By Matti Friedman, FREE PRESS

A demonstration against the Israeli bombardment in Gaza on December 23 in Istanbul, Turkey. (lker Eray via Getty Images)

JERUSALEM — In the days after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, triggering the current war in Gaza, many believed that Hamas had erred. The word “miscalculation” recurred in news analysis and in statements from Israeli leaders. People here in Israel were galvanized into action by the massacre. Western governments responded with shock and revulsion. The civilians of Gaza were staring at a looming catastrophe. Hamas was in for it now! What were they thinking?

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Through the tunnel system under the Philadelphi Route separating the strip from Egypt, massive amounts of arms have been delivered to Hamas. The extent of Egypt’s knowing what was going on there may be revealed in the future. One thing is certain – the Israeli intelligence did not know the severity of the smuggling situation before the war.

By Ariel Kahana, ISRAEL HAYOM    27 December 2023

An Egyptian Army guard tower and armored personnel carrier look out across the Egyptian side of the border at the Gaza Strip beyond in the Herzallah district of the Rafah border crossing in Egypt/AP/Ben Curtis

Despite the prime minister, the defense minister, and other officials stressing in no uncertain terms that Israel will “eliminate” and “destroy” Hamas, there is still one major card that Israel does not currently intend to take from Hamas: the Philadelphia Axis, which runs along the border with between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

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Historic 15-justice panel reportedly split 8-7 in favor of nullifying reasonableness law; judiciary slams leak, says ruling still being written; coalition MKs pan brewing decision

By Jeremy Sharon and Michael Bachner, TOI   28 Dec 2023

Supreme Court President Esther Hayut and all 14 other judges hear petitions against the ‘reasonableness law’ at the court in Jerusalem on September 12, 2023. /DEBBIE HILL

The High Court of Justice is likely to strike down the highly controversial reasonableness law passed by the government this summer as part of its judicial overhaul program, according to a draft decision leaked to the media on Wednesday evening, in what would be a bombshell ruling marking the first time Israel’s top court nullifies a quasi-constitutional Basic Law.

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The Caroline Glick Show In-Focus

Israel has vowed time and again to eliminate the group responsible for the brutal Oct. 7 attack, but critics increasingly see that goal as unrealistic or even impossible.

By Neil MacFarquhar, NYT   Dec. 27, 2023

An Israeli artillery unit in October near Netivot, Israel, firing toward Gaza. Credit…

Standing before a gray backdrop decorated with Hamas logos and emblems of a gunman that commemorate the bloody Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Osama Hamdan, the organization’s representative in Lebanon, professed no concern about his Palestinian faction being dislodged from Gaza.“We are not worried about the future of the Gaza Strip,” he recently told a crowded news conference in his offices in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “The decision maker is the Palestinian people alone.”

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The United Nations’ bias against Israel is both obvious and, at times, poorly understood. So we should be thankful for moments in which top UN officials seemingly conspire to make the nature of their corruption clear and plain.

The best examples are when senior UN figures operate against their own organization’s guidelines, definitions, and regulations in order to stick it to Israel, proving that its corruption is intentional and that its other claims to authority on international law are wholly illegitimate.

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By Shoshana Bryen, AM THINKER December 28, 2023

Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, coordinating commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, has announced that Iran will close the Mediterranean Sea in retaliation for “U.S. war crimes” in Gaza. “They shall soon await the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, (the Strait of) Gibraltar and other waterways.”

It is an expansion of attacks — both verbal and military — by Iran and its proxies for years but ramped up since the Hamas atrocities against Israel on October 7. U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria have been attacked at least 150 times since President Joe Biden took office, two U.S. defense officials told VOA. More than 103 rocket and drone attacks have occurred since Oct. 17.

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T. Belman. Amir Avivi also complained that there are those who say we have already lost. There are also many reports that we have never been so united. Forget the happy talk.

Bombshell leaked draft ruling shows High Court set to nix key judicial overhaul law. So much for how united we are.

Accepting a ceasefire will be our undoing.

Arab affairs analyst Zvi Yehezkeli warns against allowing Gazans to return to northern Gaza: ‘Terrorists will return in civilian clothing, place RPGs on porches, booby-trap buildings.’

Israel National News Dec 28, 2023, 10:16 AM

Arab affairs analyst Zvi Yehezkeli on Wednesday night posted a summary of the first 82 days of the Hamas-Israel war, contradicting the voices claiming that Israel has already lost its war against Hamas.

“I hear a lot of disagreements within Israel, which say that we lost, we didn’t win. It hurts our soldiers and our fighting spirit,” he explained. “First of all, if there is a question of whether we won – apparently, we didn’t win. We lost on October 7, we will not lose any longer. So we must understand the concept we held has collapsed and brought us to this situation, and why it is repeating itself now.”

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TOI 25 December 2023,

US-supplied military equipment arriving in Israel, December 2023. (Ministry of Defense Spokesperson’s Office)

Two hundred and forty-four US transport planes and 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war, Channel 12 reports.

The Defense Ministry has made NIS 40 billion (almost $2.8 billion) in additional purchases from the US, it says.

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Investigation by Samaria Regional Council reveals UN presents misleading data to encourage global campaign against ‘settler violence.’

Israel National News      Dec 27, 2023, 6:38 PM (GMT+2)

By pursuing only Israel’s alleged crimes, the International Criminal Court gives free rein to terrorists

By Rabbi Shlomo Levin, LLM DEC 26, 2023, 3:15 AM

The flag and the International Criminal Court at the International Criminal Court building. The Hague, Netherlands – March 27, 2016. 

