Israel-Gaza War: Day 163 - Q&A

 

Before October 7, you participated in anti-Netanyahu protests over his judicial putsch, which intended to concentrate power in his own hands. Are you taking part in the renewed anti-government protests such as the one last night?

No.

Presently, there are two streams of protest. One calls for early elections intended to end Binyamin Netanyahu's government. The other is to pressure his government to concede to Hamas's demands for a hostage deal.

The two streams have melded into one.

And since I am against any hostage deal that releases busloads of terrorists, I will not demonstrate against the government. Moreover, I am not comfortable protesting in the streets against Netanyahu in wartime.

A core group of demonstrators has been trying to provoke the police by illegally blocking traffic. It is as if we are not at war, as if the police are not working long hours, as if we are not in Ramadan.

Protesters are being manipulated. Many have not thought out the consequences of a mass prisoner release. They don't know that today's Hamas leaders in Turkey, Qatar, and Gaza are primarily alumni of Israel's prisons whom Netanyahu or one of his predecessors released in previous hostage-taking deals.

As much as I want Netanyahu to leave the political stage, I will not lend a hand to strengthening the enemy in wartime. Besides, he can only be removed if elements in Likud are willing to take him down. However, he has largely purged his party of internal opponents. Yaov Gallant, the defense minister, is the only one who has openly challenged him. And Gallant is culpable for October 7 no less than Netanyahu since he – ultimately – did not quit after publicly warning that Netanyahu had undermined our deterrence with his judicial putsch. When push came to shove – Gallant caved.

Netanyahu could be dislodged if the Hardal messianic parties (of Ben Gvir and Smotsrich) and the non-Zionist Haredi ultra-Orthodox parties essential to his coalition pulled their support. These two camps could fall out over Haredi draft dodging. For now, they have no interest in bringing Netanyahu down.  

You voted for Yair Lapid in recent elections. How does his support for releasing terrorists from Israel's prisons in a hostage deal sit with you?

Badly. Lapid has been clear. He wants to trade some of the most notorious terrorists in Israeli prisons, many serving multiple life terms, for the hostages, living or dead. He says, "No deal will be an easy deal, but a deal that will bring the kidnapped home is worth the price…There is no victory without them returning. We can't move forward without them being home."

So, I would find it hard to back him when Yesh Atid runs next. I think the alpha and omega of victory is defanging Hamas and making sure it can't govern the Strip or take over the West Bank. We can't overcome the Hamas Idea because it is embedded in what it means to be Palestinian, but we can keep Hamas (and the other armed groups) from posing a military threat. And doing so would send an unmistakable signal to Hezbollah.

Western governments and the prestige media profess to support Israel's right of self-defense. On Day 163 of the October 7 War, do you believe them?

Leaders and editorialists have convinced themselves that Israel can supernaturally overcome Hamas and Islamic Jihad without harm to Palestinian non-combatants (who are the group's primary backers, cannon fodder, and human shields). Israel can somehow win, goes fabulist thinking, by declaring a unilateral ceasefire and pulling out of Gaza, by turning the Strip over to a PLO 2.0, and by enabling the creation of an armed sovereign Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank that a bridge or tunnel would link.

This is delusional. We need to be far more creative than a PLO 2.0. I favor a trusteeship for Palestine funded by the Gulf States. One that would build Palestinian political institutions and develop a new Palestinian political culture.  

I ask myself why the West and Big Media oppose Israeli defensive measures like building a buffer zone between Gaza and Israel. They oppose cutting off Rafiah from Egypt (the point where all the tunnels cross into the Sinai); they oppose, in short, anything that would actually secure Israel from further attack.

At best, they are lying to themselves.

Should Israel be doing a better job in humanitarian aid?

Israel is constantly held to a double standard not applied to other member states of the UN. Hamas is responsible for the people of Gaza, not Israel.

Yet, Israel continues to allow the flow of food and fuel to the Strip even though this undermines our effort for regime change in Gaza. We do this to abate enemy suffering. We know if the situation were reversed, they would starve those they had not butchered.

Hamas and other Gazan actors either hijack humanitarian deliveries or engineer them into confrontations with Israel. International aid intended for free distribution is being sold. Palestinian society has little history of self-help because that would undermine its culture of victimization. And since the UN is barred from permanently resettling Palestinian refugees even within Palestine, the Sisyphean cycle of aiding the Palestinians never ends.

I have little doubt that sea-borne aid from UNICEF will also wind up being sold or controlled by clans or Hamas.

The best way to help Gazans is to help Israel overcome Hamas so that food, fuel, and material can once again flow in from Israel as they did before October 7.

