Polls show that a large percentage of Israeli citizens have lost faith in the future of their nation

Major General (Reserve) in the Israeli Army, and former ombudsman for the occupation forces, Yitzhak Brick, has sounded an alarm over the growing inefficacy of the country’s army to win a possible war.

Warning that the Israeli occupation forces have turned into an “air force army,” Brick criticized the leadership in Tel Aviv for their “sensitivity” towards human losses on the ground.

“Whoever wants to completely avoid losing on the battlefield, completely loses the deterrence of the army and the ability to win the war. This way of thinking and managing the security echelons will eventually lead to much heavier losses in the war,” the former official said in a column published on 10 May by Channel 12.

Brick went on to add that Israel’s land army and reserve system have been continuously ignored: “We lost the inter-arm combat capability and became a one-dimensional Air Force army that alone could not win a war.”

He goes on to highlight that the occupation forces in general, and the land army in particular, “are not ready for war.”

The warning comes on the heels of a number of polls showing that a large portion of Israeli citizens have lost faith in the future of their nation.

A poll published by the Pnima Movement at the start of the month showed that 40 percent of Israelis were not optimistic about the country’s future. It also showed that 33 percent of Israeli youth are seriously considering emigrating out of the occupied territory.

Meanwhile, at least 75 percent of Israeli Arabs believe Jews have no right to sovereignty in occupied Palestine, according to a survey by Habithonistim–Protectors of Israel published on 9 May.

In an article published in Yedioth Ahronoth on 7 May, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak expressed fears of the imminent demise of Israel before the 80th anniversary of its founding.

“Throughout Jewish history, the Jews did not rule for more than eighty years, except in the two kingdoms of David and the Hasmonean dynasty, and in both periods, their disintegration began in the eighth decade,” Barak said.

Earlier this year, former Air Force chief Amikam Norkin said Israel no longer enjoys superiority and freedom over the skies of Lebanon, highlighting that this reality was apparent to the Israeli military establishment after Hezbollah began manufacturing its own drones.

In the weeks after this statement by the Israeli official, Iran notified Tel Aviv that the army of the Islamic Republic has missiles pointed at all of their nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons sites.

Source: The Cradle

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Most dismissed retired IDF general Yitzhak Brick’s warning earlier this year of a Hamas invasion. Now Netanyahu wants his advice on how to win.

Yitzhak Brick might be the only Israeli military official to see what was coming. And he’s been warning of it for some time. He also does not see a ground invasion of Gaza as the only option. And Israel must prepare for a multi-front war given the situation in the north. Brick cautioned, among other things, of problems with the competence of ground forces and made it clear that the ground invasion does not have to be a mandatory step. But according to Brick, Israel urgently needs to “change its hard disk,” i.e. make fundamental changes.

General Brick has been warning for years about the horror we saw in southern Israel on that accursed Shabbat morning a week ago. But his assessment was dismissed by the defense establishment and the political leadership. Brick was even called delusional by many.

“There could be a massacre, the State of Israel has not yet recognized the danger,” Brick warned. “We feel among the people that everything is fine and there is no threat, but the public is not told that powers (Hamas) are preparing. These are equipped, trained fighters who will cross the border on foot and attack and occupy our settlements in the south. The likelihood of this happening is very high. Hamas will conquer settlements, throw grenades into bunkers and shelters and cause a massacre. The local residents, you and me, must defend these communities because the army will not be there.” Brick said these words months ago, but no one wanted to listen to him. After the massacre in the south, everyone now has an ear for retired general, even Bibi.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Brick spoke this week about the continuation of the war against terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip, as well as developments on the Lebanese border. The general made it clear to Netanyahu that his position was to continue the surgical strikes, divide the armed forces and find a solution through a hermetic siege of the Gaza Strip. His view contrasts with the attitude of the military staff, which assumes that no success in the Gaza Strip is possible without an Israeli ground invasion.

