When criticism becomes collapse: J Street’s genocide reckoning

Once “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” its president now says the Jewish state may be committing genocide, raising urgent questions about where dissent ends and damage begins.

In the wake of Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 massacre and the war that followed, most of the American Jewish community stood where they always have—on the side of Israel’s right to self-defense. But a vocal minority chose another path: undermining Israel at one of its darkest hours.

 

Kibbutz Be'eri in southern Israel, Dec. 19, 2023.
Photo by Moshe Shai/Flash90.

Organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and increasingly, even J Street, have not merely criticized Israeli policy. They’ve crossed a moral line—providing rhetorical ammunition to Israel’s enemies, weakening U.S. support and sowing confusion in the American Jewish community.

 Their rhetoric may be cloaked in humanitarian language, but their actions—and now their slander—raise an urgent question: Have these groups done harm to Israel during wartime?

 Start with JVP. This group responded to Hamas’s atrocities not with condemnation but with justification. Within days, JVP blamed Israeli “apartheid” and “occupation” for the slaughter of 1,200 men, women and children in southern Israeli communities. They demanded an end to U.S. military aid, accused Israel of war crimes and staged disruptive protests in congressional offices and on major highways.

 This is not moral clarity—it’s moral inversion.

 IfNotNow, a group that claims to represent young progressive Jews, joined the ceasefire chorus almost immediately, even before Israel had buried its dead or begun rescuing the 251 people taken hostage and dragged into Gaza. In August 2025, its activists led protests outside Trump Hotel and Columbus Circle in Manhattan, demanding that Washington halt arms shipments to Israel.

 One wonders if they would have protested U.S. arms to Britain in 1941.

 But perhaps the most troubling shift has come from J Street, long the self-described “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobby. Until recently, many in the Jewish community believed that while J Street could be sharply critical of Israeli policy, it still operated from a place of concern for Israel’s survival. That illusion collapsed this week.

 In a shocking turn, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami announced that he now believes Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza. In a Tisha B’Av newsletter, he wrote:

 “I have … been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.”

 He went further: “Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide. … I simply won’t defend the indefensible.”

 And as if anticipating the backlash, he added: “How can it be that Israel—the state founded by a people who experienced genocide—could itself be committing this most heinous of crimes?”

 Ben-Ami’s words are not merely irresponsible. They are inflammatory. Genocide is the most serious accusation one can level against a nation. It is not a policy critique; it is an allegation of premeditated, systematic mass murder. And to make that claim while Israel fights an enemy that openly calls for its annihilation is a betrayal of both truth and decency.

 This is not a fringe activist speaking. This is the head of a Washington lobby with access to lawmakers and influence in the halls of power. When Jeremy Ben-Ami accuses Israel of genocide, it sends a signal to the media, to Congress and to Israel’s enemies: The Jewish consensus is cracking.

 These groups insist that they are acting in defense of Jewish values. But their words and actions have made Israel’s job harder, not easier. They have given cover to anti-Israel resolutions, weakened bipartisan support and contributed to a global narrative that blames Israel for a war it did not start and never wanted.

 When Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran see Jewish groups denouncing Israel in terms indistinguishable from their own propaganda, they see weakness—and opportunity. These terror regimes aren’t interested in nuance. They are interested in victory. And when J Street speaks of genocide, they hear: “Keep going. The Jews are turning on each other.”

 Let’s be clear: Israel does not demand silence. Israelis themselves debate every aspect of this war. But there is a line between loyal criticism and disloyal defamation. These groups—and now, J Street, most shamefully—have crossed it.

 They do not represent most American Jews. Polling shows that a clear majority support Israel’s war against Hamas and understand that Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization, not a national liberation movement. Most American Jews understand that this is not a war of choice. It is a war of survival.

 We can debate strategy. We can question policy. But accusing Israel of genocide—while under rocket fire, while grieving its dead, while rescuing hostages—is not righteous. It’s reckless. And it’s very, very wrong.

 At moments like this, solidarity matters. So does truth. And the truth is this: When Jewish leaders like Jeremy Ben-Ami repeat the slanders of Israel’s enemies, they don’t defend peace. They damage the one Jewish state we have.

 That’s not dissent. That’s betrayal.

Stephen M. Flatow

This column originally appeared on JNS.ORG.  You can read it and others by me here.

 

 

American Jews, this is your war, too

Hamas doesn’t care whether you support Netanyahu or not. When Jews are murdered for being Jews, unity must come before politics.

Let’s be honest: Benjamin Netanyahu is not everyone’s favorite politician. That’s fair. Debate over policy, leadership and politics is healthy in any democracy, including Israel’s. But there comes a point in times of war when internal disagreements must be set aside.

Because this war is not about Bibi. It is about Israel’s survival. And the Jewish people, especially American Jews, must not let personality distract from principle.

Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.

Since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has faced a military, moral and psychological assault of unprecedented complexity. Hamas’s slaughter of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of 250, including children, the elderly and entire families, was not just a “battle.” It was a pogrom, fueled by genocidal ideology and celebrated openly by its perpetrators. Yet today, Israel is the one on trial in the court of public opinion, not the murderers who triggered the war.

