What if this was happening to your town, neighborhood, home,country?
What the unwarranted rocket and tunnels attacks by Hamas on Israel reveal is the elite in academia, the press and media remain biased against Israel and whatever their explanations they are not acceptable because it smacks of deep seated anti-semitism. There is no way anyone with a clear conscience and heart can equate Hamas with Israel nor the response by Israel . I daresay were the shoe on the other foot and Hamas (read any nation above or below America) were to attack n similar fashion we would devastate that nation. That said, I am not sure Obama would do anything other than ask them why they were doing so and would demand the Pentagon to use restraint. (See 1 below.) === The media used this same picture twice of a family killed in Syria by Assad and then claimed Israel killed the same family in Gaza. |
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An increasing number of Americans have finally come around to the realization they cannot trust this president.
The Courts are beginning to demonstrate they understand they have the power and legal obligation to save our Republic from this president's over reach and contempt for The Separation of Power's clause.
Perhaps Israel will now understand Obama does not have their back either.
In fact Obama , along with U.N. Sec. Moon,and Sec. Perry, are now engaged in a plot to force Netanyahu and Israel to pull Hamas' chestnut out of the fire enraging in Gaza.
Et tu Obama!
Caroline Glick i remains very clear eyed. (See 2 below.)
Even a Harvard Liberal now understands Obama has stabbed Israel in the back he swore to protect. (See 1a below.) It's all about Obama forcing Israel to pull Hamas' chestnut out of the fire. (See 2b and 2c below.)
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Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) From: Jonathan Rosenblum
An Inversion of Morality
From day one of its existence, the sole raison d’etre of the Hamas quasi-state in Gaza has been to kill Jews, the more the merrier.
Since taking over the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has siphoned off billions of dollars of foreign aid money to build a vast labyrinth of underground tunnels, whose only purpose is to hide rockets to be launched at Israel’s civilian population and to facilitate mass terror attacks in the form of cross border raids on kibbutzim, moshavim and towns close to the border.
All the human energy of the Gaza Strip has gone into the digging of the tunnels, often by hand. The very magnitude of the effort both impresses and depresses, for it is a measure of the hatred of Jews of Hamas and its followers.
Hamas proudly proclaims its goal of reclaiming the entirety of Palestine and killing all the Jews in its Charter. Article VI of the Charter announces that the Islamic Resistance Movement exists to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine. Article VII states that the final resurrection will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and the very trees call out, “There is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.”
The Charter goes on to explain why no Jewish state can exist. Palestine has belonged to the Islamic Waqf from time immemorial and will do so until the resurrection (Article XI), and whoever renounces even one inch of it is as if he had renounced Islam (Article XIII). Peace conferences and efforts at a permanent settlement with Israel are decried as no more than an effort to introduce non-believers as arbitrators over the lands of Islam (Article XIII). Finally, it is the binding duty of every Muslim to engage in jihad to liberate Palestine (Article XV).
NOR ARE THE CITIZENS OF GAZA “free of all sin,” as they are so often described. In 2006, Hamas won a decisive majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament. And in 2007, it seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority with surprising ease. Palestinians, including the vast majority of Gazans, voted for Hamas with full knowledge of its Charter and utter rejection of Israel’s existence. Like most ideological movements, Hamas has always put its beliefs front and center and made no effort to hide them.
Since 2007, Hamas’s popularity has been greatest among the population of Gaza when its operatives succeeded in killing Jews, and its claim to superiority over Fatah has always been that it is a more effective fighting force against Israel. Were Hamas’s rockets enjoying more success killing Jews today, Gazans would again be celebrating wildly and passing out sweet candies.
There have been no widespread protests in Gaza against Hamas’s diverting most of its foreign aid into creating the infrastructure for attacking the Jews. Even before the 2006 Palestinian elections, Gazans revealed themselves to be far more focused on destroying Israel than on the development of their own society. When Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip in 2005, it left behind 3,000 productive and highly profitable hothouses to help build a viable Palestinian economy. But instead of taking advantage of that largesse, Gazans trashed the hot houses and began shooting rockets at Israel at far faster clip than prior to the Israeli withdrawal.
In short, Gaza’s citizens are no less complicit with the Hamas regime than were overwhelming majority of German civilians, who eagerly supported Hitler’s war aims.
