 70-75 km, which would put Rehovot and Rishon within their sights and also the nuclear installation at the Negev town of Dimona.

Suspicions of a concealed stock of Iranian-made Fajr-3 - or the more advanced Fajr-5 rockets - was strengthened Monday, when the Hamas military spokesman threatened to target Rehovot, Rishon Lezion and even Tel Aviv. At the same time, the stock cannot be very large and is likely preserved as a "doomsday weapon" against Hamas' total collapse. External go-betweens have cautioned Hamas that firing long-distance weapons would provoke harsher retaliation than the Israeli Air Force has meted out till now.

Hizballah's Hassan Nasrallah tried more than once to bomb Tel Aviv in the 2006 Lebanon War, but every time he set up a launcher, the Israeli air force struck them down. But the Faj-5 rockets he received from Iran did hit the sand dunes of Caesaria north of Tel Aviv, as well as Afula and the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel.

3) Take Two Aspirin and Call Your Congressman in the Morning
By Carol Peracchio

When President-Elect Obama nominated Tom Daschle to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services, he proclaimed the former Senate Majority Leader: "one of America's foremost health care experts." Obama stated Daschle will be the "lead architect" of the administration's health care plan. As a nurse, I am always concerned when the government announces it has plans for our health care, so I decided to investigate Mr. Daschle's ideas. I read his book Critical: What We Can Do about the Health-Care Crisis.


Senator Daschle wrote his book with 2 other experts, Scott S. Greenberger and Jeanne M. Lambrew. According to the flyleaf, Greenberger is a reporter and consultant. Lambrew is a senior fellow. Tom Daschle, of course, is a former US Senator and now a visiting professor and Distinguished Senior Fellow. The back cover of the book has advance praise from 3 senators, a former White House chief of staff, yet another senior fellow, and a professor/dean at a public policy institute.


To paraphrase a famous quote by Sam Rayburn, "They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever emptied a bedpan."


In the introduction, the Senator recounts for us the many attempts by the federal government, beginning with Harry Truman, to guarantee health care to all Americans. Since none of these attempts have succeeded, Daschle diagnoses American health care as "broken." He pins blame on 3 areas:


The complexity of the health-care issue.


The limitations of our political system.


The power of the interest groups.


I realize that most of us skip introductions in non-fiction books, but this list intrigued me. What exactly is the Senator saying?


The complexity of the health care issue. Health care shouldn't be complex. Basically, it's a service. A cardiac surgeon once remarked to me, "Take a look at any hospital parking lot early on a Sunday morning and note how few cars there are. That's all you need to run a hospital. Everything else is just fluff." It's the fluff that's making American health care complex. One never hears about the "complexity in automotive repair", or the "complexity of the hair salon issue." Yet health care is deemed to be so complex that the entire system needs to be scrapped. Who's making it complex? Who's piling on the fluff? Certainly not doctors and nurses. If you answered "The Federal government," you are obviously not a Senator or a senior fellow.


The limitations of our political system. Another throwaway line by a politician that deserves some scrutiny. I'm no public policy expert, but what limitations is Senator Daschle bemoaning? Could it be the fact that once the American people learned what was involved in Hillary Clinton's plan they let Washington know in no uncertain terms what they thought of their "reforms?" The Senator learned his lesson well after that debacle. This time around, he plans on following the example of the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) legislation. Forget those silly details that sunk Hillary Clinton's plan. This time Congress should pass a single page legislation that says, in essence, "Secretary Daschle: Please fix our health care. Signed, Congress." Voila! No more exasperating political limitations! We've all seen how well TARP is working as "foremost financial experts" are playing that hot new game, "Find That Trillion!" I predict if we give Daschle the same carte blanche, we'll soon be singing "Where Have All the Hospitals Gone?"


The power of the interest groups. This one is remarkable, because the first interest group Daschle names are doctors! He also includes hospitals, insurers, drug companies and researchers as those that have "contributed to the failure to solve the health care problem." For 30 years I've watched each of these groups jump through innumerable bureaucratic hoops just to practice their professions, and Tom Daschle dismisses them as "interest groups" that have actually caused the problem.


Senator Daschle devotes the next hundred pages or so to describing how bad health care is in America today and why all government efforts to fix it have failed. He recounts for us the experiences of Americans who have lost their insurance, never had insurance, or had insurance but it really cost a lot. As I read through their stories, it became clear that the crisis in health care today is not the care, it's the financing. (In this instance I agree with the late Senator Moynihan, as recounted on page 111.) There's the fellow who gambled that even though he earned $80,000 per year, he and his wife didn't need insurance because they were young. He lost his bet when he ended up in the cardiac cath lab with the resultant big bills. A man lost his wife to cancer after ten years of treatment; the medical bills nearly wiped out his bank account.


There are many more examples, all of them tragic. Reading through them, however, I have to conclude that Senator Daschle and his fellow experts believe the real crisis is that Americans have to pay for health care.


When did it become the conventional wisdom that paying $800 dollars for a car repair is lamentable but justified, but having a $500 health insurance deductible is highway robbery? That the exchange of money for health care is unfair? I have heard financial planners exhort senior citizens to come to a seminar to discover how they can prevent "losing" all their savings by actually paying for their medical care. So paying for a hospital or nursing home is "losing your money," comparable to being swindled by Bernie Madoff! Adults across the country hire lawyers to help them hide Mom and Dad's assets so their parents can jump on the Medicaid train.


Daschle assigns plenty of blame for the fix we're in. but for some reason never mentions, even in passing, the elephant in the room. Take an informal survey of doctors actively employed in American health care. Ask them what three things need to be "reformed" and I guarantee one of the items listed will be lawyers. Yet as I browsed the index of "Crisis" there is no mention of malpractice reform, tort reform, lawyers or defensive medicine. This glaring omission tells me that the Senator is no "foremost health care expert;" he's simply another politician.


Until Senator Daschle is willing to include the trial lawyers in his list of "interest groups," he will have a very difficult time persuading health care workers that he grasps the big picture of reform. As the future Director of HHS, his ideas, of course, must be examined. But the first half of his book does not inspire confidence.