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was created to make sure those who commit the most serious of atrocities are punished, in the hopes this would help deter these crimes from happening at all. Unfortunately, the ICC is having the opposite effect. It may even be partly responsible for Hamas’s hostage taking and other war crimes taking place in Gaza now.

The ICC only has jurisdiction in countries that accept it, which Israel does not. But the Palestinians have long desired to use the mechanisms of international justice to hold Israel accountable for what they claim are war crimes. In 2015, the Palestinian Authority acceded to the court with jurisdiction going back to the start of the 2014 Gaza war. In 2020, one of the court’s judicial chambers ruled that the Palestinian Authority did in fact have the right to do this and that the prosecutor could investigate any alleged crimes that took place on the Palestinian side of Israel’s pre-1967 border from 2014 on.

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By Raymond Ibrahim, AM THINKER  27 December 2023

Because it spotlights the current state of affairs in the West — and all the key players — the recent uprising in Dublin should not be so quickly forgotten.

Background: on Nov. 23, 2023, a Muslim man of Algerian origin, with a known criminal record, knifed  a group of preschool children attending Saint Mary’s, a Catholic school in Dublin.  Three children — two girls and a boy aged between five and six — and a care assistant who tried to defend them, were stabbed in the assault. Knifed near the heart, a five-year-old girl was critically injured and, as of the last reporting from December, remains hospitalized in critical condition.

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Truman’s decision to recognize the new country of Israel was fundamental for the existential question of Israel’s right to exist.

By Richard Dean Young, THE FEDERALIST  26 December 2023

Government Press Office/Flickr

Fifty-one years ago, on Dec. 26, 1972, one of our most surprising presidents, Harry S. Truman, slipped out of life into eternity at the age of 88. Even in his ’70s and ’80s he was admirably fit and journalists had trouble keeping up with him on his morning walks. Truman left a legacy of not only a fit retiree but of a principled person who could change, not so much with the times, but when his principles confronted new challenges and required sometimes courageous stands on the issues of his day.

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“During the terrorist assault on my people in southern Sudan, in which millions of black Africans were slaughtered and enslaved by jihadists, only one nation—the Jewish State of Israel—helped us, with arms, tactical and military support,” Simon Deng said.

AMERICAN’S FOR PEACE AND TOLERANCE

A South Sudanese expression of solidarity with Israel in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Credit: Courtesy.

On December 11, Charles Jacobs published an article in Tablet urging black Americans to re-evaluate their “intersectional” alliance with Arab and Muslim Americans given that Arabs and Muslims today — as they have for centuries — own Africans as slaves.

The normal American instinct to fight for the liberation of slaves is blocked and forbidden by woke ideology which insists that all Muslims and all Arabs are “victims,” thus their conduct — and even the conduct of their “cousins” in Africa and the Middle East — cannot be criticized.

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By Elizabeth Volberding, OAN         Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Rapper Kanye West apologized to the Jewish community online following his anti-Semitic remarks throughout the years where he has previously expressed his support for Adolf Hitler.

On Tuesday, 46-year-old West apologized to the Jewish community in a social media post, which was written in Hebrew, after he had criticized “powerful” Jewish individuals several times on various online platforms.
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By Pamela Geller, THE GELLER REPORT    26 December 2023

Israel is on the front lines of the global jihad. She is the thin blue line that keeps jihadi terror at bay against the West. Look at how Islamic terror proxies are turning major cities in the West (USA and Europe) into war zones. Denying Israel cripples the West’s war in defense of freedom and Western civilization. This will come back to bite us – in spades.

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By Bassam Tawil, GATESTONE  •  December 26, 2023

• By providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with various services, UNRWA exempted Hamas from its responsibilities as the governing body, such as creating a working economy that would pay for education and healthcare, and allowed it, instead, to invest resources in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons.
• “They [UNRWA] teach us that the Al-Aqsa Mosque belongs to us [Muslims], that Palestine belongs to us,” said Atif Sharha, a student at an UNRWA school.

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Former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon is the leading proponent of enabling the voluntary emigration of Gazans to other countries.

By DAVID ISAAC

Palestinians flee Khan Yunis to Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Dec. 25, 2023. Photo by Atia Mohammed/Flash90.

(December 26, 2023 / JNS)  South American and African countries have already expressed interest in taking in Palestinian Arab refugees from the Gaza Strip in return for monetary compensation, Likud Knesset member Danny Danon said on Monday.

Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who has floated the idea of the transfer of Gazans as part of his five-point plan for the post-war period, told Israeli broadcaster Kan Reshet Bet that Israel should “make it easier” on those Palestinians who wish to leave the Strip for other countries.

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Promoting antisemitic Public School Supervisors has been going on for years. 

By Cindy Grosz, INN Dec 25, 2023, 11:33 PM (GMT+2)

Why is anyone surprised that a Jew hater employed by the New York City Department of Education was not only retained, but is heading to a new job with more responsibility and better benefits.

Last week, Hillcrest High School principal Scott Milczewski, leader in the school where a violent riot broke out attacking a Jewish teacher for attending a pro-Israel rally, announced that he is leaving the Jamaica school for a new job in the city Department of Education bureaucracy.

“It is with mixed emotions that I inform you that I have been offered, and accepted, the position of Director of Teacher Development and Evaluation within the Division of Teaching and Learning,” he wrote in a letter circulated among students, staff and parents.

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