The rift is all about the U.S. State Department’s desire to reassert control.

David Wurmser | JNS | May 9, 2024

The chattering class in Israel is struggling to understand American behavior. They ask: How did the United States go from supporting Israel in the first days of the war with Hamas in Gaza to essentially shielding the terror organization? The Israeli right asks: What happened to the Americans? The left asks: What has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu done to destroy U.S.-Israel relations?

I believe I have some insight into this. I held a senior policy position at the U.S. State Department for several years. Afterwards, I was a senior advisor to the vice president from 2001 to 2007 and then to the Trump administration’s National Security Advisor John Bolton. I also served a decade in the Pentagon as a senior intelligence officer. I have learned a great deal about the mentality of these bureaucracies.

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Ironically, Biden’s decision has freed Israel’s leadership of some of their reluctance to counter American dictates. Oh, and its also helping Trump’s campaign.

By DOUGLAS ALTABEF, JPOST MAY 15, 2024

In his never-ending attempt to cultivate the “Where would they go anyway?” Arab vote in Michigan and other possible swing states, US President Joe Biden has opened a Pandora’s box that he is likely to regret.

I suggest that he has just succeeded in creating for himself a “four-bag error,” one with potentially decisive significance, by refusing to arm Israel with kits to be used for providing greater precision for missiles and shells in attacking Gaza.

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Peloni:  Fatah is Hamas.  They are both genocidal terrorists whose rule must be ended, their organizations must be eliminated, and their leadership must be executed.  This should be the only role offered to them and their like in pursuit of peace.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the military arm of Fatah led by Mahmoud Abbas, confirms that its fighters participated in the brutal attack on Gaza surrounding villages and IDF bases on October 7th and kidnapped ‘many Zionists.’

Dalit Halevi | INN | May 14, 2024

Kibbutz Be’eriTomer Neuberg/Flash90

Abu Muhammad, the official spokesman for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the military arm of the Fatah movement led by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), confirms in an official statement that the organization’s fighters participated in the October 7th attack on Gaza surrounding villages and IDF bases.

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Nan Jacques Zilberdik  | Palestinian Media Watch | May 13, 2024

Mahmoud Abbas: “The independence of the State of Israel…is a big lie… there is no independence”

PA TV preacher [last week]: It is our “duty to fight” Israel “Palestine will return free, from its [Mediterranean] Sea to its [Jordan] River”

PA doesn’t recognize Israel in any borders – countless maps denyIsrael’s existence

“Map of Palestine” includes Israeli cities “Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, Lod, and Ramle” and is “drawn in Martyrs’ blood”- Fatah official

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The Oct. 7 attacks pumped badly needed economic and political capital into a failed state

by Judith Miller | Tablet  |   May 14, 2024

Last fall, Egypt was on the brink of economic collapse. A decade of debt-fueled spending on a pharaonic-scale had emptied its Central Bank coffers. By February, Cairo’s public debt was 89% of its gross domestic product. External debt had soared to 46% of GDP. The pound, its currency, was one of the world’s worst performing. Unable to import supplies and repatriate profits, foreign companies were leaving, or threatening to leave Egypt in droves. Annual inflation was over 35%, and double that for some food staples. Egypt seemed on the verge of a sovereign default—its first ever.

Then came Oct. 7.

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T. Belman. Biden’s concern that the bombs shouldn’t be used in crowded areas just at a time when UN cuts by more than half the number of women, children ‘identified’ as killed in Gaza and Israel is in the process of evacuationg all civilieans from Rafah.

The obvious question is, what did Israel have to agree to in return?

First major deal since president said he would stymie sales of offensive weapons includes ammunition for tanks, mortar rounds and tactical vehicles

By AP  Today, 5:04 am

Backdropped by smoke rising to the sky after an explosion in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli tank stands near the Israel-Gaza border as seen from southern Israel, Monday, May 13, 2024. (AP/Leo Correa)

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has told key lawmakers it is sending a new package of more than $1 billion in arms and ammunition to Israel, three congressional aides said Tuesday.

It’s the first arms shipment to Israel to be announced by the administration since it put another arms transfer — consisting of 3,500 high-payload bombs — on hold earlier in the month. The administration has said it paused that earlier transfer to keep Israel from using the bombs in its growing offensive in the crowded southern Gaza city of Rafah.