Hamas doesn’t care whether you support Netanyahu or not. When Jews are murdered for being Jews, unity must come before politics.

 

What Israel faces in Gaza is not a conventional war or even a typical counterterrorism campaign. It is asymmetric warfare against a terrorist organization that intentionally uses its own civilians as tools of war. Hamas stores weapons in schools, digs tunnels under hospitals and launches rockets from densely populated neighborhoods. It steals food aid from the population. This is not incidental; it is strategy.

 

Hamas leaders have made this explicit. In 2008, Fathi Hammad, then Hamas’s interior minister, declared:  “For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry. … This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly and the mujahideen.”

 

What sane person would say that?

 

That’s not rhetoric; it’s policy. Hamas relies on images of dead civilians, especially children, to inflame world opinion and pressure Israel into submission. Tragically, too many in the West, including some Jewish voices, fall for this manipulative theater. They call for ceasefires, condemn Israeli “disproportionality” and wring their hands at the humanitarian crisis, while ignoring how Hamas engineers that crisis.

 

But put this in perspective. During the U.S.-led assault on ISIS in Mosul from 2016 to 2017, between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians were estimated to have died, according to The New York Times. That battle, fought by Western militaries with advanced precision weaponry, still resulted in tens of thousands of casualties. No one accused the United States of genocide. No one proposed sanctions.

 

Yet Israel, which goes to unprecedented lengths to warn civilians, including dropping leaflets, making phone calls and pausing operations to allow evacuations, is treated like a rogue state.

 

The moral asymmetry here is staggering. Hamas celebrates death. Israel mourns it, even when forced to cause it to protect its own people.

 

And yet, Western diplomats—many from countries that have never faced a single rocket attack—dare to lecture Israel on restraint. The European Union, Canada and even the United States have called for a “ceasefire,” as if peace can be restored by papering over mass murder.

 

Some American Jews have joined that chorus, distancing themselves from Israel out of discomfort with its current government. That’s not just misguided. It’s dangerous.

 

Hamas doesn’t hate Israel because of the policies of Netanyahu and his government. It hates Israel because it exists. Article 13 of the Hamas Charter states: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.”

 

Diplomacy, negotiation, peace-building? “All are a waste of time,” the document says.

 

This is the enemy Israel is fighting. An enemy backed by Iran and Qatar, supplied by global jihad networks and committed—openly, unapologetically—to the eradication of the Jewish state.

 

To our fellow Jews in the Diaspora, especially in America: This war is about you, too. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran don’t care whether you vote Likud or Labor, whether you’re Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or unsure. On Oct. 7, Hamas murdered Thai farm workers and Israeli Bedouin alongside Jews. Their hatred is not nuanced. It is total.

 

And as antisemitism, let’s call it what it is—Jew-hatred—surges on campuses, in public squares, and online, it’s clear that Hamas’s war against Israel is fueling a broader war against Jews everywhere. This is not just a political crisis but a civilizational one.

 

So, what is the role of American Jews?

 

It is to stand with Israel—not conditionally, not reluctantly and not just when it’s easy. It is to reject the moral fog that equates a democratic state defending its citizens with a terrorist group that hides behind children. It is to recognize that you can critique Israeli policy at another time, but right now, we must remain united.

 

To those who are hesitant, ask yourself this: Would you demand moral perfection from any other country under siege? Would you have told Britain in 1940 to cease fire until Winston Churchill stepped down?

 

Israel’s democracy will sort out its leadership in due time. However, today, it needs our solidarity. Our advocacy. Our unapologetic defense in the face of global slander.

 

As the Psalmist wrote: “He who watches over Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.” But Israel still needs us to stay awake—and to stand up.

Stephen M. Flatow

This column originally appeared on JNS.ORG.  You can read it and others by me here.

Bono’s compassion is real—but his Gaza remarks risk moral confusion between democracy and terror. Stephen Flatow responds

Bono’s compassion is real—but his Gaza remarks risk moral confusion

 

Bono, Wikimedia Commons

Bono’s compassion is genuine. But his recent Gaza comments dangerously blur the line between a democracy defending its citizens and a terror group targeting them.

As a bereaved father and terror victims’ advocate, I know that empathy is essential—but not when it comes at the expense of truth.

Read my response in Israel National News to Bono's comments here.

 Stephen M. Flatow

#Israel #Hamas #Bono #MoralClarity #IsraelUnderAttack #HumanRights #StopTerror #MiddleEastTruth #JusticeForVictims 

 Unity is Israel’s most powerful weapon

Its military victories have always depended on something deeper than airpower or intelligence: The unity of its people.

I write in my latest column on JNS.ORG:

The State of Israel has always lived by the principle that its survival depends not only on military might but on the unity of its people. A review of Israel’s modern military history—from the existential wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 to more recent conflicts in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and the 2025 strike on Iran—reveals a clear pattern: when Israeli society stands united, its military achieves clarity and strength; when it is divided, outcomes are murky, costly and inconclusive.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the traumatic aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists launched a surprise attack on Israeli communities near the border with Gaza. In that darkest of moments, the deep divisions that had wracked Israeli society for months over judicial reforms and political polarization were, at least temporarily, set aside. The country responded with a surge of unity not seen in decades.

