DEBKA

Battered by Hamas’ escalating rocket and mortar assaults, Israelis are again tossed on the uncertain waters of an imminent ceasefire which never materializes. This illusion is propagated again by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi. Washington has also been enlisted to the effort by drafting a resolution for the UN Security Council. It was tabled at the request of the White House with quiet backing from Netanyahu for the purpose of blocking the European measure, which is backed by Qatar, one of the Hamas’ few supporters and host to its political leader Khaled Meshaal.

Why is President Barack Obama standing behind Egypt and Israel this time?

His reasoning is complicated. Netanyahu and El-Sisi, who speak regularly and discreetly by phone, have been persuaded by their intelligence services that Meshaal is an impediment – not just to a temporary ceasefire, but to any sort of accommodation for ending the Gaza conflict. They are convinced that all the Palestinian factions, including Hamas-Gaza, would go for an end to the war, in the hope of a Gaza deal leading to a settlement between Israel and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
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Luis Fleischman, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY starts this article by listing many of the anti-Israel positions of Latin America.  They are extreme, plentiful and unmistakeable.

During the recent “Operation Protecting Edge” held by Israel in response to attacks by Hamas against Israeli civilians, most Latin American countries took a prejudiced and intentionally political attitude against the State of Israel.

[..]

Why would Latin American countries move to join condemnations of Israel at a time when not even one Arab country was willing to do so? The reason is that it provides them with another ideological tool to ingratiate themselves with third world countries and confront the United States face to face and send the message that the U.S. is no longer “the boss” in the region.

The fact that Brazil joins hands with Venezuela is not new since I already stated it multiple times that Brazil has been and is the most valuable political ally of Venezuela.

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By Ari Yashar, INN

DEBKA

Community leaders of 40,000 dwellers of the dozens of kibbutzim, moshavim and small towns adjoining the Gaza Strip spoke out Monday, Aug 25: “It is no longer possible to hide what is going on and the country must hear the truth,” they said: “The populated front line facing the Gaza Strip is no more.” Some bluntly blamed this fiasco on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and their management of the operation against Hamas.

The collapse of the Israeli line outside Gaza is analogous in strategic terms to the fall of the Bar Lev line 41 years ago which permitted the Egyptian artillery and tank assault across the Suez Canal, some veteran reservists said.

Others pointed out that, whereas the IDF should have carved out a sterile security zone inside the Gaza Strip, Hamas had managed to depopulate a strip of territory on the Israeli side of the border by relentless cross-border short-range rockets and mortar fire, and was now dictating events in southern Israel.
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How did it happen that Washington has such close relations with a country actively and massively sponsoring terror, even after 9/11?

By Jonathan Spyer, THE TOWER

One of the most notable aspects of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is the prominent role being played by the Emirate of Qatar in supporting the terrorist organization, whose genocidal charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel.

Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, the leader of the Emirate of Qatar, is acting as Hamas’ “channel of communication” to the international community. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal is now in the Qatari capital of Doha directing his organization’s war effort in Gaza, where the Qatari royals welcomed him with open arms after his welcome in Damascus came to an abrupt end.  Qatari funds have been crucial to Hamas’ military build-up in recent years, as they were to the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempted takeover of Egypt under Mohammed Morsi. And the Doha-based satellite channel Al-Jazeera is energetically backing Hamas, as it has other terrorist-connected and supporting movements.

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BY ABE KATSMAN, BREITBART

Hamas is in trouble. Eventually, barring some cataclysmic event or full-scale Israeli invasion, one of these serial cease-fires will more or less hold and the 2014 Gaza War will sputter to an end. And, sometime thereafter, Hamas will fall from power.

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[This is an out of the box analysis. You may not agree with everything, but it makes for interesting reading. Ted Belman]

Global chess game for power at multiple levels

By Doug Hagmann  CANADA FREE PRESS

The current threats posed by ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, to world stability in general and to the U.S. specifically are very real and extremely dangerous. However, the origins of the group and hence the threats are not to be believed “as advertised.” We are being subjected to more lies from the White House to Foggy Bottom, along with many elected leaders who know the real story but insist upon pushing a false narrative.

