Unravelling Israeli Sovereignty

"Real sympathy with the Palestinian people means searching for solutions for an actual and practical peace that guarantees their safety, security, and development. The solutions should also stop those [Hamas] who are ready to burn Palestine and its people."

"[The Hamas terrorist group] was well prepared for this war by building trenches in which its members can take shelter, while innocent Palestinians were being killed. Hamas likes to play the role of victim and kill Palestinians to win Arab, Islamic and international sympathy."

"Some ask, is this the right time to present the crimes of Hamas.? This is precisely the best time to do so. The reader can conduct a quick search on the Internet to learn about the crimes that Hamas has committed against the Palestinians. Hamas has the right to destroy its homes with its own hands, but it has no right to destroy the homes of Palestinians and underestimate their blood and the blood of their children."

"Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons do not care about the suffering or interests of the Palestinians. They only care about demonizing those who stand against them. Hamas is saying: Let the Palestinians die for the sake of a Muslim Brotherhood victory."

Saudi writer/researcher Abdulah Bin Binjad Al Otaibi 

"Abbas wants to cover up for this decision to postpone the Palestinian elections so that he can continue to sit on the presidential chair at the expense of Palestinian blood. Hamas aspires to increase its popularity and drain the pockets of those who see it as a resistance movement by launching futile missiles that harm it more than doing any good."

"A few months ago, we were very happy with the signing of the Abraham Peace Accords [with Israel], which the people rely on to create peace that benefits everyone politically, economically and socially,"  "But the extremists are working to kill this dream. It is sad that some are working hard for peace, while others are working hard for the sake of war and the continuation of the conflict."

Emirati writer Al-Sheikh Wuldalsalek

Air Strikes in Gaza   EPA

Geographically, Israel is a tiny sliver of a country. As such it wasn't too much to ask for, for the remnants of world Jewry following World War II when the total number of diaspora Jews was reduced by six million men, women and children. And the singular event of the Holocaust convinced Jews that there was no country where Jews had residence, whether for a thousand years or a hundred, that would bother itself to give security to its Jewish civilian population (with rare exceptions).

Throughout history in the millennia of the diaspora, Jews became accustomed to keeping a low profile, hoping not to bring attention to themselves. They lived in Europe and throughout most of the world where happenstance took them, sometimes tolerated, sometimes not, but always vulnerable to a fallback scapegoat position of a tiny ethnic, cultural and religious minority among majority population of different heritage, culture and religions and often visceral hatred of Jews.

That tiny sliver of a country has produced miracles. As a nation dedicated to the preservation and safe security of Jews it has also absorbed, as a democratic state, people of other ethnic, cultural, social and religious groups as citizens of a Jewish state. In that state pioneering breakthroughs of another kind regularly take place in various areas of science and technology. Discoveries that render service to the world at large, from medical advances to agrarian and technological discoveries.

This country of great accomplishment whose science, medical research and allied breakthroughs give it recognition, has also in its over 70 years of existence, never started a war, though it has fought many, for its survival. It has some admirers and many critics. Who never tire of challenging the reality that is Israel's existence. From the horror of the immediate Holocaust years when the world witnessed the liberation of death camps and became knowledgeable of the hideous strategy to exterminate the Jewish identity and people, empathy has returned to the viral pathology of anti-Semitism.

In 1948 Israel was given permission by the great United Nations to form a sovereign nation out of that sliver of land representing a mere fragment of its ancestral heritage geography. Arabs, identifying themselves as 'Palestinians' (when the original Palestinians were in fact Jewish inhabitants of the land), refused the land they were offered under the UN's Partition Plan of equal opportunity. When combined Arab armies marched on the nascent Israel to destroy it, half of the Palestinians, some 700,000 people, left with plans to return once victory was assured.

At the very same time, a like number of Jews, Sephardic and Mizrahi who had lived for thousands of years in Arab lands were summarily exiled, becoming stateless refugees, and were welcomed to Israel where they found haven. Neither the Arab/Muslim nations in the Middle East nor the Palestinian Arabs themselves would give recognition to a Jewish state in the  geography; ongoing hostilities led to a number of wars until the final one that saw Israel take the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, east Jerusalem and in fact the Palestinian Territories in its defence from its enemies.

An Israeli soldier looks on as Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercept rockets launched from the Gaza Strip  Reuters

Returning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians did nothing to convince the Palestinian leadership that it would be in their best interests to live in peace, side by side, and to attain their own sovereignty through a mutual agreement with a fellow-nation it would give recognition to. The Palestinian Authority speaks of 'occupation', but it is one forced upon Israel by constant violence afflicting its people from incited Palestinians who are taught that 'resistance' (violence) against the 'enemy' (Israel), results in martyrdom for which they can anticipate financial rewards and/or Paradise.