The answer to the question of Israeli successes on the battlefield comes down to "unity."

If Israelis can re-embrace that unity, then perhaps this war—born of unimaginable loss—can also mark the beginning of national restoration. 

The full column can be read here.

Stephen M. Flatow

 

Israel’s Kindness Repaid with Terror

Israel’s Kindness Repaid with Terror

By Stephen M. Flatow, December 2018

Israel gives the Palestinian Arabs self-rule in large sections of Judea-Samaria, and they use it to promote terrorism.

Israel releases Palestinian terrorists from prison as a gesture, and the newly freed prisoners resume engaging in terrorism.

Israel permits Arab residents of Gaza—enemy territory—special permits so that they can receive medical care in Israeli hospitals or to carry out business transactions in Israel, and they use those privileges to assist terror cells.

Anybody notice a pattern here?

This week’s discovery of a huge Hamas terrorist network in the Palestinian territories is chock full of disturbing lessons.

Let’s start with the very fact that such a network, directed by the Hamas regime in Gaza, has been operating with near impunity throughout the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

The P.A. has one of the largest per-capita security forces in the world. Yet for some reason, they never noticed all these Hamas terrorists running around. It was the Israeli security services, the Shin Bet, which once again had to carry out the anti-terror operations that the P.A. refuses to undertake.

“Hundreds” of members of the terror network were captured, the Israeli news media reported this week. Not 20, not 80, but hundreds! They were planning “to conduct large-scale bombing attacks,” and had been instructed by their commanders to “select crowded sites as targets for the attacks … trains, buses, hotels and restaurants.”

Sites were scouted in order to kill as many Jews as possible. Pittsburgh-style.

The discovery of the network began with the arrest of a Hamas terrorist named Osweis Rajoub from the village of Dura, near Hebron. Dura has been under the complete control of the P.A. since 1995. It also has more than its share of residents who have been involved in terror incidents.

Rajoub spilled the beans to his Shin Bet interrogators. The Shin Bet has been criticized by various left-wing groups over the years for supposedly being too rough when questioning murderers and would-be murderers. I don’t know what tactics they used to get Rajoub to talk, but I’m sure glad they did what had to be done.

Think about how many lives they saved. Think of all the parents who will not be mourning the murder of their children, wives who will not be widows, and all the children who will not be orphans because the Shin Bet interrogators did their job.

As a result of Rajoub talking, “hundreds of young Palestinians, both men and women, who had been recruited by Hamas,” were arrested, according to the news reports. That’s right, women, too. In Palestinian society, women are silenced, abused and treated as second-class citizens in almost every respect—except in the ranks of the terrorists. If they’re willing to murder Jews, Palestinian women can finally enjoy gender equality.

How were messages carried from the Hamas leadership in Gaza to its terrorists in the P.A. areas? In two ways, the Shin Bet discovered: “by Palestinians traveling from the coastal enclave to hospitals in Israel” and by “Gazan businessmen with permits allowing them to travel to the West Bank.”

One of these couriers of death was 53-year-old Na’ama Mikdad, a mother of nine from Gaza “who had been given a travel permit to accompany her sister who had cancer and received medical treatment in Israel.” How nice of Israel to do that. In fact, the Israelis gave her the permit even though they knew she and her sister are the nieces of a Hamas military commander, Muhammad Abu Kuwaik.

How did Mrs. Mikdad repay Israel’s kindness? She traveled to P.A.-controlled Bethlehem, where she met with the terrorist Rajoub and handed him “trousers into which a cloth strip had been sewn on which instructions … had been written.” He had already been passed a phone to be used in planning the attacks.

“With the phone and the instructions on how to use it, Rajoub began working with an explosives expert to create the bombs needed for the attacks,” the Shin Bet revealed. He also recruited two assistants from another P.A.-ruled village, Yatir.

Mrs. Mikdad also brought messages from the Hamas leadership to a terrorist in the P.A. capital city of Ramallah, named Fouad Dar Khalil. He had previously spent 14 years in prison for “taking part in a shooting attack on an Israeli car,” as the Shin Bet put it. Clearly, he was released much too soon. And receiving his freedom evidently did not inspire him to give up his old terrorist ways. On the contrary.

Israel wants to be a nice guy. I get that. But I wonder how long the Palestinians will continue to repay Israel’s niceness with terrorism before it finally becomes obvious that in rough parts of the world like the Middle East, nice guys finish last—or, all too often, don’t finish at all.

This column and others by the author can be read on-line at the Jewish Press

Riots in Gaza - What if the Israelis didn’t shoot?

A scenario that is not quite out of the possible - if Western critics had their way- my JNS column:

What if the Israelis didn’t shoot?

It’s been a month now since the Israeli government made its controversial decision to stop shooting back at the Palestinian mobs surging toward the Gaza fence. Let’s see how things turned out.

