Biden, Blinken, The U.N and Red Cross harangue Israel because they are reachable and a democratic society that responds whereas, no one cautions Hamas because they are a closed society based on animal behaviour.

and:

Israel’s UN Ambassador to expose Hamas sexual crimes

Ambassador Gilad Erdan to hold event at UN exposing horrors of Hamas sexual crimes committed against Israeli women on October 7.

By Ambassador Gilad Erdan

Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan will hold an important and timely event at the UN on Monday at 11:30 a.m. EST to expose the horrors and shocking acts of sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women in the October 7 massacre and to demand the clear condemnation and recognition of these crimes by the UN and the international community.

The event will be held in partnership with the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), the World Zionist Organization, Shazur, WIZO, Hadassah and the Shusterman Foundation. At the event, which is taking place against the backdrop of the shameful silence of the UN, findings will be presented that prove the sexual violence carried out by Hamas on October 7.

Ambassador Erdan and Sheryl Sandberg, the Founder of Lean In, will speak at the event. A recorded speech by the former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be shown.

Also, members of medical teams, police, and lawyers will describe findings that prove the atrocities committed by Hamas against women. Hundreds of ambassadors and diplomats, senior UN officials including under-secretary-generals and representatives of UN agencies, Jewish organizations, and civil society organizations are expected to attend the event.

“Tomorrow at the UN, I will present the findings that prove the shocking crimes of sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7th and which the UN and its organizations ignore, neglecting the women in Israel. UN Women, two months late, condemned the ‘descriptions’ of these crimes but still did not acknowledge that they actually happened and that Hamas committed them. We will continue to fight against this shocking neglect and for the whole world to recognize the crimes committed and the barbarity and cruelty of Hamas terrorists,” said Erdan.

The event will take place at the UN headquarters in New York.

After weeks of ignoring Hamas’ sexual violence during the October 7 attack, UN Women on Friday issued its first condemnation of the brutality.

Foreign Minister Eli Cohen called the conduct of UN Women “disgraceful” and urged its executive director to resign.

Last week, nearly two months after the October 7 attack, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres finally acknowledged that Hamas committed acts of sexual violence during the attack.

Erdan said in response, “The Secretary-General's words only sharpen the fact that when it comes to Israeli women, sexual violence that has been proven by state authorities still needs to be ‘investigated.’ For him, when it comes to Israeli women, you can doubt the facts and wait 55 days to call an unknown party to conduct an ‘investigation.’ He does not acknowledge that Hamas committed these crimes!”

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Biden, Blinken and Sec.of Defense continue to dawdle as Iran thumbs their nose,

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US Warship Under Attack In the Red Sea

By Sarah Arnold

On Sunday morning, the Pentagon said that a U.S. warship and multiple commercial vessels were under attack in the Red Sea.

The attack signifies a potential escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Middle East that is linked to the Israel-Hamas war.

“We’re aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available,” the Pentagon told The Associated Press.

The Pentagon did not reveal where the fire came from. However, Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels have launched several attacks on vessels in the Red Sea. It has also launched drones and missiles targeting Israel as the Jewish state continues its war against Hamas in Gaza.

The British military confirmed earlier in the day that there had been a suspected drone attack and explosions in the Red Sea but did not provide further details. The attack reportedly lasted for about five hours.

Saree did not mention any U.S. warship being involved in the attack. He said the raids would continue as long as Israel continues its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Top Hamas Official Suggests Attack Bigger Than October 7 Is On The Horizon.

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A Liberal California Mom’s Reckoning

Picking up the pieces from a shattered world view

By Melissa Freed Cohen

In the past 6 weeks, the world as I have known it for 46 years has morphed into something unrecognizable to me. Something I couldn’t have understood before Oct. 7, but now appears with perfect clarity.

This global shift has eclipsed my sense of time, condensing the past 3,000 years of human existence into a blip, not the long arc of progress as I had understood it, but as a repetitive cycle of the most primitive inclinations - hate and violence and bloodthirst. For Jews. Every hour and every day that goes by sharpens the lens, exposing my former world view as a distortion, as if I had been looking through a fun-house mirror, its visual tricks keenly disguising the true nature of humanity. For all of my short life, the fun-house mirror reflected a utopian vision where Jews were accepted into society, and not just accepted, but valued. The glass has now been shattered. My eyes have been opened. I now see the biblical stories of attempts to destroy us not as ancient stories of triumph over evil but as a modern story, a current one, and a prescient one of what is to come.

