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Breaking: FAILED Immigration Policies - Beto O'Rourke BLASTS Biden
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This should put a lump in your throat:
https://www.instagram.com/reel
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Where were you?
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Personal Comments
Maria Bartiromo is a very fine reporter and interrogator and generally, on Sunday, interviews interesting people. Today (11/12) this is what I learned:
1) Rep. James Comer has now submitted subpoenas pertaining to information based on bank documents that significant monies have been transferred directly to President Biden. His son's lawyer claims they were repayments of significant loans.
Comer names two whistleblowers whose testimony has been verified but they have been restrained by the AG.
Furthermore, there is evidence of hundreds of methods to hide what was being done regarding hiding money laundering, tax evasion etc.
2) Sen. Cruz has written a book entitled: "Unwoke" which he claims demonstrates how Marxists have penetrated every institution and agency of our government and society from Education to our military and how the Pentagon is infected by personnel at top levels that have disrupted decisions making against our adversaries.
3) Marinda Devine, reporter for The New York Post, believes President Biden is so compromised, because of Chinese payments, that his meeting with China's Xi will be seriously impacted. Xi is aware of the alleged $20 million that has been transferred from various organizations that are directly connected to the CCP to the Biden Family. Devine also believes Xi believes Biden is a weak, incompetent president and his handling of the Afghan withdrawal signaled as much.
4)Rep. Jim Jordan spoke about how special attorney, David Weiss, lied to Congress when he testified he was not prevented from seeking special status. He was refused such when he sought help and was refused by the Washington Assistant Atty. Consequently, Weiss took 5 years investigating Hunter Biden allowing the statute of limitations to run with respect to Burisma financial connections, pay offs and the ultimate firing of the Ukranian investigator who was pursuing fraud.
5) The rise anti-Semitism is the consequence of radical Islamist's ability to manipulate public attitudes. Biden's resistance to Bibi's goal to defeat Hamas, Biden's efforts to undo Trump's success with The Abraham Accords and Biden's shipment of $6 billion to Iran sent a message America's support of Israel is questionable. Furthermore, the Biden Administration has not lifted a finger to forcefully take any action against the domestic riots against Israel nor Jewish students on University campuses.
Biden Keeps the Billions Flowing to Iran - WSJ
The Editorial Board
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The Iranian surge in oil exports since President Biden took over has brought Iran an additional $32 billion to $35 billion, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The calculations are tricky, but the cause of the Iranian windfall is clear: As part of Mr. Biden’s quiet diplomacy with Iran, the U.S. has curtailed sanctions enforcement. Customers and middlemen have concluded the risk is low and the discount on Iran’s oil is too good to pass up.
This transfer of funds to Iran is cumulatively more significant than the President’s recent $6 billion ransom payment in return for five hostages. And it keeps growing, even as the money fails to moderate Iranian behavior. Instead it finances Iran’s aggression abroad via proxies such as Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the front groups in Iraq and Syria that shoot at American bases almost daily.
(In 2020 the State Department assessed that Iran sends $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist groups, arming and training them to attack Israel and murder its civilians as Hamas did Oct. 7. Last year Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that his group receives $70 million from Iran, plus long-range rockets.
Citing an Israeli security source, Reuters reports that Iran’s funding for Hamas ballooned in the past year to $350 million. Hamas’s new capabilities took Israel and the U.S. by surprise, but they didn’t come from nowhere.
About 70% of Iran’s oil exports are to China, which helps explain the blossoming Russia-China-Iran axis challenging world order. Iran sends China cheap oil and Russia new military drones. It may export missiles too, now that the Biden Administration allowed international missile sanctions to lapse.
In return, Iran receives the money and diplomatic cover it needs to advance its war on the U.S. and Israel. Russian military support in Syria shields Iranian arms transfers, and the potential for nuclear cooperation should keep Western policy makers up at night.
If the Biden Administration wants to limit the flow of oil money to Tehran, it knows what to do: enforce the law and sanction the complicit banks, purchasers, insurers, tankers, ports and other players that facilitate the trade. Does the President have the will to break from his strategy of appeasement?)
6) Maria also questioned a retired American Lt. General, whose name I do not remember, whether he thought Biden was doing enough to protect our own troops and support Israel. He explained, in military terms, why he thought Biden was falling woefully short and could a lot more.
Every one Maria interviewed responded by confirming everything I have been saying and believe myself.