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Douglas Murray dedicated his Hamilton Award to the people of Israel for their national response to the October 7th massacre.

INN | May 14, 2024

British author Douglas Murray was honoured with the Hamilton Award recently, and in his speech mentioned the October 7th massacre and the resultant Swords of Iron War.

“On the 8th of October I went down to Times Square, and there were these men and women waving signs celebrating the massacre of the previous day. They weren’t calling for a two-state solution,” he said.

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It is time to tell Rich Uncle Joe and Chuck the Schumer to take their money and stuff it. They can go take weapons and stuff it. They just gave us the excuse to flatten Rafah.

By Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer

Have you ever personally been in a position in which you always relied on someone else’s financial support so that you could realize your goals and dreams? Like a father or mother or rich uncle. Or, let’s say, like a miserable dictatorial tyrannical father-in-law? (Just saying . . .)

And did that support sometimes come with strings? Strings that not only tied your hands but curtailed your dreams? (Just saying . . .)

>Have you ever reached a moment in your life where you decided “Either I spend the rest of my life toeing to his every command, and later look back ruefully on my deathbed wishing I could go back in time and live the life I had wanted to live — or I tell him right now to stuff his money, and I will be liberated to return to living the life I was meant to live, to pursue my dreams? (Just saying . . . )
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By Andrea Widburg, AMERICAN THINKER    14 May 2024

In two separate appearances, Tom Cotton has delivered clear, insightful, and completely accurate statements about Israel’s right to defend herself and about Joe Biden’s disastrous policies vis-à-vis Israel and Hamas in the ongoing war between the two. If you’ve been struggling for a way to articulate your feelings about what Biden’s doing in the Middle East, Cotton has you covered.

One of the problems with intellectuals is that, if they lack a moral compass, they can delude themselves into believing that completely unethical things or people are, in fact, good ideas. This is how Peter Singer, the current Emeritus Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, could be a vegetarian extremist in order to protect animals while simultaneously arguing that parents should have up to a month after a child is born to abort “defective” babies. Being credentialed doesn’t mean being either wise or good.

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By Seth Mandel, COMMENTARY    13 May 2024

The United Nations has announced that the Gaza casualty figures it has been using are bogus and it is adjusting its figures downward.

“The revisions are taken … you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,” UN spokesman Farhan Haq said at a press briefing in response to a question from JNS. “We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross check them. As we cross check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”

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Seeking the Breakup of Ukraine’s Army

By Stephen Bryen, WEAPONS AND STRATEGY    13 May 2024

Yuriy Halushkin

There is a large Russian operation going on in Ukraine focused on the Kharkov area.  At the same time, the Russians are also attacking elsewhere, primarily in Donbas but also in Zaphorize.  The threat in the north has compelled Ukraine to pull troops deployed elsewhere, including Chasiv Yar, to try and hold the line in the Kharkov area.

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“These are difficult times, but we have to hold our heads up high,” says Ezequiel Pachter, who immigrated to Israel from Argentina in 2022 with the aim of joining the IDF.

By Josh Hasten, JNS    14 May 2024

Israeli soldiers during Gaza ground operations, March 19, 2024. Credit: IDF.

On Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day), Israelis celebrate the bravery and heroism of those who fought in the 1948 War of Independence to ensure the survival of the fledgling Jewish state.

In the wake of Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel, the country now has many more heroes to celebrate. Included in that group are immigrant “lone soldiers” (soldiers without family in Israel) who were forced to fight for the country’s survival very nearly “fresh off the boat,” just as their predecessors did 76 years ago.

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The only genocide in the Israel-Palestinian war is the one Hamas and Iran seek to perpetrate against the Jews of Israel.

By Dennis Prager, AMERICAN GREATNESS    14 May 2024

In medieval Europe, Christians who hated Jews spread the lie that Jews kidnap Christian children, slaughter them, and use their blood to bake matzos for Passover. This lie became known as “the Blood Libel,” probably the greatest libel in history. Over the course of many centuries, Jews were tortured and murdered, often by being burned alive, because of the Blood Libel.