My old view held for many Western countries but particularly for America, where Jews came here with nothing and made something. Fleeing pogroms, discrimination, and eventually the Holocaust, the generations before us pulled themselves up from their bootstraps, teaching their children and then their children the value of hard work and the promise of America. And as America accepted us in, slowly decade by decade eliminating barriers to Jewish entry into higher education, top law and financial firms, and certain country clubs and neighborhoods, Jews assimilated into the culture, adopting liberal American values as religious tenets, as their religious Jewishness receded. This is the America that I grew up in. Jews had built a life here, not confined to the shtetls of the old world, but a real life among our Christian neighbors, where we went to public schools, joined neighborhood sports leagues, and contributed to our local communities. We became part of the fabric of society.

To me, this always seems like a great thing. We may have lost a bit of our outward Jewishness, but we traded it for Americanness, and we got to have both. Adopting liberal, pluralistic values wasn’t a leap at all, but rather a logical expression of our Jewish ethos. Freedom of speech and of religion, equal protection under the law, civil rights, plus baseball on Sundays and Hebrew National hotdogs. What could be better! My parents and the old guard saw the risks of that trade off, but my generation, so interwoven with American culture, couldn’t understand their perspective. Our parents knew that America was the greatest country in the world for its promise of freedom and opportunity. We were safe here, and this was the best place to be a Jew. But they also knew how fragile these freedoms were, and they just couldn't erase the indelible scars of discrimination from the very fiber of their being.

Informed by this, and by a strong sense of Jewish identity, my parents fervently believed in the importance of Jewish education and Jewish community. My mom, in particular, who holds no beliefs any less than fervently, fought hard to impart this sense of Jewishness on me. She insisted that I go to a Jewish day school, participate in Jewish youth groups and camp, and be part of a community that upheld Jewish culture and values. Naturally, I fought it. Why did we need to separate ourselves so much in this equal opportunity world? Couldn’t I assimilate just like the others? The world was ok with us now, so couldn't we be ok with them? I didn’t understand this “sticking together” mentality, and frankly, I thought it was holding us back from being the full red-blooded Americans we could be.

But my mom was one of the few people in the 21st century, before Oct. 7, to worry about the future of the Jewish people as an existential crisis. “We are a tiny drop in the bucket of all the people on this earth, and if you don’t continue our traditions that’s one less of us,” she would say. “You must learn what it means to be a Jew so you can pass that on to your children. Do you want to be responsible for the dying out of our people that has survived for thousands of years despite continuous attempts at annihilation?!” Even discounting the hyperbole, it didn't resonate. No one was trying to kill us. Antisemitism was an outdated, old world issue, other than the isolated incidents perpetrated by fringe lunatics. It didn't feel like we were a miniscule population. And we were living beautiful lives, blessed with education, economic security and broad-based acceptance.

It took 46 years and 12 hours, the time that Hamas infiltrated Israel with its reign of terror, for me to see her point. I keep replaying my mother’s words in my head, their urgency resounding. My rosy idealism, the natural outgrowth of a privileged, secure childhood, has been smashed to smithereens and supplanted with the outlook of my ancestors. When Israel was attacked in the most barbaric, unimaginable way, my community was paralyzed with shock, fear, and grief. Even for those who hadn’t been to Israel in many years, or who didn’t have a strong connection to Israel, it felt like an attack on us, our nation, our people. Americans who look like us and talk like us were among the victims! First, we sat with the shock - how could this unsophisticated terrorist group take Israel’s vaunted army and intelligence agencies by surprise. Then we sat with the grief. The grief for those murdered and raped and burned and taken capture, whose stories I can’t recount without tears rolling down my cheeks. But as we were grieving for the dead, before we were able to process the depravity and all its reverberations within Israel, we were forced to grieve again: for the humanity we thought existed among the people watching this unfold all over the world. Seeing thousands marching not just in the Arab world but also in places like London, Sydney, New York and L.A. in support of the terrorists, in support of our gruesome murder, and blaming Israel for the attack against it, was a second awakening. The world was against us. Now, for the first time in my life, I am scared.

The antisemitism that I thought was dead took little time to surface and then to flourish marvelously, spreading like wildfire, its flames engulfing the world. How quickly it happened! A destructive force as old as time unleashed itself, erasing years of peace and prosperity in an instant. And now here we are in the dark ages again, or is it 1939, or 1478, or ancient Egypt? Space and time are closing in, playing the same loop, a nihilistic Groundhog’s Day.