Biden and his family are corrupt. Joe Biden, himself, is one of the most corrupt presidents to reside in The Oval Office. His ability to stonewall may prevent mounting evidence from allowing him to be indicted and surely impeached and convicted.
One thing I am certain of is were Trump and his family being investigated radical liberals, American Muslim sympathizers, ant-Semites and Trump haters would be up in arms demanding the entire episode proceed.
Time will tell. It always does.
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It is about time:
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Pittsburgh Voters Stop a Soros-Backed Prosecutor Candidate
Pittsburgh Stephen Zappala, a lifelong Democrat, has been the district attorney in Allegheny County since 1998. He won a seventh term Tuesday with an unusual strategy: He ran as a Republican.
In May, Mr. Zappala lost a Democratic primary to Matt Dugan by more than 10 points. Mr. Dugan is a George Soros-funded progressive who promised to take Pittsburgh and its surrounding area down the same path taken by soft-on-crime prosecutors in San Francisco and Philadelphia. His campaign raked in nearly $2 million from the Sorosbacked Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC.
Fearing that the far-left Mr. Dugan would win the Democratic nod, GOP officials got creative. There was no Republican candidate running for district attorney, so former Gov. Tom Corbett and others urged voters to write in Mr. Zappala’s name. He won the nomination, setting up a rematch with Mr. Dugan in November’s general election.
Democrats enjoy a 2-to-1 registration advantage in Allegheny County, so Mr. Dugan could have expected to coast to victory. Instead, an unexpected coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents formed behind Mr. Zappala and stiff-armed the Soros agenda.
“Tuesday should be a lesson to my party that voters won’t be afraid to buck the party when it nominates candidates too far outside of the mainstream,” says Mr. Zappala. Soft-on-crime policies may be popular among Democratic primary voters, but Pittsburghers at large didn’t appreciate an out-of-state billionaire trying to influence their election. Mr. Soros has directly or indirectly supported the campaigns of Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, New York’s Alvin Bragg and San Francisco’s recently ousted Chesa Boudin.
Like those district attorneys, Mr. Dugan promised to do away with
cash bail and take a “ holistic approach” to criminal justice. Mr. Zappala’s campaign was explicit: Elect Mr. Dugan and Pittsburgh will soon meet similar ruin.
Mr. Zappala has occasionally stirred controversy. His office operates a network of more than 1,000 surveillance cameras and license-plate readers in Pittsburgh that privacy advocates and civil libertarians have called “dystopian.” In 2021 the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported on emails showing that Mr. Zappala had ordered his deputies not to offer plea deals to clients of a well-known black attorney.
The campaign was ugly, with Messrs. Zappala and Dugan sparring on social media. “Matt Dugan is dressing up for Halloween as someone who gives a damn about victims rights,” Mr. Zappala tweeted Oct. 31. “He’s always been on the side of the accused criminal.” Mr. Dugan fired back two days later: “Racial disparity has long been a problem under Steve Zappala.” Allegheny County voters evidently preferred the devil they knew to a Soros-backed progressive.
Despite running with an R next to his name, Mr. Zappala says he’ll remain a Democrat and is ready to work with Pittsburgh’s Democratic Mayor Ed Gainey and incoming progressive County Executive Sara Innamorato notwithstanding their support for Mr. Dugan. “I don’t take politics personally,” he says.
“When it comes to criminal-justice reforms, I was doing these kinds of things before it became cool,” says Mr. Zappala. He notes his long support for drug and mental- health courts to get nonviolent offenders treatment and keep them out of the justice system. “I have been a reform prosecutor before that term got taken over by these radical politicians who politicize things like cash bail and pretrial detention.”
Tuesday was a bad day for Mr. Soros and his approach to criminal justice. Voters are telling Democratic Party leaders that they’re out of touch on crime and punishment. Is anybody listening?
Ms. Hroncich, a reporter for the New York Sun, was a 2023 Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.
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Clearly, the Palestinians and their propagandists have developed a whole lexicon, a series of talking points and slogans that distorts words, negates history, and obscures Palestinian intentions. Israel went along with these lies for too long.
https://jewishjournal.com/cover_story/364934/the-nine-big-lies-9-deceitful-phrases-used-against-israel-and-what-they-really-mean/
This primer picks nine of the most popular New Big Lies Palestinians and their enablers propagate. Let’s leave the number ten for more godly commandments, while stressing that despite being debunked repeatedly, these lies have countless lives
The Nine Big Lies: 9 Deceitful Phrases Used Against Israel – and What They Really Mean
Clearly, the Palestinians and their propagandists have developed a whole lexicon, a series of talking points and slogans that distorts words, negates history, and obscures Palestinian intentions. Israel went along with these lies for too long.