THE EXISTENCE OF THE ATTACK TUNNELS under Israel’s border and the threat to the life and safety of Israeli citizens they represent would have fully justified a pre-emptive strike to destroy those tunnels. But that is not what happened. Hamas initiated the current conflict. The kidnapping and murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaer, and Naftali Fraenkel was carried out by Hamas operatives acting on orders from above. That kidnapping was then followed by the firing of hundreds of rockets at Israel, and the firing of rockets on Israeli civilians has continued without break.
Despite the fact that Hamas was and remains the clear aggressor, continuing to fire rockets at Israel and mount cross-border raids, major European capitals erupted last week in mass demonstrations denouncing Israel “genocidal” aggression on the innocent Palestinians of Gaza. None of those demonstrators, it should be noted, previously bestirred themselves to protest the more than 150,000 Syrian civilians killed over the past three years (700 in two days last week alone), or the truly genocidal campaign of Sudanese Muslims against their black, co-religionists in Darfur, or the systematic expulsion of Christians from every place in the Muslim Middle East. Somehow the only dead children that move them are those who die as a result of Israeli military action.
Nor have the demonstrators felt any imperative to distinguish between their hatred of Israel and their hatred of Jews. Synagogues have come under siege and Jewish businesses burned to the ground. The dogs of anti-Semitism have been loosed once again in Europe and they will not be soon contained. Three-quarters of France’s Jewish community, Europe’s largest, are contemplating aliyah, as France become increasingly unlivable for Jews. The Jews of Great Britain and Belgium may not be far behind.
BUT EVEN MORE DISTRESSING THAN THE OPEN ANTI-SEMITES are the nincompoops who enable Hamas’s strategy of maximizing civilian casualties. The list is a long one, but includes CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who badgered Infrastructure Minister Naftali Bennett to tear kriah and confess Israel’s sins over the apparent deaths of four children on a Gaza beach from an errant Israeli artillery shell; UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood “atrocious;” Secretary of State John Kerry’angry and sarcastic comment (caught when he thought he was off-camera) about Palestinian deaths in house to house fighting -- “It’s a hell of a pinpoint action; it’s a hell of a pinpoint action;” and President Obama’s “growing concern” about rising civilian casualties.
Blitzer knows that no Israeli intended to kill four children. But every single one of the 1700 plus rockets fired by Hamas in the current round of fighting was intended to kill as many Israelis as possible. And by what standards do Ban Ki-Moon and Kerry term Israel’s actions “atrocious” or less than “pinpoint.” Palestinian civilians were given two days warning to leave the neighborhood. But Hamas cynically ordered them to stay and blocked their flight. In both international law and morality that makes Hamas the culpable party for their deaths, as Israeli soldiers battled their way through the neighborhood uncovering multiple high-value military targets, while exposed to sniper fire, mines and booby-trapped houses.
Over 80% of the Palestinian casualties so far have been males – 50% between the ages of 18 and 28 and 66% between 18 and 38. Israel actually seems to be doing a remarkably good job of minimizing non-combatant deaths. As Lt. Col. Richard Kemp, High Commander of British NATO forces in Afghanistan, and a man with unparalleled experience in assymetric warfare has said many times, no country in the history of warfare has taken more extraordinary measures to protect civilian lives than Israel. Does Kerry have the foggiest notion of how many innocent civilians have been killed by U.S. drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, or were killed by NATO bombing in the Balkans, in situations where ground troops were far from harms way?
The Western media also encourages Hamas’s strategy of self-inflicted civilian deaths with its mindless narrative of cycle of violence and comparisons of the deaths on both sides, as a measure of right and wrong. But the repeated military conflicts with Hamas are not a Hatfield-McCoy feud in which every death on one side must be avenged by more deaths on the other side. One side initiated the war and that same side could end it by renouncing its desire to go on killing Jews. Israel is fighting to remove mortal threats to its civilian population, not for revenge.
The media treats the lack of Israeli civilian casualties as proof that Hamas’s rockets are a mere most a nuisance, hardly worth getting riled about. But the $50,000-$100,000 cost of each Iron Dome missile fired, the hundreds of millions of shekels in losses to the Israeli economy daily from mobilization, and, most of all, the psychological trauma on Israeli civilians from continually rushing for shelters are not trivial. Iron Dome is a welcome tool. But allowing Jews to be turned into ducks in a shooting gallery until Hamas improves its aim is not a strategy.
Comparative casualties, whether civilian or military, tell us absolutely nothing about moral culpability. War is not some kind of perverse boxing match where one can only strike one’s opponent as often as he strikes you. When war is justified, the goal is to win, and a war of self-defense is always justified. Germany and Japan’s civilian casualties dwarfed those of the Allies in World War II, as Prime Minister Netanyahu frequently notes. Did that make Germany and Japan right, despite being the aggressors?
