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Sunday, October 8, 2023

Irony or Karma: Hamas Attacks Israel On 50th Anniversary of Yom Kippur War

 Fifty years after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Palestinian group, Hamas--which itself often serves as a proxy for Iran--launched a devastating land, sea and air attack against Israel. Videos even showed Hamas fighters attacking Israel using motorized paragliders. The attack was described as "a co-ordinated, multi-pronged assault, Palestinian terrorists crossed into Israel from the Gaza Strip, seizing settlements and capturing and murdering civilians celebrating a Jewish holiday." 

    Heralding the start of what Hamas called 'the greatest battle to end the last occupation on Earth', Gaza's ruling group had earlier fired more than 2,500 rockets at Israeli targets, killing more than 200 and injuring 980.

    Elsewhere, some of the invaders used motorised paragliders to attack enemy bases with machine guns.

    Many more gunmen poured into Israel in a convoy of trucks, cars and motorcycles after an advance party bulldozed the heavily fortified border, previously considered impregnable. Others came ashore by boat. The attacks instantly plunged the region into all-out war.

    Israel vowed revenge and responded with a devastating missile blitz that left 230 dead and 1,610 injured in Gaza. Earlier, Hamas was accused of cold-blooded executions, with footage of apparent victims flooding social media.

* * *

    Mohammed Deif, the shadowy leader of Hamas's military wing, said the assault was in response to the 16-year blockade of Gaza, Israeli raids inside West Bank cities over the past year, violence at Al-Aqsa, the disputed Jerusalem holy site sacred to Jews as the Temple Mount, increasing attacks by settlers on Palestinians and the growth of settlements.

    'Enough is enough,' Deif, who does not appear in public, said in the recorded message.

    He revealed that the attack was only the start of what he called 'Operation Al-Aqsa Storm' and called on Palestinians from east Jerusalem to northern Israel to join the fight.

* * *

    Israel has blockaded Gaza since Islamist group Hamas gained control of the territory in 2007 and the two have fought wars ever since.

And from another article:

    More than 600 Israelis are now feared dead and thousands more have been injured following an unprecedented attack by Hamas militants.

    The Jewish nation is raining down fire on fighters in the Gaza strip in a ruthless counteroffensive in the south while it also pounds Lebanon with artillery in the north.

Making this attack different from prior incursions, Hamas forces have reportedly taken many civilian hostages, including women and children, mostly from an attack on a "rave for peace" going on near Gaza. It has not produced good optics for Hamas: a video has circulated of a naked woman (a German tourist) lying dead in the back of pickup while paraded around with Palestinians shouting "God is greater" and a boy spitting on the corpse; and just more generally celebrating the attack. John Hinderaker, at Powerline, writing about the dead woman concluded:

I suppose the German government will issue a strongly worded protest. The Germans are hopeless, but let’s hope the Israelis will finally stop coddling the Palestinians. And I am not talking about the leaders of Hamas.

"Coddling the Palestinians". That's rich.

     Although I generally don't cite to articles from the leftist news site, Vox, they are correct in stating that "This Gaza war didn’t come out of nowhere." From the article:

    It comes after nearly two decades of the US and world leaders overlooking the more than 2 million people living in Gaza who endure a humanitarian nightmare, with its airspace and borders and sea under Israeli control. The attack comes amid an ongoing failure to grapple with the dangerous situation for Palestinians in the West Bank where Israel’s extreme-right government over the past year has escalated the already brutal daily pain of occupation.

    Instances of Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers antagonizing Palestinians through violence are on the rise, from the pogrom on the city of Huwara to a new tempo of lethal raids on Jenin. Israeli government ministers have been pursuing annexationist policies and sharing raging rhetoric; both incite further violent response from Palestinians and appear at a time when new militant groups have emerged that claim the mantle of the Palestinian cause. The now-regular presence of Israeli Jews praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, have further pressurized the situation. A Hamas commander cited many of these factors in his statement.