Collectively, they are bringing us to the brink of World War III through Syria, which I have long contended, while simultaneously opening our country to a large scale attack that could equal the September 11, 2001 attacks. Unlike 9/11, however, we know at least part of their strategy.
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[This long article is an attempt to explain what is taking place. Though roughly translated from Russian, I thought it would be of interest as it was written by a Russian- Israeli.]

By Ella Graifer

Yes, I’ve surrendered to this thought’s insistence,

The last word Wisdom ever has to say:

He only earns his Freedom and Existence,                                                

Who’s forced to win them freshly every day.

Childhood, manhood, age’s vigorous years,

Surrounded by dangers, they’ll spend here.

I wish to gaze again on such a land,

Free earth: where a free race, in freedom, stand.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Faust, Part II, Act V (Translation by A. S. Kline © 2003)

Please, I beg you, do not try to console me. Do not tell me that Hamas, they say, has suffered more, or that it is like a victory by points … Because it is clear as noonday that his losses will be quickly restored by compassionate sponsors – from France to Iran inclusive – and we will pay for all these expensive toys out of our pocket. And the number of their corpses, again, is useful for their propaganda, and their women will bring new offsprings and will cheerfully raise them using UN rations. And what is more, the play, as it turned out, is not yet over and threatens to become a new “war of attrition”.
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By Gil Ronen, INN 

Seener – who has provided analysis and expert commentary for a range of international broadcasters and news outlets including the Associated Press, Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Chinese CCTV, Fox News, Sky News,Voice of America, Bloomberg, Reuters and Xinhua – told Arutz Sheva that Israel is pursuing a misguided approach to the war, both on the ground and in the battle of words and images. The result will inevitably a deterioration of Israel’s international standing, as the war wears on.

“In general,” he explained, “modern warfare is not geared towards protracted conflict, and thus Israel should have initially gone in harder. This was prevented by a lack of extensive sound intelligence of tunnels and the whereabouts of Hamas operatives. Israel’s diplomatic standing will decline as Europe does not anymore understand the power of ideologies, let alone a genocidal, zero sum game Islamist and suicidal ideology.”

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His march through Georgia has been gravely misunderstood as has Israel’s strategy in Gaza.
by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

The IDF’s 401st Armored Brigade in action near Gaza. (IDF via Flickr)

William Tecumseh Sherman 150 years ago took Atlanta before heading out on his infamous March to the Sea to make Georgia “howl.” He remains one of the most controversial and misunderstood figures in American military history. Sherman was an attritionist, not an annihilationist — a strategist who believed in attacking the sources that fuel and field an army rather than butting heads against the army itself. To review his career is to shed light on why the Israeli Defense Forces were both effective in Gaza and hated even more for being so effective.
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Channel 2 parliamentary reporter says Israel’s security leadership, including Netanyahu, just doesn’t want to go all the way in Gaza.

Gil Ronen,INN

Amit Segal, Channel 2 television’s Knesset reporter, explained Sunday on Galei Israel Radio that Israel’s leaders want to end Operation Protective Edge as soon as possible, without truly defeating Hamas.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon and IDF Chief of Staff, said Segal, “do not really have a desire to reach a victory. At one point, they wanted deterrence instead of victory, and I’m not sure they want that either. They want to end the operation.”

Segal cites as proof of his theory a speech made by Gantz three weeks ago, in which he encouraged residents of southern Israel to go back to their homes, in anticipation of the success of Cairo ceasefire talks that had just begun. “The summer is hot here. The fall will follow it. The fields will become green, and a ‘red south’ in the positive sense of the word, of anemones and flowers and stability, will be here, and will remain for many years.”
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By Mordechai Ben-Menachem, THE DAILY CALLER

Tell me who your friends are and I know who you are.