Gil Troy
November 9, 2023
23:46
In 1917, California’s isolationist senator Hiram W. Johnson captured the cynicism of politics – especially during wartime. “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” he said, echoing earlier sages, as America embarked on a “war to end all wars,” which we now call World War I.
While fabricating here and there may be every general’s pastime, Palestinian terrorists and their enablers have taken lying to a whole other level. Yet, despite building so much of their case on a foundation of falsehoods, they keep conning the world. Everyone “knows” that Israel occupies Gaza – despite disengaging from it in 2005; that “From the River to the Sea” envisions a democratic Palestine — when it envisions an exterminated Israel; and, most outrageously, that hundreds of innocent Israelis, young and old alike, deserved to be massacred, maimed, raped, and terrorized – while others denied all the evidence that the atrocities happened.
This primer picks nine of the most popular New Big Lies Palestinians and their enablers propagate. Let’s leave the number ten for more godly commandments, while stressing that despite being debunked repeatedly, these lies have countless lives.
“From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free.” Give the Palestinians credit here: at least they are honest. But I have to ask: If Palestine is free – meaning Jew-free – from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea – where is there room for me and 9 million other Israelis? “From the River to the Sea” is a one-state solution, meaning a no-Jewish state solution – and no Jews anywhere else, either.
Some Palestinians prevaricate. They claim the slogan imagines a secular democratic state with Jews and Arabs living together. In fact, the phrase’s history is exclusionary and exterminationist.
In 1964, three years before the Six-Day War, the slogan was popularized by the Palestinian activists and terrorists who founded the Palestine Liberation Organization. Their war aims were not to liberate the “occupied territories,” which Israel only secured three years later. They wanted – and want — to liberate the world from Israel itself. Similarly, since Hamas emerged in the late 1980s, the slogan has been a Hamas and Islamic Jihad mainstay.
October 7 offered at least one clear lesson: if your enemy calls for your destruction – your enemy is calling for your destruction. It’s actually bigoted not to take them at their word and decide they can’t really mean that.
October 7 offered at least one clear lesson: If your enemy calls for your destruction – your enemy is calling for your destruction. Jews should take the Palestinian death cries seriously, and Americans must start taking the Iranian mullahs’ death cries seriously. It’s actually bigoted not to take them at their word and decide they can’t really mean that. “Palestine from the River to the Sea” leaves no rooms for Jews – or the Jewish State.
“This is what decolonization looks like.” The world is a tough place. Over the centuries, powerful countries have colonized other places, sending explorers, then groups of settlers, away from the mother country to establish settlements, usually in order to extract resources. Inevitably, especially as national self-determination became a virtue, colonization led to decolonization.
On one level, decolonization is simply an historical process, whereby people in the colonies rebel, or the empire collapses. Over the decades, scholars defined decolonization as a state of mind, too. Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), born in Martinique, helped make decolonization trendy among some of the most settled and privileged people in the world’s richest and most expensive universities.
As a psychiatrist, Fanon observed that colonized people often internalized a sense of inferiority. As a revolutionary, he wanted those colonies to break free – even violently. Considering violence cleansing, restoring some balance, some dignity to the powerless, he called violence “man recreating himself.”
Fanon built on Marx’s binary dividing the world between the oppressing ruling class and the oppressed proletariat. For Fanon, the forever-guilty oppressor was the colonizer, the forever-innocent oppressed was the decolonizer. For the colonized, Fanon preached, “there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of strength.”
The oppressive colonizers in this Manichean, black-and-white world are always guilty, while the oppressed are forever pure and innocent, no matter what they do. Viewing the world through this distorting prism, Israel is always guilty, the Palestinians forever innocent.
Fanon remains remarkably influential today. Call them woke. Call them postmodern. Call them identitarians. Today’s campus commissars have forged Marx’s seesaw between the oppressor and the oppressed with Fanon’s colonizer-decolonizer dynamic and deification of violence. These people frame the world – and America – as caught in a zero-sum power struggle. The oppressive colonizers in this Manichean, black-and-white world are always guilty, while the oppressed are forever pure and innocent, no matter what they do.
