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What took them so long?
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Clever strategy:
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Rabbis thank RNC for including fight against antisemitism in abbreviated platform
The Coalition for Jewish Values, representing thousands of Orthodox rabbis, thank RNC for including its suggestion in abbreviated platform.
By Republican Party
The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing over 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, expressed its appreciation today after policy suggestions it shared with all three major political campaigns earned mention in the abbreviated document issued by the Republican National Committee (RNC) Platform Committee
CJV Vice President Rabbi Dov Fischer, a core contributor to the CJV document, stated, "Addressing anti-Jewish hate in America was, of course, a major theme in our suggestions, and we specifically asked the platform committees to address both hostility on campus and the problem of foreign nationals who come to America in order to incite hatred."
"We think it significant that both of these issues, of great concern to Jewish Americans and many others, were given attention despite the brevity of the RNC platform," Rabbi Fischer said.
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And
And California incest?
Let Hamas Lose Already
By Seth Mandel
“The enemy gets a vote” is a common expression that is invoked when your plans go awry. But what happens when events go according to plan?
There have been plenty of rocky roads during Israel’s nine-month military campaign in Gaza, but one of the underlying concepts guiding the IDF brass and the country’s political leadership hasn’t changed: keeping total victory as the goal puts pressure on Hamas.
This principle has been so maligned lately—even President Biden dismissed it as “an unidentified notion of total victory” that “will only bog down Israel in Gaza”—that it’s easy to forget it was the consensus among Western allies after October 7. Yet it’s not Israel that has just received a rude reminder of the limits of long-term planning—it’s Hamas.
“Several officials in the Middle East and the U.S. believe the level of devastation in the Gaza Strip caused by a nine-month Israeli offensive likely has helped push Hamas to soften its demands for a cease-fire agreement,” reports the Associated Press. To which the response might be: Well… yeah. Losing a war can do wonders in adjusting your refusal to compromise.
The AP isn’t just going on intuition. It has seen internal messages from senior Hamas officials describing “the heavy losses Hamas has suffered on the battlefield and the dire conditions in the war-ravaged territory.” According to the AP, “a person familiar with Western intelligence…said the group’s leadership understands its forces have suffered heavy losses and that has helped Hamas move closer to a cease-fire deal.”
This story coincides with Hamas leaders deciding to drop their demand that any ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Israel contain an up-front IDF concession it will not restart hostilities—thus meaning the war would be, for all intents and purposes, over. That would have effectively guaranteed Hamas’s survival. Instead, reports the Times of Israel, Hamas has expressed its “desire for ‘written guarantees’ from mediators that Israel will continue to negotiate a permanent ceasefire deal once the first phase of a ceasefire goes into effect.”
As I wrote in November, relentless Israeli pressure was key to the first ceasefire-for-hostages agreement. Hamas’s first true openness came when it wanted to forestall an Israeli ground invasion. Then it became pliable once again when the IDF was on the verge of taking Shifa hospital, forcing Hamas fighters to flee and leaving Israel in position to reveal the military use of the hospital by Hamas. That pattern continued until a deal was in place.
In contrast, the times any deal looked least likely were during moments of paralysis—US threats to withhold weapons from the IDF, Israeli domestic political instability, perceived Israeli diplomatic isolation. Pressure works. Unfortunately the Biden administration went from pressuring Hamas to pressuring Israel, and the hostages languished in Gaza dungeons or camps—except for the few rescued by the IDF.
Hamas isn’t only feeling the pressure from without. It’s also dealing with an increasingly assertive Gazan civilian population, whose suffering was brought upon by Hamas’s design.
“I hope that God will destroy you, Hamas, like you destroyed our children,” screams a grieving Palestinian mother in a video taken by NBC. Gazans’ support for the October 7 attacks have dropped in recent months, as have their support for Hamas.
The BBC quotes another Gazan: “I am an academic doctor. I had a good life, but we have a filthy [Hamas] leadership. They got used to our bloodshed, may God curse them! They are scum!”