As a young girl learning about our history I often thought about the roots of antisemitism. Where did it come from? Why was it constant from biblical times through to the Holocaust? I could never understand why everyone hated us. My young mind struggled to make sense of it, but now I believe the answer is simple. It’s not about land or gold. It is pure xenophobia, just hatred of the other. It's hard for my generation of secular American Jews to understand, but historically, we have always been the other. We refused to pray to multiple gods when the world was pagan and to accept Jesus when Christianity swept the world. We refused to conform to the religious beliefs of our conquerors and their empires. Our steadfast beliefs, different from convention, make us the enemy. The enemy of fascism, Islamic fundamentalism, every angry mob that has a grievance, and every simple mind that can be controlled by a demagogue’s propaganda machine. Jews have never tried to convert others, and we have been the victims of genocidal campaigns throughout history. So here we are, 0.2% of the world’s population, the teeny, tiny other swallowed by the world’s eagerness to believe the tall tales of our evil and greed.

And we have seen just how eager the world is to accept as truth any charges our enemies make against us. How easy it is to turn reason on its head. The attacked are decried the attackers, the victims of genocide called a genocidal nation, the lone liberal democracy in a sea of authoritarian countries called an apartheid state, the Jews who have been living in Judea since the time of Abraham called the occupiers. Not only do the street mobs proclaim these slanderous absurdities but so do the mobs who’ve come down from their Ivy League towers who are supposed to be our brightest minds and future leaders.

And so too are freedom-loving institutions quick to pick up the pitchforks or slow to speak the truth. If other countries called for an American ceasefire after Osama Bin Laden’s henchmen flew planes into the World Trade Center, it would be laughable. Could you imagine our academic institutions’ hesitancy to condemn terrorism if any other country were the victim? Feminists and human rights activists all resolute in their support of the Palestinian cause even through methods that rise to the most vicious crimes against humanity?

These realities are unimaginable for any country other than the Jewish state. And this new upside down world where black is white and white is black is where I now reside. I reside in this darker reality where my fellow Jews and I are alone in this world. And for Jews on the left like me, like most of my Bay Area Jewish friends, this rejection has been particularly stinging. The good-hearted people we stood with to support women's rights, LGBTQ rights, the Black Lives Matter movement, DEI - where have they been? We thought we were comrades in a fight against discrimination to make the world a better place, but even they have turned against us. And how is it possible? Didn't they see the images that Hamas proudly broadcasted to the world? The parading around of women brutally raped and mutilated, blood running down their legs, and then murdered in front of a cheering crowd. The videos of parents trying to lie on top of their children as Hamas came in to murder them in hopes that the bullets wouldn't permeate their bodies so their toddlers could survive. The audio of a Hamas terrorist calling his parents giddy with glee to recount how he murdered 10 Jews and weren’t they proud of him. How could it be that our allies saw these images too and turned their backs? How do they lack the moral clarity and the humanity to stand up for us in this Hobbesian jungle we are now in?

So Hamas’s attack was a huge win for antisemites, conspiracy theorists and apparently a large wing of the progressive left, but it also gave the Jewish community an unintended gift. Hamas ignited within us a deep solidarity formed out of tragedy, which has been a third awakening for me. We have all come together to support each other and fight for our future in a way that only people with a shared history and a future at risk can do. We’ve been shaken enough to know that there is nothing more important to fight for. And now, for the first time, I feel solidarity with my ancestors, whom I had always seen as the tragic ones who had to suffer and hide, in contrast to my comfortable perch in society. I see myself in them now, and it fills me with both fear and pride. I also feel solidarity with many non Jewish friends who have stood up in the most righteous ways, sharing in our grief and pain and speaking up not just for us, but for what is right. Our friends’ support has been a light amidst the darkness. A light that I can only hope shines brighter over the difficult weeks and months to come and inspires an awakening for others that moral clarity shouldn’t be hard to summon.

But where do we go from here? How do we continue to live in our communities where we look around and see all the faces of the people who have turned their backs. Now we know how they really feel. How do we support the social justice causes that are so deeply held for us alongside people who don’t care if we live or die? Am I no longer a democrat? I’m certainly not a republican. But am I now? Everything that was certain is now a question. Once again, we are without a home, wandering in the desert, as it appears we have always been.

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The Rapid Return of Israel's Disastrous Policy

by Daniel Pipes
Middle East Quarterly

Judging by the way Netanyahu has managed Gaza in the last 13 years,

it is not certain that there will be a clear policy going forward.
— Tal Schneider, Times of Israel

By Daniel Pipes

"Everything changed" in Israel on Oct. 7. But did it? Understanding the mistakes that led up to the Hamas massacre provides a basis to evaluate Israel's long-term response to that day. Contrary to general opinion, I shall argue that the presumptions behind those mistakes remain in place and will not change unless Israelis adopt a radically different attitude toward the Palestinians.

