by Gerald A. Honigman
I’ve been following reports in the media regarding what has transpired in Hamas-ruled Gaza since President Trump forced Israel to accept a much flawed ceasefire “deal.”
Any serious observer of the MidEast and Hamas understands that Hamas, whose charter calls for total obliteration of Israel and Jews everywhere, never intended to live up to most of its end of what Arabs call a “hudna,” a temporary cessation of fighting to regroup, rearm, and live to fight another day to achieve victory—especially over kafir infidels
Question: What is the only nation in history which has been denied victory after being repeatedly viciously attacked, but has been forced by others to not bring to justice its genocidal enemies?
Answer: The Jew of the Nations, Israel, of course.
After the horrific invasion from Gaza, which included hundreds of “ordinary” Arabs in addition to thousands of Hamasniks who deliberately slaughtered the equivalent of 40,000 Americans on October 7th, 2023, engaging in such atrocities as microwaving live Jewish infants, Israel was forced to act. It had endured such attacks for decades—blown up buses, pizza parlors, Passover Seders, etc.
The resulting war has also taken a huge toll on civilian Arabs but…
The difference is that these people are killed because their heroes, whom they freely elected twenty years ago with Jimmy “Apartheid Israel” Carter overseeing the election, habitually use them as human shields.
They’ve ignored millions of leaflets, phone calls, and so forth warning them to move out of harm’s way. No other army, besides the IDF, has ever done this to protect its existential enemies’s non-combatants.
Many alleged Arab “innocents” partook in atrocities which started this war, and posted their photos on the internet.
There is no moral equivalency here. None…
Leading experts on urban warfare, such as West Point’s Major John Spencer, marvel at how hard Israel has gone to avoid harming its foes’s civilians
Trump’s latest “deal,” forged in cooperation with Hamas-enabling Turkey & Qatar, was forced upon a war weary Israel against its own better wisdom.
Israel, ancestral homeland of those folks many Arabs refer to as kilab yahud (Jew dogs), knows its enemies better than anyone else.
Yet, The Donald repeatedly acts as if it’s a beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister who is unreasonable because he refuses to acknowledge Trump’s alleged “better” comprehension of what’s actually happening in Gaza.
Trump shamefully forced Prime Minister Netanyahu to eat crow, embarrassing him before millions watching on television, because he did what America did itself after being attacked on 9/11/2001.
A bullying Trump forced Netanyahu to call Qatari leaders to apologize for attacking Hamas masterminds of butchery on October 7th whom they had given refuge to.
Qatar, with Trump’s other good buddy, oppressor of Kurds, Assyrians, and others—Turkey’s would be Sultan Erdogan the Great—is a major enabler of Hamas and other jihadis. It pours billions of dollars into universities to greatly prejudice how subjects related to the Middle East are taught. I witnessed this personally over the years.
Israel’s earlier action in Qatar was a precision strike, not an attack against Qatari sovereignty. And regarding this sovereignty issue, America didn’t ask permission of Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq when we went after Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida after 9/11.
Furthermore, if America is entitled to sovereignty over places like American Samoa, Guam, the American Virgin Islands, and other places as well (not to mention Texas, New Mexico, and California), how can Jews, with 4,000 years of sounding corroborated history, be denied it in at least a good portion of it in Judea and Samaria?
See here if you question to whom the land truly is the age-old ancestral homeland of:
https://share.google/Od6R6o0oqu4K1FF9f
Additionally, in the wake of cries of “itbach al-Yahud”—slaughter the Jews—and the illegal blockade of Israel and, shelling of Jerusalem—Israel was forced to preempt in June’67.
At the end of this conflagration and much debate, the normally hostile UN itself came up with a final accepted draft of UNSC Resolution 242 which guaranteed that Israel would never have to return to its 9-15 mile wide, zipper of a nation status again.
Meaningful acquisition of at least some lands in Judea and Samaria and the Golan (all part of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine in the first place—along with present day Gaza and Jordan) was to finally occur.
So, where does the American administration now come off making threats to Israel over this same sovereignty issue? VP JD Vance’s are especially troubling.
