Every protestor against Israel’s response to October 7 needs to re examine her attitude. No one but no one does not cry for the Palestinians in Gaza but it is Hamas who bragged that they had set them up for sacrifice.They correctly reckoned that the world would condemn Israel when the inevitable civilian casualties would result as the “brave warriors” shielded behind them in the war that had to follow.
The narrative that the reason for the October 7 savage onslaught was that Netanyahu had axed the Two State solution is bogus because Hamas does not believe in it anyway.
Whatever the future may hold, Israel after October 7 had no alternative other than to neutralize Hamas at least to the extent that ISIS has been. Hamas has as THE cardinal provision in their constitution a genocidal threat against Israel which they have illustrated just how they will effect it.
The allegation that it is Israel being the genocidal agents in this conflict is reflective of the anti semitic “blood libel” thrown at the Jews throughout the ages.The argument that Hamas are freedom fighters against a neo colonial fascist regime that has deprived them of their country is reflective of a moral depravity of the accusers who are openly supporting an ISIS like terrorist organization.
With regard to some of Hamas’s supporters there is a cognitive dissonance. Under Hamas, LGBT people receive the death sentence while there is scant respect for women’s rights as illustrated by Hamas’s paymaster Iran. Marit Mayor, a police superintendent in Israel, believed the brutality against women illustrated Hama’s hatred against the Jews and women. It also bears mentioning that the October 7 massacre gave the green light for the perpetration of anti semitic hate crimes which increased over a thousand percent in Europe and close on four hundred percent in the USA.
In this blog the current accepted narrative against Israel will be discussed. The fatally flawed leadership in the region will be highlighted as well as the political climate in Israel even before October 7 and what is taking place in the country at the moment. The “Day After” needs airing. Israel’s position is in flux while Hama’s as yet has not deviated from its position from “the river to the sea”.
THE GENERAL NARRATIVE OF ISRAEL’S ALLEGED CULPABILITY AND THE MEDIA’S REINFORCEMENT OF IT.
A sober analysis of the current Middle East tragic events has not been aided by the Western media that have implicitly maintained that the Israelis’ policies inevitably led to the barbarism of the October 7 attack on Israel. Apparently Hamas’s objective was to enforce an independent Palestinian state. Hamas and the other members of the Iranian led “Resistance” don’t believe in a two party state. Rather they maintain that their State should be from “The River to the Sea”. Hamas incidentally have repeatedly declared that all Jews should be killed. Their spokesmen have also said they will rerun October 7 again and again. “The Palestinians are prepared to be martyrs”, argue Hamas’s leaders. Some of the “freedom fighters” from the killing fields of October 7 proudly boasted that they had slaughtered Jews.
Just to point to a glaring imbalance.of coverage. viewers are spared from the barbarism of October 7 where bodies were burned, limbs pulled off, women gang raped and where there was violent hostage taking from babies to the elderly. However the scenes are given the full blast, with all the usual warnings, of the inevitable pathetic collateral destruction and loss of life in Gaza.
The New York Times, not the most sympathetic newspaper to Israel, has produced an expose entitled, “How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence - a pattern of rape, mutilation and sheer brutality” - nails in women’s vaginas and the like.To quote the NY Times, “Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence difficult to see”. It took the UNO Women’s Movement weeks to issue an insipid comment on the desecration, notwithstanding that the organization celebrated “The International Day For The Elimination Of Violence Against Women” on November 25.
It has reached the stage where the Hamas Ministry of Health’s figures of those killed which are issued immediately after an attack are accepted. Several announcers are not even bothering to say that “the figures have not been independently verified”.The numbers, such as they are, do not include that up to ten thousand Hamas fighters, regretfully including "children", eliminated to date. It took Israel weeks to gauge the exact number murdered by Hamas. To the best of Jay H. Ell’s knowledge Hamas did not drop leaflets to warn the kibbutz members and those attending the Peace Festival warning them that they were about to be murdered, brutalized and gang raped and they needed to move North.