Palestinian protesters during clashes with Israeli
forces along the border with the Gaza
strip east of Gaza City on May 11, 2018.
Credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90

At first, of course, Israel’s leaders insisted that they had a right to defend the border. But eventually, international pressure got to be too much. All those editorials in The New York Times accusing Israel of brutality. The constant hectoring by the hosts of cable TV’s “Morning Joe” and “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” The condemnations by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The U.N. resolutions.

Then American Jews jumped on the bandwagon. At first, it was just the predictable groups—Jewish Voice for Peace and J Street denounced Israel. That’s what they do. But then, Rabbi Rick Jacobs started squirming when the pundits on his favorite MSNBC talk show began criticizing Israel, and soon his Union for Reform Judaism was proclaiming how “alarmed, concerned and profoundly saddened” it was about the deaths of all those Gaza rioters. Not much alarm, concern or sadness about the border kibbutzim being devastated as flaming kites set their crops ablaze. But never mind all that.

The Anti-Defamation League, increasingly resembling the Obama administration for which its national director once worked, chimed in with “concern” of its own. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations dithered, unable to reach a consensus on what position to take. Right-of-center groups issued their usually verbose, over-the-top press releases that nobody took seriously. No wonder the Israelis felt so alone. They really were.

So Israel announced that its soldiers would cease firing and expressed the hope that the Gaza mobs would reciprocate. Unfortunately, the word “reciprocity” is not in the vocabulary of the Palestinian Arabs. As soon as the Israelis stopped shooting, the mobs rushed forward.

Not just the few thousand who happened to be at the border that day. Word immediately spread that the Zionist enemy had collapsed, and soon there were tens of thousands of Gazans streaming towards the border fence. Then hundreds of thousands.

The young men with knives and steel bars were followed by waves of women armed with empty bags. Older Israelis remembered scenes from the 1948 war, when an Arab military force was about to overrun some Israeli town, and neighboring Arab women would rush to the scene with their empty bags, anxious to loot the Jews’ property.

What happened next wasn’t exactly a surprise. After all, on May 14, Washington Post reporters Loveday Morris and Hazem Balousha had asked the would-be border-crashers about their intentions. Here’s what they reported:

“ ‘We are excited to storm and get inside,’ said 23-year-old Mohammed Mansoura. When asked what he would do inside Israel, he said, ‘Whatever is possible, to kill, throw stones’ . . . Two other young men carried large knives and said they wanted to kill Jews on the other side of the fence.”

Mansoura was true to his word. As the Israeli soldiers retreated, Mansoura led a mob of hundreds across the border fence and through the fields of nearby Kibbutz Mefalsim. The kibbutz security men were hopelessly outnumbered. Mansoura and his comrades smashed their way into the communal kitchen, helped themselves to dozens of knives and then invaded the homes of the kibbutzniks. What happened next is too gruesome to recount here.

In the old days, the kibbutzim were American Jewry’s pride and joy. More than a few J Streeters had spent a summer on a kibbutz, picking olives and fantasizing about how a more socialist, egalitarian Israel might gain favor in the eyes of Western intellectuals. Alas, now the kibbutzim in southern Israel just got in the way. Why did they have to build them so close to the Gaza border anyway? the Jewish peaceniks wondered with dismay.

Those two “young men with large knives” who told The Washington Postthat “they wanted to kill Jews” kept their word, too. So did hundreds, and then thousands, of other Gazans. For Israel’s leaders, the choice was between headlines about dead Palestinians or retreating. They ordered the army to continue its retreat. Border towns such as Sderot and Netivot were overrun. The slaughter was horrific.

Finally, at Ashkelon, the army dug in. Tel Aviv, after all, was just 36 miles away. The left-wing Israeli intellectuals who bitterly protested when the army was shooting rioters at the Gaza border changed their tune as the Palestinian mobs got within striking distance of the cafes on Dizengoff Street.

There was a brief lull in the violence as the Palestinians filled Molotov cocktail bottles with gasoline, and the Israelis positioned thousands of sandbags along Ashkelon’s perimeter. Surely, now the world would see that the Palestinians were the aggressors, Israel’s beleaguered leaders thought. Surely, now Thomas Friedman and the United Nations would stop criticizing Israel, they thought.

But as the firebomb-throwers surged forward again and the Israeli army shot back, it all started again. Headlines about the number of dead Palestinian “protesters.” Liberal Jewish leaders expressing “sadness” over the “clashes.” Pundits calling for Israel to stop using “disproportionate force.” Ex-State Department officials pontificating about the need for Israel to “compromise.”

And that’s what it would look like, a month after the Israelis stopped shooting at the Gaza attackers.

This column and others can be read on line at

JNS.ORG

The Trump administration just doesn’t get Gaza

My JNS.ORG column-

The Trump administration just doesn’t get Gaza

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-trump-administration-just-doesnt-get-gaza/

The Trump administration’s conference on the situation in the Gaza Strip this week “focused on the need for the Palestinian Authority to take control over Gaza,” a White House official told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. If that report is accurate, it means that the United States still doesn’t understand the basic problem in Gaza—or how to solve it.