4) Gaza: Another Jihadist Ploy to Fuel Worldwide Anti-Semitism
By Marc Sheppard

Recent protests against Israel's long overdue response to six months of its cities' continual barraging by Hamas missiles have displayed a far more dangerous anti-Semitic tone than did precursors. In fact, despite the claims from many on the Arab street that the only "real Holocaust" is the one currently unfolding in Gaza, cries of "Death to Israel" are now being punctuated by shouts referring to Nazi death apparatuses of "gas chambers" and "ovens."


A perilous precedent indeed, particularly in a world whose populace, media, and international organizations grow increasingly sympathetic to the largely peer-orchestrated plight of Palestinians.


Once again, duped media toadies have decried the "disproportionate response" of the joint Israeli armed forces while themselves offering blatant disproportion in their coverage of the event. Images such as these, one depicting a "Palestinian medic carr[ying] a child, injured during the Israeli army operation in Gaza, into Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip, Sunday, Jan. 4, 2009," and this WaPo front pager of a "wounded Palestinian child scream[ing] as she arrives at Shifa Hospital after an Israeli air strike in Gaza City" are everywhere. But just try finding a single picture of Israeli children being terrorized by incoming Katyusha, Kassam, and Grad rockets on a daily basis.


Small wonder -- just as did Hezbollah guerrillas in launching their Katyusha missiles from Lebanese civilian homes and apartments in July of 2006, so have Hamas terrorists intentionally provoked Israeli counterstrikes on civilian Gazan targets. And, just as over 2 years ago, the MSM are quick to emphasize the "innocent" casualties of Israel's mischaracterized "disproportionate response." As we reported then, this is a preferred tactic of Islamic terrorists, one taught to PLO leader Yassir Arafat in 1970 by a team of North Vietnamese communists who had earlier discovered the advantages of "manipulating the American and Western media to the point of having a direct impact on the US ability to wage war against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong."


Israel has been forced to deal with a similar and growing "impact" on its ability to defend its borders ever since. What's more, Islamic terrorists have steadily improved their ability to exploit the Vietnamese lesson that "the west could not stomach the sight of blood and casualties." Particularly civilian.


But the ploy transcends western societies and media, as nowhere is such lack of intestinal fortitude more evident and unilateral than within the ranks of the United Nations. On Monday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was quick to place casualty counts above culpability in condemning Israel's actions as "clearly excessive," while referring to Hamas' continuing rocket attacks as merely "terribly counter-productive." So what path to self-protection of its sovereignty would the U.N. chief actually abide -- sanctions? Apparently not -- back in 2007, when Israel attempted to quell similarly terrorizing daily missile attacks by reducing gas and diesel supplies to Gaza, Ban called the plan "punitive and unacceptable."


So there he stood Monday responding to Secretary-General of the League of Arab States Amre Moussa's demand that the UN "put an end to this fighting and these massacres" by promising to "feed and help the men, women and children of Gaza and ease their suffering in the midst of this frightening and dangerous ordeal."


Of course, simultaneously reacting to and reinforcing the Hamas-orchestrated worldwide perspective of Israel as the unprovoked bully, Ban made no such overtures regarding the suffering of its men, women and children. In fact, were it not for the United States' refusal to sign on, a Ban-backed statement calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel would have already passed the U.N. Security Council. U.S. deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff explained that Hamas' history has proven them to be untrustworthy participants in any cease-fire agreement. Indeed, they and their ilk typically treat such accords as duplicitous opportunities to rearm and reentrench.


So once again, America stands alone beside its vital Mideast partner, and once again, the ensuing floodgates of Jew-hatred crash wide open, spewing the seeds of anti-Semitism even among those the jihadists pose the greatest threat to. And each time the world by-and-large falls for this remarkably transparent ruse, the peace-at-any-cost crowd become more mobilized while the hate-mongers grow all the more emboldened.


In the past, we've seen easily-impressionable Liberals respond as they did at this Boston rally [video] last week, playing follow-the-leader both in their aimless circular marching and mindless repetition of whatever a fellow unwashed rocket-scientist happened to cry out. Here the little ditty was "Resistance is justified when you are occupied," sounding all the more brilliant considering that Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip ended in 2005


But now, these useful idiots can be seen at rallies where imagery of Mideast conflagration quickly gives way to that of Auschwitz crematoria. Check out this moron [video], Dutch Socialist Party MP Harry van Bommel, caught chanting "Intifada intifada, Palestine free" during a Saturday pro-jihad rally in Amsterdam, while the maniacs behind him clearly recite "Hamas, Hamas, Joden aan het gas (Jews to the gas)."


You're probably thinking this the type of loathsome behavior one might expect in a country that has all but surrendered to the Sharia-imposing Islamofacists, and that such outrageously hateful screeds couldn't possibly happen here, where we're assured that Muslims are so well "assimilated."


Think again. Take a gander at this colorful December 30th pro-Hamas rally [video], which also carried the requisite cries of "Nuke, Nuke Israel," "Israel go to Hell," and "There is no Israel!" But listen to these obviously well raised and educated "religion of peace" representatives shout out to pro-Israel demonstrators first "your mothers are whores," at 1:47, then "Go back to the oven" at 3:26 and finally, just seconds later "You need a big oven, that's what you need!"


Yet this rally wasn't in Brussels, or London, or any of the growing number of European Dhimmi-dumb safe-havens for Islamic jihadists and their sympathizers. It took place in Fort Lauderdale in Broward County, Florida. These venom-filled ignoramuses in head scarves evoked threats of Nazi proportions in the midst of the fifth largest Jewish community of any county in America.


Imagine, if you can, the treatment their far outnumbered counter-protestors would have received from the crowds, the police, the media, and the U.N. - adoring world, had they been equally despicable -- perhaps calling Islam's a false prophet or the Koran a terror manual. Meanwhile, a new Rasmussen Poll reports that while 62% of Republicans support Israel's military action in Gaza, only 31% of Democrats agree. And just how many of Broward (Home of the dimpled chad) County's quarter million plus Jews do you suppose voted for Bush or McCain? Wake up, people!