The Road to Oct. 7

Israeli military planners coined a Hebrew term, conceptzia, "the concept," in the late 1960s. It held that Egypt's Anwar el-Sadat would not go to war until 1974, when his military had acquired advanced Soviet fighter jets that permitted it to take on the Jewish state's air force. Israel's Agranat Commission, which investigated how the Egyptians and Syrians surprised Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, largely blamed the conceptzia for a blindness to the preparations taking place before its very eyes.

The conceptzia misled Moshe Dayan (L) and Golda Meir.

The future commission inevitably analyzing Israel's unpreparedness on Oct. 7, 2023, will surely blame that surprise on a second erroneous conceptzia. It held that, David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explains,

under the heavy burden of governing the Gaza Strip, Hamas would feel the need to prove itself through economic performance. Specifically, economic inducements towards Hamas would moderate its foundational belief that Israel is an illegitimate entity whose very existence must be extinguished and its citizens killed. This Israeli conceptzia was driven by many factors, but at its core, it was based on the idea that Hamas was undergoing an organizational evolution in which it would now value even modest increases in living standards in Gaza. Economic advancement would bring calm, as it gave Hamas something to lose.

Note the words "something to lose": this phrase summarizes the new conceptzia, a belief that Hamas could be bought off or tempered through economic benefits. A headline published days before Oct. 7 captured the depth of this misunderstanding: "IDF and Shin Bet call on government to continue economic activities with Gaza. Senior security officials ask political echelon to increase work permits for Gazans to maintain calm on the border."[1] Maintain calm. As Col. (res.) Eran Lerman explained just ahead of Oct. 7:

The ruling center-right in Israel takes a "conflict management" approach to the Palestinian issue. They prefer to leave open the prospect that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may yet be possible one day, as the region changes and new leaders emerge. But until then, they believe, what Israel should do is ease tensions and improve living conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, while reserving the right to hit back at terrorist activity in a selective and intelligence-driven manner.

Fathi Hammad, one of Hamas' more rabid leaders.

The conceptzia transformed blood-curdling threats by Hamas into empty words. The security establishment ignored Fathi Hammad announcing in 2019: "We are sharpening the knives. ... If we die it will be when we are killing you [Jews], and we will cut off your heads, Allah willing... We must attack every Jew on the planet – slaughter and kill. ... I will die as I blow up and cut – what? The throats of the Jews and their legs. We will tear them to shreds, Allah willing." Only by completely disregarding such statements could Aryeh Deri, a senior Haredi politician, admit after Oct. 7 that he "never imagined that we were dealing with such murderers who are capable of acting with such cruelty."

Conversely, those rejecting the conceptzia met with exclusion and scorn. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir complained that his calls for the assassination of Hamas leaders caused him to be barred from cabinet discussions. Itai Hoffman, the chairman of a security organization near the Gaza border, accused the government, "We warned you about the situation. How can it be that you all sat here and kept silent? ... You have abandoned us." A kibbutz member pointed out that his community had only four rifles, adding "We have been screaming for years." Yehiel Zohar, the mayor of a town near Gaza, complained that senior security officials belittled his warnings, with maps, infiltration routes, and defense plans, about hundreds of murderers entering his town and killing its residents: "Forget about it, it won't happen."

Avichai Brodetz, whose family was taken hostage by Hamas, vented bitter frustration at a Likud member of parliament about Hamas.

The army could easily have destroyed them, but the entire conceptzia of the IDF collapsed [i.e., was wrong]. Hamas understood this, and they were far more clever than we were. They carried out an exceptional operation, raped our women, and killed our children because the IDF was not there. This did not happen because of Hamas but because of the conceptzia you used. It would have been so easy to destroy Hamas with tanks and planes – but they simply weren't there.

When Hamas drilled in plain sight, holding a live-fire exercise of blasting through a mock wall and raiding a mock town, then posted a video of this, Israelis ignored it. As the Jerusalem Post reports, "IDF lookouts who had warned that they were concerned about the situation along the Gaza border in the months before the Oct. 7 attack were told to stop bothering their commanders and even threatened with a court-martial." A noncommissioned officer specializing in Hamas military doctrine wrote three documents warning about Hamas' plans, emphasizing its exercises simulating an invasion across the border into Israeli residences and even reporting that senior Hamas officials came to watch the exercises. Her warnings went up the hierarchy, only to be met with the response, "You are imagining it." A senior IDF officer scorned such warnings as "fantasies" and refused to act on them. Just a day before the attack, a lookout reported seeing suspicious activities but commanders "discounted" her concerns, telling her "Hamas is just a bunch of punks, they won't do anything."

