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to keep yanking NATO'S chain but we don't want to see him go to Russia.
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HOOVER DAILY REPORT
| by Russell A. Berman via National Interest Erdogan is becoming a de facto partner with Iran and its proxies, supporting their destabilization agenda across the region. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I beat Bret and even The WSJ. My essay is being published tomorrow in the American Thinker. Meanwhile I have been on UNRWA's case for years. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Abolish the U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency
New York Times - Bret Stephens United Nations agencies and officials are no strangers to scandal and infamy. U.N. peacekeepers caused a cholera epidemic in Haiti and committed horrific sexual abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The U.N.’s oil-for-food program for Iraq became a multibillion-dollar kickback scheme through which Saddam Hussein all but bribed his way out of international sanctions. In the 1980s, Kurt Waldheim, a former U.N. secretary general, was unmasked as a former Nazi. He was the same secretary general who denounced Israel’s 1976 rescue of Jewish hostages in Entebbe as “a serious violation” of Uganda’s national sovereignty. Now comes the latest scandal of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, better known as UNRWA. Last Friday, Israeli officials presented the U.S. government with an intelligence dossier detailing the involvement of 12 UNRWA employees, seven of them schoolteachers, in the massacre of Oct. 7. As reported by The Times’s Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, the charges range from kidnapping an Israeli woman to storing rocket-propelled grenades to murdering civilians in a kibbutz. Awful enough — and the U.N. rightly moved swiftly to terminate the employment of nine of those identified by the dossier. But that may be the least of it. “Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The figures are worth bearing in mind the next time you weigh the credibility of information about Gaza sourced to the U.N. Also worth bearing in mind is that this has been going on for years. As Bassam Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group noted over a decade ago, “In order for UNRWA to survive, they accept [Hamas’s] conditions because they want to continue their activities.” The new revelations were enough for the Biden administration to suspend its funding for the agency — worth nearly $350 million in 2022 — while it investigates the allegations. As of Tuesday, other major funders, including France, Germany and Japan, have followed suit. That’s a start. But the fundamental problem with the agency isn’t that it appears to be infested with terrorists and their sympathizers, or that their salaries are paid by naïve foreign donors. It’s that UNRWA may be the only agency in the U.N. system whose central purpose is to perpetuate grievance and conflict. It should be abolished. Think of it this way. The United Nations has two agencies dedicated to the plight of refugees. One, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, is responsible for the well-being of nearly all the world’s more than 30 million refugees, with a mandate to help them resettle in third countries if they can’t go home. The other is UNRWA, which theoretically operates under the umbrella of the high commissioner but is really its own organization. No other group except for Palestinians gets its own permanent agency. Why? In part, because neighboring Arab countries like Lebanon cruelly refused to fully absorb Palestinian refugees, refusing them not only citizenship but also, in many cases, the right to most forms of work. In 1991, Kuwait went further by expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in a matter of days, because the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had supported Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war. Think of that the next time Arab governments profess solidarity with the Palestinian people. As bad as the cruelty is the cynicism. The changing borders and independence movements of the postwar era produced millions of refugees: Germans, Indians, Pakistanis, Palestinians and Jews, including some 800,000 Jews who were kicked out of Arab countries that had been their homes for centuries. Nearly all found new lives in new countries — except for Palestinians. They have been kept as perpetual refugees as a means of both delegitimizing Israel and preserving the irredentist fantasy that someday their descendants will exercise what they believe is their “right of return,” effectively through the elimination of the Jewish state. It’s upon that alleged right that efforts at a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal have foundered. It’s also the right that UNRWA’s very existence keeps alive. Palestinians should be citizens of the countries in which they live — just as some two million Arabs are in Israel. They should not be cudgels in a never-ending struggle, subsidized from one aggrieved generation to the next by international largess. Defenders of UNRWA insist that without it, Palestinian civilians will suffer even more. But there is no reason other international agencies can’t shoulder the burden of the immediate relief effort for Gazans. In the meantime, the Biden administration and other governments need to ask hard questions of UNRWA’s senior officials, starting with Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini. To wit: If Lazzarini and his deputies didn’t know that UNRWA in Gaza was employing potentially hundreds of Hamas members or sympathizers, what sort of oversight were they exercising? And if they did know, are they not responsible? In either case — gross negligence or quiet complicity — they need to resign now. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not be insoluble. But it can’t be solved so long as millions of Palestinians have been turned into the world’s only permanent refugees. By doing that, UNRWA makes itself an obstacle to peace — reason enough for it to finally go away. Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ While the IJC debated Israel's execution of the Hamas war Israel has lost 224 IDF as of today (Jan 31.) That is proportionately the equivalency of 6720 American. deaths. Many of these deaths are because of Israel's extraordinary attempt to reduce Palestinian casualties. +++ Talk about continuing insanity and rape of the American Taxpayer to pay for Biden's purposeful desire to keep our borders open. +++ Utter Ignorance? Why Do So Many Young Americans Hate Israel?
by Rafael Medoff
