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How Hamas Uses Words and Manipulation as Weapons
I spent the first two weeks of the Hamas war in Jerusalem, with life punctuated by screaming air-raid sirens and the blessed booms of Iron Dome interceptions. Since then, back in Washington, D.C., I wish we had an Iron Dome device to shoot down the bad ideas and bogus phrases that play a crucial role in Hamas’ strategy to generate hatred of Israel, spark Arab and Muslim uprisings, derail Saudi Arabia’s normalization policy, and, ultimately, kill all of Hamas’s enemies (a category of which the Israelis are only a part). Let’s try to intercept a few of them.
Hamas knows it cannot defeat the Israeli army, so it fights an asymmetric war. It kills Israeli civilians and cruelly hides among Palestinian civilians so that Israelis, in defending themselves, get blamed for unintentionally killing those unfortunate civilians. The war aim is not military. It is to influence public opinion around the world. The internet is a key front. News stories, ideas, memes, and words are essential.
When American journalists fall for Hamas tricks, it is hard to tell if they are gulls or confederates. The Wall Street Journal now points out that Hamas runs the Ministry of Health in Gaza. The New York Times now explains that the ministry is “part of the Hamas government.” But The Washington Post continues to cite that ministry for casualty information, at times without acknowledging that it is an arm of Hamas. Do Post reporters really think that a group that organizes mass rapes and the knifing of babies is credible in reporting about its enemies?
The war against Israel involves bizarre contortions of political terminology. Consider the terms “moderate” and “extremist.” The Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs almost all the Arab residents of the West Bank and is reputed to be moderate, is backing Hamas in this war. The PA president denounces Israel for “aggression,” and the PA prime minister accuses Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. Having said America is “with Israel,” President Biden cannot be happy that these “moderates” are accusing him of supporting aggression and genocide. His enraged denunciations of the October 7 massacre suggest that it changed his views of Hamas. He now seems aware that the Palestinian extremists are even more extreme than he had previously understood. Perhaps he will see also that the Palestinian “moderates” are far less moderate than he understood.
In every speech, President Biden pleads for a “two-state solution,” implying that Israel could achieve that goal if it wanted to. But what keeps such a peace out of reach are the extremism, hatred, and unwillingness to compromise of Palestinian leaders in the PA as well as Hamas. All of this should be easier to discern now than before October 7 — and it all warns against giving the PA control over Gaza after Hamas is destroyed. The Palestinians need new leaders altogether. Otherwise, there cannot be peace.
Similar word games are played with the term “refugee.” Take Gaza’s Jabaliya “refugee camp.” The astute Bret Baier of Fox News wondered aloud why it is called a refugee camp, as it is full of permanent structures. Good question. The answer is that the United Nations defines “refugee” differently for Palestinian Arabs than for anyone else. There is one UN refugee office for Palestinians (UNRWA) and one for the rest of the world (UNHCR). Displaced people who are not Palestinian Arabs are refugees only until they find a place to live for an extended time, which is usually within a year or two, maybe three.
According to UNRWA, however, Palestinian Arabs from Israeli-controlled land remain refugees for their whole lives, and their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on also qualify as refugees. By that definition, Tel Aviv is a refugee camp. New York too, for that matter. And London and Paris.
One of the most potent verbal missiles fired at Israel by its enemies is the accusation that it is “colonialist.” This is an especially gross case of the fraudulent manipulating the stupid.
Colonialists staked claims on behalf of their imperialist motherlands. Think of the British in India or the French in their African colonies. After Zionists began urging a “return” to Zion in the late 19th century, the typical Jew who came to build a Jewish-majority state arrived as a refugee, with little to no money. He staked no claim for the country he came from, and thought of that country as anti-Jewish and oppressive — by no means his motherland. He saw Palestine, which he called the Land of Israel, as his motherland. Jews are indigenous there. Arabs also think of themselves as indigenous, though it was relatively recently (in A.D. 7th century) that they colonized Palestine on behalf of the Arab Empire founded by the Prophet Muhammed. Since then, whenever Arabs or Muslims controlled Palestine, the land was a colonial province of a non-Palestinian empire based in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, or Istanbul. Who, then, are the colonialists?