While the ten-to-one majority of those screaming the praises of Hamas to Israel supporters was typical of such recent demonstrations across the globe, this one's setting made it uniquely disturbing. With the rest of the world readily duped by these murderous Islamic conmen and reflexively siding against Israel time and time again, who, if not its Jews, will stand-up for the Jewish State here in America?


Neither the call for nothing short of the "Zionist Enemy's" total annihilation in its very charter, nor its abysmal record of disregarding all prior truces appear to be of any concern to those who demand Israel once again negotiate with Hamas. Neither does Iran's mounting potential to fulfill its Palestinian proxy's mandate with an atom-bomb. Nor, apparently, does similar anti-Semitism festering alongside the growing influence of jihad-funded Islamic front groups throughout Asia, Africa and Europe.


Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar declared Monday night that Israel "legitimized the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine," threatening that "their people all over the world" would be fair game.


Somehow, American Jews remain convinced that it can't happen here. But, as last week's Nazi-inspired taunts in Fort Lauderdale must remind us all, European Jews once held similarly quixotic beliefs.


Whether through counter-demonstration, blogging, correspondence, financial support, vigilance, or what have you, don't just stand there - do something.

5) Coming Soon? Hamas' Media Massacre

When will Hamas and the media create a new libel?

The media is a potent weapon in the hands of terrorists and Israel has been on the receiving end many times. As HonestReporting has documented in its interactive Big Lies resource Palestinians have scored PR victories in the cases of Mohammed al-Dura, the Jenin "massacre", the Gaza Beach incident, staged photos from the 2006 Lebanon War and many other Pallywood productions.

With Israeli troops operating on the ground in Gaza and Hamas increasingly backed into a corner, Professor Richard Landes warns of what may be around the corner:

Whether by Israeli accident or Hamas engineering, expect a spectacular civilian massacre in the coming days, followed by an orgy of Pallywood photography, amplified by a compliant Western media, and even greater fury in the streets of the Muslim and Western world. It's in the Hamas playbook… and will be until the media gets sober. Here's the background, and the obscenity that will probably be played....

The pattern has long been clear, and most recently carried out with explosive effectiveness in the Lebanon war of 2006… when Israel is winning, get yourself a civilian massacre. Make sure that you have shocking civilian casualties that rally all the key players to your side - the other Arab nations and groups and individuals who are secretly, quietly rooting for your defeat, but who, once the images of dead children appear on the TV screens, watch the Arab street riot, and eventually can't avoid siding with you, the "victim" ... the European leaders and diplomats who piously kept an even-handed approach in the hopes that Israel might swiftly decapitate the snake ... and the journalists and talking heads who have been chomping at the bit to jump on Israel for their disproportionate response.

But what if the Israelis don't make a mistake and kill a significant number of people in one blow, like Gaza Beach or Kfar Qana? Would Hamas actually concoct a massacre of their own people? ...

Read Professor Landes' complete article.

Hamas continues to fire rockets on Israeli towns and cities, operating from within civilian areas, using human shields with total disregard for its own people in Gaza. It is inevitable that Palestinian civilian casualties will occur despite Israel's best efforts to avoid this scenario. The media has been fooled by Pallywood productions many times in the past. This time, we expect another libel to appear.

HonestReporting is putting the mainstream media on notice. Reporting Palestinian claims at face value, creating a new Big Lie and failing to retract or apologize later is unacceptable. The media has been forewarned.

DOUBLE STANDARDS - PROVING OUR POINT

In all of the above cases, the media failed to verify Palestinian claims, placing ultimate trust in "Palestinian eyewitnesses" or so-called "human rights" organizations that are actually Palestinian advocacy groups. All too often the media is happy to accept, without question, the Palestinian version of the story. And yet, we never see the Palestinian narrative described as "propaganda".

The current conflict is also taking place on the airwaves, in the printed press and online. Israeli spokespeople have quite legitimately taken the initiative to get the message out during the Gaza operation. The effectiveness (particularly when compared with past operations) has itself created news stories in some media outlets.

But why does the BBC's Paul Reynolds consider the Israeli message to be "propaganda?" And why does he treat IDF video sources with such skepticism, particularly in stark contrast to Palestinian sources? Instead Reynolds states:

The Israeli propaganda effort is being directed to achieve two main aims.

The first is to justify the air attacks. The second is to show that there is no humanitarian calamity in Gaza.

Both these aims are intended to place Israel in a strong position internationally and to enable its diplomacy to act as an umbrella to fend off calls for a ceasefire while the military operation unfolds.

Israel has pursued the first aim by being very active in getting its story across that Hamas is to blame. The sight of Hamas rockets streaking into Israel has been helpful in this respect.

It has also allowed trucks in with food aid and has stressed that it will not let people starve, even if they go short.

Israel appears to think its efforts are working.

One of its spokespeople, who has regularly appeared on the international media, Major Avital Leibovich, said: "Quite a few outlets are very favourable to Israel."

Why is this a "propaganda effort" and why should Israel have to justify defending its citizens against Hamas rocket attacks?

5a) Israel at War: A Primer

Background & key issues behind Israel's campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

Israel has launched a major military operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip. Over the coming days and beyond, Israel will come under intense pressure both in the mainstream media and in online forums and the blogosphere. HonestReporting presents a guide to the important talking points to enable you to answer the questions and issues that will appear.

Defending Israeli citizens from terrorist fire

A quarter of a million Israeli citizens have been living under incessant terror attacks from the Gaza Strip with thousands of missiles fired over the past eight years.

These missiles have been described as "home made" by the media. They are, in fact, deadly. Hamas has in its possession longer range Katyushas and Grad-type missiles which can cause devastation such as that on Monday 29 December as one Israeli was killed and 14 injured in a Grad attack on Ashkelon.

Israel left Gaza in 2005, giving Palestinians the chance to run their own lives. Despite this, more than 6300 rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel since then.

During the past year alone, more than 3000 rockets and mortars have been launched into Israel.