During the First Intifada in 1987, the Palestinian uprising, conflict saw 1,200 Palestinians  and 150 Israelis die. And when the Palestinian leadership identified Palestinian collaborators with Israel they executed over 800 of their own people who preferred to live in peace with Israel rather than kill Jews and die as martyrs to the Palestinian 'cause', thus setting an example that other Palestinians with such dangerous ideas would be certain to avoid.

Of those Palestinians who remained in Israel, a number equal to those who fled, this 700,000 has swelled to 1,900,000, representing 21 percent of the total 9.2-million Israeli population. Not the 'apartheid' government that Israel-haters are so fond of declaring, but one that accepts its Palestinian population as citizen-Israelis. A month ago, before this current round of attacks between Gaza/Hamas and Israel, the Jewish People Policy Institute released an annual study on Israeli identity. 

The overwhelming majority of the 1.9 million the world knows as Palestinians, refer to themselves as Israeli-Arab (51 percent), or just Israeli (23 percent), with those who identify as Palestinians amounting to roughly 7 percent.

Yet in the West Bank and Gaza the Palestinian Authority (Fatah/PLO) and Hamas, celebrate the 'Naqba' (Catastrophe) which identifies the establishment of Israel in 1948. They could be celebrating 'Palestine' from that same date forward, had they not refused categorically to even consider accepting half the disputed territory as their own. In fact, the land originally envisaged as being offered to Israel was much greater in size, but was handed over to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan which had been ensconced there as compensation when the British Mandate helped the Saudis to claim Arabia as their own, displacing the Hashemites contesting Arabia as theirs.

There's a certain hypocritical similarity in the two situations which no one ever seems to linger on, all the more so when Jordan illegally occupied part of Jerusalem, the Judean city of antiquity, the Old City called Eastern Jerusalem where Judaism's most sacred symbol sits, under an Islamic shrine and mosque built on the twice-ruined Temple of Solomon. Under Jordan's rule, the Jews who had lived in East Jerusalem since time began were forcibly displaced and no Jews were permitted to enter the area,much less to pray at the Wailing Wall, the remnants of the Eastern Wall of the Temple.

Even before that Jews were massacred in Hebron, Sefad and a dozen other ancient Jewish communities in the 1920s by rampaging Arab/Muslim mobs in what is now Israel. And the Jews exiled in 1948 from Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya among other Arab states where Jews lived for thousands of years, might consider those events their own 'naqbas'. The designs of the Muslim Brotherhood in their alignment with the Nazis helped entrench anti-Semitism throughout the Arab world in the 1940s.

And what brings the situation to the present, is the break-away group from the Muslim Brotherhood that became Hamas with its charter outlining its intention to exterminate Israel, with their links to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the al Quds Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the great patrons of Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemeni Houthis, all happily conspiring toward the destruction of Israel, with the complacent disinterest of the West other than its instant recoil of disapprobation when Israel has the unmitigated gall to defend itself.

Palestinians inspect damage to buildings in Gaza City on May 20, 2021.  Fatima Shbair/Getty Images

"What’s different about this round is the fact that Hamas has managed – not just to fire missiles in the direction of my house or to bash Ashkelon with lots of rockets – but they have made Jerusalem, and Arab and Muslim claims and complaints about Jerusalem, into a focal point."

?They have incited Arab citizens of Israel to attack Jews, who attacked Arabs in return. They have helped start a conflict inside Israel, while inciting a mini-intifada in the West Bank and also sympathy rockets fired from Lebanon."

Yossi Alpher, former Israeli intelligence officer

 

Unleashing Conflict From A Terrorist Enclave

"Hamas issued an ultimatum recently to Israel, to have all Israeli police and soldiers removed from the al Aqsa plaza or else ... they would strike at the heart of Israel, meaning Tel Aviv. Al Aqsa has been used throughout Ramadan for stockpiling weapons and rocks used to attack Israeli police and, sometimes, Jewish worshippers at the wailing wall plaza below."

"The Sheikh Jarrah situation, where families await a court ruling on eviction, has been misrepresented as a grotesque land grab, but it really is a pedestrian landlord-tenant dispute, that happens to involve Palestinians and Israelis. It is complex and has been ongoing for 40 years."

"There is speculation that internal power struggles within Hamas are partially the cause of this latest round of rocket attacks, rivals jostling for position."

Vivian Berkovici, journalist, former Canadian ambassador to Israel, Tel Aviv

Hamas rockets light up the night sky as they are fired towards Israel from Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on May 14, 2021, while Israeli Iron Dome interceptors rise to meet them (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)

 

"The sight of the pogroms in Lod and the disturbances across the country by an incited and bloodthirsty Arab mob, injuring people, damaging property and even attacking sacred Jewish spaces is unforgivable."

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Jerusalem

"We will not tolerate this; we need to restore calm."

"If this isn't an emergency situation, I don't know what is."