Brick warned that the Israel Defense Forces have turned into a primarily air-based military, and criticized the army leadership for its sensitivity to human losses on the ground. “The current situation of the land forces is tragic, they are not ready for war. Emergency supplies are not available, exercises have stopped and the battalions have not trained in years. There is also no weapons training and education, and the army is not capable of carrying out an attack.” The former ombudsman added that technology alone is not enough to win wars. “The truth is that an imaginary reality has been created by the general staff and spread throughout the army. The soldiers have lost their motivation and fighting spirit in recent years, and many are not ready to go into battle.”

“To completely avoid losses on the battlefield is to hinder the army’s ability to win the war. This type of thinking will ultimately lead to heavier casualties in war,” Brick told Channel 12 back in May.

Brick added that Israel’s ground forces and reserve system have been constantly ignored: “We have lost the ability to field an effective army and have become a one-dimensional aerial power that cannot win a war on its own.” In his view, Israel’s ground forces are not ready for war. The warning follows a series of polls showing that a large portion of Israeli citizens have lost faith in their country’s future. This was particularly evident over the last year, when the people were divided over political and judicial issues.

“In my role as general, I have visited more than 1,400 units and spoken to tens of thousands of commanders and soldiers, three to four times a week, four hours in each unit. I know the army on the ground better than anyone in the Israel Defense Forces,” Brick said years ago. “I have seen soldiers who do not take care of their weapons before leaving the base. No army in the world behaves like this. The soldiers carry their smartphones with them everywhere. Commands are sent via WhatsApp groups. These phones are being tracked by the enemy.”

Not only that, but commands are said to have been sent via email and then deleted, meaning no follow-up action is possible. “Our system has lost all control. Have we gone crazy? I cannot sleep at night. Our ground forces and armored corps are not ready for war,” Brick continually warned.

“What I present to you here is something you will not hear from the top IDF officials. Not only do many of the commanders not know anything, but even those who do know are afraid to speak out lest they be punished,” he wrote, calling on members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee to speak to the rank-and-file soldiers and address the issue. “Let them show you what is going on, share with them their problems and difficulties. It will not be the division, brigade and battalion commanders from whom you will learn about the reality that exists in the field. You should learn it from those for whom it is the routine of their life… Their statements are the truth.”

Israel’s entire security apparatus has failed and relied too heavily on technology, with an unhealthy dash of arrogance. But as is typically the case, those who don’t go with the flow and call out the glaring problems are dismissed as lunatics, like General Brick, who saw the danger before anyone else.

Source

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Top U.S. officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have urged Israel publicly to conduct a more surgical offensive in the south to avoid the heavy civilian casualties inflicted by its attacks in the north.

About 900 people in Gaza were killed in Israeli airstrikes between Friday when a truce ended and Monday, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, about the same number killed in strikes in Gaza over the four days following the Hamas cross-border raid on Israel on Oct. 7, though fewer than the 1,199 who died in the four days following the start of Israel’s ground offensive on northern Gaza Oct 28.

Washington is for now ruling out withholding delivery of weapons or harshly criticizing Israel as a means of changing its tactics because the U.S. believes the existing strategy of privately negotiating is effective, according to two U.S. officials.

“We think what we’re doing is moving them” a senior U.S. official said, citing how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shifted from refusing to allow aid into Gaza to allowing nearly 200 trucks of assistance a day, saying those improvements were the result of intense diplomacy, not threats.

The U.S. official spoke after three days of resumed aerial bombardments of southern Gaza left residents pulling the bodies of children and adults from the rubble.

But the U.S. official said reducing military support to Israel would carry major risks.

“You start lessening aid to Israel, you start encouraging other parties to come into the conflict, you weaken the deterrence effect and you encourage Israel’s other enemies,” the official said.

The United States has called its support unwavering. The Israeli government appears unmoved by international demands to change its strategy.