Since the end of a formal ceasefire (during which terror attacks continued) with Hamas came to an end on Dec. 19, more than 170 rockets and mortars have been fired at Israeli civilians including a barrage of some 80 missiles on Dec. 24 alone.
As US President-elect Obama stated during a visit to Sderot five months ago, "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing."
No other country in the world would have exercised the amount of restraint that Israel has shown for the past several years without responding.

Hamas bears responsibility

The deterioration in the situation is the direct result of Hamas policy. It violated the calm, is firing against and attacking Israeli citizens, and is investing all its resources in arming itself and gathering power.

If Hamas would renounce the path of terror, there would be no need for the Israeli action. Quiet will be answered with quiet, but terror will elicit a response.
"We strongly condemn the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel and hold Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence there." - US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice

"We talked to them [Hamas] and we told them 'please, we ask you, do not end the truce. Let the truce continue and not stop' so that we could have avoided what happened." - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas

"For quite some time, Egypt has been warning. Whoever tried to confuse the understand of [ignore] this warning, must bear the responsibility. The Prime Minister of Israel warned the Hamas and said: "You must stop, otherwise we will take measures in response." In response to what? To not renewing the calm, to the rocket fire. Just before the arrival of [Israeli Foreign Minister] Livni to Egypt, 60 rockets were fired from Gaza!" - Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit
Israel targets Hamas and the terrorist infrastructure

The goal of the Israeli military action is to strike the growing infrastructure of terror and ability of Hamas and its allied organizations to launch missiles and mortars at Israeli citizens and carry out terror attacks.

Hamas has used the ceasefire to massively arm itself with increasingly sophisticated weapons to expand the range of the threat against Israeli civilians.
Hamas has demonstrated its increased threat as the Ashdod area was hit by rockets, marking the northernmost point where Hamas rockets have reached, more than 40km north of Gaza.

Israel does not target Palestinian civilians

The terrorist organizations work out of the Palestinian population centers and cynically exploit them, so the responsibility for Palestinian civilians getting hurt rests on their shoulders. Israel, for its part directs its activity at terrorist elements and does its utmost to refrain from harming the innocent.
Those homes and buildings which are used for storing weapons caches and manufacturing weaponry are legitimate military targets.

The high casualty figures being fed to the media from (unreliable) Palestinian medical sources do not differentiate between terrorists and civilians. The vast majority of those killed in IDF actions have been terrorists. Hamas terrorists do not always wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from the general population.
As The Times of London reports: "Radio stations ordered all members of the security forces, who have borne the brunt of the attack, to slip into civilian clothes, stay away from their bases and avoid congregating in groups to escape death from above."
At the time of writing, even the United Nations is citing some 50 civilian deaths out of more than 300 Palestinian casualties.

Hamas TV has acknowledged this morning that the vast majority of those killed are from the Hamas military. A news ticker running repeatedly from 10:00 AM announced:
"More than 180 Palestinian policemen were killed including the [Police] Commander, General Tawfik Jaber."

Hamas TV is repeatedly broadcasting the same scenes of dozens of bodies of the uniformed Hamas soldiers who were killed in Israel's first attack Saturday when Israel hit a Hamas officer's course graduation ceremony. (Source: Palestinian Media Watch)

In stark contrast to Israel, Hamas actively celebrates targeting Israeli civilians. A video on Hamas TV Sunday morning blended pictures of Hamas fighters shooting at Israel with pictures of injured Israelis and medical evacuation scenes. In addition, the visuals include pictures of skulls dripping with blood, captioned: "Let them taste violent death". Other narrations and texts include:

"Send them to Hell! Tear them to pieces!"

"Send them to Hell, Qassam missile!" (Source: Palestinian Media Watch)

Israel has collected intelligence on specific targets for the past year and has not indiscriminately attacked the Gaza Strip. For example, during the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas took control over many facilities in Gaza, including this building and the "Palestinian Prisoner Tower" located in southern Gaza City. The facility was being used as a central operational facility for Hamas security operations and as a weapons arsenal. Hamas offices were also located inside this building and and additionally, large amounts of weapons are also stored inside. The building was used only by Hamas and was not a residential building by any means.

Preventing a humanitarian crisis

Israel has continued to allow humanitarian aid to pass through Gaza's border crossings despite Hamas's rocket and mortar attacks, including upon the crossings themselves.

23 trucks bearing medical supplies, basic food commodities and other humanitarian goods passed through the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza beginning at 10.30am on Sunday morning (28 Dec).

"As the prime minister said yesterday, we are not at war with the Palestinian people, but with the Hamas terrorists, and therefore we are bringing in the goods for the Palestinian people," said IDF Major Peter Lerner, Defense Ministry Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories.

Three humanitarian aid agencies are sending goods into the Gaza Strip: UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), WFA (World Food Agency) and the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross). All three agencies were notified Saturday evening that they would be allowed to send as many truckloads of supplies into the region as they could muster. "We didn't place any limit on the number of trucks," Lerner said. "There are only 30 truckloads because that was what they were able to get ready for today."

Israel also plans to allow some Palestinians wounded in Saturday's offensive on Hamas to enter Israel to receive medical treatment. Meanwhile, Hamas is preventing wounded Palestinians from crossing into Egypt to receive treatment.

6) Solving the 'Palestinian problem'
By Daniel Pipes

Israel's war against Hamas brings up the old quandary: What to do about the Palestinians? Western states, including Israel, need to set goals to figure out their policy toward the West Bank and Gaza.

Let's first review what we know does not and cannot work:

• Israeli control. Neither side wishes to continue the situation that began in 1967, when the IDF took control of a population that is religiously, culturally, economically and politically different and hostile.

• A Palestinian state. The 1993 Oslo Accords began this process but a toxic brew of anarchy, ideological extremism, anti-Semitism, jihadism and warlordism led to complete Palestinian failure.

• A binational state: Given the two populations' strong mutual antipathy, the prospect of a combined Israel-Palestine (what Muammar Gaddafi calls "Israstine") is as absurd as it seems.

Excluding these three prospects leaves only one practical approach, which worked tolerably well in the period 1948-67: Shared Jordanian-Egyptian rule, with Amman ruling the West Bank and Cairo running Gaza.

