Tag Archives: gaza

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com).

Why does the world dislike Palestinians?

This is the inescapable conclusion derived from the disparate treatment shown to Palestinian refugees as opposed to other global refugees. Just in the last few decades, the Western world has absorbed millions of refugees fleeing sundry conflicts – Iraqi refugees, Afghan refugees, Syrian refugees, Haitian refugees, not to mention the millions of illegal migrants that the United States has welcomed from South and Central America and from distressed areas on earth.

Only Palestinian refugees are treated differently. The other refugees were escorted out of war zones to safe havens as international humanitarian law requires. They were not told that they must remain in the crossfire of conflict or that the world will surge humanitarian aid to them. They were not told that Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Bashar al-Assad, and other brutes would be held accountable for their welfare or suffer adverse consequences. In most cases, the nearest country accepted these refugees until they found sanctuary elsewhere. In the last two decades, more than thirty million global refugees have been brought to safety.

Only Palestinian refugees are treated differently. Egypt, without repercussion, was allowed to deny safe passage for Gazan civilians through its territory. Imagine how differently our defensive war against Hamas would have been waged if these “civilians” had been extricated immediately. Instead, they were forced to remain and are still forced to remain. It is not only that Hamas has physically barred their departure, which is cruel enough but logical given their effective use as human shields against Israel. It is also that the United States, as repeatedly asserted by Antony Blinken, has made it one of its strategic goals that not a single Gazan be displaced. So, they are forced to suffer and die, some through direct execution by Hamas and others by indirect execution – compelled to serve as human shields and dramatize their suffering for the world and thus besmirching Israel’s image.

So why does the world dislike Palestinians?

One reason might be widespread recognition of the fabricated Palestinian national identity, a fiction that is roughly a century old and invented primarily to thwart Jewish nationalism. It is not a group that has a historic homeland or national identity, which was ever independent, or that can sustain an independent state, the delusions of the world notwithstanding. Palestinian nationalism, such as it exists, has attracted a disproportionate share of the world’s attention since Yasser Arafat arrived on the world scene with his holstered gun, hijackings, bombings, kidnappings, and monetary extortion. This was for the second reason the world dislikes Palestinians: it is because in whatever country they have lived, they routinely foment strife, violence, social unrest, and even civil war. Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait are among the Arab countries that have suffered severely since so-called Palestinians migrated to their countries. Gazans have no place to go because even in the Arab world they are not wanted as those countries fear the consequences of even temporarily housing these people.

Nevertheless, the world’s dislike of Palestinians pales before the world’s hatred of Israel and the Jewish national idea. Much of the world – including nations deemed our friends – desperately does not want Israel to win our current wars. We have reached somewhat of an impasse in the battles in Gaza and south Lebanon. Our enemies have been ravaged by our dedicated and intrepid soldiers and deterrence has been mostly but not completely restored. Gaza has been justly devastated – but its population mostly remains. And, sadly, it is inconceivable that it can be reformed or civilized such that Gazans will live peacefully with us. It is inevitable that these Gazans civilians will return to terror at the earliest opportunity, under the name Hamas or under some group that will bear a new name but retain its jihadist hatred of Israel and Jews. To think that Gazans will dwell in serenity even governing their own affairs is the sort of delusional thinking that has guided Israeli statecraft since Oslo.

Since victory eludes us – victory traditionally defined as permanent loss to the enemy of the territory used for its aggression – we have entered one of the worst stages of war: our soldiers are daily killed trying to retain territory that has already been conquered twice before in this war, not to mention three times before in previous wars. We are bled daily by these guerrilla attacks – explosives in buildings and on roads, and the occasional sniper – without any articulated plan that can permanently change the strategic equation. We mourn our losses – but do little to prevent future ones. These days, our enemies gain no strategic advantage by shooting their rockets, missiles, and drones at us; they just lust for Jewish blood. What can frustrate those malevolent desires?

Israel has carved out a military zone in which Gazans are not supposed to enter and that too irks the world, our enemies, and our friends, which resents any limitations on Gazans’ movements. We are living the conundrum that the world demands humanitarian aid for Gazans, while that same aid will serve little purpose other than allow them to stay, eventually rebuild, and reconstitute their terror machine.

It should be clear to all that much of Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable and will be so for years to come. Evacuation of Gazan civilians – in numbers that are relatively miniscule compared to the other global refugees evacuated in the last two decades – is the most moral approach to their future wellbeing, the stability of this region, and the security of the State of Israel. The entire terror infrastructure built by Hamas may never be fully discovered, so diabolical and so embedded in Gaza it is. Evacuation of those who might control and exploit that infrastructure, now and in the future, is the only way to preserve our security and prevent future brutal invasions of our land.