    But the ongoing reality of the occupation has not featured prominently in US or Arab leaders’ engagement with the region in recent years, even as circumstances for Palestinians worsened.

    The question must thus be asked to the Israeli government, the Biden administration, and Arab leaders: How did they forget about Palestinians? How did they so brazenly ignore Gaza?

    President Joe Biden has not reversed his predecessor Donald Trump’s policy of putting aside the question of Palestine and instead has exerted immense capital on the normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab states, no matter how extreme the policies of the Israeli government.

    In the current US-led diplomatic equation, there is no space for Palestinians, except for talk of minor concessions to ease daily humiliations. Biden said recently, as many of his surrogates often do, that the US remains intent on “preserving the path to a negotiated two-state solution.”

    But negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization have been frozen since 2014 under President Barack Obama, and most Palestinian analysts at this point acknowledge that US administrations since President Bill Clinton have engaged in a failed, asymmetrical process that never would have allowed for the conditions of an independent, sovereign state of Palestine.

    And so the symbolism of Hamas breaking through Israeli security barriers and wreaking havoc on Israel — including the kidnapping of at least one Israeli soldier as well as civilians — will resonate across Palestine, the Arab world, and beyond.

But it is more than just the blockade of Gaza--what one Jewish academic, Norman Finkelstein, described as the world's largest concentration camp--the illegal settlements that slowly nibble away at Palestinian land, or the growing humiliations visited on Palestinians (I related recently incidents of Orthodox Jews spitting on both Muslim and Christian Palestinians that had ventured into the Old City). I had noted recently how Israel has limited water to the West Bank. (See also, "As Israeli settlements thrive, Palestinian taps run dry. The water crisis reflects a broader battle"). But the water situation in Gaza is even worse. 

    Gaza primarily relies on water from an aquifer. But the aquifer has been drawn down so far that sea water has been intruding into it, on top of other waste contaminating the water. The Israeli blockade has lead to water plants shutting down, and stopped construction of needed infrastructure by stopping the importation of pipes and pumps. The result has been disease and illness. The UN had predicted several years ago that if nothing changed, Gaza would become unlivable by 2020, and there is no indicating that it changed. 

And there is reason to believe that this slow poisoning of Palestinians might be purposeful by Israel. After all, Israel resorted to a form of biological and chemical warfare in the 1948 by poisoning wells and contaminating them with Typhus in 1948.

That operation was inspired by a similar plan that had been concocted to poison water in Germany following World War II.

    It must also be remembered that Israel was born from terrorism and it has formed an important aspect of Israeli statecraft since. Jewish terrorists waged a terror and assassination campaign against the British until the British finally withdrew from Palestine. They invaded and overran the country with an invasion of immigrants, legal and illegal. Of course, as we know, after the British withdrew, the fledgling state of Israel was attacked from all sides, with the result that huge numbers of Palestinians were driven from their homes and not allowed to return. Being born using terrorism and assassination, Israel incorporated those strategies into its military and intelligence organizations, and have used them ever since. So there is a certain irony that Israel's main enemies also resort to terrorism. Perhaps it is part and parcel of Middle-Eastern cultures, whether Jewish or Muslim. 

    It is a horrible situation, frankly, in which many innocents on both sides have been killed and will continue to be killed. Unfortunately, many view this as an opportunity to exterminate Hamas, although it will undoubtedly go beyond that. Various Israelis are comparing it to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attacks (although no word yet whether American intelligence officers were living next to the Hamas planners or sent there to record the attacks and dance for joy when it happened). 

    Of course, the U.S. government is going to be offering military and intelligence assistance to Israel to assist them in securing their own borders, while the U.S., meanwhile continues to suffer an invasion across its unsecured southern border. One of the benefits of U.S. citizenship, I guess.

    I saw, at Western Rifle Shooter's Association, a Stone Toss comic strip that sums up my feelings on the whole matter:



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