If it was up to him, Israel would have never attacked Iran, despite being blasted with powerful ballistic missiles from it, and the Ayatollah’s race to develop nukes to obliterate Israel once and for all. And he blatantly made these provocative remarks during the very week of the American election, when some of us were authoring essays and such to try to gain more Jewish votes for a non-Democrat.
October 7th is Israel’s version of 9/11, only worse given the proportion of dead suffered to its population.
So, now that Israel has had its collective arm twisted by the Trump team to accept this non-ceasefire “ceasefire,” it’s back to square one, after losing the equivalent of 40,000 American dead 19-25 year old soldiers, and a like number of civilians on 10/7.
As has been noted many times, with billions of dollars in aid provided to Gaza over the years, it could have become prosperous if its funds weren’t devoted to constructing tunnels, enriching its leaders, acquiring weapons, teaching Jew hatred, and so forth aiming to destroy its neighbor.
Tens of thousands of rockets and such were launched against Israel over the past decades by Hamas & Co. Not to mention similar attacks blasting Israel in the north by Hizbullah.
Gaza also has a rich Jewish history dating back millennia, and was part of the original 1920 Mandate until Egypt illegally seized it in Israel’s War of Independence in May 1948. It was never meant to be Judenrein.
For the sake of others’s business deals with autocratic Arab petro-potentates by its “best friends,” Israel, once again, after being wantonly attacked, was forced by the new American leader, who was not to be like his predecessor, to cease and desist.things during his first term in office.
True, the Trump deal got some living hostages back, wonderful for sure. And Trump accomplished some great things during his first term in office—Jerusalem, Golan Heights, Iran oil revenues greatly reduced, hostile UN agencies defunded, and so forth.
But, in return, Israel was forced to release thousands of Arab butchers and wannabes, who’ll live to slaughter Jews another day—like Yahya Sinwar, who was released in a previous swap. He then directed the Simchat Torah massacre on October 7th, 2023… Nice “deal.”
When any army fights a war, gaining momentum is a top priority.
The goal is to gain control of tempo & direction in conflict to rapidly build upon successes to maintain a hoped for unstoppable advantage.
Trump forced Israel to sacrifice this hard won momentum, gained at great cost by going from house to booby trapped house, and has already paid the price with the loss of more soldiers because the predictable happened, and Hamas broke the “deal.”
Unlike Gaza or Arabs under control of latter day Arafatian terrorists in suits of “pay to slay (Jews)” Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, who pocket billions and spend funds on weapons and teaching youth to hate and murder “kilab yahud” Jew dogs, Israel is a nation in the forefront of technology, innovation, and assisting other countries, but has also been traumatized because of having to continually fight a multi-front war.
None in Israel wanted this tragedy.
Jews cherish life, and too many Arabs idealize death and slaughter of Islam’s kafir infidel enemies—especially Jews, half in Israel who fled Arab/Muslim lands, the other side of the refugee coin no one hears about because an Israel didn’t stick its brethren into squalid camps as Arabs did with their own, created due to a combined Arab attack seventy seven years ago.
Thus, the inevitable has now happened.
Hamas brazenly struts through Gaza stealing truckloads of aid, killing its rivals and those they suspect cooperated with Israel. New arm shipments have been intercepted, with others probably already having arrived in areas Trump forced Israel to cede.
It didn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz to figure out that this “deal” was extremely problematic, despite Trump, as usual, claiming that it was fantastic because it was his team’s concoction.
The latest news is that the President is threatening Hamas with “hell to pay” if it doesn’t disarm and so forth.
Hamas is laughing because its Qatari and Islamist Turk enablers are best buddies with the Trump Corporation and are business partners with his, Steve Witkoff’s, Jared Kushner’s, and other business partners’s interests.
Money talks…
So, after Israel was forced to lose its momentum, it will now have to be the one to carry out Trump’s threat.
What happened to the alleged peace keeping force his new deal was supposed to deliver ?
An effective peace keeping force, apart from the laughable UN variety, the Multinational Force and Observers, has kept relative peace in Sinai since President Sadat signed a treaty with Israel decades ago.
Why not have the same in Gaza buffer zones bordering Egypt and Israel?