Israel erred in not demanding the evacuation of Gazan civilians at the very beginning of the war. Instead, the government caved to world demands that humanitarian aid be rushed into Gaza, which prolonged the war, on the absurd pretext uttered by the likes of Blinken and Kamala Harris that Israel’s “number one priority” in this war must be the welfare of Gazan civilians. That is palpably false, and a standard to which no nation in history has been held.

Even if were true, the true welfare of Gazan civilians necessitated their immediate evacuation from the war zone. It still does. Gazan civilians, even those of indeterminate number who do not loathe Israel and seek our demise, will never be able to break away from extreme elements in their society who preach violence, jihad, and destruction of Israel as reasonable endeavors and justifiable objective to which they should dedicate their lives and those of their children.

There will be pundits and experts who will say that the world will never allow the evacuation of Gazans and will demand they all stay and rebuild, come what may. They will also say that Israel should not govern that territory but consent to local governance or maybe some Arab coalition. They will say that Israel will always have the right of self-defense if attacked – but then when Israel is attacked, as we invariably will be with rockets, drones, and missiles, they will then say that it is not worth a war. In effect, we will again acquiesce to Arab aggression against us, while knowing these hostile elements remain unreconciled to our very existence. We have been down this sorry road so many times and at such a terrible cost that one wonders why we pay any attention to these pundits and experts.

If the world will not allow the evacuation of “innocent civilians” from a war zone for unclear reasons and we cannot allow them to stay for obvious reasons, then we are at an impasse. But as long as they remain, our troops and our civilian population are in danger.

The war in the Lebanon will not be won militarily until Israel fully controls the land up to the Litani River and barring a Lebanese civilian presence – at least, those unvetted – south of the Litani, and it will not be won politically until the Lebanese people rise up and expel Hezbollah and its supporters from their government and their midst. Otherwise, Lebanon is rightly responsible for every aggressive act that emanates from its territory. And if this uprising causes a civil war, so be it. It would not be the first or second civil war in Lebanon. Better that they fight for a stable polity than we should fight and die because they refuse to do so. And if they refuse to expel the jihadist murderers who dwell among them, then they should be ready to pay a steep price for that reluctance, and not just in the terror stronghold of Dahiyeh.

Similarly, the war in Gaza will not be won militarily or politically as long as a hostile population survives that will regroup as terrorists, recruit more avid participants from the youngsters in that population, and do not feel the loss of the land that is under their feet. There is no more vivid way of demonstrating their defeat than by resettling parts of Gaza.

We must retain the tiny territory of Gaza as a symbol of victory – but to retain the land and maintain the population there is to sow the seeds of the next round of conflict, endure more rockets and incursions, and come to this same crossroads after still more deaths and desolation – ours and theirs.

Could these evacuated Gazans be repatriated at some point in the future? Certainly, if and when they are purified of their hatred and amend their priorities in life accordingly.

How will the world that dislikes them but hates us respond? Probably not well at first, with all the threats of embargoes and sanctions that they use now to constrain our right of self-defense.

But we are first and foremost a moral people, and elementary morality demands that innocent civilians be extricated from a war zone. At every opportunity, we must hammer home the notion that morality demands not the provision of food and fuel in an environment that is unsustainable, but evacuation to more pleasant climes in which they can relinquish their fantasies of killing Jews and focus on raising their children and making a positive contribution to the societies that embrace them. Our diplomacy should be focused on advocating for this moral imperative – and it is vital to our survival as long as substantial elements in their society harbor the fantasy of destroying Israel. We ignore that fantasy at our peril.

Perhaps the criminal gang known as UNWRA – soon to be expelled from Israel – can embrace this goal as their final act before its future dissolution. Rather than continue to perpetuate refugee status and actively foment terror against Jews, UNRWA can provide a new life outside of this region for the hundreds of thousands of refugees under its aegis.

Evacuation of Gazans to the West will ultimately please the Arab world also, especially those who have suffered from Palestinian violence and intimidation. There is plenty of money in the Arab world to contribute to this resettlement; indeed, it will cost far less to resettle them than to rebuild Gaza. And most Gazan civilians would love nothing more than to leave.

Hatred of Israel is a powerful motivator in much of the world. A strong Israel frightens the West – including secular Europe and America – as it makes the Bible and its prophecies all too real. It is high time that we shift the narrative of morality, expose the immorality of the West who also use the Palestinians as pawns, and do what is right and proper.

We need to save ourselves from the Palestinians – but they need to be saved from themselves and their worst impulses. We can buy time until the next conflagration soon erupts or we can try to transform the strategic situation. That can only be accomplished through evacuation now, the moral approach.

(First published today at Israelnationalnews.com)

The National Guard is patrolling New York City subways to keep the people safe and even that is not working. There are homeless encampments in every major city, cities which are already being overrun by the millions of illegal migrants that are crossing America’s porous borders. The United States is $34.5 trillion in debt. And Chuck Schumer thinks that Israel’s government needs to be changed.