TO BE sure, this back-to-the-future approach inspires little enthusiasm. Not only was Jordanian-Egyptian rule undistinguished, but resurrecting this arrangement will frustrate Palestinian impulses, be they nationalist or Islamist. Further, Cairo never wanted Gaza and has vehemently rejected its return. Accordingly, one academic analyst dismisses this idea as "an elusive fantasy that can only obscure real and difficult choices."

It is not. The failures of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and the "peace process," has prompted rethinking in Amman and Jerusalem. Indeed, the Christian Science Monitor's Ilene Prusher found already in 2007 that the idea of a West Bank-Jordan confederation "seems to be gaining traction on both sides of the Jordan River." The Jordanian government, which enthusiastically annexed the West Bank in 1950 and abandoned its claims only under duress in 1988, shows signs of wanting to return. Dan Diker and Pinhas Inbari documented for Middle East Quarterly in 2006 how the PA's "failure to assert control and become a politically viable entity has caused Amman to reconsider whether a hands-off strategy toward the West Bank is in its best interests."

Israeli officialdom has also shown itself open to this idea, occasionally calling for Jordanian troops to enter the West Bank.

Despairing of self-rule, some Palestinians welcome the Jordanian option. An unnamed senior PA official told Diker and Inbari that a form of federation or confederation with Jordan offers "the only reasonable, stable, long-term solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."

Hanna Seniora opined that "the current weakened prospects for a two-state solution forces us to revisit the possibility of a confederation with Jordan." The New York Times's Hassan Fattah quotes a Palestinian in Jordan: "Everything has been ruined for us - we've been fighting for 60 years and nothing is left. It would be better if Jordan ran things in Palestine, if King Abdullah could take control of the West Bank."

NOR IS this just talk: Diker and Inbari report that back-channel PA-Jordan negotiations in 2003-04 "resulted in an agreement in principle to send 30,000 Badr Force members," to the West Bank.

And while Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak announced a year ago that "Gaza is not part of Egypt, nor will it ever be," his is hardly the last word. First, Mubarak notwithstanding, Egyptians overwhelmingly want a strong tie to Gaza; Hamas concurs; and Israeli leaders sometimes agree. So the basis for an overhaul in policy exists.

Secondly, Gaza is arguably more a part of Egypt than of "Palestine." During most of the Islamic period, it was either controlled by Cairo or part of Egypt administratively. Gazan colloquial Arabic is identical to what Egyptians living in Sinai speak. Economically, Gaza has most connections to Egypt. Hamas itself derives from the Muslim Brethren, an Egyptian organization.

Is it time to think of Gazans as Egyptians?

Thirdly, Jerusalem could out-maneuver Mubarak. Were it to announce a date when it ends the provisioning of all water, electricity, food, medicine and other trade, and accepts enhanced Egyptian security in Gaza, Cairo would have to take responsibility for Gaza. Among other advantages, this would make it accountable for Gazan security, finally putting an end to the thousands of Hamas rocket and mortar assaults.

The Jordan-Egypt option quickens no pulses, but that may be its value. It offers a uniquely sober way to solve the "Palestinian problem."

7) Pointless Peace Proposals
By Anne Applebaum

Circumstances change; so do the names of the leading players. Peace negotiators come and go; so do the details of their agreements. But in the end, one aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains the same: When all else has failed, you can be absolutely certain that someone, somewhere, will issue a statement calling for peace.


There has been no shortage of such declarations the past few days. In the wake of Israeli attacks on Gaza, Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary general, appealed "to all members of the international community to display the unity and commitment required to bring this escalating crisis to an end." Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy spokesman, called for a halt to hostilities. "The cease-fire has to be a cease-fire complied [with] by everybody and be clearly maintained," he proclaimed. "What we need," echoed the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, "is an immediate cease-fire."


As night follows day, these statements were accompanied by a mass migration of politicians to the Middle East. French President Nicolas Sarkozy set off for Israel. So did Karel Schwarzenberg, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic, the country now holding the rotating presidency of the European Union. There, both may encounter Solana, Tony Blair and who knows how many others. Even Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent an envoy. Like having an Olympic team that wins lots of gold medals, having your own Middle East peace policy has become, it seems, a sign of international prestige.


But other than that prestige, it's increasingly hard to see the point of such gestures. In the Middle East, the most significant and successful diplomatic initiatives have always been the quietest: The Oslo peace accord of 1993 was, at least in its initial phase, negotiated in absolute secrecy. By contrast, the diplomatic initiatives most clearly designed to serve the interests of the diplomats (or at least of their constituents back home) are the loudest and most public: Think of the Annapolis peace conference of autumn 2007, where toasts were drunk, cameras were plentiful and all kinds of marginal players were at the table. It would be giving that gathering too much credit to blame Annapolis for Israel's ground invasion of Gaza this week. Still, it's surely fair to say that that conference, for all of its pomp and circumstance, failed to prevent a new explosion of violence.


But it could not ever have done so. For the trouble with all of these peace efforts, peace conferences, peace initiatives and peace proposals is that none of them recognizes the most obvious fact about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It's not a peace process; it's a war. At the moment, at least, both parties are still convinced that their central aims will be better obtained through weapons and military tactics than through negotiations of any kind. To be more explicit, Hamas and its followers believe that the continuing firing of rockets into southern Israel will, sooner or later, result in the dissolution of the Jewish state. The Israelis — both on the "peacenik" left and the more bellicose right — believe that the only way to prevent Hamas from firing rockets is to fight back. Intervention — whether by well-meaning Europeans, U.N. delegations, Russian envoys (or even Condoleezza Rice, who has wisely stayed home, so far) — can postpone the conflict but cannot halt the violence, at least not until one side or the other surrenders.

That brief, halcyon period of the Oslo peace process was possible because this is precisely what happened: a combination of Russian emigration into Israel, the end of Soviet support and general weariness led at least a part of the Palestinian leadership to conclude, after 30 years, that it would never push Israel into the sea. At least some of the equally weary Israeli leaders came to believe that their occupation policies were doing Israel more harm than good and that they would gain more from negotiating than from fighting. Further negotiations will make sense only when Hamas's leaders — currently emboldened by a combination of popular indignation and Iranian support — finally arrive at the same conclusion as their secular counterparts, and a new generation of Israelis is persuaded to believe them.


