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Accusing Israel of Immorality Is Despicable
Israeli soldiers drape their country’s flag over an IDF tank near the border with Gaza. Photo: Reuters/Ronen Zvulun
JNS.org – In a speech given on the cusp of Israel’s creation in January 1948, future Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “There can be peace in Palestine in five minutes. It depends entirely upon the attackers. The minute the attackers stop, there will be peace in Palestine. But as long as they go on, there will have to be war and we will have to fight back. And there is absolute faith on behalf of the entire community. We have no doubt whatsoever as to the results of this struggle.”
In the same speech, Meir spoke about the Israeli willingness to sacrifice in war: “I would not say, because it would not be true to say, that we do not mind that our young people are killed. We do. I read that an Arab in London made a statement that the Arab community has this advantage over the Jewish community: They do not take it to heart so much when Arabs are killed; we can stand it less than the Arabs.”
“I want to say this,” she said. “In one way it is true, every young man or woman that is killed in Palestine hurts; the death of each one of them hurts very much. We are still a small community and it is as though we were one family. We personally know each one that is killed and it hurts a lot. But it seems to me that just because it hurts so much, just because life is so dear to us, we are prepared to go to the very limit and to die if necessary.”
“Life that is not worth much if it is taken away does not matter,” she asserted. “Life is very dear to us, and the life of each youngster is very dear to us. Yet the spirit in the Yishuv is that we know that many more lives will be lost and we are prepared for it.”
Meir’s speech could be given today and it would be just as relevant as it was then.
Over the past month, American leaders like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Senator Chuck Schumer have made comments that have raised the ire of many Israelis and their supporters.
Schumer said, “What horrifies so many Jews especially is our sense that Israel is falling short of upholding these distinctly Jewish values that we hold so dear. We must be better than our enemies, lest we become them.”
These comments were echoed by Blinken: “Israel is not Hamas. Israel is a democracy. Democracies place the highest value on human life, every human life. … It’s what distinguishes us from terrorists like Hamas. If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront. Right now, there is no higher priority in Gaza than protecting civilians, surging humanitarian assistance, and ensuring the security of those who provide it. Israel must meet this moment.”
At another point, Blinken said, “Israelis were dehumanized in the most horrific way on Oct. 7. The hostages have been dehumanized every day since. But that cannot be a license to dehumanize others.”
Their words are infuriating because they are completely inapplicable to Israel’s conduct. West Point’s urban warfare expert John Spencer explained in Newsweek, “No military in modern history has faced over 30,000 urban defenders in more than seven cities using human shields and hiding in hundreds of miles of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites while holding hundreds of hostages. The sole reason for civilian deaths in Gaza is Hamas. For Israel’s part, it’s taken more care to prevent them than any other army in human history.’”
Rabbi David Ingber, the founder of the New York Jewish congregation Romemu, expressed the anger many Israelis felt at Blinken and Schumer’s words. In a speech entitled “I Love Israel” Rabbi Ingber said, “Anyone who has ever spent a minute with an Israeli soldier or spent a minute in Israel knows how absurd that hypocritical statement is from Senator Chuck Schumer. Anyone who spent five minutes discussing with a general or anyone else in Israel what it is that they are contending with at this moment. … Anyone who knows that for five minutes can feel how insulting it is, how condescending it is to people who live in Israel [and] who send their children to the army. I have friends and family in Israel. Are their children genocidal maniacs? The young Israeli soldiers stationed on the Gaza border are not a part of a state-sponsored terrorist organization called the IDF. They are heroic soldiers in an army whose purpose is to protect the inhabitants of Israel from enemies whose sworn purpose is to cause Israelis harm.”
The day after Oct. 7, Israel could have carpet-bombed Gaza in a truly indiscriminate fashion. It could have killed hundreds of thousands of Gazans from the air. The war would have been called the “Three Day War” and not one Israeli soldier would have been called up and not one Israeli soldier would have died.
Instead, Israel called up hundreds of thousands of soldiers to put their lives at risk, not to make Israel safer—the Air Force could have achieved that mission—but rather to minimize Palestinian deaths. Israel has lost hundreds of soldiers in order to fight an ethical war. For anyone in America to then claim that Israel is not upholding Jewish values or risks becoming indistinguishable from Hamas and dehumanizing others is shameful and despicable.
The post Accusing Israel of Immorality Is Despicable first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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