Schumer’s obscene outburst – which he has since tried to partially retract – was revolting both in style and substance. Yes, who is he? This gross interference in Israel’s domestic affairs exposes the hypocrisy of the Democrats who whined (falsely) about Putin’s alleged interference in America’s elections; yet, they have no hesitation at all interfering in Israel internal affairs – again. Both Clinton (1999) and Obama (2015) sent staff and money to try to defeat Binyamin Netanyahu. Now Schumer is doing Biden’s bidding in this vile display of contempt and condescension towards Israel, our electorate, and our government.

Schumer has always fancied himself Israel’s shomer, a play on his name, but he has more consistently been, throughout his career, a schemer, a partisan Democrat hack. Schumer, who has the distinction of achieving the highest elected office of any American Jew now has the dishonor of being the highest elected American Jewish official ever to betray Israel. Let us not forget that it was Chuck Schumer who in 2015 pushed through Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran that will (barring some intervention) enable them to produce nuclear weapons and provided them up front with billions of dollars in cash that was and is being used to murder Jews. Having ensured there were enough votes not to override the dirty deal in the Senate, the oleaginous Schumer voted against it (to save face in the Jewish community, which bought it).

Besides calling for elections in Israel and the defeat and removal of Netanyahu, whom he deemed “an obstacle to peace,” Schumer emitted this gem: “The world has changed, radically, since [October 7], and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” By this he meant that the path to “peace” lies through indulging the two-state delusion. Well…talk about being stuck in the past.

The “two-state delusion” is not October 6 thinking. It is November 1947 thinking. It is an archaic, discredited, wholly deranged idea that rewards terror and will only encourage the enemy to plot more, to attack more, and to bomb more because there is literally no downside to it. The Knesset made this quite clear just a few weeks ago. An unprecedented 99 MK’s voted against an imposed “Palestinian state,” and close to 80% of Israelis oppose it as well. It’s not Netanyahu or Smotrich or Ben Gvir – it’s us, it’s the people, it’s common sense, it’s elementary morality.

Sure, “the world has changed radically” since October 7. Evil is ascendant across the globe. Rather than fight and destroy it, Schumer, Biden, Blinken and many in the Democratic Party want to appease it in the finest tradition of Neville Chamberlain. But Israel is not South Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Taiwan, all abandoned by the US in one way or another. They can either aid Israel in this struggle or not. But if US military aid is only granted not with strings but with chains, Israel does have the capability and the obligation to protect our interests.

Israel cannot prevail with this type of US support, the kind that demands – as Antony Blinken unctuously intoned, words then read verbatim by his water-carrier Schumer – that Israel’s “priority number one” must be the protection of Gaza’s civilians. No, no, no. That is depraved, preposterous, and defeatist. The fate of Gazan civilians should not be in the top ten of Israel’s concerns – or as much as the fate of enemy civilians was America’s concern in Germany, Japan, or Vietnam. In truth, but for Israel’s excessive concern about enemy civilians, we would have fewer dead soldiers and the war would be over by now. The stated war objectives are destroying Hamas’ terror capability, liberating our hostages, and ensuring that Gaza is never again a center of terror. Gazan civilians – the ones whose homes all had tunnels and were used as weapons depots – are not our problem. Months ago, they should have been resettled elsewhere – perhaps in the US, which annually admits millions of people who have identical problematic pasts.

Despite Blinken’s blathering, our concern should prioritize our civilians – those who were murdered, those who were kidnapped, and those who remain homeless because of the predations of our enemies. Blinken never mentions displaced Jews – only displaced Gazans. His priorities are skewed and should never be ours. We must never intentionally target civilians – and we never do – but that is wholly different than prioritizing their safety at the cost of victory.

What are we missing? Why is Schumer, like a lapdog with a bone, suddenly obsessed with a Palestinian state? What do the Democrats – and the Israeli left – not understand? Why do even genuine supporters continue to speak of coexistence as if, with just a little more goodwill, it is right over the horizon?

There is a missing piece to this puzzle.

In a private conversation some thirty years ago as the Oslo debacle unfolded, I spoke with a former State Department official, a former ambassador, and someone gung-ho about the prospects for peace in the Middle East (always just a few more Israeli concessions away). I asked him one simple question: “what if this is all a ruse? What if the real objective of the Arab countries is to destroy Israel, and all the peace process does is incrementally weaken Israel until it is ripe for conquest?”

His answer was telling and frightening. He said: “We do not factor in that possibility at all. If we did, we could never have a peace process.” It emerges that the likeliest explanation for all the terror, the missiles, the invasions, the wars, the bombings, the stabbings, the ramming, and the incitement – that many Arabs reject Israel’s very existence and always will – is never a consideration in the halls of diplomacy. It is this missing piece, this willful blindness, that shapes international diplomacy and now has produced the wailing for the “two-state delusion.” Would it not endanger Israel’s existence? No, say the grand poohbahs of diplomacy, because they have categorically ruled out that Israel’s existence is in danger and that our enemies want us dead.