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By CDM staff, CREATIVE DESTRUCTION MEDIA  13 May 2024

The money supply (M2) has bounced to March 2023 levels and has been rising almost every month since October last year. Furthermore, US government deficit spending has more than offset the decline in the Federal Reserve balance sheet. While the Fed’s balance sheet has shrunk by $1.5 trillion from its peak, the US government deficit remains above $1.5 trillion per year.

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Peloni:  This is an important analysis which describes a major strategic failing adopted by the IDF as it pursued what the authors describe as “the ‘small and smart’ force reliant on precision airpower, special forces, and technology-centric intelligence”.  The consequence to this is that “Israel does not have the right force structure, defense technological industrial base, or alliances to ensure a longer-term victory”.

Israel must abandon the failed idea that technological wizardry will guarantee its security

by Michael Doran & Can Kasapo?lu | Tablet | May 13, 2024

“Infantry soldiers from the Givati brigade are put through their paces with new, high-tech weapons and computers at the army’s urban warfare training base,” in this IDF photo from 2005.   Yael Bar Hillal/IDF via Getty Images

On April 29, 1956, two assassins, an Egyptian and a Palestinian, ambushed Ro’i Rothberg, the security officer of kibbutz Nahal Oz. Luring him into the fields, they shot him off his horse, beat him, and shot him again, ending his life. They then dragged his lifeless body as a gruesome trophy back to Gaza, where it was desecrated. Unlike Iran and its proxies today, however, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Gaza at the time, did not ransom Israeli corpses. The day after Rothberg’s murder, the Egyptian authorities transferred his mutilated remains to United Nations mediators who, in turn, passed them back to Israel for burial.

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Peloni:  There is a basic premise in any data collection scenario which should always be noted: Garbage in leads to garbage out.  If you can’t trust the source of the data, there is really very little to talk about and little need to explain why you shouldn’t be talking about it.

The UN  also highlighted that the plurality of identified fatalities were men (40%), while children were (32%) and women (20%).

By YUVAL BARNEA | JPOST | MAY 11, 2024

THE UNITED NATIONS headquarters building in New York City, and the UN logo: Today’s UN needs to be reimagined and reformed to address the limited problems it can effectively handle, says the writer.  (photo credit: CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS)

The United Nations seemingly halved the estimated number of women and children killed in Gaza, according to UN data published on May 6 and 8.

The UN published the number of fatalities reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. The Government Media Office in Gaza and Israeli authorities provided a disclaimer below the data: “The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures.”

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PM Netanyahu | I24 English | May 13, 2024

Peloni:   “The case for an exodus from the corrupt quads of Columbia and Harvard seems both urgent and clear. The question is: an Exodus to where and for what purpose? To save ourselves as Jews or to help save America from those who seek to destroy us?”  It is a fascinating, thoughtful, and challenging discussion in which Cohen ultimately challenges American Jewry to “focus not simply on our safety in America but our responsibility for America.”  Full text can be found on Mosaic, here.

Eric Cohen | Tikvah | May 13, 2024

Tikvah’s CEO Eric Cohen delivers a special video address on a Jewish answer to the university crisis. The long-brewing crisis on our university campuses has reached a tipping point. The anti-Israel encampments that recently took over Columbia, Yale, UCLA, and dozens of schools across America—chanting pro-Hamas slogans, harassing Jewish students, vandalizing and trespassing—force us to confront the moral confusion that plagues so much of higher education. This assault on Jews and Israel is also an assault on America and the West. How should American Jews respond? Can our most prestigious universities be saved, or is it time to build new centers of learning that advance our noblest Jewish and American values? Are these storied institutions of higher learning worthy of our children, our creativity, and our support, or is it time for an exodus?

By Caroline Glick, JNS    13 May 2024

This Yom HaZikaron, author and journalist Caroline Glick spoke with bereaved mother Sarah Schwartz on what it feels like to have lost her son on Oct. 7th. Her son, Segev Schwartz, died fighting Hamas in Kibbutz Sufa. Sarah is active in pushing the Israeli government to finish Hamas in Gaza and to not listen to an outside world that doesn’t understand the Middle East and the war Israel faces. The family is running several campaigns to support bereaved families and in memory of their son.