By focusing on Palestinian casualties as the crucial metric, President Obama and his secretary of state are doing nothing but paving the way for the next round of war and yet more Palestinian casualties. Instead of moving to deny Israel victory and the opportunity to uproot the terrorist infrastructure, they should be figuring out how to secure a peace that removes Hamas’s attack tunnels and rockets once and for all – something a little more effective, if you please, than UN Security Council Resolution 1701 ending the Second Lebanon War, which did nothing to prevent Hezbollah from doubling its pre-War missile arsenal.
In the meantime, Israel should heed the advice of Powerline blogger Scott Johnson and “pay zero attention to world opinion when world opinion is certifiably insane.”
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By Caroline B. Glick
The American president knows what's at stake and he's chosen sides
Operation Protective Edge is now two weeks old. Since the ground offensive began Thursday night, we have begun to get a better picture of just how dangerous Hamas has become in the nine years since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. And what we have learned is that the time has come to take care of this problem. It cannot be allowed to fester or grow anymore.
We have known for years that tunnels were a central component of Hamas's logistical infrastructure.
What began as the primary means of smuggling weapons, trainers and other war material from Hamas's sponsors abroad developed rapidly into a strategic tool of offensive warfare against Israel.
As we have seen from the heavily armed Hamas commando squads that have infiltrated into Israel from tunnelssince the start of the current round of warfare, the first goal of these offensive tunnels is to deploy terrorists into Israel to massacre Israelis.
But the tunnels facilitate other terror missions as well.
Israel has found tunnels with shafts rigged with bombs located directly under Israeli kindergartens.
If the bombs had gone off, the buildings above would have been destroyed, taking the children down with them.
Other exposed shafts showed Hamas's continued intense interest in hostage taking. In 2006 the terrorists who kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Schalit entered Israel and returned to Gaza through such a tunnel.
Today the presence of sedatives and multiple sets of handcuffs for neutralizing hostages found in tunnel after tunnel indicate that Hamas intends to abduct several Israelis at once and spirit them back to Gaza.
In an interview with Channel 2 Monday evening, Minister Naftali Bennett spoke of a mother at Kibbutz Netiv Ha'asara who told him that her children wake her in the middle of the night and tell her that they hear digging beneath their beds.
As Bennett said, this state of affairs simply cannot continue. People cannot live in fear that there are terrorists burrowing beneath their homes, digging tunnels to murder or kidnap them.
These tunnels must be found and destroyed not merely because they constitute a physical danger to thousands of Israelis. They must be located and destroyed, and Hamas's capacity to rebuild them must be eliminated because the very idea that they exist makes a normal life impossible for those immediately threatened.
Hamas's tunnels are also the key component of their command and control infrastructure inside Gaza.
Hamas's political and military commanders are hiding in them. The reinforced bunkers and tunnel complexes enable Hamas's senior leadership to move with relative freedom and continue planning and ordering attacks.
The sophistication of the tunnels and the malign intentions of Hamas are not in the least surprising.
But Hamas's rapid advances in both tunnel and missile technology are deeply worrisome. At a minimum, they indicate that if it is allowed to end the current round of fighting as a coherent, relatively well-armed terrorist army, Hamas will be able to rapidly rebuild and expand its capabilities.
As a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is not a stand-alone terror group. It is part of a much larger web of Islamic jihadist terror groups including al-Qaida and its affiliates as well as the Shi'ite Hezbollah. Like Hamas, all of these threaten several major Sunni Arab states.
Due to their recognition of the threat Hamas and its allies pose to the survivability of their regimes, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have taken the unprecedented step of supporting Israel's efforts to defeat Hamas.
They understand that a decisive Israeli blow against Hamas in Gaza will directly benefit them. Not only will Hamas be weakened, but its state sponsors and terrorist comrades will be weakened as well.
Presently, Hamas's most outspoken state sponsors are Qatar and Turkey.
As Israel's Calcalist newspaper reported earlier this week, Qatar is Hamas's biggest and most important financier, a role it plays as well for ISIS, al Nusra, the Muslim Brotherhood and various jihadist groups in Libya.
Turkey for its part is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Like Qatar, Turkey has also been a major supporter of ISIS and al Nusra, as well as Hamas. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's slander against Israel has grown so hysterical in recent weeks that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been trying to downplay Turkey's animosity, called him out on his open anti-Semitism.
By Tuesday morning, IDF forces in Gaza had destroyed 23 tunnels. The number of additional tunnels is still unknown.