Many observers held Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally responsible for the conceptzia. Thus, Israeli defense analyst Yoav Limor finds that he

promised to eliminate Hamas and claimed that Hamas is the same as ISIS, yet continued to effectively allow the organization to build up through various means, including money, supply trucks, fuel, electricity, labor, and more. He, who saw Hamas as a devil, should have destroyed it, but during his long rule, he did the opposite: It thrived and became a monster. Netanyahu effectively legitimized Hamas, and that allowed a misconception to form around it.

Israeli journalist Nadav Shragai agrees, holding Netanyahu "responsible for the misconception and its outcomes. He is its father, mother, and guardian." But to be fair, Shragai adds,

it must be noted that almost all of Israel's highest political and military officials, right and left, and most of the media, too, lined up behind the separation policy, either as a systematic worldview or by acquiescing in it. Almost all of them backed Netanyahu when he refrained from crushing Hamas by land; almost all of them belittled the Hamas threat.

Along those lines, Ben Gvir speaks of a "conceptzia camp" that included former prime minister Naftali Bennett and former IDF chiefs of staff Benny Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot. The conceptzia even had followers among those living closest to Gaza. Hanan Dann, a member of a kibbutz devasted on Oct. 7, explains:

We were glad that workers from Gaza were coming to Israel with work permits to have jobs to meet Israelis, to see that we're not all "those devils." We all really believed that things are changing, that Hamas has maybe matured from being this terrorist group to be the grown-up taking responsibility for its people, worrying for its welfare. And that concept really blew up in our face.

To summarize: Israel's leadership hardly paid attention to the Islamist and jihadi nature of Hamas, believing that Israel's economic strength, military superiority, and technical advancement moderated Hamas, rendering it less dangerous.

Apparent Changes

The post-Oct. 7 reckoning was brutal. "So many policies and paradigms," David M. Weinberg of the Misgav Institute writes, "have been proven faulty, phantastic, illusory, and grotesque." The idea of a Hamas-governed Gaza placated by economic well-being, Martin Sherman of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies concludes, is but "a hallucinatory pipe dream."

In reaction to such criticisms, politicians abruptly and radically changed their tune. Netanyahu spoke at least fourteen times of victory and winning. "Victory will take time. ... now we are focusing on one goal, and that is to unite our forces and storm ahead to complete victory." He told soldiers "The entire people of Israel are behind you and we will deal harsh blows to our enemies to achieve victory. To victory!" And: "We will emerge victorious."

Many others in government followed suit. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant quoted himself informing President Joe Biden that Israel's victory "is essential for us and for the United States." To his soldiers, Gallant declared, "I am responsible for bringing victory." Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance, announced the halt "of all budgetary outlays and redirected them to one thing only: Israel's victory." He called the goal of Israel's war with Hamas to be "a crushing victory." Benny Gantz, a member of the War Cabinet, deemed it "the time for resilience and victory." The deputy parliamentary speaker called on Israel to "burn Gaza." An unnamed defense official announced that "Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings." The minister for heritage endorsed attacking Gaza with nuclear weapons.

Legions of other Israelis also called for victory and the destruction of Hamas:

Naftali Bennett, former prime minister: "It's time to destroy Hamas."
Yaakov Amidror, former national security advisor: Hamas "should be killed and destroyed."
Meir Ben Shabbat, former national security advisor: "Israel should destroy everything connected to Hamas."
Chuck Freilich, former deputy national security advisor (in Ha'aretz): "Israel must now deal Hamas an unequivocal defeat."
Tamir Heyman, former IDF intelligence chief: "We have to win."
Amos Yadlin, former IDF intelligence chief: "We are going to destroy Hamas."
Yossi Cohen, former head of Mossad: "Eliminating Hamas officials is a decision which needs to be made."

Shay Golden, an Israeli news anchor, lost it while on air.

Public figures expressed unprecedented verbal aggressiveness. Gallant called Hamas "human animals" and Bennett called them "Nazis." Television news anchor Shay Golden went off-script to unload a tirade.

We will destroy you. We keep telling you every day – we are coming. We are coming to Gaza, we are coming to Lebanon, we will come to Iran. We will come everywhere. You must take this into account. Can you imagine how many of you we are going to kill for every one of the 1,300 Israelis that you massacred? The death toll will reach numbers that you have never seen in the history of the Arab nations. ... You will see numbers that you never imagined were possible.