Until then, there is no point in bemoaning the passivity of the Bush administration, the silence of Barack Obama, the powerlessness of Arab leaders or the weakness of Europe, as so many, predictably, have begun to do. It's no outsider's "fault" that the fighting continues, and pretending otherwise merely obscures the real issues. Diplomats might be able to slow its progress, but this war won't be over until someone has won.

8) Israel acts because the world won't defend it
By Daniel Finkelstein


It was strictly forbidden to have a notebook in Belsen, but my Aunt Ruth had one anyway. Just a little pocket diary - an appointment book with one of those tiny pencils. And in it, in the autumn of 1944, she noted that Anne Frank and Anne's sister, Ruth's schoolfriend Margot, had arrived in the concentration camp.

My mother and my aunt had been watching through the camp wire when the Franks arrived. Mum remembers it well, because they had been excited to spot girls they knew from the old days in Amsterdam. They had played in the same streets, been to the same schools and Ruth and Margot attended Hebrew classes together. The pair had once been pressed into service to act as bridesmaids, when a secretive Jewish wedding had taken place at the synagogue during their lesson time.

But Ruth and Margot did not grow up together. Because while Ruth and my mother lived, Margot and Anne never left Belsen. They died of typhus.

I am telling you this story because I want you to understand Israel. Not to agree with all it does, not to keep quiet when you want to protest against its actions, not to side with it always, merely to understand Israel.

There are two things about the tale that help to provide insight. The first is that all these things, the gas chambers, the concentration camps, the attempt to wipe Jews from the face of the Earth, they aren't ancient history, and they aren't fable. They happened to real people and they happened in our lifetime. Anne and Margot Frank were just children to my aunt and my mother; they weren't icons, or symbols of anything.

The second is that world opinion weeps now for Anne Frank. But world opinion did not save her.

The origin of the state of Israel is not religion or nationalism, it is the experience of oppression and murder, the fear of total annihilation and the bitter conclusion that world opinion could not be relied upon to protect the Jews.

Israel was the idea of a journalist. Theodor Herzl was the Paris correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse when he witnessed anti-Semitic rioting against the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus who had been falsely accused of espionage. Herzl was then among the small corps of journalists who in 1895 witnessed the famous ceremony of disgrace in which Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulettes.

The experience led Herzl to abandon his belief in assimilation. He became convinced that Jews would only be safe if they had their own national home. Herzl became the first leader of modern Zionism. For many years many Jews resisted Herzl's conclusion. My grandfather was among them. But the experience of Jews all over the world in the first half of the 20th century - not just in Europe but in the Middle East too - rather bore out Herzl.

So when Israel is urged to respect world opinion and put its faith in the international community the point is rather being missed. The very idea of Israel is a rejection of this option. Israel only exists because Jews do not feel safe as the wards of world opinion. Zionism, that word that is so abused, so reviled, is founded on a determination that, at the end of the day, somehow the Jews will defend themselves and their fellow Jews from destruction. If world opinion was enough, there would be no Israel.

The poverty and the death and the despair among the Palestinians in Gaza moves me to tears. How can it not? Who can see pictures of children in a war zone or a slum street and not be angry and bewildered and driven to protest? And what is so appalling is that it is so unnecessary. For there can be peace and prosperity at the smallest of prices. The Palestinians need only say that they will allow Israel to exist in peace. They need only say this tiny thing, and mean it, and there is pretty much nothing they cannot have.

Yet they will not say it. And they will not mean it. For they do not want the Jews. Again and again - again and again - the Palestinians have been offered a nation state in a divided Palestine. And again and again they have turned the offer down, for it has always been more important to drive out the Jews than to have a Palestinian state. It is difficult sometimes to avoid the feeling that Hamas and Hezbollah don't want to kill Jews because they hate Israel. They hate Israel because they want to kill Jews.

There cannot be peace until this changes. For Israel will not rely on airy guarantees and international gestures to defend it. At its very core, it will not. It will lay down its arms when the Jews are safe, but it will not do it until they are.

And if you reflect on it, doesn't recent experience bear this out? Just as Herzl was borne out? A year or so back I met a teacher while I was on holiday and fell to talking with him about Israel. He was a nice man and all he wanted was for fighting to stop and to end the suffering of children. And he had a question for me.

Why, he asked, doesn't Israel offer to give back the West Bank and Gaza? Why doesn't it just let the Palestinians have a state there? If the Palestinians turned it down, he said, then at least liberal opinion would be on Israel's side and would rally to its assistance.

So I patiently explained to this kind, good man that Israel had, at Camp David in 2000, made precisely this offer and that it had been rejected out of hand by Yassir Arafat, not even used as the basis for negotiation. I told him that Israel was no longer in Gaza, having withdrawn unilaterally and taken the settlers with it. The Palestinians had greeted this movement with suicide bombs and rockets. Yet the teacher, with all his compassion, wasn't even aware of all this. And liberal opinion? Sad to relate, my new friend's faith in it was misplaced. It has turned strongly against Israel.

Israel has made many mistakes. It has acted too aggressively on some occasions, has been too defensive on others. The country hasn't always respected the human rights of its enemies as it should have done. What nation under such a threat would have avoided all errors?

But you know what? As Iran gets a nuclear weapon and so the potential for another Holocaust against the Jews and world opinion does nothing, I am not so sure that the errors of world opinion are so much to be preferred to the errors of Israel.

8a)Gaza after a Hamas rout will be an even greater threat to Israel
By Jonathan Freedland

The scenes of calamity just get worse. Yesterday Guardian readers awoke to an image that will haunt many for years to come: three young children, their eyes closed as if in sleep, laid out dead on a hospital floor. One was no bigger than a baby; next to him, a toddler wearing junior tracksuit trousers, the kind your own son might wear. Except these were dyed red with blood.