“I must admit I sense that the prime minister feels zero pressure, and that we will do whatever it takes to achieve our military goals,” Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser Ophir Falk told Reuters last week when asked about the international pressure on Israel.

SIGNIFICANT U.S. LEVERAGE

The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in military aid annually, ranging from fighter jets to powerful bombs that could destroy Hamas tunnels, and the Biden administration has asked Congress to approve an additional $14 billion.

Such support gives Washington “significant leverage” over how the war against Hamas is conducted, said Seth Binder, director of advocacy at The Project on Middle East Democracy.

“Withholding certain types of equipment or delaying refilling stockpiles of various arms would force the Israeli government to adjust strategies and tactics because they would not be guaranteed to have more in the pipeline,” said Binder. “To date, the administration has demonstrated an unwillingness to use that leverage.”

Weighing on Biden is the 2024 presidential election, even as senior aides have stepped up calls for Israeli restraint. Any attempt to cut aid could hurt the Democratic president with pro-Israel independent voters as he seeks re-election.

Biden also faces pressure from a faction of progressive Democrats who want the U.S. to set conditions on military aid to its closest Middle East ally, and for the president to support calls for an immediate ceasefire.

A senior Israeli security source said that so far there has been no change in U.S. support for Israel. “At the moment there is an understanding and there is continued coordination,” said the source. “If the U.S. shifts course, Israel will have to speed up its operations and wrap things up quickly.”

Fighting between Israel and Hamas resumed on Friday after a seven-day pause to exchange hostages and prisoners and deliver humanitarian aid. Israel is retaliating for an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants that it says killed 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages.

Gaza’s health ministry, whose data the U.N. has deemed broadly reliable, said on Monday that at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women or people under 18 whom it defines as children, have been killed in Israeli bombardments over eight weeks of warfare.

SEEING ‘EYE TO EYE’ WITH ISRAEL

The Israeli military’s offensive in northern Gaza began with intense aerial bombardment, then a large-scale ground incursion that ultimately saw Israeli forces surround and enter Gaza City, the largest settlement in the enclave.

Israeli officials say they are conducting operations in the south differently, allowing more time for non-combatants in combat areas to evacuate, but can’t promise to eliminate civilian casualties.

“We are going to continue with our campaign to destroy Hamas, a campaign that the United States sees eye to eye with us about,” Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy said on Tuesday. He repeated Israeli accusations that Hamas uses woman and children as human shields.

On Friday, Israel’s military began posting grid-based maps online ordering Palestinians to leave parts of southern Gaza, directing them towards the Mediterranean coast and Rafah, near the Egyptian border. Some residents said the so-called “safe areas” where they told to go also came under fire that caused casualties.

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Monday that Washington expects the Israelis to follow through on not attacking those areas.

A second U.S. official said the fact that Israel was being more deliberate in saying what areas civilians should avoid was a sign U.S. pressure was working. The official said the U.S. wants Israel to be more precise with its strikes in southern Gaza, but it was too early to tell whether Israel had taken this advice on board.

Residents and journalists on the ground said intense Israeli airstrikes hit southern Gaza on Monday, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians.

“All indications and reports suggest that the same pattern – of dropping heavy duty bombs and using artillery in densely populated areas – is continuing” since Israel’s offensive resumed, said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch.

On Tuesday, Amnesty International said it had found that U.S.-made munitions had killed 43 civilians in two Israeli air strikes in Gaza.

Source: Reuters

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But it wasn’t always that way. For the first two decades after independence, Israel’s primary foreign ally was France, which supplied almost all of its major weapons including planes, tanks and ships as well as building the nuclear plant from which it developed atomic weapons.

Neither did the US offer the same diplomatic cover it does today. When Israel invaded Egypt with the British and French during the 1956 Suez crisis, Washington joined Moscow at the United Nations to force Israel and its allies to withdraw.

For many years, US aid to Israel was limited to loans to buy food through the economic hardship in the years after independence.