Think of how we could change the world as we know it if we just ignored inconvenient facts. Why, human beings could fly… if we ignore the effects of gravity. And perhaps with enough international goading, and the magical words uttered by the right people that produce the ostentatious signing ceremony, Israel can be convinced that it can really fly, far and high.

Two months ago, my wife sat on a plane next to an American Israeli woman from a leftist kibbutz in the south who was also returning to Israel. Asked if she supports the “two state delusion,” the woman demurred. Everyone else on her kibbutz did before the Hamas massacre, but she did not. Why not? She explained that she studied just a few years earlier for a graduate degree in London, and there befriended some classmates who were from Gaza. Talking about politics, she questioned them about the two-state delusion, and, as she described it, they laughed at her. “We don’t want two states. We will not rest until we destroy Israel. You have no right to live on any part of that land – our land. And we don’t care how long it takes.”

So many of Israel’s devoted defenders have publicly repudiated the accusation that Gaza was “occupied,” and that the “occupation” was the cause of the invasion, because, indeed, Israel (foolishly) abandoned Gaza in 2005. All true – but it misses the point.

To our enemies, Gaza is occupied, as are Ashkelon, Beer Sheva, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Yerushalayim, Tzfat, and Kiryat Shemonah. That is the sum and substance of the “river to the sea” chant. Why do we ignore what they are saying? Why do we act horrified when we point out “that means no Israel!” Duh – that is exactly what they mean. Why do we pretend otherwise? We do so because we are loathe to consider the implications, but that does make it any less true.

Freed from the illusion that peace will ever be possible with enemies who will never stop and never give up, our entire statecraft should change. Our strategies, our public presentation, and our narrative cannot be the same. We would not just be managing the conflict. Our settlement policies would be efficient and coherent, not protracted and reactions to terror. We would not worry about antagonizing our enemy because they cannot already be more antagonized.

We no longer have the luxury to fantasize that our enemies do not mean what they say. We must somehow get it through our skulls that too many Arabs – in Gaza, Judea, Samaria, Lebanon, Syria, and even among Israeli Arabs, not to mention the Iranians – want to smother us and strangle our reborn state. And there is not much we can do to change that. We can through strength, vigilance, and fierce determination convince them that in the short term, their dream is dead. They will not defeat us and we should prove that by re-claiming Gaza and dispossessing them. But we should not allow continued residence in the land of Israel to those who harbor these genocidal fantasies. No one should live here – from the river to the sea – who does not want to dwell in the Jewish state of Israel.

To be sure, the Abraham Accords demonstrated that there are Arabs and Muslims throughout the region who respect our existence and sovereignty. There have always been such voices in the Arab world, although many have been muted, silenced, and killed over the last century. Time will tell if this friendship is based on love of Mordechai (the Jew) or hatred of Haman (the Persian). But if we refuse to acknowledge this basic truth – that those who are our enemies will never be reconciled to our existence – that nothing will change, even if Hamas is destroyed in Gaza.

If we ignore this reality, painful as it is, we will wake up the day after to still more rockets, bombs, stabbings, and shootings. We will be lamenting how hard it is to be a Jew in Israel rather than lamenting how hard we make it on ourselves to be a Jew in Israel because we choose to ignore reality. Perhaps it will take new leaders untainted by conceptions, fantasies, and illusions, and willing to tell the truth to our citizenry, to recognize what has been obvious for most of the last century. There is a reason Arabs have rejected the two-state delusion consistently from 1937-2024. They do not want us here and they will never abandon that dream. The fact that we do not mind having some of them here – we welcome co-existence if they recognize our rights and our sovereignty – does not alter the reality that many of them do not want us here. And they prove that almost daily through acts of terror and violence, through the propaganda and incitement they feed their children in school and their worshippers in the mosques, and through their explicit statements.

But this is why Schumer can say what he says, and Biden and Blinken can carry on as they do, and Israel’s left can continue to foster the illusion that if only they were in power, we would be the darlings of the Middle East, eating hummus in Damascus because they would know how to make peace with our enemies who feel religiously compelled to destroy us. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the Oslo crowd is resuscitating itself before our eyes hoping we have short memories.

Perhaps it is time that our leaders spoke frankly to us, to the Americans, and to the world, about our intentions in the land of Israel. We are fools if we again relinquish Gaza having conquered it for the third time, fools if we indulge the diplomatic delusions of Americans and Europeans, fools if we worry about enemy civilians more than we do our own, and fools if we pay no attention to what our enemies say and mean.

Perhaps we would benefit if we, a “wise and understanding people” as the Torah describes us, started acting like it, with pride and confidence in our national mission.