The idea that Hamas is the “bad guy” and the Palestinian Authority is the “good guy” is a fallacy that began with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, and is still the mindset of too many people in Washington.

The attempts to distinguish between the “moderate” P.A. and the “extremist” Hamas always foundered on the reality that the P.A. regards Hamas as its brother, not its enemy. Brothers may quarrel from time to time—they may get into a scuffle now and then, or even try to kill each other—but they remain brothers.

The P.A. leadership promised, as part of Oslo, to disband all terrorist groups, seize their weapons and outlaw them—in short, to put them out of business. But here we are, 25 years later, and Hamas still has active terrorist cells throughout the P.A.-controlled parts of Judea and Samaria.

There’s no doubt that the P.A. has the means to eliminate Hamas in the territories; it has one of the largest per-capita security forces in the world. Yet it has never even outlawed Hamas. It has never made a real effort to capture its members or confiscate its weapons. It has not extradited a single Hamas terrorist to Israel, even though the Oslo agreement obligates it to do so.

Even The New York Times, a longtime cheerleader for the P.A., has occasionally conceded that Hamas and other terrorists roam free in P.A.-run cities. On March 23, 2014, the Times reported that Israeli troops were forced to enter the Jenin refugee camp in pursuit of terrorists because although Jenin is under the “full control” of the Palestinian Authority, “the Palestinian [security forces] did not generally operate in refugee camps.”

When the P.A.’s newspapers, television and radio glorify terrorists as “martyrs” and “heroes,” they don’t talk about only Fatah terrorists. They glorify Hamas murderers, too.

When the P.A. pays salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists, they don’t give out the payments only to Fatah members. They pay Hamas murderers and their families, too.

So there’s no reason for surprise that the P.A. boycotted this week’s conference on Gaza in Washington. No matter how hard the State Department crowd wishes it, the P.A. is not going to fight Hamas for control of Gaza. In fact, it’s not going to fight Hamas at all.

The solution to Gaza’s various ills is not to pump more international money into the region. That has been tried for decades, and it hasn’t worked. The solution is regime change. But a change from Hamas to the P.A. —even if it were possible and even if the P.A. were amenable to that— would not represent genuine change. It would mean replacing one corrupt, violent Palestinian dictatorship with another corrupt, violent Palestinian dictatorship.

Not every group of people with a grievance deserves, or is ready for, self-rule. Some have too little experience with the culture of democracy to establish and run a free society; the last thing the world needs is more dictatorships. Some are too violent to live in peace with their neighbors; that is the danger Israel faces.

For years, advocates of Palestinian statehood urged Israel to grant self-rule to the Arabs in Gaza. They claimed that if the Gazans were allowed to rule themselves, they would become peaceful neighbors since surely they wouldn’t want to risk losing their self-rule. It would be an experiment to see if giving them a fully sovereign state could succeed. Yitzhak Rabin took that risk (my family paid a high price for it) and then Ariel Sharon decided to take that risk.

The tens of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza at Israel over the years have demonstrated that the experiment was an abject failure. Gaza proves that the Palestinian Arabs are not yet ready for self-rule. Neither conferences in Washington nor handouts from the international community will change that.

News from Gaza reveals Palestinian values

Three news stories came out of Gaza this past week, and at first glance, they might appear to be unconnected. But taken together, they reveal important truths about Israel and the dangerous neighborhood around it.

The first news item, courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch, concerns a prominent Muslim religious authority in Gaza encouraging men to beat their wives.

Hassan al-Laham, a leading mufti in Gaza, declared that when Muslim men find their wives to be troublesome, they should first "warn them politely." But if the problem continues, then “Allah created a solution for this…hitting—hitting that does not make her ugly.” The mufti continued: “The Prophet [Muhammad] said: ‘Do not hit the face and do not make her ugly,'” he continued. “In other words, not hitting that will bring the police and break her hand and cause bleeding, or hitting that makes the face ugly. No….The hitting is not meant to disfigure, harm, or degrade. The hitting will be like a joke. He will hit her jokingly.”

It should be noted that Mufti al-Laham's endorsement of wife-beating was broadcast on some obscure Hamas or Islamic Jihad television station, but on official Palestinian Authority TV (on February 8, 2016).

The second news item from Gaza, reported by the Associated Press on February 16, concerns the United Nations' Mideast envoy, Nikolay Mladenov. While touring Gaza, Mladenov complained that "only a third of funds pledged by international donors" after the 2014 Gaza war has actually been received.

The third piece of Gaza news comes from the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, General Gadi Eizenkot. He held a press conference to reveal that Hamas is actively building new tunnels from Gaza to Israel, in order to stage kidnappings and other terrorist attacks. He said that Hamas' tunnel-digging is so extensive and dangerous that the Israeli army has re-enforced to "concentrate considerable engineering and intelligence efforts to combat this threat."

What do wife-beating, international stinginess, and new tunnel-digging have to do with each other? Everything.

After the last Gaza war ended, the Obama administration pressured Israel to permit Hamas to import construction materials for "humanitarian purposes." Various countries pledged large amounts money to "build homes." And pundits assured us that homes and jobs and foreign aid would encourage the emergence of a peaceful, modern, civilized society in Gaza.