And now, Israel is being pressed to make “humanitarian pauses” to ensure that food and other supplies make it into Gaza. Is there another case in the annals of the human race when a country at war was duty-bound to sustain a population under enemy control before the enemy surrendered? Wars have often been decided by which side most effectively cuts supplies to the other side. That was how the Allies won the First World War. Remarkably, when Germany surrendered unconditionally in 1918, there was not a single Allied soldier on German soil. The Allies won not by taking Germany over, but by preventing supplies from getting in. If a foreign diplomat had told British leaders that they had a humanitarian duty to feed the Germans before they surrendered, he would have been dismissed as clueless, if not crazy. Even so, Israel is allowing massive quantities of humanitarian aid into Gaza, though there seems to be wall-to-wall opposition in Israel to any kind of cease-fire, even one that is labeled a “pause.”
The promoters of pauses also commonly express fear that Islamophobia is surging in the West. The warning is better received if it comes from principled opponents of bigotry. But Hamas supporters denounce anti-Muslim bigotry while championing obliteration of the Jews. In any event, is there anything that generates hostility toward Islam and Muslims more than committing mass rape, burning live people, and butchering babies, at the hands of people who proclaim that they are acting in the name of Islam? Nothing will help the fight against Islamophobia more than the destruction of Hamas.
Let’s end on a hopeful note. People naturally wonder what will come after this round of war ends. The nothing-gets-accomplished-by-violence school argues that, no matter how many Hamas members Israel kills, other Palestinians will replace them, and in any event, Hamas’ ideas can’t be killed. But that’s not necessarily true.
Hitler’s defeat effectively ended Nazism in Germany (at least it has for nearly 80 years). Likewise, when the Tokyo military regime was destroyed, its extremist ideology went with it. And though Marxism-Leninism is still alive in China, the USSR’s demise buried that ideology in Russia and the other former Soviet states. Ideas, as a practical political matter, can actually be killed and buried, perhaps never to be resurrected. Another example, closer to home: The American South’s pro-slavery ideology died with the Confederacy and never came back. Ideological movements tend not to regenerate after they spawn wars in which they are devastatingly defeated. This is an optimistic thought for Gaza.
As Israel defeats Hamas — despite the terrorists’ rockets, jihadist ideology, and dishonest propaganda — Gazans have an opportunity to rise up and create a better government, not run by murderous ideological extremists. “Free Palestine” could be reinterpreted to mean that the Arabs there should be freed from the corrupt tyranny of their own bad leadership. Palestinian leaders actually interested in improving the life of their people would treat Israel as a partner, not an enemy.
Douglas J. Feith, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and as under secretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration. This article was originally published at National Review.
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On Explosive Northern Front, Hezbollah Lurks; IDF Conducts Precise Defense
UN peacekeepers (UNIFIL) patrol in the village of Khiam, near the border with Israel, in southern Lebanon, July 12, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Aziz Taher
JNS.org – As Israel prepares for the strong possibility of a resumption of war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli Defense Forces is also currently in a heightened state of alert and preparedness along the border with Lebanon, responding to the continuous threats posed by Hezbollah.
Since Oct. 7, the IDF has deployed significant military resources, including artillery, tanks and engineering corps, along the Lebanese border, striking Hezbollah anti-tank missile squads and other terrorists whenever they are detected, either after an attack or preparing for one.
This low-intensity conflict when compared to Gaza has resulted in some 90 casualties for Hezbollah and nine Israeli casualties—six military personnel and three civilians.
Several Israeli homes and military bases have sustained heavy damage from Hezbollah strikes since Oct. 7, and tens of thousands of Israeli residents from areas near the border with Lebanon remain evacuated, displaced from their homes by the threat of the Radwan Hezbollah elite terrorist unit.
In response, the IDF has employed a defensive-responsive posture aimed at protecting Israeli territory from Hezbollah’s aggression but not escalating the situation into a full-scale war front at this time.