Another fact that barely surfaces is the political philosophy of those living in the Kibbutzim on the Southern envelope of Israel. That fraternity was famous for their championing of Palestinian aspirations. As the extent of their betrayal became more and more evident, the depressive cloud that enveloped Israel following the aftermath of October 7, thickened. And in case the watching public missed it, the festival where a massacre took place was a “Peace Festival”
The appeal to call a halt to the war is only directed at Israel while the culpability for the ongoing slaughter in Gaza lies with Hamas who by not surrendering are sacrificing the Palestinian women and children, which they were ready to do from day one. In fact the greater the mortality and wounded the more it feeds into their narrative fueling more protests. While their attempts to block the movements of their citizenry following warnings from Israel was extensively reported in the latter’s media they barely raised a mention in the West.
The Israeli answer to the unwitting fatalities in Gaza is that they have irrefutable evidence that Hamas operates under the cover of civilian establishments. The poverty of the Palestinians is the outcome of Hamas diverting the massive payments from their benefactors to build tunnels and ammunition factories rather than for the social purposes that they were allegedly designated for.
This is a proxy war between Israel and Iran where its other five entities are mixing in and attacking Israel. They all form “The Resistance” . So those who are backing Hamas because they are David to Israel being Goliath, next to Iran and 6 proxies Israel is not the Goliath.
The public and the media don’t seem to get what October 7 has done to the psyche of Israelis. They are shell shocked comparing the coldblooded cruelty to the holocaust. Cruelty that was essential to underline their hatred. There is also a displacement of a quarter million Israeli citizens. While it is not nearly equivalent to the predicament of a million and a half Palestinians in Gaza but nevertheless the South of Israel sustained an even worse worse destruction coupled with desecration. In the North, Hezbollah are busily destroying the villages and towns on that border. The only one who “gets it” is President Biden. He like other government officials has seen the real happenings of October 7.
Finally, as Zionism, the belief in Israel as the Jewish homeland, is now equated with anti semitism, this non nuanced approach has reinforced the longstanding anti semitism that has been festering on the University campuses, (Blog: July11, 2021:The Silent Epidemic of Campus Anti Semitism”), as well as on the extreme right and left.
THE DAY AFTER AND JUST BEFORE AND FATALLY FLAWED LEADER NETANYAHU
The Israeli Prime Minister is the most fatally flawed leader of the unholy three dramatis personae in this arena. He has orchestrated this unholy mess.
As Hamas’s official position is that they have no negotiating position, the initiative is in Israel’s hands. The latter have to balance their twin objectives of the release of hostages and winning the war. They also have to move into a new phase of targeted objectives now that have eliminated Hamas's ground operations.
In Israel there are competing solutions for "The Day After". These range from a one state solution - an apartheid one from the right and an integrated one from the extreme left - to an eventual two state solution or at least have that as an end goal. While it has been the right wing narrative that has dictated Israeli policy for almost two decades there has been a massive shift in the landscape.
For months prior to October 7 there have been crowds of hundreds of thousands every weekend protesting the Netanyahu’s right wing coalition’s attempt to subvert Israel’s democracy. These would meet the dual purpose of no longer protecting Israeli Palestinian rights and keep Netanyahu out of jail.
It is fair to say that Netanyahu and his extremist coalition partners are becoming more and more isolated. There are protests daily as to his apparent disregard for the hostages - a criticism that is reflective of the mood’s anger towards him. As the death rate of the Israel Defense Force rises fuel is added to the fury.
Netanyahu supports the apartheid solution for “The Day After”. Not only is he out of sync with the majority of the country and what happens next, he is repeatedly blamed for October 7 for his total misreading of the “Palestine Future”. He backed Hamas carrying suitcases of Qatar's cash to them. He created the political environment that allowed the intelligence to be ignored. If it wasn’t was for the protestors' infrastructure the massive relief effort would not have happened. He not only had sent the army brigade on the Southern border to protect Minister Smotrich’s thugs on the West Bank, Netanyahu had axed every decent civil servant for his lackeys.
Michael Oren the former Ambassador to America and a close confidant of the Prime Minister has publicly told him not to contradict Biden in public. The general consensus is how fortunate it was that the American President in this crisis was Joseph Biden. Oren points out that Biden is alone in his party and alone in the world. It is obscene that the Prime Minister is running an election campaign while the war wages. Central to his strategy is that he wants to pick a fight with Biden as to “The Day After”.