Viewing the world through this distorting prism, Israel is always guilty, the Palestinians forever innocent. As a result, the October 7 barbarian bloodbath was exhilarating, joyous, justified. One influencer even injected the Hamas-romanticizing term “settler-babies” into the mix.
To see the world this way requires much fanaticism, many simplifications, multiple distortions, and, at the end of the day, a very, very bruised soul. But those blinders explain how so many feminists failed to see Hamas’s rape culture and child abuse, how so many liberals failed to acknowledge the despotism, how so many humanists failed to cry out in shame and horror as Palestinian marauders crossed every civilizational red line.
“Israel is practicing apartheid.” The Jews seem to have magical powers. Over the centuries, Jews attracted all kinds of labels: Jews were too rich and too poor, too capitalist and too socialist, too traditional and too modern, too anxious to fit in and too eager to stand out.
Today, the Jewish state has similar plastic powers. As trends change, Israel is deemed guilty of the most heinous of national sins. Today Israel is a white-supremacist or, even better, Jewish-supremacist state, and a settler-colonialist enterprise. In the 1990s, Israel was racist, colonialist, and imperialist, as well as guilty of “ethnic cleansing” once the Balkan mess introduced that phrase into the international vocabulary. But since the 1970s, as the international community justifiably turned away in disgust from apartheid South Africa, Israel has been called an apartheid state.
Apartheid was a system of racial differentiation – apartness – based on all kinds of racial classifications and perverse beliefs that whites and blacks and colored people were not equal. The Apartheid Wall in Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum lists 148 laws sifting people into different racial categories to keep them apart and calibrate who deserved which privileges – and which restrictions.
Israel has never passed one law defining people by racial categories. In fact, Israelis and Palestinians are involved in a national conflict, not a race war.
If Israel wants to be racist, and create an apartheid state, it’s doing an awful job. Israeli-Arabs enjoy equal rights and have served as Supreme Court judges, Knesset members, key members of the last coalition. With about 20% of the population, Israeli-Arabs are overly represented in Israel’s medical system.
Moreover, if Israel wants to be racist, and create an apartheid state, it’s doing an awful job. Israeli-Arabs enjoy equal rights and have served as Supreme Court judges, Knesset members, key members of the last coalition. With about 20% of the population, Israeli-Arabs are overly represented in Israel’s medical system: About 20% of the doctors, as much as 40% of the nurses, and 43% of the pharmacists are Israeli-Arab. Finally, if Israelis hate Arabs so much and see them as inferior, why was there so much excitement about the Abraham Accords, and why are Hamas and Iran trying to subvert a Saudi Arabian deal with Israel?
Maybe Israelis don’t hate Arabs – but only pass laws protecting themselves against enemies who seek to destroy them?
“Israel is carrying out genocide.” Genocide, literally tribe-killing, is defined as a systematic series of violent acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” For decades, Palestinians have been crying “genocide,” claiming Israel seeks to wipe them out. Yet the Palestinian population has at least quintupled since 1967, from just over 1 million to nearly 5-and-a-half million people. Zionists are even worse at genocide than they are at apartheid.
Pure hatred often involves projection: You hate in others what you hate in yourself, you imagine your enemies would do to you what you would do to them if you had a chance. These false cries that Israelis are targeting Palestinians for genocide reflect the sweeping, categorical, and thus genocidal tendencies in the Hamas charter, in the October 7 sadism, and in too many twisted corners of the Palestinian national soul.
“Israel is engaged in disproportionate bombing.” The phrase “disproportionate bombing” is in many ways redundant, like fattening fudge – one goes with the other. When terrorists attack your civilians, then hide behind their civilians, what can a serious army do? Inevitably, some of those human shields will die.
Moreover, when you have an air force, and you have a choice between bombing an enemy from the air and sending your troops in door-to-door, what’s the moral call? A leader’s primary moral responsibility is to the led – and a defender’s primary moral responsibility is to defend those unfairly and viciously attacked. In April, 2002, Israel chose to send reservists into Jenin to apprehend terrorists instead of bombing from the air, U.S.-style. The result was a Palestinian ambush that killed 23 Israelis. Israel’s supporters may have felt momentarily pure – but 23 families were scarred for life that day.
When an enemy attacks, then cowers in mosques and hospitals and kindergartens and schools, those protected places become military objectives. Complaining about a “disproportionate response” from a regular army when fighting terrorists embedded in a city is in essence complaining about any response from the army. When your enemy calls for your annihilation, tries acting on it, then vows to try again and again, it’s unrealistic to expect no collateral damage.