Qatar, the world’s terror paymaster, has just been granted one of the largest arms deals in history – eleven billion dollars. They have a population of two million, in total. Who, pray tell, is about to use all this hardware? If they draft every male between the ages of 18 to 30 they still have literally tons of hardware left over. Believe me, they are not about to draft all those males who are too busy having fun. No sane person has any doubt for whom this hardware is meant to serve – and they don’t live anywhere near Qatar, though they sport similar head-coverings. Different colored flags – rather blacker.
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By: Mordechai Ben-Menachem, HUMAN EVENTS
8/22/2014 09:05 AM

The Islamic State is huge, rich and powerful because its ideology drew the most fighters and the most financial support.  It is popular, loved by vast swaths of population.  IS massacres Christians, Yazidis, Assyrians, Chaldeans and others as ideology; but not merely’ ideaology.  It is providing a highly prised service to its fellow travellers, Sunni Arabs.  That is a strong desire of theirs.  As Steve Jobs showed us, a successful company provides it customers with the product they most desire, even if they are not yet aware of that desire.  All murderers are not even necessarily IS ‘troops’.  A surviving Yazidi, Jamal Jamir, told CNN that Arab neighbours gleefully joined in the killing.

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DEBKA

Both sides were preparing Saturday night, Aug. 23, for an impending battle on Gaza Strip soil, DEBKAfile’s military sources report. Heavy IDF ground forces were poised ready to enter the territory for the initial mission of reaching and demolishing the sources of Hamas’s short-range rocket and mortar attacks, which have disrupted the lives of neighboring Israeli communities and forced their mass evacuation.

Hamas has been firing those short-range weapons from 3-7 km inside the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian extremists escalated the barrage in the last 48 hours as a provocation, daring the IDF to send in the forces massed around its borders.
All the signs point to Israeli forces preparing for limited ground strikes in the first stage.
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I don’t accept the argument that it is all about antisemitism, though that certainly plays a part. Countries act to protect their interests. And these interests require countries to side with 1.3 billion Muslims, who control much of the world’s energy, rather than with the 13 million Jews. If the numbers were the other way around, they would kiss up to us. It may be argued that antisemitism is due to our minority status and the fact that both Christianity and Islam were derived from Judaism. Freud notes that children rise up to kill their father. In any event, if we dominated the world in numbers, antisemitism wouldn’t exist.

An argument can be made that it is in their interests to support Israel because Israel is on the front lines in the civilizations war. The world believes that two states based on ’67 borders is a happy compromise because the Islamic countries, they believe, have accepted this solution and Israel as a garrison state has its uses. But I would point out that Islam does not accept Israel on any borders.

Sharansky’s 3 D’s, referred to in this article, are merely tools.Ted Belman

By JANET LEVY, FSM

Israel’s recent defensive war against Hamas and other Islamist factions in Gaza has generated a wave of criticism against Israel, which, in truth, is simply old-fashioned and persistent, anti-Semitism disguised as political argument. A means to determine the difference was actually created more than a decade ago by Israeli political leader

Natan Sharansky, who dubbed his method, the “3D Test.”
A co-founder of the Soviet refusenik movement in the mid-1970s – mostly Soviet Jews denied permission to emigrate to escape the USSR’s institutionalized anti-Semitism – Sharansky was no stranger to anti-Semitic persecution himself. He spent nine years in a Soviet gulag before he was released thanks to the efforts of President Ronald Reagan.
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CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

The partnership that has emerged in this war between Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is a direct consequence of Obama’s abandonment of the US’s traditional allies.

Hamas’s war with Israel is not a stand-alone event. It is happening in the context of the vast changes that are casting asunder old patterns of behavior and strategic understandings as actors in the region begin to reassess the threats they face.