Somehow, and quickly, even that horror was surpassed with the news yesterday that a UN school, used as a shelter, had been hit, killing more than 40 Palestinians, more than half of them women or children. Israel says Hamas fighters were launching mortar shells from the UN facility, which is why Israel hit back. Either way, Operation Cast Lead seems designed to leaden the heart with sorrow.

Still, Britons and Americans have no cause for self-righteousness. The scale of the Israeli offensive is shocking, and yet the killing is not of a greater order than that of the two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which our very own British troops are taking part. I spoke yesterday with one foreign diplomat based in Jerusalem who recalled how, during an earlier posting in Afghanistan, he had seen the remains of an entire village razed to the ground by American fighter jets in pursuit of a couple of Taliban commanders. "All that was left was rubble and body parts," he says now. Seen in the context of the last seven years, the grim truth is that Israelis are not guilty of a unique crime in Gaza.

When and how will this end? "The sooner, the better," says Ehud Olmert, the accidental prime minister whose tenure began with the pounding of southern Lebanon and will end with the pummelling of Gaza. He told Ha'aretz last night he is in touch with world leaders seeking a diplomatic way out - but he did not sound like a man in a hurry.

The conventional wisdom suggests crises like this conclude when the international community finally says enough is enough. But in the Middle East, the international community is a fiction. The only pressure that counts is Washington's and nothing is coming from that direction. George Bush fully endorses Israel's action and Barack Obama is sticking to the protocol that a president-elect keeps his mouth shut till he has sworn the oath on January 20.

That leaves the only pressure that can divert Israeli governments: Israeli public opinion. If the fathers and mothers of Israel's soldiers turn on this operation, then its days will be numbered. For that to happen, the Israel Defence Forces would have to sustain serious casualties. Support for the 2006 war in Lebanon melted once too many Israeli families were burying their dead.

But that does not seem to be about to happen. For one thing, the IDF is currently winning plaudits from the Israeli press for proceeding gingerly, pushing its ground troops forward with caution as if they have learned some of the operational lessons of 2006. More importantly, Hamas is not staging anything like the opposition mounted by Hezbollah in Lebanon, when Israeli fatalities reached triple figures.

It lacks the resources of Hezbollah, with its open border and supply lines to Syria. Hamas is in tiny, sealed-off Gaza. True, it is backed by Iran - which partly explains the strength of support for Cast Lead from an Israeli public long fearful of an Iranian proxy on its southern border - but relying on smuggled kit is not the same as having a powerful patron across the border.

Unless, of course, this is all a fiendish plot by the Hamas leadership. On this theory, they are not really cowering in their underground bunkers - too scared to resist, saving their own skins, as the uncle of those dead toddlers accusingly told the Guardian yesterday. Instead they are waiting to lure the IDF in, enticing Israeli troops deep into Gaza's cities where they will be most vulnerable. But in the absence of such a lethal Hamas fightback, the ending of this conflict will be in Israel's hands. The Israelis won't end it now, not when they are still finding weapons caches or other Hamas military capacity to be degraded. It is too tempting to press on, to crush the enemy. That way Israel gets to claim what it could not in 2006: a clear and total victory.

But there is a massive risk here. Such a victory will not just achieve Cast Lead's original stated aim, namely altering Hamas's calculus - reducing its incentive to fire rockets at civilian targets inside Israel - but could topple the Hamas government altogether.

Israeli officials deny that regime change in Gaza is either likely to happen or the goal of their mission. But that may end up being the result: intelligence reports suggest the organisation has been eviscerated, its ability to govern all but destroyed.

Israeli leaders will crow at that; their poll numbers will surge. But it will surely prove a pyrrhic victory. For what would be the consequences of crippling the Hamas administration in Gaza? Israel would be confronted with a sharp dilemma. Either it would have to stay, resuming the occupation it sought to end in 2005 - a notion with zero popular appeal in Israel. Or it would have to withdraw, leaving behind a huge and dangerous question mark.

For Gaza could become a vacuum, rapidly descending into Somalia, a lawless badland of warlords and clans. A new force could seek to replace Hamas. Most likely it would be even more radical: al-Qaida has long been pushing at the edges of Gaza, eager to find a way in.

Would either of those options appeal to Israel? Of course they wouldn't. As one Israeli commentator put it yesterday: "In this context the IDF is afraid of being too successful."

Israel's preferred scenario, having pushed Hamas out of the way, is for the pro-western moderates of Fatah to take over. But Fatah knows that to return to Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank is the kiss of death: they would for ever be branded collaborators with the enemy.

Israel may try to dump responsibility for Gaza on a coalition of moderate Arab states and others, including the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. But would any of them be willing to take it on? Analyst Ahmad Khalidi notes that the "amount of aid, reconstruction and psychological nursing is of such intensity" that surely no one would step in. Israel may be left recalling what Colin Powell once called the Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it".

And from the rubble of Gaza, the attacks on Israel will surely resume. Hamas is too deeply rooted to disappear. New cells will arise, more filled with hatred and bent on revenge than ever. Already there are warnings of a return to suicide bombing, inside Israel and beyond. And, warns Khalidi, there would be no Hamas leadership - with undeniable discipline over its forces and the pragmatism to see the benefits of a ceasefire - to rein in these new, angry fighters. The great irony is that Israel may well decapitate Hamas - only to regret the passing of a Palestinian administration with sufficient stature to bring order.

Perhaps Israel's leadership will see this danger and hold back, pushing for a ceasefire that would be robust and externally supervised but would ultimately, if indirectly, amount to a deal with Hamas. If that is the outcome, it will be a strange kind of victory. For Israel could have got that through diplomacy, without causing the death, mayhem and damage to its international reputation now unfolding before our eyes. If it goes further, it will have removed one danger - only to have replaced it with one far greater.

8b) Militant Islam Threatens Us All
By Benjamin Netanyahu

Imagine a siren that gives you 30 seconds to find shelter before a Kassam rocket falls from the sky and explodes, spraying its lethal shrapnel in all directions. Now imagine this happens day after day, month after month, year after year.

If you can imagine that, you can begin to understand the terror to which hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been subjected. Three years ago Israel withdrew from every square inch of Gaza. And since that withdrawal, our civilians have been targeted by more than 6,000 rockets and mortars fired from Gaza. In the face of this relentless bombardment, Israel has acted with a restraint that other countries, faced with a similar threat, would find hard to fathom. Israel's government has finally decided to respond.