It all turned out to be a lie. And of course Israel is left to deal with the real-life consequences of what everyone demanded.

Most of the countries that made pledges have not delivered. They talked big about the "suffering" of Gaza, but they don't really care. They just wanted to make Israel look bad--calculating, correctly, that their complaints would get lots of publicity and their failure to pay up would get little or no publicity.

As for the "humanitarian aid" that has reached Gaza, part of it has been used for building terror tunnels, not homes--exactly as Israel warned. Yet that has not resulted in the Obama administration reducing its annual aid package to Gaza.

And the wife-beating? A horrifying reminder that Palestinian society--whether the portion run by Hamas, or the portion run by the Palestinian Authority, which broadcast the mufti's sermon--continues to embrace values that are vastly different from those of the civilized world.

Homes and jobs and international donations will not make a whit of difference until Palestinian culture enters the modern world. Until then, Palestinian violence --against women, against political dissidents, and most of all against Israel-- will continue to be a way of life. No peace process or international peace conference or Israeli concessions will change that cruel reality.

 

This column first appeared on Israel National News.

Rockets from Gaza due to lack of salaries? I think not

Just when you think someone would properly hold Hamas accountable for its rocket fire into Israel along comes Nathan Thrall in The New York Times who blames the war on Israel because Hamas has not been able to pay salaries.

He writes,

AS Hamas fires rockets at Israeli cities and Israel follows up its extensive airstrikes with a ground operation in the Gaza Strip, the most immediate cause of this latest war has been ignored: Israel and much of the international community placed a prohibitive set of obstacles in the way of the Palestinian “national consensus” government that was formed in early June.

And what is one of those obstacles?

Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and Gaza residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one…

This, my friends, is just another instance of the West’s patronizing of Palestinian terrorists.  In other words, the Palestinians cannot help but be violent when a crisis (of their own doing) erupts.

I was able to have a letter in response to this column printed in The Times.

It reads

Re “How the West Chose War in Gaza” (Op-Ed, July 18): I disagree with Nathan Thrall that the absence of pay to civil servants is the reason for war in Gaza. War has broken out because Hamas does not recognize the right of Israel to exist. A look at the Hamas charter and listening to the spoken words of Hamas leadership would convince all but the most jaundiced of that.

Hamas made a choice when it took over Gaza. Instead of building an economy and housing for Gazans by using the many tons of concrete and other building materials that were allowed into Gaza, it used them to build tunnels to smuggle weaponry from Egypt and to cross under the border of Israel for future attacks against its citizens, as demonstrated this week.

It’s not the West’s failure that brought about war, but Hamas’s refusal to live peaceably side by side with Israel.

STEPHEN M. FLATOW

The above link will bring you to the full column.  My letter can be found on line here.   

 

Well, that’s what I think.

A reasonable suggestion to counter missiles and rockets

OK, OK, it's not a serious suggestion, but it does demonstrate the frustration felt by the many Israelis living within rocket and mortar range of the terrorists in Gaza.

Glick on jpost.com, “The trap that Arik built”

Carolyn Glick on Israel, Hamas and Gaza, “The trap that Arik built” from jpost.com.  Israelis and their supporters do not have a lot to draw comfort from.

The cease-fire agreement that Israel accepted Wednesday night to end the current round of Palestinian rocket and missile attacks is not a good deal for Israel by any stretch of the imagination.

Supporters of Israel will not take comfort from the quiet from Gaza. Why?

At best, Israel and Hamas are placed on the same moral plane. The cease-fire erases the distinction between Israel, a peace-seeking liberal democracy that wants simply to defend its citizens, and Hamas, a genocidal jihadist terrorist outfit that seeks the eradication of the Jewish people and the destruction of Israel.

At worst, the cease-fire places Israel beneath Hamas. The first two clauses require both sides to end hostilities. The third suggests Israel is expected to make further concessions to Hamas after the firing stops.

Over the weekend, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood held what the media claimed was a stormy meeting. Its members were split over what to do about Israel. Half wanted to go to war with Israel immediately. The other half called for waiting until the Egyptian military is prepared for war. In the end, the voices calling for patient preparation for war won the day.

And for their patience, the Muslim Brothers received the plaudits of the US government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her boss President Barack Obama were effusive in their praise of the Egyptian government, and joined Egypt in placing Israel on the same moral plane as a terrorist group.

Moreover, Obama and Clinton compelled Israel to accept wording in the cease-fire that arguably makes Egypt the arbiter of Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the agreement.
 

So what's left for Israelis to do?  Toss out the old and bring in a new group of politicians?

The full article is below.

November 25, 2012 Sunday 11 Kislev 5773 8:40 IST

By CAROLINE B. GLICK

Column One: The trap that Arik built

22/11/2012

The millions of Israelis who opposed the withdrawal from Gaza do not seek personal vindication for being right.

The cease-fire agreement that Israel accepted Wednesday night to end the current round of Palestinian rocket and missile attacks is not a good deal for Israel by any stretch of the imagination.