(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is Whistleblowers: Four Who Fought to Expose the Holocaust to America, a nonfiction graphic novel with artist Dean Motter, to be published by Dark Horse in February 2024.) Young Americans are turning against Israel, and that’s Israel’s fault, says New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. Is he right? In a major January 27 op-ed, Klein pointed to a recent poll showing only 27% of Americans aged 18 to 29—known as “Gen Z”—are more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinian Arabs, as compared to 63% of Americans who are 65 or older. According to Klein, that’s because of the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, since young Americans “know only Netanyahu’s Israel.” Does that mean all Gen Zers were pro-Israel when the left-of-center Yair Lapid was prime minister fourteen months ago? Hardly. The real reason for hostility toward Israel among that age bracket is their ignorance of the history and facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not the specific polices of a particular prime minister. Israel is not to blame if many young people choose to base their views on misleading Instagram photos, biased college professors, and radical ideologies that falsely paint Israel as a “white supremacist” state. Nor is ignorance among the younger generation about foreign affairs a new problem in America. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was bothered by it, too. In the 1930s, polls found 63% of college students favored unilateral American disarmament and many thousands of them signed a public pledge declaring, “We will not support the U.S. government in any war it may conduct.” They couldn’t be bothered to read up on what was happening in Nazi Germany and the threat Hitler posed to world peace. They were worried about being drafted. They preferred sweet fantasies of peace to the reality of a world headed for war. And some just wanted to mimic “what the cool kids were doing”—they saw that many British university students were signing the Oxford Pledge, vowing that “under no circumstances” would they “fight for [their] king and country.” In 1934, 25,000 American college students took part in a one-hour walkout from classes to demonstrate their opposition to U.S. involvement in any war. The strike mushroomed to 175,000 participants in 1935, then 500,000 in 1936— nearly half the national college student population. The student antiwar movement began to crack when communist-aligned students changed their position—again and again—not as a result of studying the facts but out of obedience to their party. For them, ignorance was truly bliss. In the early 1930s, the Soviet Union preferred that America keep out of European affairs, so their followers on U.S. college campuses promoted the antiwar strike. But when the Spanish civil war erupted in 1936 and the Kremlin backed Spain’s leftwing government, its campus sympathizers suddenly dropped their calls for American isolationism. Then when the Soviets signed their nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany three years later, their followers all went back to urging America to stay out of Europe’s conflicts When the Soviets invaded Finland in November 1939, American communist college students defended the attack and denounced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal for modest financial aid to the Finns. Not long afterwards, FDR gave a previously-scheduled address to thousands of activists from the American Youth Congress—including many of his communist critics. He decided to give them a piece of his mind. The students’ claim that aid to Finland would “force America into an imperialistic war” was, the president said, “unadulterated twaddle.” He repeated that slap for emphasis. Roosevelt called their position “about the silliest thing that I have ever heard in my fifty-eight years of life.” Note the contrast between Roosevelt’s response to his youthful critics and the recent responses by President Joe Biden to pro-Hamas protesters. On two occasions when hecklers shouted at Biden over Gaza, he responded that he was pressuring Israel to slow down its actions against Hamas and to withdraw from Gaza. He treated the protesters’ shouts as reasonable, persuasive arguments and sought to convince them he was already doing his best to implement their demands. Not Roosevelt. He considered his pro-Soviet student critics to be ignoramuses, and told them so. Despite audible boos from the crowd, he admonished the students that their positions were “based perhaps on sincerity, but, at the same time, on 90 per cent ignorance” of the subject matter. “There is room for improvement in common-sense thinking and definite room for improvement in the art of not passing resolutions concerning things one doesn’t know anything about,” the president said. He characterized his student critics as “young people [who] get a smattering of the subject from two or three speakers who themselves have but a smattering on the subject.” Has the political climate on America’s campuses changed very much since then? Whether Communist Party members then or Israel-haters now, campus political activity is often steered by a handful of ideologically-driven militants. Particular social, economic, or political circumstances create opportunities to attract sympathetic students—not because many students are deeply acquainted with the relevant history, but precisely because they are not. Probably very few American college students in the 1930s had read Mein Kampf; probably very few today are aware of the discovery of Arabic-language copies of Mein Kampf in Gaza. Those members of Gen Z who are marching for Hamas or telling pollsters they oppose Israel are driven by a variety of motives. For many, old fashioned ignorance or personal factors such as a desire to join a popular cause may determine whether they march against Israel, as their predecessors marched for isolationism in the 1930s. Whatever their motives, however, the real-world impact of their activities must be considered. Their actions back then contributed to America’s aloofness in the face of Hitler’s outrages against the Jews and fascist aggression in Spain, Ethiopia, and China. Their actions today are undermining America’s support for an ally fighting for its very survival. +++++++++++++++++++++++ Secret Obama Memo Could Impact Jack Smith's Classified Documents Case Against Trump | The Gateway Pundit | By Cristina Laila ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Would Churchill and FDR agree to allow Hitler to live and Germany retain it's military capability? Would they agree to cancelling the trials of Germany's top Nazi leaders? If you answer