Its approach is characterized by a reactive rather than proactive stance. Operations are tailored to respond to specific threats and attacks from Hezbollah, avoiding initiating aggression. This goal remains to protect civilian lives and property, as well as to make sure that Hezbollah cannot surprise the north as Hamas did the south. Still, the decision of any expanded war efforts in Lebanon remains up to the war cabinet.
Hezbollah’s tactics, meanwhile, involve embedding its operations within Lebanese civilian areas; using southern Shi’ite villages as bases of attack; firing anti-tank missiles at Israeli northern homes and military positions; and continuing to pose a serious and persistent threat.
The question of whether the Radwan unit, which has murder and kidnap squads much like Hamas’s Nukhba unit, could breach the Israeli border and conduct attacks has no clear answer at this time, although the IDF is present at the border in large numbers and has proven effective at detecting Radwan unit movements in real-time.
Hezbollah’s terror tactics not only endanger Lebanese civilians but are designed to complicate the IDF’s response—a familiar use of human shielding that Hamas employs as well in Gaza.
In this explosive situation, the IDF currently exercises restraint in its counterstrikes, relying on precise intelligence to target terrorist threats while minimizing civilian casualties and collateral damage.
UNIFIL ineffective in curbing provocation
The role of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in challenging Hezbollah’s flagrant violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which bans Hezbollah from operating in Southern Lebanon, is nonexistent.
Worse yet, Hezbollah has been actively using UNIFIL as human shields, launching attacks on Israel in some cases from tens of meters from UNIFIL positions.
UNIFIL’s ineffectiveness in curbing Hezbollah’s activities is self-evident, highlighting the limitations of international peacekeeping forces in such scenarios.
Despite this, the IDF continues to remain in contact with UNIFIL and has been transmitting its concern over Hezbollah’s destabilizing activities with no tangible results.
So far, Israel’s policy on the Lebanon border is a delicate balance between essential defense and cautious restraint. But it remains unclear how long this can continue since northern residents will not return to a persistent Hezbollah threat to their lives in the new, post-Oct. 7 reality, and the IDF cannot remain fully deployed in the north indefinitely.
The result is a paradox that appears to suggest difficult decisions in the future by the Israeli war cabinet if the north is to be sustainable and its residents granted a new sense of security.
The post On Explosive Northern Front, Hezbollah Lurks; IDF Conducts Precise Defense first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Determination of Israel’s Reservists
IDF soldiers are seen at rest stop near the border with Gaza. Photo: Reuters/Jim Hollander
JNS.org – Who is the Israel soldier? They can be of any age and profession. It may have been a long time since they held a weapon. Many of them are at Tze’elim, one of the IDF’s largest bases, just across the border from Gaza on yellow sand.
When I meet them, they are waiting, as the brief ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was still holding. A short time later, Hamas broke the truce, attacked Israel with rockets, and the fighting began again.
These soldiers are older and more emotional than you would imagine. Their intentions are clear: “Never Again.” The Oct. 7 massacre will never be permitted to reoccur. Israel must be freed from the nightmare of Hamas.
In Tze’elim, rows of barracks and numerous disorderly tents house thousands of soldiers of all kinds. We meet with a group of them from Brigade 252. They are soldiers from the miluim—the reserves. They have completed their three-year military service—or two years, if they are women—but they all keep their “miluim bag” under the bed. If the phone rings, as happened on Oct. 7, they rush to the front, whether they are in Tel Aviv or traveling in Japan, whether they are left-wing or right-wing, professors or taxi drivers. They tear themselves away from the operating room and the shop, the lawyer’s office and the bus they drive.
Commander A. is thin, with gray hair and a kind smile. He is religious. On the morning of Oct. 7, he was in synagogue without a telephone. Someone told him “something never seen before is happening.” A. rushed to his collection point in the south and has yet to return home.
On Oct. 7, the reserves were immediately thrown into the battle to retake the kibbutzim that had been attacked and massacred by Hamas terrorists. They hunted down the Hamas men who remained and collected the wounded and dead Israelis in the fields and on the roads. A. closes his eyes. He has seen hell.