At best, Israel and Hamas are placed on the same moral plane. The cease-fire erases the distinction between Israel, a peace-seeking liberal democracy that wants simply to defend its citizens, and Hamas, a genocidal jihadist terrorist outfit that seeks the eradication of the Jewish people and the destruction of Israel.

Under international law, Israel is not just within its rights to defend itself from Hamas. It is required to. International law requires all states to treat Hamas terrorists as criminals and deny them safe haven and financing. But the cease-fire agreement requires both the Israeli policeman and the Hamas criminal to hold their fire.

At worst, the cease-fire places Israel beneath Hamas. The first two clauses require both sides to end hostilities. The third suggests Israel is expected to make further concessions to Hamas after the firing stops.

Then there is the cease-fire’s elevation of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government to the role of responsible adult. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian President Muhamad Morsi openly supports Hamas. Morsi sent his Prime Minister Hesham Kandil to Gaza to personally express the Egyptian government’s support for Hamas’s criminal assault against Israeli civilians.

Over the weekend, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood held what the media claimed was a stormy meeting. Its members were split over what to do about Israel. Half wanted to go to war with Israel immediately. The other half called for waiting until the Egyptian military is prepared for war. In the end, the voices calling for patient preparation for war won the day.

And for their patience, the Muslim Brothers received the plaudits of the US government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her boss President Barack Obama were effusive in their praise of the Egyptian government, and joined Egypt in placing Israel on the same moral plane as a terrorist group.

Moreover, Obama and Clinton compelled Israel to accept wording in the cease-fire that arguably makes Egypt the arbiter of Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the agreement.

Aside from the administration’s de facto support for the Hamas regime in Gaza, it is hard to think of a greater humiliation than Israel being forced to submit complaints to its sworn enemy about the actions of the sworn enemy’s terrorist client.

And yet, for all of that, it isn’t clear that Israel had a better option than to sign on the dotted line. Israel might have gotten better results if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had ordered the ground forces poised at the border to take out a few Hamas ground installations. It certainly would make sense for Israel to end Gaza’s electricity supply.

But as it stands today, a full-blown ground invasion in the mold of the 2002 Defensive Shield Operation, where Israel seized control of Judea and Samaria from Palestinian terror groups and reasserted its security control over the Palestinian areas, so ending the Palestinian terror onslaught against Jerusalem and central Israel, was not in the cards.

Israel is in a strategic trap. And it is one of its own making. Starting with the Rabin-Peres government’s decision to embrace the PLO terrorist organization as a peace partner in 1993, Israel has been in strategic retreat. Each incremental retreat by Israel has empowered its worst enemies both militarily and diplomatically and weakened the Jewish state militarily and diplomatically.

In May 2000, following years of political agitation by the radical Left, then-premier Ehud Barak ordered the IDF to retreat from Israel’s security zone in south Lebanon. Hezbollah immediately seized control over the border area. Within months it kidnapped and killed three IDF soldiers and held them for ransom – hiding the fact that they had been murdered. The same Barak-led government that withdrew the IDF from south Lebanon was loath to acknowledge the failure of its policy and so did nothing when the three soldiers were kidnapped.

Within six years, Hezbollah was strong enough to launch an all-out missile war against Israel.

Facing them was the government that had just carried out the withdrawal from Gaza. The governing strategy of Ariel Sharon’s heirs, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, was based on surrendering land and demonizing as warmongers those who opposed surrendering land. When Hezbollah attacked Israel in July 2006, Olmert and Livni were in no position to order a serious ground invasion of Lebanon. And since that was the only way to win the war, Israel lost the war, paving the way for Hezbollah’s subsequent takeover of the Lebanese government.

As for that withdrawal from Gaza, just like the phony peace process with the PLO and the strategically demented withdrawal from south Lebanon, the withdrawal from Gaza was a self-evidently insane policy. It was obvious that it would lead to the strengthening of Palestinian terrorist groups and so put Israel’s population centers in striking range of their missiles.

After both the Oslo process and the withdrawal from Lebanon left Israel strategically and diplomatically weakened, with its politicians, generals and its very existence brought before international tribunals and targeted by diplomatic pogroms, there was no basis for the empty claim that by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel would gain international legitimacy to defend itself.

By leaving Gaza, Israel was saying – as it had in Lebanon – that it had no right to be there. And if it had no right to be there, it had no right to return.

To force this mad initiative through, Sharon had to explicitly disavow the platform he was elected to implement. Sharon won the 2003 elections by pledging never to surrender Gaza.

After he betrayed his voters, Sharon demonized and, when possible, fired everyone in positions of power and influence who opposed him.

He called a referendum of Likud members to vote on his plan, and when his opponents won the vote overwhelmingly, he ignored it. He fired Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, then IDF chief of General Staff. He fired his cabinet ministers. He castigated as “rebels” his party members who opposed his plan.

Moreover, with the active collusion of the legal system, Sharon violently repressed his political opponents. Young girls were thrown into jail without trial for months for participating in anti-withdrawal demonstrations. Privately chartered buses en route to lawful demonstrations were interdicted by police and prevented from traveling.

