T. Belman. Its good to see the WSJ is on our side.
The IDF takes grave risks to satisfy the U.S. President’s demands on how to fight in Gaza.
By The Editorial Board, WSJ Dec. 14, 2023 6:31 pm ET
Israeli troops conduct military operations in the Gaza Strip, Dec. 5. PHOTO: XIN HUA/ZUMA PRESS
President Biden made headlines by declaring on Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has to change.” As is typical with the President, his subsequent remarks were hard to follow, but many heard them as a call for a new Israeli government coalition willing to jump-start a two-state solution.
By David Mark, PULSE OF iSRAEL dEC 14/23
Israel was prevented from unleashing its full fire power on Hamas from the air, which allowed the Gazan enemy to prepare accordingly.?While Israel was allowed to use artillery in the beginning -?it has since been discontinued due to the Biden administration’s continued threats.?The most concerning of them is the potential discontinuation of a resupply of weapons and munitions to Israel.
The US State Dept. is still deluded on UNRWA’s role in educateding Palestinian Arab youth to enact another October 7 massacre. Not us.
By David Bedein, INN Dec 14, 2023, 2:54 PM (GMT+2)
On September 27, 2023, less than two weeks before all hell broke loose in Israel. three officials from the Israel Ministry of Strategic Affairs met with four researchers who have spent their careers studying different aspects of the strategic threat posed by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency).
UNRWA oversees 59 refugee camps that comprise more than five million descendants of Arab refugees relocated by the 1948 war.
ETTINGER DISCUSSES US-ISRAEL RELATIONS
Support for the Palestinian cause is not about human rights, but a fear that Israel’s democratic values will spread across the region
By R. Raza and M. Rizwan, NAT’L POST 12 Dec 2023
Iranians burn a U.S. flag during an anti-Israeli rally to show their solidarity with Palestinians, in Tehran, on Oct. 13/ AFP
The pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine, anti-Israel rallies on the streets of Canada, the United States, Europe and the Middle East are nothing new. Ever since the creation of State of Israel in 1948, Arab politics has largely been defined by Palestinian question.
The question for the rest of us is: what drives this sentiment? Is this expression of political support driven by sympathy and affinity for Muslims in Palestine? Is this a question of human and religious rights? Or is it a decades-long attempt to change a regional geopolitical situation that Arab rulers believe is unfairly tilted towards a lone Jewish state in a sea of Arab monarchies?
by Dr. Eric R. Mandel, THE HILL
The U.S. is ramping up pressure on Israel to end the Israel-Hamas war. But is our country ready for the next phase?
I am not speaking about the inevitable reappearance of Hamas terrorist cells in Gaza or an escalation of Hamas’s activities in the West Bank, but about Israel’s war with Iranian proxy Hezbollah in the north.
The war in the south is just one phase of the battle of annihilation, jihad against Israel, orchestrated by Tehran.
By Hana Levi Julian JEWISH PRESS 14 Dec 2023
In 2019, the IDF saluted the soldiers who monitored the Gaza border from the Nahal Oz military base, and specifically one who spotted four armed terrorists infiltrating in an attempt to carry out a lethal attack that year/IDF
An investigation into the deaths of IDF surveillance soldiers at the Nahal Oz military base on October 7 has discovered that Hamas terrorists used chemical (gas) weapons to kill Israelis.
According to a report by Israel’s Channel 12 News, investigators examining the bodies of the surveillance soldiers at the base reportedly revealed they died from the effects of toxic gas.
Robert Spencer’s new masterpiece unveils how the Byzantines saved civilization.
Founded as a kingdom in 753 B.C., Rome became a republic in 509 B.C. and an empire in 27 B.C By the fourth century A.D., the empire was so huge – extending from present-day Scotland to the Persian Gulf – that it was decided to divide it, for administrative purposes, in half, with one capital (and one emperor) at Rome and another at Constantinople. Most reasonably educated people in the Western world today are aware that our civilization began with Rome, and had its antecedents in Athens and Jerusalem. If we went to decent schools, we acquired at least some awareness of Rome; some of us read Virgil’s Aeneid, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, and Robert Graves’s I, Claudius; those of us with a fondness for old movies have seen Roman epics like Spartacus and The Robe and Quo Vadis? We know that while the Greeks were big on philosophy and drama and art, the Romans were more practically inclined, constructing massive arenas and aqueducts, not to mention a number of roads that are still used to this day. No, we’re not experts on Rome, but it’s a part of our consciousness. Indeed, a series of postings on social media that were widely shared just a few weeks ago suggested that a not inconsiderable percentage of American men think about the Roman Empire several times a day.
Read more…
As Israel deals with a multi-pronged Hamas-led invasion from the Gaza Strip amidst unwarranted international pressure, Canadian writer David Solway’s scholarly collection of essays, Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam and the West, comes as a timely reminder of how multiplicity in self-identification is undermining Jewish unity. The book, to be released today, December 12, also addresses the idiosyncratic position of Israel among the nations of the world, the threat to liberal Judeo-Christian values posed by Islam, and the Left’s catalysis of the subsuming of Western culture.
Read more…
T. Belman. The wishful thinking persists. Hope burns eternal.
Does this mean that the Israeli Iron Wall has been cracked? Nothing of the sort.