So, instead of conspiring with Iran behind the scenes and leaning on Israel, which the Biden administration has been doing in secret talks in Oman – it should be sending a clear message that the US supports Israel's efforts to defang Hamas.

Ideally, Jerusalem should have a plan in place for who runs Gaza after we leave. But that would be too much to expect from Netanyahu, who habitually kicks complex problems down the road.

Finally, what did you make of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's call on Netanyahu to resign? And his claim that the good Palestinians and good Israelis want peace but that Hamas and Bibi and the settlers are in the way.

I was chagrined that Schumer pretended he doesn't get that the Palestinians don't want a state alongside Israel. He is right that Netanyahu should go, but his intervention's impact will be counterproductive. It helps Netanyahu stay. Some settlers are fanatics, and some settlements are genuinely problematic but in the final analysis, the crux of the problem is Palestinian intransigence.

Isn't it curious that Schumer's call on Mahmud Abbas to resign got no attention? That's because everyone understood his critique of the Palestinians was just a cover for his attack on Netanyahu.

Why Schumer (who is unarguably a friend of Israel) played along with the psychological warfare orchestrated by the Biden WH is anyone's guess – perhaps fear that the Democrats will further hemorrhage Muslim, woke, and African American voters, constituencies that surveys show have an antipathy toward the Zionist enterprise. If the  Biden-Harris ticket loses to Trump, it will be because Joe Biden abandoned the border with Mexico, led from the left, and having failed to inspire confidence, did not have the courage to step aside, giving a moderate Democratic governor a chance to lead the party against Trump. 

Biden showed courage and decency in backing Israel at the start of the war, and Israelis are grateful for that. He was a profile in courage. He just did not have the stamina to go the distance.

Don't Flinch - Look at Yazan Kafarneh and the Suffering Palestinian Children

Is your heart made of stone? If it isn't, you need to give a thought to Yazan Kafarneh, the ten-year-old cerebral palsy Palestinian boy whose sufferings and skeletal image have become the newest ploy in Hamas's propaganda war against Israel.

Hamas and the activist aid groups that collaborate with it say some 20 Gaza children like Kafarneh have already died from malnutrition and dehydration. And for once, I have no reason to doubt them.

The deplorable humanitarian conditions in Gaza are wrongly (but intentionally) being blamed on Israel – not Hamas – including by the Biden administration. That and the approaching "holy" month of Ramadan are being used as leverage to force Israel to…what precisely? 

To halt its military campaign and agree to an indefinite ceasefire. This would give Hamas breathing room to regroup and reassert its control over Gaza. Billions of aid dollars would flow into the Strip, which the terror group would again siphon. UNWRA, the Palestinian-infiltrated relief agency that is forbidden to resettle refugees, would be reconstituted. And in the fullness of time, Hamas – which is committed to Israel's destruction, not a Palestinian state alongside it – would be ready to fight again.

In return for snapping up this opportunity for a devastating strategic defeat, Israel would get back some of its 130 or so captives, or their remains the good citizens of Gaza are still holding. That's hardly all. Israel would need to release from its prisons the next generation of Mohamed Deifs, Yahya Sinwars, and Marwan Iss's, who would mastermind in the fullness of time their own onslaught.

From the perspective of the "international community," we had better capitulate before Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, prayer, and reflection. It is also, as anyone familiar with contemporary Islamic civilizations knows, a period of intramural bloodletting and violence against non-Muslims.

Several near-certainties accompany Ramadan: in Islamic countries, the stock market climbs; in Jerusalem, the already amplified pre-dawn adhān, or call to prayer, becomes even more piercing than usual; and there is a rise in Muslim bloodletting.

No doubt, for many of the faithful, Ramadan is a period of quiet reflection and spiritual serenity. For others, however, especially in places where large numbers of Muslims cross paths with Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, or Jews, it is an occasion for barbarity.

It is said that the gates of hell are closed during Ramadan, funneling martyrs to heaven with ease.

Jihadist groups tend to conduct more terrorist attacks during Ramadan than on non-Ramadan days.

No amount of ecumenical goodwill can change the fact that Ramadan is a blood-soaked period. 

Yahya Sinwar is not rushing to surrender so that suffering Palestinians can enjoy a tranquil Ramadan in Gaza. But if Western patsies want to believe Ramadan is like Lent or the Chinese New Year, he's not about to disabuse them. 

That said, Israel should do nothing to make it easier for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists to mobilize uninvolved believers in the struggle against it who would use Ramadan as a cudgel. Hence, we should tread lightly on the Temple Mount. We don't need to further expand the Gaza conflict to the rest of the land of Israel. Hamas does. 