So what changed and why?

As tensions rose ahead of the 1967 six-day war, Paris imposed an arms embargo on the region and refused to deliver 50 fighter jets Israel had paid for. After the war, France sided with Arab countries, in part to improve relations after its defeat in the colonial war in Algeria.

President Lyndon Johnson was sympathetic to Israel’s position but hesitant about supplying large amounts of weapons out of concern about a regional conflict drawing in the Soviet Union.

Following Israel’s stunning victory and occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Washington concluded that Arab nations had moved into the Soviet camp and so increased weapons sales to the Jewish state, including Phantom jet fighters.

Johnson committed the US to maintaining Israel’s “qualitative military edge” and opened the door to decades of weapons sales that helped build the Israeli military into the strongest force in the Middle East.

Did the US support Israel’s development of nuclear weapons?

In the late 1950s, France built Israel a larger reactor capable of producing plutonium and a reprocessing plant at a secret facility at Dimona in the Negev desert which provided the basic tools to develop a nuclear weapon. Israel told the US the nuclear plant had only a “peaceful purpose” but in 1960 the CIA concluded that it would be used to produce plutonium for weapons.

In 1963, President John F Kennedy demanded Israel allow regular US inspections of Dimona and warned that failure to present “reliable information” about the nuclear plant would “seriously jeopardise” Washington’s support for Israel, according to a 2019 report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Israel agreed to inspections but, after Kennedy’s assassination, the Johnson administration was less firm on the issue and the inspections stopped in 1969. By then, US officials concluded that Israel was indeed developing an atomic bomb despite its claims to the contrary.

When did the US get into the business of trying to broker peace agreements?

When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur holiday, President Richard Nixon was alarmed by Israeli hints about using nuclear weapons as its forces were initially forced into retreat. Nixon ordered an airlift of military supplies to Israel.

After the tide of war turned, the US was keen to limit the scale of Egyptian losses in part to keep the Soviets out of the conflict but also to bolster American influence over the Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat. That in turn laid the ground for the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement later in the decade.

The failure of the Israeli government to pre-empt the Yom Kippur war forced a political realignment that saw the rightwing Likud party take power for the first time with Menachem Begin as prime minister. Begin extended an invitation to Sadat, via the US, to visit Jerusalem and the Egyptian president addressed the Israeli parliament.

President Jimmy Carter engineered months of negotiations that culminated in the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, and laid the ground for the final Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in March 1979 which saw Israel withdraw from the Sinai. But Begin rebuffed Carter’s attempts to reach an agreement for Israel to give up the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.

If Carter wanted peace, what did Ronald Reagan want?

Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, was more interested in selling guns than brokering peace.

Military support for Israel solidified under the Reagan administration which also began a more vigorous diplomatic defence of Israel – particularly shielding it from criticism at the United Nations.

The two countries signed strategic military agreements and Washington began stockpiling weapons in Israel officially assigned to US forces but which could quickly be handed to the Israelis.

There were tensions. Israel’s attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 was done without US approval and prompted Reagan to suspend some weapons shipments. The US administration also soured on Israeli’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

But Washington continued to protect Israel at the UN, including vetoing a Soviet move in the security council to impose an arms embargo. Still, the Reagan administration shocked Israel by talking to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, a terrorist group in Israeli eyes.

What happened to all the peace initiatives?

A succession of presidents thought they could be the one to finally pull off an Israel-Palestine peace deal.

President Bill Clinton arguably came closest when he oversaw a series of talks and agreements that culminated in the 1993 Oslo peace accords establishing the Palestinian Authority with limited governance over parts of the occupied territories as a step toward a final deal.

But the assassination in 1995 of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who signed the accords, opened the way to the rise to power of Benjamin Netanyahu, who openly opposed a Palestinian state and did his best to scupper Oslo.