Let’s be clear: the moral onus for every death, every injury, every misfire, remains on Hamas for initiating this round. It’s unfair to forget that ultimately war is a clash of powerful, ugly forces. If you want to win, it’s logical – and moral – for your own side to mobilize as much force as you can – within the bounds of reason of course, but not being immediately criticized, as Israel is.
“Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza since 1967.” In June, 1967, threatened by three Arab armies, Israel fought for its life and more than tripled its size. It won the Golan Heights in the north from Syria. It took over Gaza and the Sinai in the South from Egypt. And it reunited Jerusalem, while securing the Biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria from Jordan – which had, ahem, occupied what it called its “West Bank” territories, with no international authorization, since the Jordanian Legion invaded to its west during the 1948-1949 Israel War of Independence.
While Israeli governments over the years wavered, using different legal theories including the laws of occupation to define Israel’s relationship to all the territories, calling them “occupied” was triply problematic – especially to historians.
Signs at Farragut Square during the National March on Washington for Palestine while calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas on November 4, 2023 in Washington, DC. Alex Wong/Getty Images
• First, in defending itself legitimately, Israel seized territory from a hostile neighbor – when those Jordanian-administered territories languished in a legal no-man’s-land. From 1949 to 1967, the Jordanian conquerors ignored the U.N. 1947 Partition Plan to make those areas an independent Arab state. The U.N. never recognized Jordanian sovereignty there, making the territories truly disputed, not occupied.
• Second, this was no colonial expedition, going to some exotic locale in pith helmets and safari suits. Jews had international rights to the territories and a deep history there, especially the Biblical territories of Judaea and Samaria, which were deemed Jewish and open for Jewish settlement under the 1920 (often overlooked) San Remo conference and, subsequently, the British Mandate.
• Third, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan presciently noted in 1980, calling Israel an “occupier” implicitly compared Israel’s far more benign, legitimate, and rooted policies “to the Nazi practice of deporting or murdering vast numbers of persons in Western Poland – as at Auschwitz – and plans for settling the territory with Germans.” This false comparison, Moynihan noted, played “perfectly into the Soviet propaganda position” and the Palestinian projection that “Zionism is present-day fascism.”
Today, alas, the occupation preoccupation has become the main launching pad not only for the Bash Israel Firsters, but those hyper-critical Jews who habitually doubt Israel. Moreover, Palestinians use the words “occupation” and “settlements” promiscuously, to delegitimize anything Zionist. Israel is “occupied,” all of Israel. Every Israeli is a “settler.” The plundered kibbutzim of the southwest Negev are “settlements,” despite lying in pre-1967 Israel, within the “Green Line,” the borders from the 1949 armistice with Jordan, hastily drawn in green pencil. This sweeping Big Lie helped legitimize Hamas’s savagery, deeming every Israeli, every Thai volunteer, every tourist an “occupier,” and deserving of any violence Hamas and the other Palestinian murderers could mete out.
“Israel’s so-called disengagement from Gaza just turned it into an open-air prison.” In 2005, Israel disengaged from Gaza, uprooting over 9,000 Israeli citizens living in 25 settlements scattered through Gaza and northern Samaria. Amid the anguish, military strategists lobbied intensely to keep a strip of land for defensive purposes – the Philadelphi corridor. The Duke of Disengagement, Ariel Sharon, resisted. He claimed that if Israel even retained one grain of Gazan sand, critics would claim it was still “occupied.” And he was confident that once Gaza was no longer occupied, Israel could live in peace as the Gazans prospered.
If there is one word that best explains Israelis’ current frustration and fury, it is “disengagement.” Eighteen years ago, there were some weapons in Gaza, no tunnels, and a limited terrorist infrastructure, because Israel still retained some control. Yet, almost immediately after withdrawing from Gaza, primitive Qassam rockets started bombarding Israel – while critics kept bombarding Israel with the o-word, the occupation charge. The violence against Israel – and the criticism — intensified when Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, killing fellow Palestinians brutally.