"We are talking about life and death here."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Paramedics observe a fire in Ramle caused by a rocket from Gaza that landed in the city, May 13, 2021. (United Hatzalah)

 

A not-surprising state of emergency was declared by Israel's prime minister responding to riots that have been spreading across the country, leading to schools, synagogues and cars being torched in Jewish neighbourhoods, set on fire by their Arab neighbours. The uneasy peace that prevailed between Arab and Jewish segments of the population in mixed Arab-Jewish towns has been rent asunder. In the central city of Lod a curfew was imposed in response to the wave of riots led by Israeli-Arabs and countered just as violently by resident Jews who have taken offence at their schools and synagogues set ablaze.

 

The protests, riots and violence have spread to other cities in Israel, including Haifa, Acre and Ramla, while Hmas continues to fire hundreds of rockets and Israel retaliates in kind, bombing the Gaza coastal enclave. The difference between the two is that the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists deliberately target crowded civilian areas in Israel with the intention of killing Jews, in a kind of match for locating their armaments and missile sites in Gaza in crowded civilian areas, inviting a military response from the IDF to hit those areas.

 

An Israeli man checks the damages in a residential building after a rocket attack from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, in the central Israeli city of Petah Tikva, on May 13, 2021. (GIL COHEN-MAGEN / AFP)

In contrast, the Israel Defence Forces directly target buildings and other infrastructures owned by Hamas, used as headquarters and weapons-producing depots. Even then, there is a precursor knock-on bomb to alert residents of the buildings to evacuate before the explosives follow, to destroy the designated building. Israelis hearing air raid sirens make directly for the closest shelters. Hamas has never seen the need to build shelters for Gazans; after all Hamas members have their tunnels to take shelter in.

 

Just a short while ago, the world was commiserating with Hamas bemoaning the fact that they had no money to purchase COVID vaccines with, to protect Gaza's Palestinian population, taking issue with Israel for launching a mass vaccination campaign, while ignoring the needs of Palestinians in Gaza whose rulers were too impoverished to fund vaccines for them. The very same rulers who are at the present time, sending off hundreds of rockets into Israel, at a cost far greater than vaccines.

 

The death toll will continue to rise. There will be more Israeli deaths, of both Jews and Israeli-Arabs hit by the incoming rockets. The deaths of Palestinians in Gaza always are greater in number because they are used as human shields. Hamas uses those deaths for public relations purposes, informing the international community that Israel deliberately kills innocent Palestinian civilians and children. It bothers them not one bit that many of their own rockets misfire and land in Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians and children.

 

A long exposure picture shows Iron Dome interception missiles fired as rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip to Israel, May 13, 2021. (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)

Israeli chiefs of police see in the current situation echoes of the riots of 2000 heralding the Second Intifada that lasted for five years, a mass Palestinian 'uprising' against Israel. Jewish families in Lod were at work clearing debris from their burnt-out school interior. Molotov cocktails had been lobbed at the building by a group of 30 masked Arabs, witnessed by Jewish families in the area. 

 

"I am a former soldier. I was not scared then, but when I looked out the window I knew that if I went outside I would be killed", stated a 28-year-old-father of two, Yedidya Harris. A synagogue, a school and a dozen vehicles were torched overnight during the riots in Lod. A Wednesday announcement by Israel spoke of the destruction of weapons manufacturing sites used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.

 

A separate strike killed several high0ranking Hamas commanders, including the head of the Gaza City military division, Bassem Issa, which Hamas confirmed. Hundreds of strikes targeting Hamas were carried out by Israel, responding to the unprecedented barrage of 130 rockets fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv in the space of mere minutes, a planned challenge to the capacity of Israel's defensive Iron Dome system, overwhelming its ability to stop them all.

 

Smoke and flames rise after an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip, May 12, 2021. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

A similar barrage of 130 rockets set off in the space of five minutes took place over Ashkelon. Plumes of smoke from rocket and artillery hits from Israel into Gaza rose over Gaza City. In a Tel Aviv suburb a woman died when her house was destroyed by a rocket that also set vehicles ablaze. Since Monday, close to two thousand rockets were fired by Hamas into Israel.

 

Israel's friends and allies speak of her need and her 'right' to respond with force against the attacks constituting war crimes, targeting civilian populations, while with the same breath her friends such as the Biden Administration's Antony Blinken urged restraint on Israel, of which he said, there was a "clear difference" between Israel defending itself and Hamas raining down rockets on civilians.

"[The government of German Chancellor Angela Merkel] condemns these incessant rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip against Israeli cities in the strongest terms. [They] could not be justified."

"Israel has the right to self-defence against these attacks."                                             Spokesman Steffen Seibert

Rockets (l) are seen in the night sky fired towards Israel from Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on May 14, 2021, while Iron Dome interceptors rise to meet them (Photo by ANAS BABA / AFP)