The report goes on: “Residents have told the BBC that swearing and cursing against the Hamas leadership is now common in the markets, and that some drivers of donkey carts have even nicknamed their animals after the Hamas leader in Gaza—Yahya Sinwar—urging the donkeys forward with shouts of ‘Yallah, Sinwar!’”
What these desperate men and women realize is that this deprivation isn’t going to end until Hamas is out of power, because Hamas won’t let it end. Everything the West has done to buy time for Hamas leaders has moved the Palestinians in Gaza ever closer to a future that looks a lot like their present.
Those Gazans whom Hamas permits to live, that is. Hamas has been executing rival clan members and perceived competitors for postwar governance. Gaza peace activist Hamza Howidy, who has been imprisoned and tortured for protesting against Hamas, recounts that since October, “hundreds of Gazans have been killed by Hamas’ failing rockets. Hamas has confiscated the food, fuel, and medicine sent to Gaza, and they did not stop here. 13-year-old Ahmad Breka was shot in the head by Hamas in Rafah while attempting to collect humanitarian aid. Others were fortunate because they were merely shot in the legs by Hamas while attempting to grab humanitarian goods that Hamas stole and kept in their facilities.”
Putting Hamas’s back against the wall helps the Israeli hostages. It helps the Palestinian civilians. And it enables the US to live up to its professed ideals. There’s a reason this was the goal when all this started. Because that’s the way it should end.
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the north's race against time
by Douglas Altabef
Franz Kafka would feel right at home in northern Israel.
Life here has a surreal, absurdist character with the indivisible mix of the mundane and the potentially catastrophic. A quiet day has only a handful of rocket or drone attacks and we have become used to incessant plane noise and to looking up and around after a boom or two.
Israelis are resilient, but resilience is often the product of being able to maintain one’s routine and “normalcy” within one’s familiar surroundings.
Anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 people have been stripped of their surroundings and have become refugees in their own country. Schools, businesses, farms, communities, you name it, have all been eviscerated, gutted and functionally abandoned.
Like so much in this war, the real difficulty is less the sacrifices that have been made than the lack of clarity as to how much longer those sacrifices will be required. What would have to happen to enable residents to return home, and is there any sense of when that might be?
I think most residents know that this is not about them in the sense that they are being ignored or singled out for korban (sacrifice) treatment. But still, in the real world, there is great pain, disruption and alienation. Adults can articulate their pain and confusion but most children cannot and we do not know the accrued damage that this dislocation is causing to our youth.
Yes, the evacuees are being compensated. They have not organized or been weaponized by others with a political agenda that would exploit evacuee distress in the name of that agenda.
But we must know that we are corroding the spirit of people who love their country and bleed blue and white.
There is a real world price for the current state of affairs. There is extensive collateral damage being inflicted.
Our leaders—political, military and security—need to recognize that they are not just playing with battlefield strategies and tactics. Or rather, the battlefield is much more complicated than the field of combat.
What the residents ask, what those of us who relate to their plight ask, is that our leaders’ planning and strategy take into account the costs of not acting, as well as the possible implications of our actions.
This cannot be seen as happening in a vacuum. We recognize that military plans are multifaceted and have a range of considerations and pressures—external and otherwise—that have an impact on their formulation and implementation.
We on the Zionist right have no interest in second guessing or questioning the judgment of our leaders. We only ask that their planning takes significant account of the real implications of any plans or the lack thereof for the displaced residents.
Time is not on their side.
The opinions and facts presented in this article are those of the author, and neither JNS nor its partners assume any responsibility for them.
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What would a two-state solution solve?
Hamas, Hezbollah, and Tehran are fighting for an Islamic empire
By Clifford D. May
Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Empire illustration by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times more >
I don’t oppose a two-state solution. Nor do I oppose Tinker Bell. I just seriously doubt that either exists.
If you’re among those who believe that widespread recognition of a Palestinian nation-state would resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I’d remind you: This is an idea that has been tried and found wanting.
For example: In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recommended partitioning western Palestine (eastern Palestine having been given over years earlier to what would become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) into two states, one for Palestinian Arabs, the other for Palestinian Jews. Jewish leaders accepted the recommendation. Arab leaders rejected it.
