There are three reasons that Israel is in real danger
The Hamas attack on Israel and the role of the Israeli army and defense establishment in defending the Judea-Suez Regime
The October 7 killings of 1,400 people, including soldiers and civilians, has hardened Israeli hearts towards the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.
How does a modern democracy live with such a threat? This is exactly the question the demonic forces wanted to ask every Israeli. They aren’t hoping to find a territorial compromise with the Jewish state. Their goal is to collapse the confidence of Israelis that their defense and intelligence services can protect them from surprise attacks across their borders — so Israelis will, first, move away from the border regions and then they will move out of the country altogether.
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 killed some 1,400 people, according to Israeli authorities. The Israeli response has resulted in more than 10,000 deaths.
If Israel is able to engage in a wartime diplomatic initiative to get the Palestinians in the West Bank to stop Hamas, then President Biden can help Israel get the support it needs.
The Syrian kidnapping of Kiryat Shmona — an Israeli woman whose family fled to Israel and invaded Israel without a word
Kiryat Shmona is one of the most important Israeli towns on the border with Lebanon. A father said his family fled northern Israel with thousands of other families after the pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia and Palestinians in southern Lebanon started shooting rockets at Israel and made incursions to support Hamas.
When might they come back? They did not have any idea. Like more than 200,000 other Israelis, they have taken refuge with friends or in hotels all across this small country of nine million people. And it has only taken a few weeks for Israelis to begin driving up real estate prices in seemingly safer central Israeli towns. For Hezbollah, that alone is mission accomplished, without even invading like Hamas. Along with Hamas, they are managing to shrink Israel.
In order for Liat Admati to return to her hometown in Gaza, she needed to find a way to return to Be’eri, where she ran a beauty clinic for 11 years.
“The main thing for me to go back is to feel safe,” she said. “Before this situation I felt I have trust in the army. I think the trust is broken. I want to not feel that people are covering themselves in shelters all the time, even though there are people who can do this again. I really don’t know at this point what the solution is.”
She thought the threat was rockets and she and her neighbors built safe rooms, but now that Hamas burned parents and children in their rooms, who knows what is safe? “The safe room was designed to keep you safe from rockets — not from another human who would come and kill you for who you are,” she said. She concluded that it appeared that some people who worked on the kibbutz gave Hamas maps of the layout.
There are a lot of Israelis who listened to the recording, published by The Times of Israel, of a Hamas gunman who took part in the Oct. 7 onslaught, identified by his father as “Mahmoud,” calling his parents from the phone of a Jewish woman he’d just murdered, and imploring them to check his WhatsApp messages to see the pictures he took of some of the 10 Jews he alone killed in Mefalsim, a kibbutz near the Gaza border.
“Look how many I killed with my own hands! According to a English translation, he says that his son killed Jews. “Mom, your son is a hero,” he later adds. His parents can be heard seemingly rejoicing.
This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This is a time for looking at things in a different way. The policy will have to be held until the mourning is over.
Really? There are over 9 million people who live in Israel, including Israelis in the West Bank, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. There are over 8 million Jewish, over 2 million are Arab and over 472,000 are neither. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics puts the West Bank Palestinian population at a little over three million, and the Gaza population at just over two million.”
So, Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza — while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.
Netanyahu was slammed by the public for digitally attacking his army and intelligence chiefs in the middle of a war. He apologized for the things he said following the press conference. I am very supportive of the heads of Israel’s security services.
But the damage was done. What amount of trust do the military leaders place in Netanyahu if the campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?
This society is far better than the leader. It’s not good that it took a war to get that home. Ron Scherf is a retired member of Israel’s most elite special forces unit and a founder of Brothers in Arms — the Israeli activist coalition that mobilized veterans and reservists to oppose Netanyahu’s judicial coup. Immediately after the Hamas invasion, Brothers in Arms pivoted to organizing reservists and aid workers to get to the front — left, right, religious, secular, it didn’t matter — many hours before this incompetent government did.
It’s a remarkable story of grass-roots mobilization that showed how much solidarity is still buried in this place and could be unlocked by a different prime minister, one who was a uniter, not a divider. When you move to the front, you’re overwhelmed with the power of what we lost.
So it’s reasonable to ask why the death of a single olive farmer is getting so much attention. Numerous news outlets, including NPR, covered the killing of Bilal Saleh outside his village last month. The case has received attention from human rights groups and think tanks.
The episode represents a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Identity, security, faith, nationalism, and history are all associated with a conflict that is often portrayed as a fight over land.
The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since 1967. It’s home to millions of Palestinians and is seen as being in the path of a future Palestinian state. Israeli settlers have built walled communities that connect them to Israel proper via their own limited access highways. The U.S. and United Nations have branded the settlements illegal. The region is referred to as Judea and Samaria by Israelis.
Hazem Saleh said that the harvest was more than agriculture. It was a big event. Ladders are being brought to the fields. “We take food. We take kids,” he told Morning Edition. Residents of the village knew they were also taking a risk when they harvested on October 28. They had strained their relationship with Rehelim and knew a war was about to start. They went ahead.
They were picking olives on wooden ladders. The Palestinians say they decided to retreat, and then Bilal Saleh realized he had left behind his cell phone. He went through the trees to get it.
He was out of sight in the trees when his wife heard him shout and at least two gunshots. His friends and relatives later found him with wounds to the chest and arm. Lacking first aid supplies, they used a ladder as an improvised stretcher to carry him uphill to the nearest road. He died in the presence of his wife and children.
The case of the off-duty israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip: Israel Defense Forces, Ikhlas, Biden, and the Prime Minister of Australia
The man was in custody for the crime when we spoke with her. The Israel Defense Forces arrested an off-duty soldier. Israeli military law is supreme in the occupied territories. The arrest made the case different from other violent incidents on the West Bank, but Ikhlas was unimpressed. I don’t think he will be charged or punished. He will be there for a few days. After that, he’ll be released, Ikhlas said. The law that they have for themselves is stronger than what we have.
Days later, her prediction came true. The soldier was free according to his lawyer. The IDF did not answer a request for comment on the status of the case. The suspect’s family denies having any connection to Hamas, despite the accusations by the suspect’s lawyer.
Palestinian authorities say that since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, 176 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank. Israel characterized the counter- terrorism operations as killing most of the people. Some were killed by settlers.
On Oct. 25, President Biden said he was alarmed by extremist settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, equating it to “pouring gasoline on fire.” In a joint press conference with the prime minister of Australia, Biden said, “They’re attacking Palestinians in places that they’re entitled to be, and it has to stop. They have to be held accountable.”
Israel has been warned against actions that would deepen the war, in particular acts that would inflame the West Bank by the U.S. administration. But on the question of West Bank settlements, Israeli authorities have often disregarded the advice of their allies.
