Tag Archives: Israel

Palestine: Hamas Defeats Israel, by The Saker

Israel’s enemies in the Middle East know it is not invincible. From The Saker at unz.com:

Credit: Musa Al-Shaer/AFP

Just like in 2006, when both Ehud Olmert and George Bush declared that the “invincible IDF” had, yet again, achieved a “glorious victory” and the entire Middle-East almost died laughing hearing this ridiculous claim, today both the US and Israeli propaganda machine have declared another “glorious” victory for the “Jewish state of Israel” cum “sole democracy in the Middle-East”. And, just like in 2006, everybody in the region (and in Zone B) knows that the truth is that the Zionist entity suffered a huge, humiliated, defeat. Let’s try to unpack this.

First, a few numbers. The combat operations lasted two weeks. All other missile numbers are in dispute. Rather than trust this or that source, I will simply say that Hamas fired many thousands of missiles into Israel. Some, probably less than 50%, were truly intercepted by the Israeli air defenses, others hit in no man’s land, and some actually landed and caused plenty of destruction and at least 12 deaths. The Israelis executed hundreds of artillery and airstrikes causing massive destruction in the Gaza strip and killing about 250 Palestinians. Again, these numbers are guesstimates and they don’t really tell the full story. To understand the story, we need to forget about these numbers and look at what each side was hoping for and what each side achieved. Let’s begin with the Israelis:

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The ‘Missile Intifada’ Brings an Era Crashing Down, by Alastair Crooke

War making capacity has scaled down and become more decentralized. Seems the US may be the last to get the news. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

As Gaza quietens for now, the next phase to this war likely will centre around Al-Aqsa, Jerusalem and the 1948 Palestinian communities within Israel.

The acclaimed novel Birdsong tells a story from inside the gruelling trench warfare of 1914-18. The trenches – mere mud, and rain-soaked corridors – were separated from the German lines, by the desolate hell of ‘no man’s land’ – an indescribable flat wilderness of mud, mud and more mud, littered with broken bits of what once were men, whose remains no one dared retrieve, and the surreal black art of coiled razor wire twisted out into every imaginable shape and angle.

Across this Hieronymus Bosch landscape, the Germans laid down rolling wave after wave of intense high explosive artillery shells sending plumes of earth high up into the sky. Yet, in counterpoint to this dark and demonic backdrop, Birdsong unfolds a story of human struggle, near death and deep compassion for injured fiends. But at the core, it is a story about tunnels – those who dug them; those buried in them, as they fell in; and those who sprung out from them – as earth-worms rising – to surprise and kill the enemy.

Tunnels were the secret weapon of WW1. They was the answer to the merciless aerial bombardment unleashed by the crushing mass of a superior military machine. Battalions would enter the trenches 800 strong, and emerge after the barrage, with a mere 100-200 living men. Yet on they went – volunteers digging tunnels through the mud to rise, like ghosts, upon a sleeping enemy.

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America’s ‘Deal of the Century’ in Flames After Israel Pounds Gaza, by Finian Cunningham

So much for US diplomacy in the Middle East. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

The pretense of American mediation in the Middle East is in tatters. A year after the Abraham Accords, and the world is witnessing another bloody round of ethnic cleansing by the Israelis armed with American warplanes and missiles.

It only took a year for Trump’s “deal of the century” to fall apart for the fraud that it always was. The Arab and Muslim world are enraged by the crimes against humanity committed by Israel against Palestinians in nearly two weeks of violence.

A ceasefire has halted the bloodshed – for now – but the damage to America’s image of peace broker is permanent.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump bent over backward to please Israel. So much for all his bluster about “America First”. More like “Israel First”. Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and gave a green light to continue the annexation of Palestinian land.

Then in a re-election bid, Trump cobbled together the so-called Abraham Accords, a grandiose sounding deal between Israel and Arab countries. This was supposed to be the “deal of the century” which Trump, with his characteristic megalomania, touted as solving the seven-decade-old Middle East conflict. It was a con-job, befitting a wheeler-dealer real-estate mogul who is currently being investigated in the U.S. for corruption.

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The US Isn’t An Israel Puppet, Israel Isn’t A US Puppet: It’s One Empire, by Caitlin Johnstone

The empire that dares not declare itself certainly includes both the US and Israel. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Nearly 200,000 protesters attended a pro-Palestine demonstration in Central London on Saturday afternoon, another clear sign that support for Palestinian rights is becoming increasingly mainstream and the imperialists are losing control of the Israel narrative.

The real consequence of this is that people will begin losing trust in the government and media institutions which support Israel, because without trust the empire can’t propagandize people, and without the ability to propagandize us our rulers cannot rule. There’s no risk for Israel of losing US backing due to the US government suddenly evolving a conscience or listening to its constituents, that won’t happen, but losing control of the narrative poses a major problem for the empire. Someone’s image is going to have to change, and those changes could end up benefiting Palestinians.