The most respected institutions in the country are the Intelligence Agencies and the Armed Forces.. The immediate past officers of the Shin Beit, Mossad and the armed forces have joined organizations one of which asks for the immediate resignation of the Premier. The highly respected former Head of Mossad and the National Security Agency, Ehud Halevi, who also incidentally brokered the Israel/Jordan peace treaty, is scathing in his criticism calling for the Prime Minister's resignation.
There is a group which has five hundred members made up of retired Generals and their equivalents in the Intelligence Agency and the Police, “The Commanders of Israel’s Security". They believe in the Two State solution. Initially there should be consolidation of the West Bank territory and for now a separation between Gaza, The West Bank and Israel.
What has been mooted for “The Day After” is that Israel’s Sunni partners form the political entity which oversea the rebuilding of Gaza and act as a transition group. The majority of opinion makers don’t support Netanyahu’s vision of Israel occupying Gaza.
To add insult to injury Ehud Olmert a former premier and member of the Likud, Netanyahu’s party, is calling for a permanent halt to the war for a return of the hostages. The latter is a solution floated by Tom Friedman of the NY Times and to compound the War Cabinet’s woes is gaining currency. Netanyahu has appeared totally unempathetic to the families involved and was booed by them in the Knesset.
Well what about the other two fatally flawed leaders?
HAMAS’S FATALLY FLAWED LEADER,, YAHYA SINWAR AND THE FATALLY FLAWED PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY’S, LEADER, MAHMOUD ABBAS
Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar is a highly intelligent sociopath who served 22 years in an Israeli prison for six murders. In prison he murdered two inmates. His favorite execution method is with his “own hands”. He "terminated" a leader of his organization for homosexuality. Another priority is the “elimination” of anyone suspected for collaboration with the enemy. Sinwar fostered Netanyahu’s narrative that Hamas sought peace. His brother is an engineer who built tunnels with the money designated for social services.
It is a myth that the Palestinians in Gaza are behind Hamas, the latter not having held an election since 2007. The Dean of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, Amanda Jamal, reported on a poll completed fortuitously on October 6, 2023, “Sixty - seven percent of Palestinians in Gaza had little or no trust in Hamas”. The population’s biggest gripe - corruption. The war may well have changed perceptions but that was the verdict before.
The Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas at 87 years old is basically only controlling the town of Ramallah. Abbas took over from Arafat in 2004. He is also a victim of Netanyahu’s grand plan to control the Palestinian territories. Netanyahu would finance Hamas and control and weaken Abbas. Hamas does not recognize Abbas’s leadership So Netanyahu can argue that the Palestinians were divided so he has no one to talk to. He did not have to do much convincing with regard to Abbas who is hopelessly corrupt.
Abbas openly rues refusing the two state solution offer made in 2018, by Ehud Olmert, who was the Prime Minister in Israel in one of the rare Bibi respites since 2000. Abbas obtained his Ph. D. with a dissertation denying the holocaust. Not so long ago he hinted that he was on message then.
Maybe in “The Day After”, “The Commanders For Israel Security”will hold sway. If so Abbas’s image among Palestinians will improve and he can act as an interim negotiator. He, for lack of no one else around, is regarded internationally as the leader of the Palestinians. (Sinwar has been designated a "terrorist" by the United States and the EU).
AT THE END OF THE DAY
It is sad that the extreme left is now ad idem with the extreme right.
It is hard to believe that student activists have so lost their way. While it is difficult to gauge their numbers, the New York Police Chief stated that the anti Israeli protests had only between one and five thousand participants.
Jay H. Ell firmly believes that TV viewers, adults only, should not be spared, the October 7 barbarism. If the legislators can scan it so can their constituents. Perhaps they may then understand why Hamas must be taken out. Understandably for the Jews, who have a long never ending history of persecution and genocide, October 7 has to evoke an overwhelming fear of doom. They have to respond to this arm of “The Resistance”. In Iran there is a doomsday clock which ticks down the time when Israel will be no more.
We have to pray that “The Day After” will be the beginning of a two State solution. The solution has to take place in the region with the Sunni nations who too are praying that Israel will knock out Iran’s proxy.
The war cabinet has to take into account the imperative to bring home the hostages as well as winning the war.
The war cabinet owe it to Biden to finish this in a few months. They need to overrule the Prime Minister who has long overstayed his welcome.
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