While Israel had killed 183 terrorists, it appeared that most of the terrorists killed were in the low to middle ranks of Hamas's leadership hierarchy.
Hamas's senior commanders, as well as its political leadership have hunkered down in hidden tunnel complexes.
In other words, Israel is making good progress.
But it hasn't completed its missions. It needs several more days of hard fighting.
Recognizing this, Israel's newfound Muslim allies have not been pushing for a cease-fire.
In contrast, the Obama administration is insisting on concluding a cease-fire immediately
As Israel has uncovered the scope of Hamas's infrastructure of murder and terror, the US has acted with the UN, Turkey and Qatar to pressure Israel (and Egypt) to agree to a cease-fire and so end IDF operations against Hamas before the mission is completed.
To advance this goal, US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Cairo on Monday night with an aggressive plan to force on Israel a cease-fire Hamas and its state sponsors will accept.
As former ambassador to the US Michael Oren told the media, it is clear that neither Israel nor Egypt invited Kerry to come over. Their avoidance of Kerry signals clearly that the US's two most important allies in the Middle East do not trust US President Barack Obama's intentions.
And their distrust is entirely reasonable.
The State Department has openly applauded Turkey and Qatar for their involvement in attempts to achieve a cease-fire. Last week Israeli officials alleged that the US was responsible for Hamas's rejection of the Egyptian cease-fire proposal. By attempting to coerce Egypt to accept Qatar and Turkey as its partners in mediation, Obama signaled to Hamas's leaders that they should hold out for a better deal.
Due to Turkey's membership in NATO and the glamour of the Qatari royal family, many Westerners find it hard to believe that they are major sponsors of terrorism. But it is true. Turkey and Qatar are playing a double game.
While sending his ambassador to Brussels for NATO meetings, Erdogan has been transforming Turkey from an open, pro-Western society allied with Israel into a closed, anti-Semitic and anti-American society that sponsors Hamas, ISIL, al Nusra and other terrorists groups.
As for Qatar, the tiny natural gas superpower presents itself to Americans as their greatest ally in the Muslim world. The emirate gives hundreds of millions of dollars to US universities to open campuses in Doha and pretends it is a progressive, open society, replete with debating societies.
Qatar hosts three major US military bases on its territory. And it is becoming one of the most important clients for US military contractors. Earlier this year Qatar signed an $11.4 billion dollar arms agreement with the US.
At the same time, according to the Calacalist report, Qatar is the major bankroller of ISIS and al Nusra in Syria and Iraq. It gives $50 million a month to jihadists in Libya. It gives Hamas $100m. in annual aid. And in the past two years Doha has provided Hamas with an additional $620m. dollars, including $250m. it transferred to Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal's personal bank account, and $350m. in military aid to Hamas, transferred after the Egyptian military forced the Muslim Brotherhood government from power last July.
Add to that the $100m. per year that Qatar pours into Al Jazeera's satellite network — which has dedicated itself to undermining pro-Western Arab regimes while popularizing the likes of al-Qaida and Hamas, and Qatar is the largest financier of international jihad in the world.
Rather than notice that Qatar and Turkey are playing a double game, and treat them with suspicion, the Obama administration has embraced them.
Chances that Kerry will secure a cease-fire in the near future are small. In all likelihood, the government will be able to buy the time necessary to complete the mission in whole or large part. But the fact that the US has chosen at this juncture in the operation — with Israel enjoying unprecedented support from the most important Sunni states in the region — to side with Hamas and its state sponsors in their demand for an immediate cease-fire speaks volumes about the transformation of US foreign policy under Obama's leadership.
Hamas's decision to fire rockets in the direction of Ben Gurion Airport may well have ended any real prospect of a two-state solution. Whether the regulators and airlines that have stopped flights to and from Israel are right or wrong, this stoppage cannot possibly be tolerated by a democratic country that relies so heavily on tourism and international travel. It is of course a war crime to target an international civilian airport, as Hamas has clearly done. Israel has every right to keep that airport open, employing all reasonable military means at its disposal. Since Hamas fires its rockets from densely populated civilian areas, there will be more Palestinian civilian deaths.
This of course is part of Hamas' grand strategy: by targeting Israeli civilians and international air travel from its own civilian areas, Hamas leaves Israel no choice but to take military actions that risk the lives of innocent Palestinians. There will be even more innocent Palestinian deaths now, as Hamas has raised the stakes considerably for Israel. Every country in the world would do everything in its power to keep open the airports, which are the lifelines to its economic viability. Hamas knows this and welcomes Israeli military action that produces more dead Palestinian civilians and hence more international criticism of Israel.