Clinton had one last shot at a deal at the 2000 Camp David summit between the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, and the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak. When those talks failed, Clinton blamed Arafat. But some of the Clinton officials present at the talks said the Israeli offer fell short of what was required for an agreement.

One of the Israeli negotiators, the foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, later said that if he were a Palestinian he would have rejected the Camp David proposals. In 2005, former US state department official Aaron David Miller, who played a key role in the Clinton peace efforts, said that Washington had not acted as a neutral arbiter but as “Israel’s attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations”.

Clinton’s successor, President George W Bush, launched his own peace effort, the “road map”, although he pushed the plan in part to offset the diplomatic damage done by the US invasion of Iraq.

Israel’s prime minster, Ariel Sharon, could not defy the White House and so praised the Bush plan and then set about sabotaging it by setting conditions. He also used the withdrawal of Jewish settlements and Israeli military bases from Gaza in 2005 as a means to freeze the road map in “formaldehyde … so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians”, in the words of Sharon’s chief of staff, Dov Weissglas.

Why were relations so bad between Israel and President Obama?

President Barack Obama oversaw the biggest ever package of military aid to Israel, worth $38bn over a decade, but was still regarded as an unreliable ally, particularly by prime minister Netanyahu.

Israeli officials were angered when Obama chose to make his first visit to the region as president to Cairo where he made a speech promising the Muslim world a “new beginning” after the Iraq war. Obama and Netanyahu had a testy meeting at the White House where the president said he wanted a freeze in Jewish settlement construction and Israel to take peace talks with the Palestinians seriously.

Some Obama administration officials wanted him to set a deadline for Netanyahu to agree to talks or face the US coming up with its own plan for a Palestinian state. But that determination fell away as the Israeli leader mobilised political support in the US, particularly among Republicans happy to bash Obama.

Netanyahu also openly opposed the US deal with Iran to contain its nuclear programme as a “historic mistake” that would allow Tehran to develop atomic weapons. The Israeli leader took the unprecedented step of openly criticising White House policy in an address to Congress.

Obama fired a parting shot in his last month in office when the US unusually declined to veto a UN security council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction. Netanyahu responded by saying he was looking forward to the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House.

So Netanyahu got along with Trump?

By the end of his term as president, Donald Trump was deeply unpopular across much of the world. Israel was an exception after he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognising the city as Israel’s capital which most countries do not.

The Trump administration negotiated deals to normalise relations between Israel and several Arab countries. It also came up with its own Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal which allowed Israel to annex about 30% of the West Bank. The plan included a vision of a Palestinian state made up of several enclaves surrounded by Israeli territory that bore a strong resemblance to proposals by the Israeli right that have been described as replicating apartheid South Africa’s black homeland system.

Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said that after the president suggested Netanyahu might be the real obstacle to peace with the Palestinians, the Israeli leader produced a doctored video of the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas supposedly calling for the murder of children. Trump’s position then swung against the Palestinians.

The following year, Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal.

Source: The Guardian

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But as the war enters this new ground phase in the south, the White House is deeply concerned about how Israel’s operations will unfold over the next several weeks, a senior US administration official said. The US has warned Israel firmly in “hard” and “direct” conversations, they said, that the Israeli Defense Forces cannot replicate the kind of devastating tactics it used in the north and must do more to limit civilian casualties.

The US has conveyed to Israel that as global opinion has increasingly turned against its ground campaign, which has killed thousands of civilians, the amount of time Israel has to continue the operation in its current form and still maintain meaningful international support is quickly waning.

In perhaps the most direct public warning to date, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin admonished Israel that it can “only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians.” Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum over the weekend, Austin said US support for Israel is “not negotiable,” but he said Israel risks replacing a “tactical victory with a strategic defeat” if it did not do more to prevent civilian deaths.

Almost 16,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its campaign in October, following Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on October 7, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel believes it has killed “several thousand” Hamas militants, an Israeli official said.