yes then you are stupid and if no then why would you support the attached? +++ The Return of Another Bad Idea -- The Two-State Solutionby Jonathan Rosenblum -Mishpacha MagazineStudents of American Mideast diplomacy will be quickly be struck by the number of doctrines that have persisted long past their "sell by" dates and after having been refuted by events. For decades, it was a fundamental tenet of the State Department that the Arab-Israeli conflict lay at the heart of the failure to thrive of virtually every Muslim regime, as if Muslim leaders deliberately kept their countries backward and unfree to spite Israel. And then came the Arab Spring of 2010. As Jackson Diehl, deputy editor of the Washington Post editorial page, wrote in late March 2011, "A reasonable person might conclude from the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, et al., that the Middle East's deepest problems have nothing to do with Israel and that the Obama administration's almost obsessive focus on trying to broker an Israeli-Palestinian settlement in its first two years was misplaced. But Obama isn't one of those persons." Another article of faith of American policymakers was that no Arab country would make peace with Israel absent resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But then came Anwar Sadat's journey to Jerusalem, followed by the 1978 Camp David Accords. Forty years later came the Abraham Accords between Israel and three Arab states. And Saudi Arabia was widely seen as likely to join the Abraham Accords prior to October 7, despite the absence of a Palestinian state. Indeed, that prospect is thought by many to have lain behind Hamas's October 7 attack, orchestrated by Iran. Yet at the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan confidently asserted that Saudi Arabia would never join the Abraham Accords absent a clear pathway to Palestinian statehood. In that they may be right, but only because their public pronouncements made it impossible for the Saudis to move forward with Israel. Diplomatic relations with Israel, however, would not be an act of largesse by the Saudis toward Israel, but rather a calculated strategic decision that Israel is their best possible ally against Iran and an assessment of the economic advantages of partnering with the more advanced Israeli economy. THAT BRINGS US to perhaps the most enduring myth of America's Middle East diplomats — to wit, that it should be possible for men of good will to sit down with a map and pens and divide up the Land between Palestinians and Israelis to create the so-called two-state solution. On its face, post-October 7 seems like an odd time to revive that particular fantasy. After all, as former Israeli national security advisor Giora Eiland points out, the Gaza enclave was in all but name the first Palestinian state. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it did so entirely. And how did that work out? Had the Palestinian Authority in 2005, or Hamas, which seized power from the PA in 2007, wanted to do so, they could have demonstrated the Palestinians' state-building capabilities. But that is not exactly what happened. Immediately after the Israeli expulsion of the last Jewish family from Gaza, the local population gutted the lucrative hothouses purchased on their behalf by a group of philanthropists (mostly Jewish) from the expelled Jewish population. The Palestinian state in Gaza under Hamas rule has shown little concern for the well-being of its citizens, preferring to leave responsibility for them to UNRWA. And it has siphoned off billions of dollars of international aid and directed it not toward bettering the lives of Gazans but to building an elaborate system of tunnels under Gaza, some as deep as 150 meters, and wide enough to drive a truck through, with close to 6,000 hatchways emerging into public buildings — schools, hospitals, and mosques — and private residences. The total length of those tunnels, now estimated to be at least 350 miles, greatly exceeds that of the London Underground, even though Gaza is narrow and only 25 miles in length, and London is one the world's largest cities in land area. In the words of the New York Times' Bret Stephens, Hamas turned Gaza into a military fortress for the sole purpose of attacking Israel. And attack it did. Between 2005 and last October 7, Israel was forced to launch at least six separate operations to halt rocket fire from Gaza at Israeli civilians. That history culminated on October 7, with Hamas's invasion of Israel, resulting in 1,200 murdered; hundreds of women brutalized, mutilated, and killed; entire families burned to death or tortured in the most sadistic fashion imaginable; and more than 240 taken hostage back to Gaza to be jeered by delirious crowds. Not exactly a compelling argument for a Palestinian state on Israel's borders. President Isaac Herzog spoke for the entire nation of Israel at Davos when he told the assembled grandees, "Israelis have lost faith in the peace process because they see that terror is glorified by our neighbors.... [F]or the vast majority of Israelis right now, talking about a two-state solution — while the hostages are still being held, while Israel is fighting on various fronts, and while Palestinian polls are giving Hamas a staggering amount of support in the West Bank — is just a pipe dream." YET THERE WAS US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan telling the same WEF audience that "the pieces are all there" to put together a comprehensive Middle East peace, "not years down the road, but in the near term if all of us pull together and make bold decisions." That comprehensive peace depends on a clear pathway to a Palestinian state, he argued. Secretary of State Blinken even went so far at the WEF as to place the blame on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for not having done enough to prepare his people for the profound changes that must come. He acknowledged that in the past it was Palestinian leaders, most prominently Yasser Arafat, who had stymied efforts to create a Palestinian state. But now, he told Thomas Friedman, the onus is on Netanyahu. Who precisely are those Palestinian leaders who have prepared their people for peace? Presumably, Blinken does not mean Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 invasion of Israel. Nor does he mean Mahmoud Abbas, now in his 18th year of a four-year term as head of the Palestinian Authority, who has yet to condemn Hamas's atrocities on October 7. Far from being prepared for peace, every poll of Palestinians living under PA rule rates their support for Hamas's October 7 atrocities even higher than that of Gaza residents. A December 13 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that 