To Win the War, Defeat Hamas and Stop Settlements is an opinion

Israel is not going to lose hope: Why Israel should not act militarily against Israel in the first few days of the Sept. 11, 2001 Israeli-Israel War

While the president expressed deep understanding of Israel’s moral and strategic dilemma, he pleaded with Israeli military and political leaders to learn from America’s rush to war after Sept. 11, which took our soldiers deep into the dead ends and dark alleys of unfamiliar cities and towns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The keystone of Bibi Netanyahu’s 15 years as prime minister has been strategically expanding settlements to prevent any prospect for a contiguous Palestinian state ever coming into being.

Because in the first week of this war the Supreme Leader of Iran and the leader of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, appeared to be keeping very tight control on their militiamen both on the border with Israel and in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But as the second week has gone on, U.S. officials have picked up increasing signs that both leaders may be considering letting their forces more aggressively attack Israeli targets, and maybe American targets if the United States intervenes.

Have not doubt: the possibility of a regionwide war that could draw the United States in is much greater today than it was five days ago, senior U.S. officials told me. As I write on Thursday night, The Times is reporting that a U.S. Navy warship in the northern Red Sea on Thursday shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched from Yemen that the Pentagon said might have been headed toward Israel. More missiles likely from pro-Iranian militias were fired at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and at Israel from Lebanon.

Israel is not likely to let Iran use its proxies to hit Israel without eventually firing a missile directly back at Tehran. Anything can happen if that happens. Israel is believed to have submarines in the Persian Gulf.

What makes the situation triply dangerous is even if Israel acts with herculean restraint to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, it won’t matter. Think of what happened on Tuesday at the Ahli Arab Hospital.

As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (P.I.J.) achieved more this week with an apparently faulty rocket than it did in all of its successful missile launches.

That is why I believe that Israel would be much better off framing any Gaza operation as “Operation Save Our Hostages” — rather than “Operation End-Hamas-once-and-for-all” — and carry it out with surgical strikes and special forces that can still get the Hamas leadership, but also draw the brightest possible line between Gazan civilians and the Hamas dictatorship.

Where I have a vote — just one — is in America. The president, in his prime-time speech Thursday night, vowed to ask Congress for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel to get through this war, along with an immediate injection of $100 million in new funding for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

If Israel needs weapons to protect itself from Hamas and Hezbollah, by all means ship them. But in terms of broader economic aid for Israel, it should be provided only if Israel agrees not to build even one more settlement in the West Bank — zero, none, no more, not one more brick, not one more nail — outside the settlement blocs and the territory immediately around them, where most Jewish settlers are now clustered and which Israel is expected to retain in any two-state solution with the Palestinians. The coalition agreement will annex the whole of the West Bank.

I am well aware that Hamas has been committed to eliminating the Jewish state since its inception — not because Israel has expanded settlements in the West Bank. If Israel hopes to build up a Palestinian leadership that can replace the Hamas in Gaza in the long run, it needs to stop the settlement project now.

There is no future for moderation in this corner of the world, no chance of a sustainable peace and no chance of normal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, without those two sets of conditions being met.

So no, we’re not telling Netanyahu what to do in Gaza — Israel is a sovereign country. We’re just going to tell him what we’re not going to do anymore — because we happen to be a sovereign country too.

I am talking about America indirectly funding Israel’s suicide. See what Netanyahu did in June of last year. To buy off the ultra-Orthodox parties he needs in his coalition to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges, Netanyahu’s government gave the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers “an unprecedented increment in allocations … including full funding of schools to not teach English, science and math,” explained Dan Ben-David, a macroeconomist who has focused on the interaction between Israel’s demography and education at Tel Aviv University, where he heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. “This budgetary increment alone is more than Israel invests each year in higher education altogether — or 14 years of complete funding for the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T.,” Mr. Ben-David said. “It is completely nuts.”

If this is the season of war, it also has to be a season for answers about what happens the morning after. I am hardly the only who wants to know. In an essay published in Haaretz this week, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote that Netanyahu’s government could dream of exploiting victory to annex territories, forcefully relocate populations, ignore rights, censor speech, and realize messianic fantasies.

She Defends Israel’s Immigrants and Refugees During the Second Debate, When Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley met

She’s come under more scrutiny because of the upward climb. After the second debate last month, the former president attacked her as a “birdbrain” on social media, and Ms. Haley accused his campaign of sending a birdcage and birdseed to her hotel.

Ms. Haley’s campaign has countered with several emails to supporters and the news media, citing fact checkers who have found that Mr. DeSantis got her statements wrong and rejecting what her campaign officials have described as Mr. DeSantis’s consistent mischaracterizations of her statements and her record.

Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, reported spending nearly $1 million against Ms. Haley this week, after devoting just $29,000 to anti-Haley messaging during the first half of the year.

Ms. Haley advocated for a welcoming United States for immigrants and refugees. She supported the efforts of faith groups to resettle people. After the terror attacks in Paris that same year, Ms. Haley took an aggressive stance against resettling Syrians in her state, citing gaps in intelligence that could make the vetting process difficult.

Despite the other features of Mr. Trump’s plan, Republicans united behind his hard-line approach to immigration and the nation’s borders with Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley largely aligned in their calls to keep

It is assumed that Gazan refugees will not be going to the United States any time soon. At the South Carolina event on Thursday, the crowd applauded when Mr. DeSantis said that he would not accept people from Gaza as president. He said that any American aid to Gaza would end up in the hands of Hamas.

Rick McConnell, an Air Force veteran, said he understood that Gazans could not survive on their own. Iran should give aid to Hamas because it was responsible for the attacks, according to Mr. McConnell.

The concerns were echoed at Ms. Haley’s events. Corrine Rothchild, a retired elementary school teacher, said that she did not think people living in Gaza love America or are Christian.

Mr. DeSantis, who served on the Foreign Affairs Committee during his time in the House of Representatives, has sought to distinguish himself on foreign policy, pointing to restrictions he signed in Florida that banned land purchases by many Chinese nationals and calling for the use of military force against Mexican drug cartels. The last week has seen the misuse of state funds to charter flights that bring home Americans who are stranded in Israel.

Ms. Haley wants to make her foreign policy credentials, her stance on China and her support for Israel central to her campaign. The ambassador of the UN, Shannon Haley, spoke out against Mr. Trump’s decision to cut funding to Palestinian refugees and his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

They have argued about foreign policy before. She has criticized Mr. DeSantis for his support of Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and his hold on military nominations over a policy that covers the travel expenses of service members who seek reproductive health care services, including abortions, in other states. She accused Mr. DeSantis of calling a territorial dispute that was not central to the U.S. interests in the war in Ukraine.

In recent days, both have also turned their scorn on Mr. Trump for remarks that he made after the Hamas attack criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and referring to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, as “very smart.” Mr. Trump has retreated from what he had said. He, too, has pledged to reject refugees from Gaza.