The 252 was then sent into the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, home to 50,000 inhabitants who serve as human shields for what is essentially a massive rocket launching pad. The reservists were trained in a mock-up of a Gaza city. They practiced how to enter, shoot, exit, climb, attack and go through tunnels full of TNT. They trained against ambushes, snipers and RPGs.
A. says that, when they went into Beit Hanoun itself, “We had to quickly learn a lesson: Beit Hanoun’s ambush is in his heart, not its outer circles. The terrorists let you enter easily. There’s a row of houses, two or three more, and that’s where Hamas is waiting for you—where you don’t expect it, in civilian structures.”
A. explains, “If we decide to destroy a structure and there are civilians inside, we warn the civilian population. … There are precise rules for evaluating whether we have to act, whether it’s essential because if we don’t act, the lives of soldiers or Israeli civilians are in danger. We try to stop Hamas’s continuous use of human shields by moving the civilians out completely.”
A. is happy to say, “Of civilians killed in Ben Hanoun, the number is zero.”
Israeli soldiers, however, were killed. Maj. Moshe, a 50-year-old engineer who works in high-tech, explained, “An army generally advances on a territory that, once occupied, is the starting point of your next step. But here, through the tunnels under the ground, suddenly you find the enemy shooting at you from behind.”
Thus, great efforts were made to locate the tunnels. “With the use of sophisticated instruments, and also sometimes suffering unexpected explosions given that Hamas’s specialty is to mine everything with large quantities of explosives, we quickly understood that the tunnels were a very sophisticated network, not holes of various sizes dug here and there, but an enormous spider web that converged on the urban center.”
“The structures used by Hamas, which they protected with human shields, included a mosque, a school, a hospital, a public swimming pool, civilian homes, children’s rooms, even their beds. There were weapons everywhere,” he says.
As a result of the truce, Moshe states, some of the evacuated civilians have begun to return. “We can block them,” he says, “but not attack them or approach them. There is a truce.”
Nonetheless, I point out, three soldiers were wounded two days ago in an attack. “True,” Moshe replies, “and we returned fire. If we are in danger we respond.” He notes that some of the returnees are Hamas terrorists, “but we are in a truce, we act according to the rules of defense.”
“We have two ways of being at war: offensive and defensive,” he continues. “The offensive is much easier: You face the enemy. You can move. Defense is unnerving, even dangerous, especially when there are civilians around.”
However, he says, there is much to do, even during a truce. “For example, we had completely dismantled the explosive systems inside a building, and then we realized that everything had been mined again.”
Hamas, he says, is “easier to deal with than endure while you can’t move. So, we wait for orders. The mission is to destroy Hamas and bring the kidnapped people home. That and nothing else.”
Now that the soldiers are back at war, the humanitarian issue is certainly important to them; not because of what the Biden administration tells them, but because that is what an Israeli soldier is.
First and foremost, however, they are Jews who know exactly what was done to their people on Oct. 7 and will continue their war of justice and survival. One of them tells me, “Yes, I feel when we fight, feel it physically, that our kidnapped citizens are not far away, and I fight for them too with all my heart. This is the most just war of all time.”
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The Moral Bankruptcy of IfNotNow
IfNotNow supporters at a rally in New York City. Photo: IfNotNow via Facebook.
JNS.org – A few days ago, I attended a webinar entitled “Jews for Ceasefire,” presented by the young Jewish anti-Zionists of IfNotNow. It was hosted by an earnest young woman named Gen (IfNotNow activists often don’t use their surnames), who began by reaffirming what the group calls its main goal: to “end American support for Israeli apartheid.” She went on to emphasize that all the positions taken by IfNotNow are “deeply grounded in Jewish tradition.” To prove the point, she called on Rabbi Monica Gomery, who led a prayer and enthusiastically praised the group’s work.
Next up was Noa, a young woman who said, “I’m going to root us in the moment.” “The moment,” however, did not include Hamas’s Oct. 7 genocidal attack on Israeli civilians. Noa said nothing whatsoever about it. Instead, she presented a litany of alleged Israeli abuses inflicted on Palestinians. Her omission appeared to be deliberate, as it helped portray the IDF’s defensive military operations in Gaza as an unprovoked act of aggression.