Protest organizers were arrested in their homes at 3 a.m. And with the active collusion of the media, all debate on the merits of the withdrawal plan was stifled.

As bad as it was in Israel, the situation in the US was arguably even more devastating. Since Oslo, Israeli opponents of the Left’s strategic insanity were intellectually and politically buoyed by their conservative counterparts in America.

The latter helped legitimize political opposition and enabled the conceptualization and maintenance of alternative policies as viable options.

Despite government repression, some 45 percent of Israel’s Jewish population actively participated in anti-withdrawal protests. In the US, virtually no one supported them. The absence of opposition owed to the fact that in America withdrawal opponents were boycotted, demonized and blacklisted by the American Jewish community and the previously supportive conservative media.

During the years of the fake peace process, conservative US Jewish groups and conservative publications led by Commentary, The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal forcefully opposed it. But when Sharon joined the radical Left by adopting its plan to withdraw from Gaza, these formidable outlets and institutions enthusiastically followed him.

Leading voices like former Jerusalem Post editor and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Bret Stephens, Commentary editors Norman Podhoretz and Neil Kozodoy, commentator Charles Krauthammer and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol not only lined up to support the dangerous planned withdrawal. They barred all voices of opposition from the pages of their publications.

To greater and lesser degrees, their shunning of voices that warned against the Gaza withdrawal continues to this day.

So, too, with the exception of the Zionist Organization of America, every major American Jewish organization supported the withdrawal.

Like the editors of Commentary, the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, they barred voices of opposition from speaking to their groups.

All commentators who warned of the strategic calamity that would befall Israel in the aftermath of a withdrawal from Gaza were marginalized and demonized as extremists.

In a notable gesture, this week, Stephens along with Commentary’s Max Boot, acknowledged their error in supporting the withdrawal from Gaza. Their recantations are noteworthy because most of their colleagues who joined them in pushing Israel down the garden path and cheered Sharon’s “democracy” as 8,500 Israelis were thrown out of their homes and off their land in order to free it up for a terrorist takeover, continue to deny that they were wrong to do so.

But Stephens’s and Boot’s belated intellectual integrity on Gaza is not enough to make a difference for Israel today.

Israel has only two options for dealing with the ever-escalating threat from Gaza. It can try to coexist with Hamas. This option is doomed to failure since Hamas seeks the annihilation of the Jewish people and the eradication of Israel. Recognizing this state of affairs, in a public opinion survey taken on Wednesday for Channel 2, 88% of Israelis said that a cease-fire with Hamas will either not hold at all or hold for only a short time.

74% of Israelis opposed accepting a cease-fire.

The other choice is to destroy Hamas. To accomplish this Israel will need to invade Gaza and remain in place. It will have to kill or imprison thousands of terrorists, send thousands more packing for Sinai, and then spend years patrolling the streets of Gaza and arresting terrorists just as it does today in Judea and Samaria.

Whereas the first option is impossible, the latter option is not currently viable. It isn’t viable because not enough people making the argument have the opportunity to publish their thoughts in leading publications. Most of those who might have the courage to voice this view fear that if they do, they will be denied an audience, or discredited as warmongers or extremists.

So they remain silent or impotently say that Israel shouldn’t agree to a cease-fire without mentioning what Israel’s other option is.

The millions of Israelis who opposed the withdrawal from Gaza do not seek personal vindication for being right. They didn’t warn against the withdrawal to advance their careers or make their lives easier. Indeed, their careers were uniformly harmed.

They did it because they were patriots. They felt it was their duty to warn their countrymen of the danger, hoping to avert the disaster we now face. They should be listened to now. And their voices should be empowered by those who shunned them, because only by listening to them will we develop the arguments and the legitimacy to do what needs to be done and stop fighting to lose, again and again and again.

caroline@carolineglick.com

All rights reserved © 1995 - 2012 The Jerusalem Post.

Israel, Hamas and Gaza

So, we ask, just how did this latest conflict between Israel and Hamas begin?  Well, Israeli citizens have been the target of hundreds of missiles, rockets and mortars launched from within Gaza over the past months and that the government whose job it is to protect its citizens had to act.  Unless you are virulently anti-Israel, you will understand that Israel had no other choice but to respond as it is.

You can think otherwise, but I'd like to know your logic.

Corrie family loses in Israeli court

An Israeli court has ruled that the state of Israel was not responsible for the accidental death of Rachel Corrie in a 2003 bulldozer accident.  Corrie was crushed by the bulldozer as she stood in its path in a misguided attempt to protect homes slated for demolition by the Israeli army since they were used to hide smuggling tunnels bringing weapons into the Gaza Strip from Egypt.

I'm not going to comment on Rachel Corrie other than to say that she was no innocent Alice in Wonderland.  Her face tells the story in this photo of her burning a mock American flag just a few days before her death on behalf of people who were using her as a pawn in a deadly game.  They are the same people who send their youngest men and women to kill Jews in suicide attacks.

The saddest part of her story is that Corrie's family continues to fail to see that they have been used by Jew-haters for almost 10 years in their efforts to destroy Israel and, ultimately, the Jewish people.

You can read a story about the trial and verdict here.