For this action to succeed, we must first have moral clarity. There is no moral equivalence between Israel, a democracy which seeks peace and targets the terrorists, and Hamas, an Iranian-backed terror organization that seeks Israel's destruction and targets the innocent.


In launching precision strikes against Hamas rocket launchers, headquarters, weapons depots, smuggling tunnels and training camps, Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties. But Hamas deliberately attacks Israeli civilians and deliberately hides behind Palestinian civilians -- a double war crime. Responsible governments do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties, but they do not grant immunity to terrorists who use civilians as human shields.

The international community may occasionally condemn Hamas for putting Palestinian civilians in harm's way, but if it ultimately holds Israel responsible for the casualties that ensue, then Hamas and other terror organizations will employ this abominable tactic again and again.

The charge that Israel is using disproportionate force is equally baseless. Does proportionality demand that Israel fire 6,000 rockets indiscriminately back at Gaza? Does it demand an equal number of casualties on both sides? Using that logic, one would conclude that the United States employed disproportionate force against the Germans because 20 times as many Germans as Americans died in World War II.

In that same war, Britain responded to the firing of thousands of rockets on its population with the wholesale bombing of German cities. Israel's measured response to rocket fire on its cities has come in the form of surgical strikes. To further root out Hamas terrorists in a way that minimizes Palestinian civilian casualties, Israel's army is now engaged in a ground operation that places its soldiers in great peril. Carpet-bombing of Palestinian cities is not an option that any Israeli leader will entertain.

The goal of this mission should be clear: To end the current round of missile attacks and to remove the threat of such attacks in the future. The only cease-fire or diplomatic initiative that should be accepted is one that achieves this dual objective.

If our enemies assumed that the Israeli public would be divided on the eve of an election, they were wrong. When it comes to exercising our most basic right of self-defense, there is no opposition and no coalition. We stand united against Hamas because we know that only by defeating Hamas can we provide security for our people and hope for a future peace.

We fight to defend ourselves, but in so doing we are also fighting a fanatical ideology that seeks to reverse the course of history and throw the civilized world back into a new dark age. The struggle between militant Islam and modernity -- whether fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, India or Gaza -- will decide our common future. It is a battle we cannot afford to lose.

8c) The Decline of Israel's Leadership
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa

WASHINGTON -- The heart-wrenching events taking place in Gaza confirm what has been apparent since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 -- the mediocrity of Israel's political leadership. By mediocrity, I mean the supremacy of knee-jerk reaction over groundbreaking initiative, of petty politics over vision.

On paper, Israel's logic is unassailable: Hamas, a terrorist organization determined to destroy the Jewish state, periodically fires rockets across the border; Israel, as any other state would do, is exercising self-defense by attempting to annihilate Hamas' offensive capability.

That logic is self-defeating. Only a permanent occupation of Gaza could ensure the absence of rockets in southern Israel. But Israel's occupation of Gaza proved to be politically and practically unsustainable -- and the Israelis withdrew in 2005.

Suppose Israel tried again. Hamas or some other organization, helped by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, would harass the occupiers from across the border. By Israel's logic, its army would then have to push into Egypt.

In 1982, Israel went into Lebanon in pursuit of the Palestine Liberation Organization using the same arguments it is using in the case of Gaza today. It eventually withdrew, and the invasion did not prevent Hezbollah, another terrorist organization, from using Lebanese territory to attack Israeli civilians years later.

Anything less than a permanent occupation of Gaza will guarantee Hamas' resurgence. A permanent occupation, on the other hand, will put the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank -- Israel's moderate interlocutor -- in the impossible position of either betraying the Palestinian cause or playing second fiddle to Hamas, something we are already beginning to see. The extremists will have a broader popular base in the West Bank and rockets will soon be fired across the border into eastern Israel.

The Israeli security logic would then force a full occupation of the West Bank, pushing Palestinian terrorists into Jordan. And if rockets started to fly into an Israeli-controlled West Bank from Jordan, would the security logic dictate an Israeli invasion of the Hashemite kingdom?

All of this is to say that Israel's leadership needs to accept (painfully) the futility of a purely defensive logic. Its best bet is to help create the conditions in which the Palestinian moderates are able to marginalize the fanatics with the help of a population that starts to see improving standards of living. That would mean making concessions and taking risks such as Menachem Begin did when he signed the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, and in the way Rabin did when he signed the Oslo accords in 1993 and made formal peace with Jordan soon after.

Gaza's living conditions since the end of Israel's occupation have been dismal. One has only to read the articles of moderates in the Israeli daily Haaretz or the testimonies of Western observers to realize the bitter resentment that the 1.5 million Gazans must feel under Israel's drastic commercial and transit restrictions. The severe limitations placed on daily life in the West Bank are also a source of humiliation for many Palestinians. This is not to say that Arab terrorists who fire rockets against innocent Israeli civilians are justified and it does not excuse the corruption and incompetence of the Palestinian Authority. But Israel's conduct does not help the Palestinian population place the blame where it belongs for Hamas' tyranny in Gaza and for Fatah's appalling governance in the West Bank.

One senses that since the fiasco of the attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, Israel's leaders have spent time preparing for a more efficient assault on Gaza rather than pushing toward the solution that moderate Israelis and Palestinians know is the only workable solution: two states living side by side with Jerusalem containing two capitals, acceptance by the Palestinians of the fact that the refugees will not be able to return to what is now Israeli territory, and acceptance by the Israelis of the fact that their settlements in Palestinian territory will have to be dismantled.

In any "conflict between two rights" -- as Amos Oz, Israel's leading novelist, has called it -- the best outcome is one in which both sides end up with a certain degree of frustration, but not too much. With differences of nuance, today's Israeli leaders -- Kadima's Tzipi Livni, the Labor Party's Ehud Barak and the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu -- are unwilling to move beyond the defensive frame of mind into which Arab terrorism has pushed millions of Israelis who not so long ago were willing to support more visionary and courageous leaders.