A hip-hop anthem promising to rain hell on Israel's enemies jumped to the #1 spot. A pop singer called for Israel to "Erase Gaza. Don't leave a single person there."

And Israel's voters? The Middle East Forum commissioned poll on Oct. 17 [2] found extraordinary support for the destruction of Hamas and for a ground operation to achieve this. When asked "What should be Israel's primary objective?" in the current war, 70 percent of the public answered to "eliminate Hamas." In contrast, only 15 percent answered to "secure the unconditional release of captives held by Hamas" and 13 percent "disarm Hamas completely." Remarkably, 54 percent of those Israeli Arabs (or, more technically, voters who supported the Joint List, a radical anti-Zionist Arab party), made "eliminate Hamas" their preferred objective.

Given the option of a ground operation in Gaza to eradicate Hamas or avoiding a ground operation in favor of another way to deal with Hamas, 68 percent chose the former and 25 percent the latter. This time, 52 percent of Israeli Arabs concurred with the majority.

In short, a ferociously anti-Hamas and anti-PA mood came to dominate Israeli politics, with only the two left-wing parties (Labor and Meretz) somewhat in opposition. Even a majority of Israeli Arabs recognized the danger that Hamas and the PA pose to their safety and well-being. Victory had become a matter of consensus, or so it appeared.

Quick Reversion

But did that ferocity signify a fundamental shift in outlook or just a passing surge in emotions? Mounting evidence suggests the latter. American novelist Jack Engelhard noted in late November about the mood in Israel: "I am so damn depressed. ... I hardly hear any talk of victory anymore." Indeed, the robust rhetoric of victory following Oct. 7 ended as abruptly as it began, replaced by negotiating with Hamas over terms for the release of just some of the hostages. More profoundly, Israeli officialdom and public alike showed signs of hastily reverting to the attitudes and policies that had led to Oct. 7.

Those policies rest on two main assumptions: that economic benefits – more work permits in Israel, a larger fishing zone, outside funding – gives Palestinians something to lose, taming them and making them less inclined to aggress; and that an Israel so much mightier and more advanced than its Palestinian enemy can afford to make concessions.

Symptoms of the reversion include the following:

The security establishment approved the entry of 8,000 West Bank workers to Israel, mostly to engage in agricultural work. It did so in response to Israel's agriculture minister assuring his colleagues that the workers had been vetted and posed no danger. That thousands of workers from Gaza had spied on Israel and made themselves complicit in the Oct. 7 massacre seemed blithely to be forgotten.

Gazan workers waiting at the Erez border crossing to work in Israel, March 13, 2022.

On the West Bank itself, Israel's commanding general there issued oxymoronic orders limiting Arab access that appeared tough but changed very little. As explained by the Binyamin Regional Council, "There is no entry into Israeli towns for Arab workers. They will be permitted to enter industrial areas at night only." Do marauders and murderers carry out their crimes only in daylight?

The Palestinian Authority that nominally governs part of the West Bank not only offered full-throated support for the Hamas massacre but PA President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement boasted of having a role in it. The PA also required mosques in its jurisdiction to instruct congregants that exterminating Jews constitutes an Islamic duty. Despite this, the Israeli cabinet continues to send tax monies to the PA. Gallant endorsed this decision, saying that "It is appropriate to transfer, and transfer immediately, the funds to the Palestinian Authority so that they will be used by its forces who help prevent terrorism." (That theme of economic benefits never seems to die.)

Ben-Gvir tried to loosen the rules of engagement for police officers, permitting them in emergencies to shoot at the legs of aggressors but Gantz managed to deflect the vote, thereby keeping the more restrictive regulations in place.

Five days after Oct. 7, Israel shuttered its Public Diplomacy Ministry, providing a perfect symbol of Israel's historically hapless information efforts.

Contrarily, Israel's communications minister called Al Jazeera, the Qatari television channel, a "propaganda mouthpiece" that incites against Israel and attempted to close down its office in Israel. The government rejected his recommendation, wanting not to upset the Qatari government, which had helped with the release of several hostages, thereby ignoring its role in perpetrating Oct. 7. Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad, went further; he favored "refraining from criticizing Qatar."

Before the massacre; Israel supplied Gaza with 49 million liters of water, or 9 percent of the territory's daily consumption, through three pipelines. It cut all supplies after the massacre. But that lasted just twenty days, after which Israel reinstated 28.5 million liters through two pipelines. Why not all three? Because Hamas had damaged the third on Oct. 7, necessitating repairs. Not to fear: IDF Col. Elad Goren announced his office had "assembled a team of experts who assess the humanitarian situation in Gaza on a daily basis." Avigdor Liberman, head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, called this "simple idiocy." Fuel supplies also resumed.