In Gaza, Ben Caspit, a veteran pundit, has suggested that we call the Ramadan ceasefire bluff and hold off taking Rafiah – the last Hamas stronghold – until after the month is over. I am agnostic on this matter as I am not privy to the minutia of the military situation. I just worry about how long the IDF can remain in a holding pattern while the Palestinian population of Gaza is living under Hamas-generated Hobbesian conditions.

The US decision to drop aid by parachute and build a makeshift pier off Gaza is the Biden administration's way of shaming Israel. They want to make it look like Israel is holding up aid to Gaza. 

In just the past 24 hours, even as Hamas is shooting at us, we sent a 28-truck convoy carrying food into northern Gaza. Likewise, we coordinated with UNICEF and WHO missions to refuel Al Ahali Hospital and water pumping facilities. Israel also facilitated the airdropping of 288 packages of humanitarian aid. The IDF controls the airspace over Gaza.

Israel is facing a relentless diplomatic and propaganda blitz. The Arabs who control the UN General Assembly are mustering votes to suspend Israel's membership. The Biden/Harris 2024 campaign, which is struggling to achieve a come-from-behind victory against Donald Trump, is losing its woke, Jewish-quisling, Muslim, and African American base because of the president's military backing for Israel. Western media intones the vacuous two-state solution mantra religiously as if the Palestinian Arabs want to live alongside a national homeland for the Jewish people. As if Israel is primarily responsible for the failure of the two-state approach. 

Internally, Binyamin Netanyahu shows no sign of stepping down, and his political survival remains his first priority.

Israel's non-messianic, non-apocalyptic population (still, I venture, the majority) is growing weary with the prime minister's political partners. Last night, the Supreme Spiritual Leader of the Shas Party, who also happens to be on the state payroll as Sephardic Chief Rabbi, declared that if his constituents were forced to do any form of national service, including the army, he would advise them to relocate to the Galut. Twenty years or so of Netanyahu's rule has created a Hardal and Haredi Political Golem that is out of control.

Meanwhile, Iran is waiting in the wings, watching our divisions and the fatigue the Biden White House is displaying in Gaza. If Israel is forced to abandon its mission of defanging Hamas and ensuring it cannot rule the Strip, that will bring relief to Hezbollah, which controls the failed state of Lebanon. Nasrallah's shock troops remain positioned to strike Israel when the Teheran mullahs give the order.

In the final analysis, Israel's fate is not in its own hands. We are burning through our ammunition and military supplies. We can't sustain a war against the Iranian Empire without US backing. Moreover, one of the unintended consequences of the Hamas attack on October 7^th is that it catalyzed a global tsunami of anti-Israelism and antisemitism from New York to Melbourne and from Pretoria to London.

Yet this much is clear: Defeat in Gaza – meaning leaving Hamas capable of fighting another day and the Palestinian polity emboldened in its zero-sum goal of Israel's destruction – will only make things worse for the Diaspora.

This is the unadorned reality as we begin the Day 156 of the Gaza war. Yazan Kafarneh does not deserve to suffer. Yet those responsible for his misery - and the sufferings of the other innocent Palestinian children in Gaza - are about to get away with it unless the US administration comes to its senses.

Day 150 of the October 7 Gaza War

I find myself irritated with Benny Ganz for making a solo trip to Washington today without Cabinet backing. I am annoyed with Netanyahu for failing to instill unity in his war cabinet. He has long mis-led by example.

I can't say I am disappointed at VP Kamala Harris for using a civil rights backdrop to hold forth about a Hamas-Israel ceasefire. It was a cheap, tendentious gimmick.

I appreciate that wokes, Muslims, and African Americans have lost patience with Joe Biden for standing with Israel. I know they are core constituencies in the Democratic Party, and their empathies lie with the Palestinians, not the Israelis. 

Some Democrats in Congress want to save UNWRA even though it is riddled with Hamas functionaries and has as its mandate to keep Palestinian refugees – refugees in perpetuity. Other Democrats want to save Hamas leaders hunkering down in Rafiah from the IDF. There's a lot of Democratic energy on Capitol Hill and at the White House devoted to rescuing Hamas from its deserved fate.

I well appreciate that Israel, under Netanyahu's botched leadership, has failed to offer a strategic plan for Gaza, created a military and humanitarian vacuum, and done so in an already hostile media and international political environment.

Be that as it may, there is a consensus among ordinary Israelis that Hamas must be defanged, that it can not again be the sovereign in Gaza. Sure, there will always be Palestinian Arab terrorism – after all,  the Palestinian polity rejects a national homeland for the Jewish people in any part of our country and has done so for over 100 years.