85 percent of West Bank Palestinians supported Hamas's October 7 attacks. Another poll of Palestinians by Arab World for Research and Development found the same thing. When asked what is the best way of achieving Palestinian goals, a comfortable majority responded "armed struggle" — i.e., terrorism. On his first visit to Washington, D.C., in the new Obama administration in 2009, Abbas shocked the editorial board of the Washington Post by telling them that he had no intention of negotiating with the Israelis and would rely instead on American pressure on Israel. What has changed since then? Has Abbas, for instance, ordered changes in the Palestinian school curriculum, which whips Palestinian children into frenzies of hate against Israel and fills them with dreams of a Mideast where Israel has been wiped off the map? Here's how Lawrence Haas, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, describes the Palestinian Authority's preparation of its people for peace in the current issue of the National Interest: "Day to day, Palestinians are indoctrinated at school, in mosques, on TV, and on social media to hate Jews and reject Israel's legitimacy, virtually guaranteeing that they'll oppose the notion of two states 'living side by side in peace.' "The PA continues to describe Palestinian terrorists who lose their lives as 'martyrs' and portray them as innocent youth who are gunned down for no reason by Israeli forces. It also continues to pay monthly stipends to families of dead or jailed terrorists — the more murderous the attack, the higher the stipends. Among its latest libels, the PA has said Israel is stealing organs from dead Palestinians in Gaza and claimed the Talmud permits cutting open pregnant Palestinian women and stealing their fetuses. At least eleven Palestinian schools, eight of them run by the PA, celebrated October 7...." In short, pace Blinken, nothing has changed since Yasser Arafat walked away from Camp David in 2000, without even making a counter-proposal to Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer of a Palestinian state; or since Mahmoud Abbas did the same in response to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's offer of Palestinian statehood in 2008. Both recognized that they would have become "dead men walking" had they recognized Israel, even if they had gained a state by doing so. Senior Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, head of Hamas's political bureau, spoke for both Hamas and the PA leadership when he said recently, "We reject this notion of a two-state solution, as Palestinians would have to recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist entity." THUS, THE ONLY PIECE that has arguably fallen into place, in Sullivan's phraseology, is that the Americans now think that they have the leverage to force upon Israel acceptance of a two-state solution with a "revitalized" Palestinian Authority because of Israel's need for American armaments to finish the dismantling of Hamas. That will not happen. About the only subject upon which Prime Minister Netanyahu can speak confidently for an Israeli consensus is rejection of a two-state solution. Four-fifths of Israelis, including Israeli Arabs, see no prospects of peace with the Palestinians, and 88 percent have no trust in a Palestinian leadership that they view as committed to Israel's destruction. Even 71 percent of those who describe themselves as left-wing currently do not see any prospects for peace. Remember, the settlements around Gaza that bore the brunt of the October 7 attacks were among the most left-wing in the country. That has not stopped the Biden administration, however, from continuing its efforts to undermine Netanyahu's government — a near constant of Democratic administrations going back to the Clinton years. News stories of President Biden's demands that Israel begin to wind down its Gaza campaign and of his disillusionment with Netanyahu are appearing with ever-increasing frequency. Much of that criticism of Netanyahu is dictated by American domestic politics. Democrats fear that the administration's support for Israel since October 7 is costing the party the support of younger progressive voters and the large Palestinian-American population in Michigan, a key battleground state. Thus, 15 Jewish Democratic congressmen recently endorsed the Biden administration's push for a Palestinian state. "A future peace requires a very real pathway for Palestinians to realize their own peaceful aspirations for a Palestinian state," said Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois, without providing any evidence of those "peaceful aspirations." And 49 out of 51 Democratic senators signed on to an amendment introduced by Jewish senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii to a national security bill before the Senate, which includes billions of dollars in military funding for Israel. That amendment specifies that it is US policy to support a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "resulting in two states living side by side in peace." That amendment could have described the position of every American administration over the last three decades, with the exception of the Trump years. And Schatz clarified that he would not use a failure to vote on his amendment to hold up aid to Israel. In short, it is primarily for political consumption. The issue of who will govern Gaza at war's end is a legitimate one, and one that America and Israel should be discussing privately. But it is also largely premature until Hamas is ousted entirely. Without knowing if, when, or how that will happen, it is almost impossible to speak of the postwar landscape. Some solutions are clearly off the table — e.g., UN peacekeepers. Under the watchful eye of UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has amassed an arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles directed at Israel. And there is little enthusiasm in Israel for reoccupying Gaza beyond security strips along the border. But about what might work to ensure that Gaza does not become a launching pad for future October 7s, there are few good ideas so far. Until there are, it is counterproductive for the Biden administration to publicly criticize Israel or promote purely fanciful solutions. As Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, wrote last week, by doing so, the administration only bolsters the view of Iran and its allies in the region that America lacks staying power and commitment to Israel's security. Doing so promotes neither American nor Israeli interests. ++++++++++++++++++++++++ Gazan 'Civilians' Involved in Every Stage of Hamas Hostage Scheme, Freed Israelis