Talk of victory did not stop negativism from quickly rearing its head. "I don't see any kind of victory going out of this mess," comments Fauda creator Avi Issacharoff. Orly Noy of B'Tselem cries out to her Israeli conationals, "I have no interest in the victory you're offering me. ... I'm ready to admit defeat."

The principal of a public high school in Tel Aviv devoted 45 minutes to talking to three students who had come to school wrapped in Israeli flags. During the conversation, one student reported, the principal pointed out that other students objected to such a display of patriotism, adding that "if a large number of students came to school wrapped in Israeli flags, he would end this immediately." So extreme had things become that even the far-left Ha'aretz newspaper ran a story under the headline, "Stop Applauding Hamas for Its 'Humanity'."

The Regavim organization warned that the Palestinian Authority has built close to 20,000 structures close by the Green Line, its border with the part of the West Bank under full Israeli control (Area C); it called this phenomenon "frightening and threatening ... a real danger; a ticking bomb." When presented with this information, the security establishment responds now as it did previously to the comparable threat from Gaza: it would rather ignore this topic or dismiss the buildings as organic construction by individuals.

If mid-October polling showed 70 percent wanting to "eliminate Hamas," in mid-November polling by The Jewish People Policy Institute,[3] a mere 38 percent defined victory as "Gaza is no longer under Hamas control," a roughly 50 percent drop. Asked about the war's most important objective, a November poll of Israeli Jews by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers found that 34 percent say incapacitating Hamas (and 46 percent the hostages' return). Asked about making "painful concessions" to secure the hostages' release, 61 percent expressed a readiness, a near-tripling of the 21 percent ready to do so six weeks earlier. A poll by Israel's Channel 14 reported a 52-32 percent approval of the hostage agreement. The numbers – 38, 34, 32 – are impressively consistent.

Politicians and the security establishment drove previous flights from strategic reality (e.g., the Oslo Accords, the retreat from Gaza) but not this one. Here, the public pushed the destruction of Hamas aside in favor of rescuing the hostages. In the words of one survivor, Nadav Peretz, "We want two things. To see Hamas destroyed and to free the hostages. And right now, the latter outweighs the former." A mid-November Maariv poll found that the National Unity party headed by Gantz, a former chief of staff and the personification of the security establishment, jumped from 12 seats in the prior election to 43 seats in the next one. According to Nimrod Nir, a psychologist who led the Hebrew University survey research, "Our polling shows that the Israeli people were consistently ahead of the decision makers on this. As they learned about who Hamas was holding and under what conditions, the pressure to do something grew."

Politicians began seeking ways to square the circle. Former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren suggested changing the war goal "from annihilating Hamas to securing Hamas's unconditional surrender," thereby allowing Hamas to continue to exist. More specifically, he advocated offering Hamas "free passage from Gaza ... in return for the hostages' release." The talk about destroying Hamas had nearly vaporized.

The Hostage Deal

Speaking of hostages, the biggest reversion concerned them. Israel's President Isaac Herzog called Hamas "absolute evil" and then-Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott offered advice to the Israelis, referring to Hamas: "You cannot negotiate with evil. You have to destroy it." But just 1½ months after the massacre and weeks after the avalanche of calls for the destruction of Hamas, the Government of Israel reached a deal with the jihadi group, thereby undercutting its moral position and relapsing to the negotiating policy that brought about Oct. 7 in the first place.

The contents of the deal only made matters worse, for a desperate Israel made a majority of the concessions. In return for fewer than one-quarter of Israeli hostages being freed, all of them females and children, Israel agreed to: free 150 female and minor security prisoners (i.e., prisoners arrested in connection with offenses bearing on national security); permit an increase in water, food, medicine, and fuel to Gaza; and for four days not send warplanes over southern Gaza, engage in drone aerial surveillance during six hours each day, and not attack Hamas.

Consider some implications of these terms:

1. Just a fraction of the hostages implies that the bargaining process will continue indefinitely, with multiple breaks. This suits Hamas' needs while disrupting the Israeli military campaign. As Col. (res.) Shai Shabtai explains, Hamas' "continued hold on the hostages has one object: to use endless negotiation in order to undermine the dismantling of its political and military power."