By Uri Dromi, JTA DECEMBER 14, 2023 03:48
One hundred years ago, in November 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the greatest leaders of the Zionist movement and definitely the one with the greatest foresight, wrote in Berlin a seminal article in the Razsviet (Dawn, in Russian) newspaper, titled “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs).” His main argument was that in order for the Zionists to succeed in settling the Land of Israel and persist in living there, they must create an “Iron Wall” that will thwart Arab ambitions to eradicate the Zionist enterprise. It is worth quoting him at some length:
Read more…
Peloni: Badran continues to provide an insightful look into the ridiculous lengths to which the US gone in recent weeks while refusing to end or even to slow the US realignment towards Iran which has been taking place since Trump left the White House.
A chronicle of the Biden administration’s increasingly absurd attempts to hide its complicity in the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust
by Tony Badran, TABLET December 13, 2023
It may strike some observers as curious, and others as unimaginably evil, that only weeks after Hamas slaughtered over 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, the Biden administration awarded sanctions waivers worth $10 billion to Iran, the primary external sponsor of those attacks. The waiver, which allows Iran to collect money from the sale of electricity to Iraq, an arrangement that further deepens Iranian control of that country, came with an added bonus: Iran would be allowed to convert the funds into euros which it could spend immediately, without the usual requirement that the money remain in escrow inside Iraq. The prospect that Iran might immediately spend the money it receives on continuing to target U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria doesn’t appear to have disrupted the deal, either.
| The Caroline Glick Show In – Focus
(December 13, 2023 / JNS) Israeli security forces operating in the Samaria city of Jenin have detained hundreds of Palestinian suspects in a major counterterrorism raid that has already lasted some 30 hours, the Israel Defense Forces said on Wednesday.
The suspects were transferred for questioning by Israel’s security agencies, added the military.
IDF soldiers, as well as officers from the Israel Border Police and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), have so far searched more than 400 buildings and confiscated 30 weapons, large amounts of ammunition, explosives and other military equipment, the IDF said.
State Comptroller Matanyahu Engleman tours border fences in the north, south, and in the Jerusalem area, highlighting gaps in the security barrier, and in the nation’s security.
By Jerusalem Post Staff, 13 December 2023
View of the Separation Wall and the Al-Aqsa compound in the background on February 02, 2020/OLIVIER FITOUSSI
After touring along the southern and northern borders, State Comptroller Matanyahu Engleman visited the security fence in Jerusalem, the Sharon region, and Samaria, in the West Bank.
Engleman stated, “The massacre in the Gaza border area should never happen in Jerusalem and Gush Dan. It is the government and the army’s responsibility to thoroughly examine the effectiveness of the security barrier.”The State Comptroller emphasized that he would present security authorities with the weaknesses in the border that require urgent refortification, following extensive surveys since the outbreak of Operation Swords of Iron on the southern and northern borders and in bordering communities.
T. Belman. This is a site in Hebrew that was recommended to me. If anyone can find other articles about what’s happening in Jenin in Hebrew of otherwise please provide me with the url.
Yesterday’s activity in Jenin is an exception (for the better) compared to the pattern of the last few weeks which was based on spot raids.
Yesterday the pressure and measures were deep and continuous.
Israel immediately needs a type of “protective wall” model 2023 and similar events in other areas of Judea and Samaria as well.
Gaza resident: Hamas leaders Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar “are sons of dogs.”
By Baruch Yedid, JNS 13 December 2023
Israeli troops operating in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Dec. 12, 2023. Credit: IDF
As Hamas’s ability to rule the Gaza Strip crumbles, Palestinian fear of the terror group is disappearing, leading towards anarchy.
Gaza residents openly criticize Hamas in front of TV cameras—once unthinkable—and call the Iran-backed Hamas “betrayers of the Palestinian people.”
In one notable incident, a resident of Gaza told Radio Hebron, which also broadcasts from the Strip, that Hamas leaders Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar “are sons of dogs.”
by
Israel is resolved to remove Hamas and its terrorist infrastructure from the Gaza Strip permanently, and for much of the world, its determination raises one question more than any other: What comes next in Gaza? For those who disapprove of Israel’s actions in the war or those who either passively or actively support the role of Hamas as the Strip’s governing authority, the lack of answers provides a pretext not only to demand a permanent cease-fire but to suggest (often quietly and with a furrowed brow indicating supposed realpolitik wisdom) that the path Israel seems to be making for itself is a dead end from which it needs to be saved.
Israel’s prime minister says he won’t allow the Palestinian Authority to take over Gaza
By David S. Cloud, Carrie Keller-Lynn, Summer Said and Andrew Restuccia, WSJ Dec. 12, 2023 4:40 pm ET
President Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clashed Tuesday over who should govern Gaza after the war, in a remarkable public display of differences emerging between the two leaders over the conflict.
Speaking during a fundraiser in Washington, Biden made his toughest remarks since the war began about Netanyahu’s government. He suggested that its hard-line stance has prevented Netanyahu from accepting the Biden administration’s postwar plan to have the Palestinian Authority take over Gaza, and that it would also obstruct progress toward political, economic and security arrangements that could spawn a separate Palestinian state—an outcome the U.S. president sees as a long-term solution to the conflict.
American Thought LeadersDec-12-2023
WATCH VIDEO
“People think democracies die with a sudden shock, and you see Black Shirts or Brownshirts goose-stepping in the streets. That’s not how democracies die. Democracies die through a thousand cuts,” says Naomi Wolf, CEO of DailyClout and author of the new book, “Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age.” “…