Following Noa, there was a testimonial from a young man named Boaz. He made what appeared to him to be a confession that his grandfather helped perpetrate the “nakba.” What he meant was that his grandfather was a soldier in Israel’s War of Independence. For Boaz, his father’s participation in Israel’s successful effort to prevent a second Holocaust was a source of shame, not pride. As he explained, he was trying to work through his guilt. A poster behind him bore the slogan, “Palestine will be free,” a popular euphemism for that second Holocaust.
After Boaz’s self-flagellation came the highlight of the webinar—an appearance by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Tlaib has been an ally of IfNotNow for some time. In fact, the group’s leadership began collaborating with Tlaib before she was elected to Congress. During her presentation, Tlaib referred to them as her “siblings.”
Sporting a t-shirt that said, “Justice from Detroit to Gaza”—a slogan that falsely connects Israel to police brutality controversies in the U.S.—Tlaib declared that Congress must demand a ceasefire in Israel’s war against Hamas and “stop funding war crimes.” Like her IfNotNow supporters, Tlaib conveniently made no mention of the Oct. 7 attack or the hostages held by Hamas.
It apparently did not bother the leaders of IfNotNow that the House of Representatives had just censured Tlaib for her genocidal call to free “Palestine from the river to the sea.” Indeed, IfNotNow leaders repeat the same call in their training sessions. That training also endorses the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to economically strangle Israel, as well as the so-called “right of return,” which aims to demographically eliminate the Jewish state.
It seems that IfNotNow leaders are unperturbed that Tlaib has characterized Hamas’s rampage of crimes against humanity as justified “resistance” to an “apartheid state.” These Jews, it appears, are perfectly happy to align themselves with someone who supports murdering large numbers of Jews. They are also unbothered by the fact that Tlaib posted a video on social media that says, “Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people”—a genocide that is not happening. One of IfNotNow’s campaigns calling for a ceasefire is entitled, “No Genocide in Our Name.” Having erased Hamas’s genocidal attack, IfNotNow appears to have fabricated one.
In addition, IfNotNow has officially endorsed Tlaib’s statement, “You cannot claim to hold progressive values yet back Israel’s apartheid government.” To them and other young Jews who clasp hands with Tlaib and her compatriots, condemnation of Israel is the sine qua non of being a progressive, and a policy of racist exclusion must be imposed on any Jew who doesn’t get with the program. IfNotNow looks to Tlaib to lead the way, even though, like antisemites throughout history, she is happy to exploit them and eventually discard them once they have outlived their usefulness.
Most tellingly, IfNotNow has been unfazed by Tlaib’s open antisemitism, such as her claim that American supporters of Israel “forgot what country they represent,” clearly invoking the “dual loyalty” libel. She has also engaged in antisemitic conspiracy theories, talking about the “people behind the curtain” who are exploiting victims “from Gaza to Detroit.”
Worst of all, Tlaib is the only member of Congress to call for an end to the Jewish state. It should not be surprising that IfNotNow is fine with that, as they proudly state that they take no position on Israel’s right to exist.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has perfectly and accurately described such people as “Hamas’s useful idiots.”
The origins of IfNotNow’s ideology are obvious. Like Tlaib and many other “social justice” ideologues, IfNotNow divides people into two groups: Oppressors and the oppressed. Depending on your racial or ethnic identity, you by definition belong to one or the other. There are no gradations, no nuance and only one permissible narrative. Thus, decades of genocidal Arab violence go unmentioned, including the Oct. 7 massacre. There is only Israeli oppression and Palestinian “resistance.”
It would be a mistake to believe that IfNotNow is an inconsequential outlier. They have nine chapters across the United States and an office on K Street in Washington, D.C. The webinar I attended had more than 1,600 attendees.
They also have powerful friends and an enormous amount of money. According to NGO Monitor, IfNotNow has received grants from the wealthy Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Tides Foundation, the New Israel Fund’s Progressive Jewish Fund and the Foundation for Middle East Peace.
All that, plus support from a member of Congress. It seems that racism, hate and support for genocide pay off.
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