2. Interrupting surveillance permits Hamas fighters to escape their besieged tunnels or bring supplies into the tunnels.

3. Trading Palestinian security prisoners for Oct. 7 victims confirms Hamas' argument that a moral equivalency exists between criminals and innocent civilians violently abducted.

In retrospect, that the same leadership team which brought on Oct. 7 also went on to sign the hostage deal hardly surprises: responsibility for the first made it vulnerable to the appeals of hostage families and foreign states. That Netanyahu and others – for example, the commander of the Unit 8200 that gathers about 80 percent of Israeli intelligence [4] – refused to take responsibility only compounded the problem. For Brodetz, the hostage family relative quoted above addressing a Likud member of parliament, the conceptzia still reigns: "You are living in a fantasy and blaming Hamas when it is you yourselves who are to blame. The problem was you. Get that into your heads, and perhaps then you will be able to solve the problem."

It gets worse. On Nov. 22, Netanyahu very unusually publicly announced that he had instructed Mossad to kill Hamas leaders "wherever they are," by implication including those in Qatar. When pressed whether the ceasefire agreement with Hamas grants immunity to its leaders, he replied in the negative: "there is no commitment in the agreement to not act in a truce against the leaders of Hamas, whoever they are." He further added that "such a clause does not exist." Two days later, however, Georges Malbrunot of Le Figaro newspaper reported that a "generally well-informed source" informed him that Netanyahu assured Qatar at the start of the hostage negotiations that "Mossad would not go to the emirate to kill Hamas political leaders." The Jerusalem Post then "indirectly confirmed that Israel made commitments to Qatar on this issue."

Le Qatar a reçu l'assurance d'Israël que le Mossad ne viendrait pas tuer dans l'émirat des chefs de la branche politique du Hamas, confie une source généralement bien informée. Cette assurance aurait été donnée par l'Etat hébreu lorsque Doha a entamé sa médiation sur les otages. pic.twitter.com/VVE1Bta4yp
— Georges Malbrunot (@Malbrunot) November 24, 2023

It bears noting that not all Israelis place personal concerns over the national interest. Eliahu Liebman, father of the hostage Elyakim Liebman, summed up the dilemma in his valorous protest against the proposed deal: "We want all of our hostages released, and the only way to do that is by attacking the enemy with all of our strength, without interruption and without surrendering to their demands, as if they are the victors." Tikvah, an organization of families related to hostages, concurs: "The most correct and effective way of retrieving the hostages is by applying uncompromising pressure on Hamas, until the hostages become a liability for Hamas instead of an asset." But the wailing drowned out such voices.

Conclusion

I observed in a late October article that "the inflamed Israeli mood of the moment will likely fade with time, as old patterns reassert themselves and business-as-usual returns." I was wrong in one respect; it did not take time. Rather, it occurred almost right away, within two weeks. Contrary to the initial impression that "everything changed," at the time of writing – late November – almost nothing has changed.

This reversion also fits a much larger pattern. From 1882 until the present, the two feuding parties to this conflict have compiled extraordinary records of sterile continuity. The Palestinians maintain a mentality of rejectionism (no, no, and never to everything Jewish and Israeli), while Zionists stick to conciliation (accept us and we will enrich you). The two go around and around, hardly evolving or making progress. Change will only come when Israelis break with the traditional Zionist mentality and seek Israel Victory.

Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum and author of the just-published Islamism vs. The West: 35 Years of Geopolitical Struggle (Wicked Son). © 2023 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

[1] IDF refers to the Israel Defense Forces; Shin Bet (or Shabak) is Israel's internal security service.
[2] Shlomo Filber and Zuriel Sharon of Direct Polls Ltd. carried out the poll with 1,086 adult Israelis; it has a statistical sampling error of 4 percent.
[3] By theMadad.com with 666 respondents on Nov. 15-18.
[4] According to one account, that commander neglected his intelligence duties in favor of helping the disadvantaged, dealing with climate change, and various social issues.

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What Arab Nations Are Reportedly Saying to Israel in Private Is Quite Interesting

By Matt Vespa

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The IDF is committed and determined. The impact of Hamas' wanton attack is either not understood by our pitiful president or he does not care. This is the same dude who went to military funerals and spent more time looking at this watch.

If Israel is able to vacate Hamas from Gaza, I have no doubt the Saudis will go through with establishing a diplomatic relationship with Israel strengthening America's position in the region.

Contrast this with the way Biden dribbled out aid rather than be decisive so Ukraine could have already smashed Russia.

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Middle East and Other Musings

Sunday, December 3, 2023

Iran Thumbs Its Nose. Biden Only Has Two Choices. Hamas Threatens. Pipes Speaks Out.