That is why the PLO and Hamas do not want a Palestinian state and have blocked one at every juncture.

Tens of thousands of Israelis remain dislocated at our border with Lebanon (which is controlled by Hezbollah) and at our border with Gaza.

The IDF is taking casualties daily. Barely a day goes by without an IDF funeral. Thousands of young men have suffered life-changing war injuries.

Hezbollah and Hamas continue to shoot and launch rockets and weaponized drones.

Hamas cares not a whit for non-combatant Gazans. It uses them as fodder for its propaganda. As sacrifices for its jihad. It never offered the Palestinian masses the protection of its vast tunnel network. And the chic kafiyah wearers who shill for Hamas don't mob Times Square or Trafalgar Square for the war victims in the Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, and Yemen – and we all know why they are so decerning in their humanitarian concerns.

Life in Israel has taken on a new "war normal." Yes, many of us hope for the Netanyahu government's demise, but I have little faith in Benny Ganz. Simply not being Netanyahu is a low bar for leadership. He – and Yair Lapid, too, unfortunately – has been pushing to exchange Israeli captives for dangerous Palestinian terrorists without knowing if any of our hostages are even alive. I find this scandalous—this willingness to gamble the safety of 9 million Israelis for an unknown number of captives or remains. While giving Hamas the respite it craves.

No one on the political horizon inspires confidence, not in Israel and not in America.

 

 

 

What Losing in Gaza Would Look Like for Israel & What it Means Regarding Lebanon

The chiefs of the CIA and Mossad are scheduled to hold hostage talks with 

Qatari and Egyptian spymasters who are in contact with Hamas.

It smells like a deal is in the air.

In almost any possible "deal," the price for Israel would be

 defeat in Gaza.

And if we lose in Gaza, it would be futile to embark on a war with Hezbollah. 

Losing would entail (1) an open-ended break in fighting, (2) exchanging hundreds if not thousands of terrorists with blood on their hands for the remaining captives or corpses, (3) a photo op of Hamas leaders strolling through the wreckage of Gaza (4) not seizing control of the Phildelphi corridor (5) failure to facilitate a Palestinian Authority 2.0 to take over in the Strip and (6) not insisting in any armistice that the Palestinian Authority 2.0 lease us the right to the 1-kilometer-wide buffer zone we are clearing on our border with Gaza so there is no “war crime” claim. 

The instant it is clear we did not fail in Gaza, the troubles with Hezbollah will fall into place. 

We will be in a credible position to insist that Hezbollah pull back north of the Litani. 

We should offer them a face-saving cosmetic border concession in the Har Dov area. 

But if we trade captives and corpses for a Gaza defeat, we might as well sue for peace with Hezbollah on their terms.

Netanyahu held a news conference last night, and too much attention was paid to what he said about a Palestinian state

Hi Elliot,

I expect you anticipated I’d be trying to understand & seeking your views on this;

what do you think about Netanyahu’s latest ( at least latest here) statement suggesting that a 2 state solution is impossible ? is it ( to my mind a not very subtle ) negotiating 1st position that he can then climb down from and meet in what looks like a compromise position but closer to his wishes than it would have been if he had started in what one would think of as a more reasonable place or is it indeed where he sees the end place as being? how much support does he get from the people? and if not much what hope of doing anything about it? can there/ will there be elections while the war is on? I think you suggested that even if there were the numbers don’t suggest the government would necessarily change to 1 that was less right wing.

 

The headline writers in the foreign media came away from Binyamin Netanyahu’s “news conference” last night with the revelation that he had “publicly” rejected the “US push for a Palestinian state.”  

He did warn rather disingenuously that when he was gone, Israel would have wobbly leaders who would allow a militarized Palestinian state. “I can say something about what they call the day after Netanyahu. I do not love to speak of myself in the third person. But those who speak of the day after Netanyahu are talking about the creation of a Palestinian state led by the Palestinian Authority…”

Personally, I look forward to hearing him one day say, Nixon-like, "You won't have Netanyahu to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." We should live and be well.

On Thursday night, however, all Netanyahu did was reiterate that he opposes a state that could threaten Israel. As most of us Israelis do.

Mainly, his “news conference,” which aired just before the main news programs, was orchestrated so that Netanyahu could attack the mainstream media and feed his brainwashed base. Last night was not primarily about the Palestinian issue. He lied, dissembled, and evaded – about his dysfunctional relationship with his cabinet and the medications he supposedly arranged to be provided to our captives.