Palestinian Jews knew what total Arab control of Palestine would mean for them. In 1929, Palestinian Arabs had carried out a terrible pogrom – akin to that of Oct. 7 last year – against Palestinian Jews in Hebron. In 1936, the “Arab Revolt” included terrorist attacks not just against the British who had replaced the Ottoman Empire as Palestine’s ruler but also against Jews.
And the most important leader of Palestine’s Arabs at that time was Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had spent World War II in Berlin assisting Hitler.
So, the week after the British withdrew from Palestine, the Jews declared an independent state. In response, the armies of five Arab nations invaded Israel, waging a war to exterminate the fledgling Jewish homeland.
Against all odds, Israel survived. Palestinians Arabs who neither fought the Jews nor fled from them became Israeli citizens. Nevertheless, what was then called the Arab-Israeli conflict persisted.
In 1964, at a summit meeting in Cairo, the Arab League created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Three years later, Israel’s Arab neighbors again attempted to push the Jews into the sea. Again, they failed.
At the conclusion of the Six-Day War, Israel had taken Gaza from Egypt, and the West Bank from Jordan. The West Bank, by the way, had been known by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, before those territories were conquered by Jordan in the 1948 war. Following that conquest, Jordan expelled the Jews, destroyed the synagogues, and desecrated Jewish cemeteries and shrines.
In the aftermath of the 1967 war, the Arab League issued what became known as the “three Noes”: no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel.
Today, Israel’s most consequential conflict is with Iran’s rulers who fund, arm, and instruct Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah which, from Lebanon, has been rocketing northern Israel since Oct. 8. The Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the Shia militias in Syria and Iraq also are proxies of Tehran.
For 45 years, Iran’s self-proclaimed jihadis have vowed “Death to Israel!” and “Death to America!” The slogan of the Houthis: “God is Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, a Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Could there be a more explicit rejection of a two-state solution? Is it not indisputable that what Iran’s rulers and their minions want instead is a “final solution” – the Nazi term for the extermination of Jews?
Iran’s rulers believe the world is divided into the Dar al Islam, the countries ruled by Muslims, and the Dar al Harb, the countries ruled by non-believers who must be fought and conquered. Israel is the only slice of land between Morocco and Pakistan not ruled by Muslims. To an Islamist, such diversity is intolerable.
The various “peace processes” have ignored these inconvenient truths. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s, agreements between Israel and the PLO, set up the Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern the West Bank. Its main problem has not been that Israel and the U.S. have refrained from granting it formal recognition as a nation-state.
Hamas violently ousted the PA from Gaza in 2007, two years after the Israelis withdrew from that territory.
Since then, what attributes of statehood has Gaza lacked? Huge amounts of aid have streamed in from the “international donor community.” Health care, education and other social services have been provided by U.N. agencies that became Hamas’ handmaidens. These agencies have employed Hamas members, some of whom took part in the atrocities of Oct. 7.
Israel has supplied Gaza with electricity and water and, prior to last Oct. 7, permitted thousands of Gazans to enter Israel to work at higher salaries than they could command in Gaza. For decades, Israeli hospitals have opened their doors to Gazans in need.
Media reports have often called Gaza an “open-air prison.” But we now know that Gazans were always able to leave and return over their border with Egypt. Some did so for terrorist training. Hamas constructed an elaborate subterranean fortress. Do prisons generally allow inmates to dig tunnels?
Through highways under the Egyptian border, an enormous supply of weapons and munitions poured into Gaza over the years.
Hamas’ goal has not been nation-building. Its goal has been, and still is, to create an emirate “from the river to the sea” to be included in a new caliphate and empire.
Which is why any solution to the multiple conflicts now underway in the Middle East must begin with the defeat of Hamas’ military and governing capabilities.
More challenging but essential: neutralizing the neo-imperialist and openly genocidal regime in Tehran which, you should note, is now firmly allied with Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang.
The day after that, progress can perhaps be made toward establishing an independent Palestinian state with leaders willing, however reluctantly, to peacefully coexist alongside Israel.
To sum up: Belief in a two-state solution does not make that a realistic option, any more than belief in Tinker Bell can bring the little fairy to life.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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