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Israel Must Carry Out Its Mission, and Ignore Biden and Sullivan
An armored personnel carrier (APC) maneuvers near the Israel-Gaza border, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Israel, March 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan thinks Israel is making a major error.
“A major ground operation [in Rafah by Israel against Hamas] would be a mistake,” he said at a White press briefing on March 18. “It would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepen the anarchy in Gaza, and isolate Israel internationally. More importantly, the key goals Israel wants to achieve in Rafah can be done by other means.”
According to Sullivan, President Joe Biden reassured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “I am for the defeat of Hamas… At the same time, I believe that to get to that, you need a strategy that works. And that strategy should not involve a major military operation…”
Sullivan’s war aims for Israel appear to be preventing Palestinian civilian deaths, feeding people, restoring government functions, and protecting Israel’s international political standing. Both he and the president seem to think they know better than Israel how to achieve them.
Instead, the team that brought you the deadly, disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan should recalibrate.
After the horrific attack by Hamas on Israel — maiming, raping, burning alive, and otherwise killing 1,200 people and dragging 240 others, including corpses and babies, into Gaza — the Israeli cabinet issued a set of war aims to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). They are:
toppling the Hamas regime and destroying its military and governmental capabilities,
removing the terrorist threat from the Gaza Strip,
creating conditions for the return of the hostages,
defending the borders of the state and its citizens while removing the security threat from Gaza,
leaving the IDF full freedom of action without restrictions on the use of force.
The Israeli government’s aims are military, they are achievable, and success would ensure the security of the citizens of Israel as well as rescuing the Palestinian people from the brutality of a Hamas occupation designed to kill them.
Sullivan and President Biden should stand firmly behind those aims.
In 2021, Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy, gave an interview to inFOCUS Quarterly magazine of the Jewish Policy Center. He defined Hamas’ strategy of locating its military under the civilian population — in order to ensure as many Palestinian casualties as possible in the event of a future war — as “ironic and perverse.”
“No party to a war has ever… as an element of its strategy, purposefully arranged to maximize civilian deaths on its own side,” said Feith. “… So, Hamas is doing something that is really innovative, morally horrific and… even worse than the war crime of using civilians as human shields.”
“The purpose of using human shields in war is to protect what the human shields are shielding,” he said. “… But what Hamas is doing is purposefully maximizing Palestinian civilian casualties. It wants to force Israel to have to kill Palestinian civilians…”
On the other hand, there is Israel.
Professor John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, served for 25 years as an infantry soldier. In January, he wrote, “Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war… Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Spencer pointed to mechanisms for minimizing civilian casualties, including providing warning and evacuating urban areas. “This tactic is unpopular for obvious reasons: It alerts the enemy defender and provides them the military advantage to prepare for the attack.”
He noted that the IDF air-dropped more than half-a-million flyers, made nearly 20,000 real phone calls, and sent 64,000 text messages and almost 6 million pre-recorded phone calls to civilians in Gaza — along with radio and social media messages with instructions for evacuation. “The IDF also conducted daily four-hour pauses over multiple consecutive days of the war to allow civilians to leave active combat areas,” he wrote.
This week, Spencer updated his thoughts. “Calls for a ceasefire are simply calls for Israel to surrender and let October 7 happen repeatedly. If the U.S. was in such a situation, it would respond more aggressively. Hamas exceeds ISIS in its desire to slaughter civilians. They’re unique in wanting many of their own people to die. Despite this, the fighter: civilian casualty ratio is 1:1 in Gaza vs a 1:9 global average – the lowest rate by far for similar urban conflicts.”
The IDF, Spencer concludes, “Is successfully achieving its goal of neutralizing Hamas in a uniquely difficult urban environment, with an enemy determined to increase civilian tragedies.”
Military victory first.
The author is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center. A version of this article was previously published by The Daily Caller.
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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.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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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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