We’re already seeing this narrative management campaign come into play as mainstream outlets are now permitting some serious criticisms of Israel. This is done cynically to prevent people from losing trust in propaganda institutions, but it also has real effects that can benefit real people. This is a good example of how expanding consciousness is always beneficial, even on the most depraved institutions. The more aware the public becomes of abusive imperial power dynamics, the less abuse the empire can get away with. The empire losing control of the narrative is always a good thing.

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The Image of Victory, by Gilad Atzmon

Israel’s goals regarding the Palestinians are political, not military. From Gilad Atzmon at unz.com:

If winning a military battle is defined by the accomplishment of one’s military objectives, then Hamas won the current round of violence with its very first ballistic barrage on Jerusalem ten days ago. Israel, on the other hand, won’t win, can’t win and doesn’t even dream of winning. Like in recent ‘rounds’, all Israel hopes to achieve is an ‘image of victory.’ Despite its military might and destructive enthusiasm, Israel can’t prevail militarily because it doesn’t even remember what military objectives are or what they look like.

In the last seven decades Israel has worked relentlessly to divide the Palestinians in an attempt to dismantle their ability to resist as one people. This project had been so successful in the eyes of the Israelis that many of them started to believe that the Palestinian cause had evaporated into thin air. But then, completely out of the blue (as far as the Israelis are concerned), Hamas managed to unite the Palestinians into a unified fist of resistance: on Tuesday every Palestinian between the River and the Sea joined a strike called by Hamas. Such a collective, multi-sectorial strike didn’t happen in Palestine since 1936.

Military victory is not measured by the carnage you inflict on your foe. It isn’t measured by the number of casualties or the residential towers one reduces into dust. Admittedly, there is no room for comparison between Israeli military capabilities and Hamas’ firepower. Israel is one of the most technologically advanced military forces in the world. Hamas is decades behind, yet it wins over Israel in every round of violence.

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Some Simple Lies Out of Washington: Who Is the Terrorist and Who Is the Victim? by Philip Giraldi

Americans would not want to live the way Palestinians in Gaza live. Whether that’s the fault of Israel, the Palestinian leadership, or both is open to debate, but Palestinian anger is understandable. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

There have been few surprises coming out of the violence that has erupted in Palestine and Israel. Israel, firmly in control of much of the media in the U.S. and Western Europe has chosen to depict it in simple terms: the Palestinian “terrorist” group Hamas has attacked the Jewish state which has taken proportionate steps to defend itself. This simplistic rendition of a much more complicated series of interactions has been picked up by many of the talking heads that pass for political commentary in the United States as well as by the completely corrupted Washington politicians.

Comments expressing any sympathy for the decades long plight of the Palestinians have been as scarce as the proverbial hens’ teeth, though such sentiment is growing even in Congress as Israeli killing of civilians increases. In fact, initially I could only find five statements coming from Democrats that in any serious way regretted the suffering being inflicted on Arab civilians in Gaza, in Jerusalem and on the West Bank. One consisted of remarks by Senator Elizabeth Warren regarding the series of thefts of Palestinian homes that sparked the recent violence. She tweeted “The forced removal of long-time Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah is abhorrent and unacceptable. The Administration should make clear to the Israeli government that these evictions are illegal and must stop immediately.” Senator Bernie Sanders also made the case for Palestinian suffering in a hard-hitting New York Times op-ed entitled “The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apologist for Netanyahu.” He describes the Israeli Prime Minister as having “cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism.”

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Why Does the Left Seemingly Hate Israel? by Victor Davis Hanson

The left would answer that they hate Israel because the country oppresses Palestinians, yet the left is unmoved by the oppression suffered by many other groups. From Victor Davis Hanson at theepochtimes.com:

Commentary

With more than 3,000 rockets having been fired into Israel by Hamas recently, the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war.

It’s not just that they fear that “The Squad,” Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of Antifa, and woke institutions such as academia and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel. They are also terrified that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon, the Democratic Party will end up as disdained as the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.

The new core of the Democrats, as emblemized by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, has in the past questioned the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel, and occasionally has had to apologize for puerile anti-Semitic rants.

The left in general believes we should judge harshly even the distant past without exemptions. Why then, in venomous, knee-jerk fashion, does it fixate on a nation born from the Holocaust while favoring Israel’s enemies, who were on the side of the Nazis in World War II?