SayBy Andrew Tobin TEL AVIV, Israel—Israeli women and children have in recent weeks begun speaking publicly about what they experienced during nearly two months in Hamas captivity late last year. In primetime Hebrew TV interviews, the released hostages have confirmed that ordinary Gazans were deeply complicit in every stage of the hostage scheme. Unarmed teens helped to abduct Jews from their homes on Oct. 7, while Gazan women and children held some of the Israelis captive. In other cases, Gazan doctors collaborated with Hamas terrorists to covertly treat kidnapped Israelis and imprison them in hospitals. When the Israelis encountered Gazans on the streets, the results were often terrifying. The revelations underscore the urgency of Israel's 100-plus-day war to destroy Hamas and bring home the 132 hostages who, officials believe, remain captive in Gaza. At the same time, though, the released hostages' accounts indicate how difficult it could be to extricate either the remaining hostages or Hamas from a radicalized population. "The main issue is that the organization is very much melted into the social structure of Gaza," Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer and a leading expert on Hamas, told the Washington Free Beacon. "There is no way you can really know who is Hamas. Someone might have a grocery store where he sells tomatoes and water, but he might also have storehouse of weapons and give religious lessons there." And his wife and kids might be keeping an Israeli hostage at home. "Hamas is not only a political matter in Gaza. It's a way of life," Milshtein said. "We can and should ruin Hamas militarily and change the political arena in Gaza. But ultimately the Gazan people will have to do some soul searching. And here in the Arab world, not only the Palestinians, soul searching is very rare." Abduction On Israel's Channel 12 news earlier this month, Nili Margalit, 41, recounted how Gazan "civilians, regular people" took her hostage at knifepoint on Oct. 7. Margalit said a "boy … 17, maybe 18 years old" and an "older man with the knife" broke down the door of her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz and forced her into a stolen golf cart, still barefoot and wearing pajamas. As they exited the kibbutz, Margalit said, she saw a "mob, thousands of people," including "women and children," pouring across Israel's breached border with Gaza, less than two miles away. She said a pair of boys, one "no more than 4 or 5 years old" and the other 15 or 16, were riding an ATV that belonged to her father, a local cattle breeder who was among about 1,200 people in Israel murdered by terrorists that day. After Margalit's abductors crossed into Gaza, they transferred her to a blood-stained car along with another Nir Oz resident, Tamar Metzger, 78, who was "very injured," Margalit said. The Gazans then drove to a warehouse, where they "sold" the Israelis to Hamas terrorists, according to Margalit. For the next 49 days, Hamas held Margalit and Metzger in its network of underground tunnels along with dozens of other captives. Both women were among 105 hostages, 80 of them Israeli women and children, freed during a weeklong truce deal between Israel and Hamas at the end of November. While Margalit was the first released hostage to publicly confirm that Gazan civilians abducted Israelis on Oct. 7, eyewitnesses, footage, and other evidence have indicated the phenomenon was relatively widespread. As the Free Beacon reported, a mob of mostly unarmed Gazans, including children and women, followed Hamas into Nir Oz and other Israeli communities on that day and participated in the professional terrorists' atrocities. Roni Krivoi, a 25-year-old Israeli taken hostage from the Supernova music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7, was recaptured by ordinary Gazans after he escaped captivity for several days, his aunt told Israel's Kan public radio station following his release in November. Gazan "civilians" were also responsible for the abduction of Margalit Moses, 78, from Nir Oz on Oct. 7, Irit Lahav, an unofficial spokeswoman for the kibbutz, told the Free Beacon this week. Moses and Krivoi declined through representatives to be interviewed. Detention A number of the Israeli women and children freed by Hamas said in interviews with Channel 12 last month that they spent part of their captivity in family homes, hospitals, and other civilian sites in Gaza. Mia Schem, who was shot in the arm and abducted by Hamas terrorists from the Supernova rave on Oct. 7, said her captors brought her directly to a hospital in Gaza as she was bleeding to death. The surgeon who operated on her arm "looked at me and said, 'You’re not going home alive,'" she recalled. After the procedure, Schem received no further treatment of even pain medication, she said. She was taken to a family home, where a man and his family held her captive with "pure hate," Schem said, forbidding her to speak, cry, or move. She would go days without receiving food and was never allowed to bathe. "[The man's] wife hated the fact that he and I were in the same room. She hated it. So she'd taunt me," Schem said, recounting how the woman would insult her appearance and bring the man food "but nothing for me." "The children would open the door look at me, talk about me, laugh at me," Schem said. "One time, the son enters the room with a bag of candy. He opens the bag and gives his father candy, then comes over to me, opens the bag, closes it, and leaves. You know, pure evil." "I experienced hell. Everyone there are terrorists," Schem said in a separate interview on Israel's Channel 13. "There are no innocent civilians, not one." Schem said she spent the final days of her 54-day captivity in Hamas's underground tunnels. Doron Katz Asher, 34, said terrorists took her and her daughters, 5 and 2, from her mother's house in Nir Oz to a family home in Gaza on Oct. 7. Her mother was killed on the way. For 16 days, a Gazan woman and her daughters traded shifts watching Katz Asher and her daughters "24/7," she said. After that, the family was sent, at night and disguised in traditional Muslim clothing, to a nearby hospital, where they were sealed in a room with a half-dozen other captives for more than a month, Katz Asher said. There were no mattresses, food was inconsistent, and using a toilet required permission from the captors. "Constant fear" was how Katz Asher described the 49 days of captivity: "fear that maybe because my daughters are crying and are making some noise, [the terrorists will] get some directive from above to take them, to do something to them." Chen Goldstein-Almog, 48, said Hamas terrorists moved her and her three youngest children, 17, 11, and 