Israel will now likely have to sustain far more casualties because it has lost the momentum it so painfully gained after two years of booby trapped, house to house fighting, and condemnation from Western hypocrites who would have never put up with what Israel endured for so long before finally acting to try to solve this existential crisis.
Any nation faced with such a genocidal foe, whose charter calls for its total destruction, as Israel indeed is, has no option but to settle for nothing less than absolute victory over its would be executioners, not a ceasefire which will only be repeatedly broken.
America and the Allies wouldn’t settle for anything less from Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
So how can a nation which can fit twice into America’s Lake Michigan settle for anything less?
https://open.substack.com/pub/urikurlianchik/p/the-israeli-government-has-betrayed?r=5ob3uc&utm_medium=ios
Mr. Honigman has presented us with a lot of ideas about how the war was remotely directed by various politicians, mostly US politicians, who felt they had the right and the means to prolong the war to ensure that Israel, yet again, doesn’t win.
He listed all the accomplishments of Israel’s local enemies, Hamas, Hizballah, the Iranians and the Houthis, who lined up to take their best shot(s) at the Jews without even a whimper from the rest of the world including the demands for restraint and proportionality.
He then pointed out that those almost local neighbors, Turkey and the gulf states are best buddies with those who have our arms tied behind our backs while fighting this defensive war. The USA, UN, the EU and the “UK Commonwealth” are all in the first row demanding that Israel cease and desist from all those bad things they are doing like killing the vermin that are firing rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas of Israel. Those in the second row are no better, just not so loud.
He mentions the momentum or lack of it enforced on Israel under the threat of “No more support from us” if the current activities are not stopped, irrelevant of the provocation. Just as an example, Israel should never have dared to bomb Iran’s nuclear program although most of Israel’s neighbors, including those pulling the strings in the background, are very happy with the result.
The alleged peace force that is/was intended to keep the peace in Gaza but we see that Hamas are not only continuing their enforcement of their power, they are preparing for the next round which will probably happen quite soon. Of course, after the IDF actually captured most of the strip and was commanded to retreat to the yellow line, it will be called upon to repeat the process with the required loss of lives due to the renewed deployment of booby traps and reinforced defensive positions now occupied by the Hamas reinforcements. Of course, the whole world will be, figuratively, up in arms about Israel’s activities but not to assist or indeed to keep the promises made towards phase 1 of the peace treaty. I am neither an Islam expert or a military expert but even I have learned enough about the situation to understand that this was a Hudna a la Mohammed rather than a truly intended peace initiative. They are preparing for more Oct 7 events.
Connecting just a few of the dots, we can see gulf state oil revenues being used to grease palms and ensure that Israel will not win this war, not because it can’t or has lost the will to or fears the ensuing claims of genocide and starvation of the poor Palestinians who, so far, haven’t been able to do anything for themselves except to build and fire rockets into Israel day in, day out. Israel has to take the outcome of this war into its own hands and WIN and the sooner the better.
What Mr. Honigman forgot to mention was that every rocket or other missile fired indiscriminately into civilian areas of Israel is a war crime. Why hasn’t the ICJ taken up this issue or allowed these facts to be introduced during their court sessions against the defenders of Israel in this war? Why does the UN not call for reprisals against the terrorists in the Gaza Strip, Yemen or Iran? why are the nefarious activities behind a very transparent viel of deniability by the Egyptians and the Turks not being addressed at the UNSC? Harboring of terrorists in Turkey, or allowing freedom of movement in and out of the Strip by Egypt is never mentioned but the starving of Gazans is blamed on Israel which has been transporting humanitarian goods into the strip for decades although their is no requirement to do so, neither in peace time nor in war is ignored.
Since there is no way to get any benefit out of international law at any court of justice, Israel should stop trying and solve the problem in its own way.
Replying to myself: nobody is willing to raise their voice to point out the issue of persistent attacks, mostly by rocket fire, on Israel. They lean back and insist that Israel has Iron this-and-that to protect itself so those rockets are OK!! No need to protest or even assert misbehavior at the UNSC. Of course, none of these rockets are pointed at the current members of the UNSC.
@dreuveni
A very insightful pair of comments.