Under the gun, now facing an implacable foe vowing to exterminate the Jewish state and the Jews – see the Hamas charter – Israel tried blockading Hamas. As a result, a whole series of lies burst forth: that Israel is occupying the territory it withdrew from completely (in fact, note how little control it had and how ineffectual its blockade was as Hamas built its deadly arsenal); that Gaza is the “most densely populated place on earth” (it doesn’t compare to Manhattan, Hong Kong, and other super-skyscrapered city centers); and that the Zionists have made it an “open air prison” or concentration camp (when you can see on a map that Egypt controls Gaza’s southern border, and know it keeps Gazans far, far away from Egyptians).
In short, Israel did everything it said it would when it disengaged. In doing so, Israel betrayed many of its own citizens. Nevertheless, Israel ended up with no peace, no peace of mind, and a piece of territory that became Hamasistan rather than the Mediterranean resort it could have been if its governing body had put its generous international aid to good use. Today, Israel has on its border a hostile, seething launching pad for tens of thousands of rockets and marauders, exporting so much trauma and misery – while those responsible treat their own people as cannon fodder, too.
In the Middle East today, that phrase [humanitarian ceasefire] may be the ultimate oxymoron – like a moral terrorist, a pragmatic Hamasnik, a feminist Islamic Jihadist, a liberal-democratic Palestinian Authority member, a healthy cancer.
“Israel must agree to a humanitarian ceasefire.” In the Middle East today, that phrase may be the ultimate oxymoron – like a moral terrorist, a pragmatic Hamasnik, a feminist Islamic Jihadist, a liberal-democratic Palestinian Authority member, a healthy cancer. For 18 years the world has yelled “disproportionate bombing” and keeps demanding “humanitarian ceasefires” whenever Israel tries defending itself. For 18 years, much humanitarian aid has been diverted to Hamas itself. After Hamas invaded and raided and shattered so many lives, from an Israeli perspective, what would be “humanitarian” about a premature ceasefire?
Diplomats and pro-Palestinian demonstrators say “humanitarian ceasefire.” Israelis hear “a chance for Hamas to regroup” and “more of the same.” Many Israelis wonder: “When do the hostages get such a pause, especially those who might be tortured or enduring the agony of sexual slavery?” Until the hostages are released, Israel cannot relent.
Israel can move to ease the burden of the truly innocent stuck between Hamas and the IDF. Israel could set up field hospitals or temporary refuges in empty parts of Gaza, in Egypt, or even in isolated parts of the Negev. But let’s not kid ourselves. Hamas will take advantage of any break or kindness: at least one-third of the first wave of what was supposed to be foreign nationals evacuated to Egypt were wounded Hamas terrorists, trying to sneak away. Fuel delivered by international organizations has long been hijacked by Hamas for its war machine.
Some claim Hamas is a small group holding the peace-loving Gazans hostage. But if Hamas is abusing people, a humanitarian pause giving the terrorists a break increases Palestinian misery, too. It delays the liberation they need. In fact, most Gazans, like most Palestinians, celebrated the carnage on October 7, and many zealously participated.
So, yes, try improvising ways to help, to minimize civilian suffering. But the phrase “humanitarian aid” sounds like resupplying Hamas, and “ceasefire” sounds like letting the killers regroup.
“Israel must pursue a two-state solution.” In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181. It was epic, recognizing the Jewish right to a national home – a right rooted in the Bible, promised in the Balfour Declaration and San Remo redeemed through the blood, sweat, and tears of Zionist pioneers who had already built an impressive infrastructure for the state that would be declared in May, 1948. To treat – in the parlance of the time — the Palestinian Jews and the Palestinian Arabs fairly, the U.N. partitioned the area, envisioning a Jewish state and an Arab entity, while internationalizing Jerusalem, the Jewish people’s forever-capital.
The Jews found this compromise devastating. But Palestinian Jewry’s leadership, pushed by David Ben-Gurion, decided that half a loaf was better than none. Two years after the Holocaust ended, Ben-Gurion feared more bloodshed. The Jews needed a state. The day after the U.N. Resolution passed, as Jews finished singing and dancing, Arab rejectionists rioted, trashing Jerusalem’s commercial district.
That started an historic pattern. Again and again, the Jews – and after 1948 what became the State of Israel — offered compromises, were willing to split territory, to cede territory. Yet again and again, the Palestinian leadership rejected it. No wonder the leading historian Efraim Karsh titled his book about the era, “Palestine Betrayed,” emphasizing that Hitlerian extremists like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem betrayed their own Palestinian Arab people.