Even more importantly, Hamas' actions in essentially closing down international air traffic into Israel, considerably reduces the prospect of any two-state solution. Israel will now be more reluctant than ever to give up military control over the West Bank, which is even closer to Ben Gurion Airport than is Gaza.
Were Israel to end its military occupation of the West Bank—as distinguished from its civilian settlements deep in the West Bank—it would risk the possibility of a Hamas takeover. That is precisely what happened when Israel removed bothits civilian settlements and its military presence in Gaza. Hamas took control, fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian targets and have now succeeded in stopping international air traffic into and out of Israel.
Israel could not accept the risk of a Hamas takeover of the West Bank and the resulting Hamas rocket attacks at the nearby Ben Gurion Airport. It may still be possible to create a two-state solution whereby Israel withdraws its civilian settlers from most of the West Bank and agrees to land swaps for areas that now contain large settlement blocks. But Israel will have to retain military control over its security borders, which extend to the Jordan River. It will also have to maintain a sufficient military presence to assure that what happened in Gaza does not happen in the West Bank. These military realities do not have to exist forever. Israel's military presence could be reduced if the Palestinian Authority were to maintain effective control over the West Bank and prevent terrorists from using that area to send rockets and terrorists into Israel.
The new reality caused by Hamas' shutting down of international air travel to and from Israel would plainly justify an Israeli demand that it maintain military control over the West Bank in any two-state deal. The Israeli public would never accept a deal that did not include a continued Israeli military presence in the West Bank. They have learned the tragic lesson of Gaza and they will not allow it to be repeated in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, however, is unlikely to accept such a condition, though it should. This will simply make it far more difficult for an agreement to be reached.
It was precisely one of the goals of the Hamas rocket and tunnel assaults to scuttle any two-state agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. The Hamas Charter categorically rejects the two-state solution, as does the military wing of Hamas. In this tragic respect, Hamas has already succeeded. By aiming its rockets in the direction of Ben Gurion Airport, Hamas may well have scuttled any realistic prospects for a two-state solution. It cannot be allowed to succeed.
The international community, which has a significant stake in protecting international air traffic from terrorist rocket attacks, must support Israel's efforts to stop these attacks—permanently. If Hamas is allowed to shut down Israel's major airport, every terrorist group in the world will begin to target airports throughout the world. The shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over the Ukraine will be but one of many such tragedies, if Hamas is allowed to succeed. An attack on the safety on Israel's airport is an attack on the safety of all international aviation. Israel is the canary in the mine. What Hamas has done to Israeli aviation is a warning to the world. In its efforts to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at Ben Gurion Airport, Israel is fighting for the entire civilized world against those who would shoot down civilian airliners. The world should support Israel in this noble fight.
2b) Let Israel Decide
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A premature Gaza cease-fire would help Hamas.
Nations must be militarily strong and determined enough to ensure their own survival. Israelis have long understood this harsh reality of global politics, and it has never been clearer than this week as the world browbeats Israel and the terror group Hamas for a "cease-fire" in Gaza.
Israeli soldiers spray gas at the exit of a tunnel which was used the day before by Hamas militants to infiltrate I
sraeli lines on July 22. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
President Obama and John Kerry have adopted this ostensibly even-handed trope, and on Tuesday the European Union went further and deplored Israel and Hamas as if they were equal perpetrators. Hamas should stop its "criminal and unjustifiable acts," the EU said, but it added that it was "particularly appalled" at the human cost of the Israel ground offensive. Particularly?
This all may be intended as fine impartiality, but the reality is that a cease-fire now would help Hamas. The terror group rejected Egypt's offer of a cease-fire last week after Israel had accepted it, perhaps figuring that Israel wouldn't risk a ground invasion. Or perhaps it wanted such an invasion figuring the world would condemn Israel for civilian casualties and Hamas would win the propaganda war.
In any case now that it has moved on the ground, Israel will lose if it stops before it achieves its main military objectives. This means blowing up the entire network of tunnels that Hamas uses to infiltrate into Israel and to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Egypt. It also means destroying the stockpiles of rockets and storage sites.
The Israelis are best positioned to judge their progress, and the U.S. should publicly support its military response in a war it didn't start. This is what will bring the most rapid end to the violence.