9, between different homes, the tunnels, a school, and a grocery store in Gaza. She also told the New York Times that they were held in a mosque. The family walked from location to location at night, wearing hijabs to hide their identity. Goldstein-Almog's 17-year-old daughter, Agam, said that during their stay at the school, "a sweet lady welcomed us and offered us water and arranged a place for us to sleep." "I turned to my mother and said, 'There are good people in the world,'" Agam recalled. "And five minutes later, they shot a barrage of rockets from the school [into Israel] and everyone was shouting, 'Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,' and I told her, 'Forget what I said, they're all the same.'" In the tunnels, Agam and her mother said they met young women who had been abused by their captors, echoing multiple other accounts. "Some still had bloody gunshot wounds that had been left untreated in makeshift bandages. One had a dismembered limb," Agam elaborated in an essay for the Free Press published on Tuesday. "I heard from them accounts of terrifying and grotesque sexual abuse, often at gunpoint." One day, the family heard on the radio that the father and eldest daughter had been killed on Oct. 7 in their homes in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz 15 miles north of Nir Oz, also near the Gaza border. "We will never forgive and we will never show any kind of empathy towards these people," Agam said. "If we previously believed that there was a chance for peace, we've lost all faith in these people, especially after we were there and among the population." Ofelia Roitman, 77, of Nir Oz said that she was held captive by a Gazan couple, a technician and a nurse, who locked her in a room of their apartment alone for 46 days. The couple kept her window closed so that she could not tell day from night and fed her small portions of pita bread and rice. "The situation with the food was like the Holocaust," even as the couple appeared to eat well, she said. Roitman said she heard and felt rockets being launched directly underneath the apartment building. People in the street would erupt in celebration. "I heard the cheers, a party outside near the market," she said. "When the rockets hit Tel Aviv or Beersheba, they applauded. … They were so joyful." Roitman was taken to several Gazan doctors to treat a gunshot wound she sustained during her abduction, and she spent her final week in Gaza in a hospital with other hostages, she said. The first doctor Roitman saw, in an underground tunnel, at first refused to treat her, saying, "I'm not treating a Jew." As Israel has waged war on Hamas, it has uncovered numerous examples of Hamas apparently hiding terrorist operations behind civilian infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, and schools. Israel has also found evidence that Gazan medical personnel work for Hamas and that the terrorist group is holding hostages in hospitals. Hamas has denied the allegations. Coming and going According to many of the released Israeli hostages who have told their stories, their captors repeatedly warned them that their lives would be at risk if they were discovered by ordinary Gazans. The crowds that gathered as the Israelis entered and left Gaza seemed to confirm those warnings. Sharon Aloni Cunio, 34, recalled how she and her twin 3-year-old daughters were mobbed on Oct. 7 as terrorists brought them into Gaza on a tractor from their home in Nir Oz. "We cross the border, and I say to myself, God help us, we're in Gaza. People start beating everyone who was sitting on the tractor—just beating us, from all sides. It was horrific," she said. "You don't know if [the terrorists] intend to take you hostage or to lynch you in front of the mob." Maya Regev, 21, who was shot at the Supernova rave and abducted along with her brother, said their captors "paraded us in Gaza … screaming, 'Allahu Akbar!'" "I'm with my head down," Regev said. "Someone pulls me backward by the hair, holding me like that so people could see my face." Yaffa Adar, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor whose abduction from Nir Oz on Oct. 7 appears to have involved ordinary Gazans, said that when she arrived in Gaza, there were "people all around, lots of them, spitting, yelling—not pleasant." The Free Beacon could not reach Adar for comment. Katz Asher described a similar scene as Hamas handed her and her daughters over to the Red Cross on Nov. 24. "As soon as the Red Cross jeeps arrived, the Arab street was on us," she said. "Hundreds of people gathered in seconds, banging on the cars. It was the first time [five-year-old daughter] Raz told me, after I protected her for a month and a half, it was the first time Raz told me, 'Mom, I'm scared.'" ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Worth reposting: If you have children or grandchildren in university please make sure they publish this important letter in the students' rag or post it on the university bulletin board. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Now for some humor which all married men understand: +++We now have a second president who should be named "stonewall." +++ BREAKING: White House refuses to handover early drafts of Biden speech demanding Ukraine fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin: House Oversighthttps://thepostmillennial.com/ +++ WHAT PRICE ARE PALESTINIANS WILLING TO PAY? THE TINY NATION OF ISRAEL IS ONE OF THE MOST MALIGNED DEMOCRAT NATIONS IN THE WORLD. NOT BECAUSE IT IS GUILTY OF THE MANY OUTRAGEOUS CHARGES MADE AGAINST IT, BUT BECAUSE THE HATERS ARE WITLESS WHO PREFER JEWS ON THEIR KNEES AND NOT STRONG AND SUCCESSFUL. ANTI-SEMITES ARE BOTH JEALOUS AND INSECURE. THE WORLD ALWAYS NEEDS A CONVENIENT SCAPEGOAT. I BELIEVE THE SAME IS TRUE WHEN IT COMES TO FORMER PRESIDENT TRUMP. THOSE WHO HATE AND SMEAR HIM HAVE ACTUALLY BEGUN TO BELIEVE THE TAR THEY "PITCH" AT HIM. WE ALL KNOW A LOT GOES TO HIS HEAD. WE KNOW HE IS NARCISSISTIC, WE KNOW HIS BEHAVIOUR IS OFTEN ATROCIOUS , WE ALSO ARE UNWILLING TO CREDIT HIM FOR SOME AMAZING SUCCESSES LIKE THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS, THE PRIVATE TAX BENEFIT MONEY ENTICED TO BUILD EQUITY ZONES FOR BLACK FAMILIES UNLIKE TRADITIONAL GOVERNMENT "HOUSING PROJECTS" THAT MOSTLY BECOME HAVENS FOR "DOPE DEALERS" AND BULLYING CRIMINALS BEARING WEAPONS BENT ON SENSELESS MURDERS OF THEIR OWN. TRUMP IS A BILLIONAIRE WHO IS COMFORTABLE EATING A SANDWICH WITH CONSTRUCTION WORKERS AND THEY WITH HIM AND LATER THAT EVENING HE CAN BE AT A BLACK TIE CHARITY GIVING MONEY AWAY. YES, HE IS A MAN OF MANY CONTRASTS AND IF HE IS NOMINATED AND WINS IT WILL BE BECAUSE MANY DEPLORABLES, LIKE MYSELF, ARE WILLING TO TURN THE