With Genocidal Intent

"Our hearts are with you. May Allah protect Israel and its people. We will not let the treacherous hand of Iran and its agents in Gaza reach the Israeli people."
"It’s time to say this out loud: confronting the terror of Hamas is the responsibility of all the countries in the region and of the international community [as a whole], not only of Israel."
"I say to the Arabs…: Do you want these murderers and agents of Iran to rule Jerusalem?!"
Abd Al-Hamid Al-Hakim, Saudi intellectual, former director, Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia


"The campaign isn't over, and demands patience and judiciousness."
"We're getting ready for what comes next."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"We felt happy every time a rocket was fired from Gaza, but at the same time, we were so scared of the consequences."
"I was afraid to become one of the innocent people who will be killed or wounded and remain disabled for life."
"But thank God, it's quiet and calm now, and I hope this calm will be beneficial this time and last a long time."
Tareq al-Shurafa, 27, unemployed university graduate, Gaza City 

"Israel and Hamas seem destined for more of these violent outbursts."
"The Israeli government is focused on keeping the quiet in the south, and not regime change, which would likely sacrifice the lives of many soldiers."
"But any concession Israel grants to Gaza, Hamas will use to rearm itself for the next round of fighting."
Reserves Brig.-Gen.Udi Dekel

"We hope that the situation will change in the future, but from the past I know that nothing will change."
"[The rest of the world] pressures Israel that you can't send the army into Gaza, but that's the only solution."
Alon Davidi, Sderot mayor

"Because Hamas has refused to accept Israel as a state, refused to move toward disarmament, refused to declare a long-term ceasefire and stop launching rockets, we have all the right to maintain the blockade as long as we can avert a humanitarian crisis."
"If we open the borders, do you believe that Hamas will disarm itself and not produce new rockets in its factories?"
Eitan Dangot, former commander, COGAT, Israeli defence unit responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs

Israel's Iron Dome missile-defense system.  AP

It is a dilemma like no other. One nation returned to its heritage roots post-historical destruction and resulting diffusion globally of its ethnic and religious people in a vast diaspora where they were never quite accepted as citizens, held to be alien, accustomed to ghettoization, preyed upon, discriminated against, suffered numerous new expulsions and mass murder finally leading to a monumentally successful genocide.

Another ethnic group calling itself a new 'nation' refusing to recognize and acknowledge the legitimacy of the new state, vowing its extermination and the 'recovery' of the land to be re-apportioned to a later invasion of migrants from countries in the Middle East.

Israel, since its dedication as a Jewish state in 1948 has never since stopped defending itself from violent attacks by its neighbours. Arabs calling themselves Palestinians (despite that the original Palestinians were Jews that never joined the diaspora) have never stopped militantly attacking the Jews calling themselves Israeli.

As an example of just how removed the Arabs in Gaza are from regarding their Jewish counterparts as neighbours, from the mouth of 27-year-old Tareq al-Shurafa, the sentiment that he would be an 'innocent' victim should he fall in retaliation by the IDF from indiscriminate rocket fire from Hamas into Israel where he considers any deaths there to be a matter of celebration for any Israelis' lives lost cannot be considered those of innocent lives lost.

A picture taken on May 5, 2019 from the Israel-Gaza border shows a barrage of rockets being fired from the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave. (Jack Guez/AFP)

A more deep-rooted, hostile adversarial attitude cannot be imagined, but it is the result of relentless slander and deliberate indoctrination of Palestinians by their leadership from cradle onward to regard Jews in their midst as an abomination, the Jewish presence an insult to Islam, and belief that Jews have no agenda other than to victimize and slaughter innocent Arabs whose only crime is that they will not accept the presence of a usurping multitude whose arrival disentitled Arabs from their land.

What the Arab world regarded as a foreign invasion by Jews into Arab-dominated and Islamic consecrated land, and which Europe has been persuaded to believe through a clever Palestinian campaign of public relations victimhood portraying themselves as innocent victims of Jewish malevolence has resulted in is an isolation of Israel in the framework of the United Nations, faulting the nation for every conceivable human rights abuse imaginable.

At the very time that human rights abusers run rampant over the various committees of the United Nations, controlling and steering them toward ongoing accusations and condemnations in the General Assembly and its numerous arms against solely one country, the state of Israel. When Israel unilaterally left the coastal strip of Gaza, removing its settlers and its protective soldiers, what resulted was not a Palestinian response of building on a civil infrastructure for Gazan Palestinians but increased violence and chaos.

And when Hamas violently wrenched Gaza from its ideological adversary Fatah, it began its iron grip on the two million Palestinians living there, imposing on them restrictions and restraints to normal life. The blockade of entry to Israel by Palestinians living in Gaza resulted from bloody attacks by Palestinians bombing Israeli sites and killing Israeli citizens, not only Jews but Druze and Christians.

An Israeli police sapper holds part of an exploded Qassam rocket fired from the Gaza Strip in a village near the Gaza border, May 5, 2019. (AP/Tsafrir Abayov)

Hamas is adamant; its charter calls for the destruction of Israel. It boasts of its rocket-making industry, perfecting range and accuracy. It builds underground tunnels at horrendous cost, diverting aid funding from Europe and the UN for the Palestinians it governs, to pay for the construction materials required for the tunnels. It trains children in summer camps to become future terrorists instilling in them a pride for committing acts of violence against Jews.

Hamas impoverishes Palestinians in Gaza, leaving them hugely unemployed while the elite among them, members of Hamas can afford luxurious homes and expensive vehicles. When Hamas lobs rockets into Israeli border towns like Sderot it terrorizes thousands of Israeli children, traumatized and endangered, in effect taunting Israel to respond and in so doing target the launch sites which have been placed in crowded civilian areas of Gaza City.

The world's solution to this intransigent problem of viral hatred and intention to destroy a nation and its citizens, is a collective, disinterested shrug of so-be-it. Yet international public opinion has it that Israel restrain its impulse to retaliate, to once and for all, mount a massive campaign to destroy its enemies emboldened by the world's support seeing them as 'underdogs' and Israel as the aggressor. And this is what the Jewish state has accommodated itself to living with.

The Arab and Persian worlds are on a collision course, however. The majority Sunni and minority Shia sects of Islam both of which utterly despise the offshoots of either sect as insults to Islam, pretenders as Muslim, each have taken to viewing one another as mortal enemies; the hostility between Fatah and Hamas writ large, encompassing the entire Middle East, with Iran squatting as a grotesque beast awaiting its opportunity to prevail with influence and control reflecting its production of ballistic missiles and the search for nuclear warheads to subdue its detractors and gain the coveted position of Islamist command along with its goal to annihilate the state of Israel for which goal it supplies Hamas and Hezbollah with munitions and funding.

"Since the Hamas coup and its takeover of Gaza, the [Gaza] Strip has been suffering mismanagement which has caused [its residents] to lose even the most basic services, [namely] power and water."
"[All this is] due to the foolish policy of Hamas, which does nothing but fire a few rockets that fall even before they reach their target, and which achieve no balance [of power] and exert no political pressure."
"It ends with Israeli strikes that destroy the Gaza Strip’s infrastructures."
Mut’ab Al-Jabrin, Saudi intellectual