In 1974, the U.N. passed a resolution endorsing “two States, Israel and Palestine … side by side within secure and recognized borders.” Thus began this diplomatic Holy Grail, pursuing a “two-state solution.” The most dramatic attempt to achieve it – the Oslo Peace Process of the 1990s – ended in bloodshed, when after the Camp David Peace Talks in 2000 Yasir Arafat rejected any compromise and led his people from negotiation right back to terror.
So yes, for decades there has been talk of a “two-state solution,” and many Israelis would love to see a territorial split. But, especially after October 7, the phrase stings. It reeks of three lies – the lies they tell us, the lies the world buys, and the lies we tell ourselves.
• First, when Palestinian diplomats and propagandists play the two-state game, they imply that once they have their territorial share, one of two states, the conflict will be solved. But the Palestinian leadership consistently refuses even to adjust its sweeping, all-or-nothing rhetoric promising to wipe Israel off the map. The Americans worked so hard in the 1990s to get Yasir Arafat to change the PLO charter calling for Israel’s destruction – and were so desperate to succeed — they overlooked what Arafat kept saying in Arabic, when he thought Bill Clinton and company weren’t paying attention. Again and again, especially Arafat in 2000, Mahmoud Abbas when he rejected Ehud Olmert’s compromise in 2008 and, most dramatically, Hamas in Gaza, showed no interest in a true “solution” that leaves Israel intact. Hamas’s charter is explicit about that.
• Today, the phrase is even more misleading and infuriating because it’s usually used as code in the international community and certain parts of the Jewish community for “Israel, just do the right thing, give them their territory ‘back’ and we will have peace.” But, especially after October 7, most Israelis know that the call on the Palestinian side is a ruse. Gazans had the potential to make a state. Israel and the international community would have showered peaceful, constructive Palestinians with money. Instead, they turned their strip of land into a multi-layered stationary warship – and the international community still showered them with money.
• Most upsetting, “the two-state solution” represents the lies we told ourselves. Admittedly under great international pressure (don’t just throw Bibi under the bus) Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence establishment decided that Hamas was “pragmatic,” Hamas could be contained. After all, no credible person could really believe the rantings in Hamas’s charter using the Quaran to justify destroying Israel and killing the Jews.
This is not to say that the problem is insoluble. At certain moments, no one imagined peace with Egypt or Jordan or the UAE. But that particular slogan is too compromised, and too associated with the lives and limbs and love and faith Israelis just lost.
Clearly, the Palestinians and their propagandists have developed a whole lexicon, a series of talking points and slogans that distorts words, negates history, and obscures Palestinian intentions. Israel went along with these lies for too long, often bullied into guilelessness by a gullible international community. October 7 was a nightmarish wake-up call. Israel must be moral – for its own sake, for its soldiers’ consciences and its national soul. But the game of buying into Palestinian lies and international niceties ended when those terrorists swarmed the peaceful kibbutzim and villages, sowing death and destruction. The challenge now is creating a new reality – and a new lexicon to acknowledge that reality—and build a better, fairer and genuinely safer new Middle East from there.
Professor Gil Troy, a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the JPPI, the Global Think Tank of the Jewish People, is an American presidential historian, and, most recently, the editor of the three-volume set, Theodor Herzl: Zionist Writings, the inaugural publication of The Library of the Jewish People
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IDF strikes terrorist infrastructure and military posts in which Hezbollah terrorists operated, in response to recent launches from Lebanon.
In response to the launches over the last day, IDF fighter jets and aircraft on Friday evening struck a series of terror targets belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization in Lebanon.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said that, among the terror targets that were struck, were a number of terrorist infrastructure and military posts in which Hezbollah terrorists operated, weapons depots, and intelligence infrastructure that assisted Hezbollah in gathering information and directing terrorism against Israel.
Earlier on Friday, the IDF cleared for publication that three IDF soldiers were seriously injured due to an anti-tank missile launched at an IDF post in the area of Manara in northern Israel.
The soldiers were evacuated to receive medical treatment and their families have been notified.
In another incident, an IDF soldier was severely injured and another was moderately injured from the fall of a hostile aircraft that infiltrated into Israeli territory from Lebanon.
The soldiers were evacuated to receive medical treatment and their families have been notified.
On Friday afternoon, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit confirmed that three aircraft infiltrated into Israeli territory from Lebanon.
One was intercepted by the IDF Aerial Defense Array and the other two fell in an area in the north. The event has concluded and the incident is under review.
On Thursday, IDF soldiers identified and struck two antitank terrorist cells in the area of the communities of Biranit and Yiftah in northern Israel.