NATION BACK OVER TO HIM BECAUSE HE WILL NOT PUT AMERICA LAST. HE MAY NOT ACCOMPLISH ALL HE CAMPAIGNED ON BUT HE WILL GIVE IT HIS BEST AND AMERICA, LIKE BEFORE, WILL BE BETTER OFF FOR HIS EFFORTS. ASK MOST BLACKS IF YOU DOUBT THIS. ASK THOSE WHO NO LONGER WERE ON FOOD STAMPS AND THOSE WHOSE PRIDE WAS GIVEN A BOOST BECAUSE THEY HAD JOBS. BECAUSE TRUMP TAKES A BUSINESS APPROACH, OFTEN THINKS OUTSIDE THE BOX, UNLIKE MOST POLITICIANS, HE IS FREE OF ORTHODOX D.C DEAD END THINKING. YES, THIS GETS HIM IN A HEAP OF TROUBLE AT TIMES, AS DOES HIS VULGAR MOUTH, BUT WITH THE GOOD COMES SOME BAD, EVEN EVIL. SHOW ME A HUMAN BEING WHO IS PERFECT. MLK WAS A HERO OF MINE BUT HE ALSO HAD SOME QUESTIONABLE VIRTUES. SO THAT BRINGS US BACK TO ISRAEL. SHE TOO IS NOT PERFECT. BUT ALL MOST ISRAELIS WANT IS TO RAISE AND EDUCATE THEIR CHILDREN, LIVE IN PEACE AND BE A FRIEND TO THEIR NEIGHBORS, TO PROSPER AND HELP THOSE IN NEED. THE BEST WAY THAT COULD HAPPEN IS FOR BOTH ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS LIVE SIDE BY SIDE IN GAZA AND LEARN ABOUT EACH OTHER. IF THEY COULD DO THIS, WITHOUT KILLING EACH OTHER, THEY WOULD LEARN EVERYONE BASICALLY WANTS THE SAME THING. THIS I STRONGLY BELIEVE. THE QUESTION IS, CAN PALESTINIANS BURY THE "SWORD?" CAN THEY LISTEN TO THEIR BETTER INNER SOUL AND REJECT THE WICKED CALL OF TERRORISM? WHAT HAVE THEY GOT TO LOSE? IS THEIR PRIDE, IN BECOMING MARTYR'S OR BEING IN PRISON, WORTH THE GUILT BURDEN ON THEIR CONSCIENCE, THEIR LIFE AND CONTINUED DESTRUCTION OF THEIR HOMES? +++ Benjamin Netanyahu at War Israel’s prime minister is determined to crush Hamas, diplomatic about the Biden administration, and optimistic about peace with Saudi Arabia.By Tunku Varadarajan It’s 9 p.m. and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just returned to Israel’s capital from a military base near Haifa. He’d gone up north to give the troops a pep talk. An aide tells me that a young reservist stood up and asked, “What do you expect from us?” “Total victory,” Mr. Netanyahu replied. What does total victory mean to a country that lived through a genocidal attack on Oct. 7? What does it mean to win after suffering such loss? “We have three war aims,” Mr. Netanyahu says in our interview. “These aims are achievable,” but the war “will take many months.” He lists the aims in his distinctive baritone. “One, destroy Hamas. Two, free the hostages”—of whom about 136 remain in Hamas’s tunnels, some of whom are presumed dead. “Three, ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.” That last aim will require “durable demilitarization, which can only be carried out and sustained by Israel,” along with “deradicalization,” a cleansing of the ideological poison in Gaza that most Jewish Israelis on both left and right now regard as nonnegotiable preconditions for peace with the Palestinians. The day before we meet, Israel had suffered the worst day of its ground war: 21 soldiers killed in an explosion triggered by a Hamas rocket-propelled grenade. The mood in the prime minister’s office is somber, and an aide says he’d expected Mr. Netanyahu to postpone our interview. He didn’t. How is the campaign going? “Better than many expected,” the prime minister says. “It took the U.S. and its allies nine months to defeat radical forces in Mosul,” he says of the 2016-17 battle against Islamic State. “Mosul is smaller than Gaza and did not have the massive terror underground infrastructure. We’re now in the fourth month, but we’ve had tough days.” He alludes to the soldiers lost the day before, all reservists: “For us every fallen soldier is a tragedy. We pay a heavy price. We seek to minimize casualties, both of our own soldiers and Gaza’s civilians.” That’s a sore spot for Israelis who bridle at accusations that Israel kills Palestinian civilians indiscriminately. Mr. Netanyahu, like most Israelis, is aghast at the way protesters in the West—especially on American campuses—demonize Israel and, in some cases, laud Hamas. “This is a problem not just for Israel but also for America,” he says. “Many of these supporters of Hamas are woefully uninformed. But this goes beyond ignorance. Twenty percent of them support bin Laden,” he says, citing a recent poll of Americans under 30. “I’m obviously concerned by these demonstrations. America is the vanguard of freedom and the guarantor of liberty in this century. If a younger generation emerges in America that supports the head-choppers, it is a problem for civilization.” That said, he believes that America’s founding values will prevail. In addition to the ugly, often antisemitic demonstrations, he cites “the beginnings of a movement in the opposite direction. I saw it in the congressional hearings with the three university presidents. The reaction to the way in which they talked about genocide was a positive sign.” Given Mr. Netanyahu’s reputation for abrasiveness—not entirely unearned—it’s easy to forget that he’s an effective diplomat. He served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations between 1984 and 1988. When asked if any awkwardness has ensued from Washington’s seemingly tone-deaf push for a two-state solution while Israel is in the throes of an existential war, he speaks with finesse. “I appreciate President Biden’s support that was given from day one,” he says. He notes that Mr. Biden called Hamas “worse than ISIS,” sent two aircraft carriers to the region and supplied Israel with ammunition. The U.S. is confronting Iran-backed Houthis in the Red Sea, for which Mr. Netanyahu is grateful. “We agree on the war aim of destroying Hamas. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had differences of opinion, but we have worked to overcome them.” The U.S. State Department, for its part, plays the two-state solution like a broken record. Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised the matter awkwardly in Davos, Switzerland, in a conversation with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Mr. Netanyahu allows that he isn’t “the most avid and diligent reader of Tom Friedman” and says, without further naming names: “Anyone supporting Israel and who also supports a two-state solution should ask themselves some questions. Do they support the Palestinians having an army? The answer is of course not. Should the Palestinians be able to bring in weapons? The answer is of course not. Should they be able to make military pacts with Iran? Of course not.” His “formula for peace has been consistent,” he says. “In any future agreement, the Palestinians should have all the power to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten Israel.” In any agreement, “Israel must retain overall security control over territory west of the Jordan River, and that includes Gaza.” Oct. 7 brought a “massive shift in Israeli public opinion in recognizing Israel’s overwhelming need for security control. This necessarily detracts from Palestinian sovereignty. Any solution to this conflict in the future begins by recognizing this reality today.” Mr. Netanyahu gets a bad rap in America’s liberal press. “Some in the United States,” he says, “believe that the obstacle to peace with the Palestinians is—me. They don’t realize that I reflect the view of most Israelis.” Polls confirm Mr. Netanyahu’s assertion and indicate that Israelis, far from clamoring for a two-state solution, are adamant that the war should be fought with intensity. In late December, 75% of Jewish Israelis opposed U.S. demands to reduce the heavy bombing then under way in Gaza. Most of his compatriots “understand that the problem is that the Palestinians don’t want peace with Israel but peace without Israel. There has been a persistent opposition among Palestinian leaders to the very existence of the state of Israel.” It’s “not the absence of a Palestinian state but the opposition to a Jewish state that is the obstacle to peace.” Mr. Netanyahu thinks peace is possible through a strategy he calls “outside in”: “The way to achieve it is to go to the Arab states and then circle back to the Palestinians.” But the latter appear to be in no mood for peace. “Unfortunately,” Mr. Netanyahu says, “85% of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—support the massacre done by Hamas on Oct. 7.” Israel also faces a startling lawsuit at the International Court of Justice, in which South Africa accuses the Jewish state of genocide. “What South Africa did was shameful,” Mr. Netanyahu says. Israel was established in the aftermath of genocide and was one of the earliest signatories of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. “South Africa is basically aligning itself, in the name of opposing genocide, with the genocidal murderers of Hamas. The only difference between what Hamas did and the Nazis did is capability, not intent.” (On Friday the court rejected South Africa’s No subject energizes Mr. Netanyahu more than Iran. America got a taste of his singlemindedness on the subject in 2015 when he addressed a joint session of Congress and opposed President Obama’s nuclear deal with Tehran. Mr. Netanyahu says Israel has “taken consistent action to ward off Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We delayed them by many years, perhaps a decade, but we haven’t stopped them. The jury is still out on all of us.” It would be “catastrophic,” he says, “if they got nuclear weapons. Look at what they’re doing without nuclear weapons. They’ve blocked international maritime routes with their Houthi proxies, they subvert states across the Middle East, they are the foremost state sponsor of terror across the world, and they and their proxies have repeatedly attacked American targets.” He points to the malign consequences of failing to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear arms. “Iran is much more powerful and much more dangerous than North Korea. It promotes radical Islam and chants ‘Death to America.’ You don’t want such a regime to threaten the U.S. with ballistic weapons armed with nuclear warheads.” He also worries about Russia’s partnership with Iran. Israel has reached a modus vivendi with Vladimir Putin over Syria, Moscow’s vassal state. “I acted against Iran’s plans to build a second Hezbollah base in Syria,” he says. “We have been taking forceful military action to prevent that—this while Russia has had a strong military presence in Syria.” Years ago, he says, he “told President Putin that Iran’s military buildup in Syria would pose an unacceptable security threat to Israel.” That would raise a real possibility of Israel’s air force clashing with Russia’s. “Thankfully, so far, we’ve avoided such a clash.” But now “Iran has become the chief arms supplier to Russia, and we’re obviously concerned about Russian reciprocation.” But the Iranian threat has also led to improved Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia. “I’m sure no one in Riyadh has any illusions about Iran’s ambitions and aggressions,” Mr. Netanyahu says. He appears sanguine about the prospects of a deal with Saudi Arabia along the lines of the Abraham Accords, by which Israel normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. “The prospects are good,” he says, “and I intend to work for it. The United States wants it. Saudi Arabia wants it. And we want it.” But that’s all he’ll say. “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” was the first of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points. “I believe in open covenants, secretly arrived at,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “If we make any progress, it will require important consultations, and if those are to succeed, they need to be done discreetly. That is exactly what happened with the Abraham Accords.” Mr. Netanyahu believes that the war in Gaza isn’t Israel’s alone. “We have an opportunity to change the Middle East, but that requires total victory against Hamas. We are not dealing just with a terrorist organization. We are engaged in a battle between Israel and the moderate forces in the Middle East, backed by the United States, against Iran’s axis of terror.” If the Middle East “were to go down,” he says, “Europe will be next, and the U.S. will be threatened as well. This is a battle between civilization and barbarism, and civilization has to win.” Few in Israel would disagree with Mr. Netanyahu when he says that Oct. 7 was the worst day in Israeli history. “We have had other days, other times of barbarity and sorrow, but we hadn’t seen anything like this since the Holocaust. In the European death camps, the Jews were utterly helpless.” Not today, when “we have brave soldiers fighting back.” Jews “had that ability in ancient times. Read the biblical stories of Joshua, David, the Maccabees. We didn’t always win, but we had the capacity to fight back. We lost that capacity in exile. The desire to destroy the Jews hasn’t gone away. What has changed is the ability to fend off attacks.” Mr. Netanyahu ends with a message to America: “Our fight is your fight.” The war against Hamas is “part of the larger struggle between the pro-American forces in the Middle East and the anti-American terror axis led by Iran.” If Iran gets nuclear weapons, “every American will be held hostage to an ideological enemy with an implacable hatred for America.” “If we lose, you lose. If we win, you win.” Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute. And: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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