It wasn’t just that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi sympathizer. Egypt, for example, welcomed ex-Nazis for their hatred of Jews and their military expertise, including infamous death camp doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim and Waffen-SS henchman Otto Skorzeny. The Hamas charter still reads like it is cribbed from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The left claims it champions consensual government and believes the United States must use its soft-power clout to isolate autocracies. But the Palestinian Authority and Hamas refuse to hold free and regularly scheduled elections. If an Israeli strongman ever suspended free elections and ruled through brutality, U.S. aid would be severed within days.

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Is the Biden Administration an Enemy of Israel and the Free World? by Guy Millière

The Biden administration is shifting away from Trump’s strong support for Israel. From Guy Millière at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • Biden made no distinction between a democratic ally of the United States and a terrorist organization he did not even name. He spoke as if he did not know that the calm was broken by a terrorist organization and by no one else, and that what prevents Palestinians from having freedom, prosperity and democracy is precisely that they are ruled by terrorists and people who supports terrorism.
  • On April 7, a US Department of State press statement said that the Biden administration had decided to restore US financial “aid to Palestinians”, without requiring that American money not be used for terrorist purposes….
  • The appointment to the post of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs of Hady Amr, a man who has accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid”, and said that he was “inspired by intifada”, seemed to confirm that the Biden administration would not be particularly “pro-Israel”…. Amr met Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Muhammad Ishtayya in Ramallah to negotiate the use of US financial aid to the PA while Israel was under missile fire….
  • In a PBS interview on April 2, one of the American negotiators, Robert Malley, announced that he wants “to remove those sanctions that are inconsistent with the deal”, “so that Iran enjoys the benefits that it was supposed to enjoy”. Nothing shows that the Biden administration has changed that position.
  • There were no threats to stop the new funding he had promised the Palestinians until they stopped firing rockets. He did not threaten to withdraw his promise of an office in Washington DC for them.
  • Most unsettling of all, while Iran’s proxy, Hamas, was raining nearly 4,000 rockets and missiles into a country the size of New Jersey, the US was engaged in talks in Vienna to discuss how much money the US was prepared to give Iran – to buy more weapons to batter Israel again?

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Why Biden Wants a War in Israel, by David Greenfield

The other perspective in the Palestinian-Israel conflict, with a h/t to reader Neil Dunn. From David Greenfield at frontpagemag.com:

Terrorists have only one thing to offer. It’s right there in the name.

The business model of terrorism is killing people and then demanding a payoff. The game always works the same way. The terrorists attack, their targets fight back, and a third party sends in the diplomats to negotiate on behalf of the terrorists before they get hit too hard.

The Islamic terrorist war against Israel has worked exactly this way for generations.

Like a radio pop song that plays every time you go into a supermarket, you know the next verse and can feel the next beat before it even kicks in no matter how much you hate the music.

It’s the same way with the regular mini wars that begin with a manufactured political provocation that can be blamed on Israel, (this time a court ruling evicting illegal Muslim colonists occupying homes that were seized during the ‘48 ethnic cleansing of Jews from Jerusalem), followed by terrorist violence with the usual pattern of attack and escalation.

Hamas and a few of its allies shell Israeli towns and cities using the latest Iranian technology and some of their own cruder models. Israel responds by calculatedly taking out terrorist compounds which Hamas has, with equal calculation, filled with civilian human shields.

Especially children.

Politicians, the media, and social media (three distinctions without a difference) rush to attack Israel, vastly inflating the already inflated casualty figures put out by the terrorists, lying about the nature of the conflict, and doing their best to mainstream antisemitism a little more.

The Biden administration makes a few public statements vaguely supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, an absurd point, and sends in mediators to negotiate the payoff for the terrorists.

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Israel To Buy Weapons From America With Money Given To Them By America To Shoot Down Iranian Rockets Paid For By America

From The Babylon Bee:

JERUSALEM—Biden has approved a $735 million weapons sale to Israel. Israel will be paying for the weapons using money from foreign aid given to them by America. According to experts, Israel needs these weapons so they can shoot down Hamas rockets that were given to them by Iran, who paid for them using money given to them by America.

“Yeah, it’s all pretty straightforward,” said one Middle East expert. “Not confusing in the least.”

According to sources, Iran bought weapons technology with $1.8 billion in cash given to them by the Obama administration. They then provided those weapons to Hamas terrorists in Gaza in order to kill Jews.

Israel is responding with weapons systems purchased with American foreign aid dollars from the Trump administration.

“Yeah,” said the expert, “the entire conflict is pretty much a proxy war between Democrats and Republicans at this point.”

Some in America have started a petition to bring those dollars back to America so Democrats and Republicans can just shoot rockets at each other here at home.

https://babylonbee.com/news/israel-to-buy-weapons-from-america-with-money-given-to-them-by-america-to-shoot-down-iranian-rockets-paid-for-by-america