Later in the evening, IDF fighter jets struck Hezbollah terror infrastructure in Lebanon. Additionally, the IDF struck terror targets using artillery and the "Iron Sting" guided mortar munition.
Among the targets were terror compounds and infrastructure, observation posts, and technological equipment used to direct terror against Israel.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)
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Israel’s 37th Day of War
By Sherwin Pomerantz
On the 37th day of ware in Israel, the IDF has adjusted downward the number of Israelis killed during the October 7th massacre to 1,200 from the original 1,400. As of today, 46 Israeli soldiers have lost their lives since the war began. 240+ hostages remain held by Hamas.
Israel has said doctors, patients, and thousands of evacuees who have taken refuge at hospitals in northern Gaza must leave so it can tackle Hamas terrorists under and around them. To assist, the IDF said it was ready to evacuate babies from Gaza's largest hospital on Sunday, where Palestinian officials said two newborns died and dozens more were at risk after fuel ran out amid intense fighting in the area.
While the IDF tightens its encirclement of the area around Shifa Hospital in Gaza (under which Hamas has its headquarters), the northern border with Lebanon seems to be getting hotter. Four Israeli soldiers were injured over the weekend by Lebanese attacks. Defense Minister Gallant told the troops today that Hizballah is very close to making a mistake that will end with the residents of Beirut fleeting for their lives. So we may be closer to entering Lebanon than any of us wanted
Palestinians in Gaza have reportedly started attacking members of Hamas as severe shortages in food, water, and medicine plague the area. The tensions suggest that fissures could be forming in Hamas' authoritarian rule. The UK’s Telegraph reported that Palestinians are pushing back against Hamas forces, launching rocks at Hamas police who have attempted to cut water lines. Civilians also insulted Hamas officials, according to witnesses. Gazans reportedly hold Hamas at least partially responsible for the humanitarian crisis that has cropped up since Israel invaded the area in October. It appears Gazans are starting to lose their fear of Hamas, whose forces have generally ruled the area with a draconian fist.
The United States Central Command announced on Sunday the presence of an Ohio-class submarine in its area of responsibility. Ohio-class submarines are the largest in the U.S. fleet, and can be equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. It is highly unusual for even their approximate locations to be disclosed. The US has already deployed to the region the USS Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, which includes the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason and Carrier Air Wing 3, with nine aircraft squadrons and embarked headquarters staffs. This in addition to the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which includes the USS Normandy, USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney and USS Roosevelt. The US Air Force also announced deployment of squadrons of F-15, F-16 and A-10 fighter aircraft. In a statement, Defense Secretary Austin said that this is being done “as part of our effort to deter hostile actions against Israel or any efforts towards widening this war following Hamas’s attack on Israel.”
Anti-Israel sentiment seems to be growing worldwide with massive demonstrations over the weekend in London and New York, among others. Amazingly at Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance late last week, a showing of uncut footage taken of the October 7th massacre by helmet cameras of captured Hamas fighters, was picketed by anti-Israel protestors claiming the film was propaganda. Again, it was unedited film from the cameras of the Hamas invaders themselves. Seemingly all logic has now disappeared from the lexicon of the protestors.
Today’s on-line version of the New York Times carries an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof urging President Biden to say to Prime Minister Netanyahu “enough” and then the war will end immediately. That may be true but may not be in Israel’s best interests. At the end of the day, for the moment, this is our existential war which we may just need to win and win conclusively.
And by the way, if you can make be in Washington DC on Tuesday for the rally around the Reflecting Pool starting at 1 PM EST.
Sherwin Pomerantz has lived in Israel for 40 years, is CEO of Atid EDI Ltd., a international business development consultancy. He is also the Founder and Chair of the American State Offices Association, former National President of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel and a past Chairperson of the Board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies
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End DEI
For Tablet, Bari Weiss writes about the damage DEI has done to our institutions and why it is time to end it altogether.
The answer is not for the Jewish community to plead its cause before the intersectional coalition, or beg for a higher ranking in the new ladder of victimhood. That is a losing strategy—not just for Jewish dignity, but for the values we hold as Jews and as Americans.
The Jewish commitment to justice—and the American Jewish community’s powerful and historic opposition to racism—is a source of tremendous pride. That should never waver. Nor should our commitment to stand by our friends, especially when they need our support as we now need theirs.
But “DEI” is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power.
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