Personally, I would have told the BBC and Guardian not to stop the presses over his remarks about a Palestinian state.

The two-state solution mantra has no resonance for Israelis like me. Not at this juncture. Not when polls show that 82 percent of Palestinian Arabs back the butchery of October 7. Not when we are in the middle of a war that is bleeding us. When we have lost over 1,400 soldiers and civilians. Thousands of soldiers and reservists have been wounded, including an untold number with life-changing injuries. Tens of thousands of citizens have been dislocated from our boundary with Lebanon and our border with Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of families have been upended because fathers, mothers, sisters, sons, and partners have been called up for reserve duty. And when the families of our captives are stuck in a limbo of anguish and torment. 

For the only way to bring our captives home now is by trading them for bloodthirsty terrorists in our prisons, including those involved in the October 7 atrocities. Yet Hamas will not discuss even such a lopsided trade unless we declare defeat, pull out of Gaza, and let it resume governing the Strip. 

Most Israelis do not want to capitulate to Hamas.

So, I am not much in the mood to talk about a Palestinian state – especially since the Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly rejected one. Not when they have yet to accept the idea of a national homeland for the Jewish people in any part of Palestine. We can't want a Palestinian state more than the Palestinians. And Arab-conducted polls before October 7 show the Palestinians reject a two-state solution.

The PLO/PA, crooked and discredited, has demonstrated it is incapable of creating an infrastructure for a Palestinian state. It has opposed normalization and coexistence with Israel. 

The West Bank and Gaza will need some trusteeship. Or a Palestinian Authority 2.0 – whatever.

Right now, though, I want to see Hamas and the other Islamist groups in Gaza (and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Battalions in the West Bank) defanged so that they do not pose a threat to Israel and can’t govern in the Strip or Judea and Samaria.

If we succeed in Gaza, Lebanon will fall into place. If we fail, it will whet Hezbollah’s appetite.

The campaign needs time. Unfortunately, the government is in disarray, so decisions are not being made – about who should run Gaza in places where there is no fighting and about the strategic Philadelphi corridor separating Gaza from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, for example. Hence, as Israel pulls out of north Gaza, we are seeing Hamas policemen in uniform returning to Gaza's streets.  

Getting back to the “two-state solution.” Yes, it is presently impossible since the Palestinians need to accept the idea of a demilitarized state. Every recent Israeli prime minister, including Netanyahu in 2009 – with the exception of Naftali Bennett – is on record as accepting a Palestinian state. No Israeli prime minister will tolerate a Palestinian state that is militarized or will have unlimited sovereignty that would allow it to invite Iran to set up a forward base down the road from Ben-Gurion Airport.

Netanyahu has never been as politically enfeebled as he is today, not because he opposes a PLO or Hamas-led state overlooking our cities but because he allowed us to be caught unprepared after spending months dividing the country and after forming an extremist government that would protect him as he navigated corruption trials.

There is a small but growing movement for elections during the war. I am not sure it is a good idea. But if the war continues to be mismanaged, there may be no choice. The best solution would be for Likud to depose Netanyahu, but he has created a party in his image that is indebted to him, and his internal opponents don’t trust each other.

The polls I see show Likud capturing about 16 seats out of 120 if elections were held today. Remember, no Israeli party in the country’s history has ever won an outright majority. Yesh Atid, led by Yair Lapid – the party I am inclined to support – gets a meager 13 seats. Benny Ganz, the Hamlet-like leader of the National Camp and now a war cabinet minister, would get 39 seats and presumably form the next coalition. The extremist messianic settler parties would get 14 seats. The ultra-Orthodox haredim would get about 15 seats. Meretz (but not Labor) would make it into the Knesset with four seats – in pre-October 7 days, they favored a Palestinian state almost unconditionally.

As a security hawk, I oppose Netanyahu for his corruption, ineptitude, judicial putsch, and – having led the country from 2009 to 2021 and again since December 29, 2022 – for the October 7 debacle. (*) That does not mean he is wrong about Hamas or the PLO. However, he is dead wrong in refusing to make clear what Israel is for. 

By not saying what Israel wants, Netanyahu is opening the door for Hamas or some other nefarious actor to fill the power vacuum, and to provide the answers to questions he refuses to address. I already mentioned that Hamas police are back on the streets in northern Gaza.

He is wrong for playing partisan politics during wartime, refusing to make peace with Yoav Gallant, his defense minister, and repeatedly playing the gullible Ganz for a fool.

But since voters seem to identify with him, it may well be that Ganz is the one who will have the last laugh.

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(*) Netanyahu also held power from 1993 to 1996.