Hamas was once funded by Saudi Arabia and enabled by Egypt. Now the regimes of these countries view it as part of a larger axis of Sunni jihad that threatens not only Israel, but them.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and its state sponsors Qatar and Turkey, are the key members of this alliance structure. Without their support Hamas would have gone down with the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt last summer. As it stands, all view Hamas’s war with Israel as a means of reinstating the Brotherhood to power in that country.
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By Melanie Phillips, JPOST

Unfortunately, because the media, intellectuals and fashionable personalities who dominate the culture overwhelmingly inhabit one or more of these sealed rooms, public discourse about Israel is shaped almost entirely by lies, distortion and malice. As a result, many people simply don’t know that virtually everything they hear or read about Israel is maliciously twisted – because they encounter no evidence to the contrary.

Israel’s strategy should be to re-frame the narrative of the Mid East conflict, delegitimize the delegitimizers, whether these be the media, the UN or Israel’s supposed allies abroad.

The tsunami of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred that has all but engulfed European countries has not only left Diaspora communities uneasy and frightened but has shocked and bewildered Israelis and decent folk (yes, there are still some left) in Britain and the West.

It seems that Israel has utterly lost the war for hearts and minds. So could it be doing any better than it has done? The answer is undoubtedly yes.
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By Marin Sherman, JPOST

It is possible Operation Protective Edge could have been conducted with greater ineptitude. But it is not easy to see how.

Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy.  – Henry Kissinger

He who becomes compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate. – Midrash Rabba, Ecclesiastes 7:16

A cease-fire is no solution to ending a war. Unconditional surrender seems to always work. – John D. Stoller, Jerusalem Post talk-backer

Yes, I know. The title of this column will ruffle many feathers, especially while the cannons are still roaring.
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By Joseph Farah, WND

Israel’s military response to thousands of rocket attacks from Gaza and infiltrations by terrorists through a maze of Hamas-built tunnels has, somewhat predictably, prompted its enemies and many others around the world to demand the Jewish state stop building what they call “settlements” in areas on the West Bank of the Jordan River, or, more accurately, Judea and Samaria.

As a former Middle East correspondent and an Arab-American, let me explain why Israel must never allow pressure from its enemies or foreigners to deter the building of “settlements” or consider ceding any more land to Palestinian Arab control.

Israel dismantled similar “settlements” in Gaza in exchange for promises of peace. But “settlements” is a loaded word. What the world calls “settlements” are Jewish communities built on historically Jewish land – territory desperately needed by Israel to protect itself from the kind of attacks being perpetrated by Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. In fact, some 9,000 Jews were forcibly removed from Gaza by the Israeli military in 2005.
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This is a beautifully written speech. In it Yair Lapid identifies two lessons namely the need to fight vigorously to defend ourselves and the need to remain moral. Unfortunately he doesn’t make the point that the first is more important than the latter. Sometimes we don’t have the luxury to be moral. In the name of morality we have no right to sacrifice our own soldiers to save the lives of our enemy. And yes they are the enemy. This is a war between us and them and not between the IDF and Hamas. This is not to say that we should be gratuitously cruel. We shouldn’t but we should do what is necessary to achieve victory with the least casualties on our side and secondarily the least on their side. But war is war and in all wars civilians are killed. So be it. Ted Belman

The following is the text of a speech delivered by Yair Lapid Wednesday, August 20, 2014 at Platform 17, Holocaust Memorial Site, Berlin.

The Holocaust causes us all to ask of ourselves the same question: What would I have done?

What would I have done if I was a Jew in Berlin in 1933, when Hitler rose to power? Would I have run? Would I have sold my house, my business? Removed my children from school in the middle of the year? Or would I have said to myself: it will pass, it is just momentary madness, Hitler says all these things because he is a politician seeking election. Yes, he’s anti-Semitic, but who isn’t? We’ve been through worse than this. It’s better to wait, to keep my head down. It will pass.

What would I do if I was a German in Berlin on the 18th October 1941, when the first train left this platform, heading East and on it 1,013 Jews – children, women, the elderly — all destined for death.
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