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By Jonathan S. Tobin
After several days of personally observing the people of Israel reacting to rocket attacks and the grim reality of the fight against Hamas in Gaza, the irrelevance of most of the things the country’s American critics say about it has never seemed more obvious to me. After being forced into a war that the overwhelming majority of people here understand is one about their survival and not the political issues that divide Jews, it’s little wonder that most Israelis pay little attention to their country’s foreign detractors who seek to save them from themselves. People who claim to care about the Jewish state need to draw similar conclusions.
The contrast between the support for the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces to attack Hamas’s rocket launchers and terrorist tunnel network in Gaza that is exhibited by most Israelis and the outrage that these efforts at self-defense have generated elsewhere is hard to ignore. Israelis understand the current conflict has nothing to do with arguments about settlements or borders. You don’t have to be a supporter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or those of pro-settlement critics on the right here to understand that Hamas and its sympathizers don’t care where Israel’s borders should be drawn. Nor is there any real debate about the impact of a Palestinian political culture in which even the supposed moderates applaud terrorism and treat those who slaughter Jews as heroes. The point of the terrorist fortress in Gaza that the Israel Defense Forces is trying to disarm if not dismantle is to serve as the base for an ongoing war against the existence of the Jewish state. The choice of Hamas’s leaders to deliberately sacrifice as many of their own people as possible in order to protect their terrorist infrastructure has not been lost on Israelis. Nor has it escaped their notice that the whole point of the massive investment in rockets and infiltration tunnels by the government of a district mired in poverty is to produce as many Jewish casualties as possible regardless of the impact such actions may have on the safety or the quality of life of Palestinians.
Just as important is the ugly anti-Semitic tone of much of the protests that have been mounted against Israel’s counter-attacks against Hamas in Gaza. Simply put, much of the world seems to think that Hamas has a “right” to shoot thousands of rockets at Israeli cities or to launch cross-border terror raids aimed at kidnapping or killing as many Jews as possible and that the Jewish state has no right to defend itself against these actions–even if they go to great lengths (as the Israel Defense Forces do as a matter of course) to avoid hurting the civilians that the Islamists use as human shields. The general invective against Zionism being heard on the streets of Europe’s cities and even in the U.S. protests against Israel is of a piece with the tone of Hamas’s talking points. The solidarity these demonstrators are expressing for the “resistance” against the “occupation”–a term by which they mean all of Israel and not just the West Bank or the Hamas-run independent Palestinian state in all but name in Gaza–also makes plain the nature of the struggle. Even those who support a two-state solution that would entail an Israeli withdrawal from most or all of the West Bank must now comprehend that their dislike of the settlements or the desire to satisfy the Palestinian ambition for sovereignty can’t ignore the fact that the debate about these ideas is entirely moot while the rockets are flying and terrorists are tunneling beneath the border in hope of emerging inside Israel to slaughter innocents. In this context of hate and violence, the only real points of contention are whether you support the survival of the Jewish state or not.
That is why the energy expended by so many American liberals on behalf of projects designed to pressure Israel’s government to make more concessions to the Palestinians is not merely wrongheaded. It’s utterly irrelevant to the realities of both the Middle East and the global resurgence of anti-Semitism. Groups such as J Street that are predicated on the notion that Israel must be saved from itself by principled liberal critics are treated as both serious and representative of Jewish opinion by the mainstream media. But that group has little to say about the current conflict that requires our notice. Nor are its efforts to distinguish itself from far more radical anti-Zionist groups that openly support efforts to isolate Israel economically and support protests against its right of self defense of any importance any longer.
At this moment it is no longer possible to pretend that the conflict can be wished away by Israeli concessions that would, if implemented, create another 20 Gazas in the West Bank. Nor can one rationally argue that more Israeli forbearance toward Hamas in Gaza and a less vigorous effort to take out its vast system of tunnels shielding its rocket arsenal and terror shock troops would bring the region closer to peace when the only way to give that cause a chance is predicated on the elimination of Hamas.
If, at some point in the indefinite future, the Palestinians turn on Hamas and its less radical allies and embrace a national identity that is not inextricably linked to Israel’s elimination, perhaps then we can resume the debate about settlements and borders that J Street craves. But until that unlikely event happens, it is imperative that Americans realize that the J Street critique of Israel that is often echoed by some in the Obama administration and throughout the left is over. The only question to be asked today is whether you stand with Israel’s right to defend itself or not. Jews and others who consider themselves friends of the Jewish state must find the courage to speak up for the justice of Israel’s cause in the current crisis against the forces of hate. Viewed from the perspective of the last week’s events here in Israel, anything else is a waste of time.
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