Though senior Biden administration officials have publicly called on Israel to do more to minimize civilian deaths, they have been careful to avoid directly admonishing any of Israel’s tactics, believing officials believe it is more effective to quietly counsel Israel behind the scenes rather than loudly shame them.

The senior administration official told CNN that they did not feel comfortable using the word “receptive” to capture Israel’s response so far to the administration’s military advice – contrary to some public statements from senior-most members of the administration.

Both in public and in private, Israeli officials maintain that part of their end goal is to weaken Hamas to such an extent that the group can never repeat the attack that it unleashed on Israel on October 7. That goal, one senior US official told CNN, is unlikely to be achieved by the end of the calendar year, and Israel is expected to continue pursuing that objective in the next phase of the conflict that US officials see as a “longer-term campaign.”

An Israeli official agreed that a transition is likely to come in the next few weeks, saying: “We are in a high-intensity operation in the coming weeks, then probably moving to a low-intensity mode.”

CNN asked the National Security Council and Israeli government for comment.

Israel can’t maintain high-intensity operations indefinitely

Current US assessments also show that Israel simply cannot maintain its level of high-intensity operations indefinitely, especially the mobilized reservists, a source familiar with the intelligence said. Israel has also needed to respond to near-daily attacks by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah on its northern border — another reason Israeli forces will likely need to transition to more targeted raids once they have cleared as many Hamas militants based in Gaza as they can, the source said.

US officials are hopeful that Israel will move to a more targeted strategy by January, which will resemble how the US transitioned away from high-intensity combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to a more narrow campaign against terrorist leaders, senior US officials told CNN. Israeli officials have indicated that that is their intention, one of the officials said.

Senior US officials have been careful not to publicly criticize Israel and are increasingly insisting that their strategy of counseling Israel to target Gaza more deliberately and surgically has delivered some results.

After Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on Israel to take concrete steps to protect civilians during a visit to the region last week, the IDF unveiled an online map of Gaza divided into tiny parcels as an apparent effort to allow Israel to warn residents of a specific area to evacuate because of military operations. But the map requires electricity and internet connectivity to access, both of which have been cut off in Gaza multiple times.

Pointing to that development, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Monday that Israel has “actually taken the quite unusual step for a modern military and identified precisely the area that they intend to have ground maneuvers, and they have asked the people in that area to move out.”

Still, he declined several times to offer an assessment of whether Israel’s tactics have been more proportional since a truce with Hamas broke down last week and the fighting resumed, telling reporters on Monday that it is “too soon” to pass judgment.

Officials have also insisted that the Israel Defense Forces’ initial incursion into northern Gaza would have been far wider in scope had it not been for the US’ warnings. Israel’s original plan after the Hamas terror attack involved an immediate large-scale land, air and sea operation involving hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops and a desire to “level” the entirety of the Gaza Strip, people familiar with their planning said.

US officials have also argued in recent weeks that Israel has heeded the lessons senior American military advisers have shared with their Israeli counterparts about how to conduct urban warfare.

“I do believe that they have listened,” Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters on Sunday when asked whether Israel is listening to the US. Two days earlier, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had told reporters: “We believe that the approach that we’re taking thus far has produced effective results.”

Source: CNN

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Toronto, Frankfurt (2/11 – 42)

World media are jumping all over the conflagration in Gaza following the 7 October attack, killing 1400 Israelis and kidnapping several hundred others – followed by an all-too-predictable retaliatory response from Israel, with indiscriminate bombardment and gunfire into Gaza. The number dead and injured in the Palestinian zone will likely never be known but it is currently estimated at over 5,000 – many of whom are women and children caught in the crossfire.

Is Hamas sorry about those who voted for them and support their cause being machine-gunned or trapped by crumbling concrete in a bombed building? Not at all – for them it’s just the cost of doing business.

What do the neighbors across the region say? As a matter of fact, the timing of the bloody 7 October attack was quite apt.

It was just three weeks ago that the “Abraham Accords”, an agreement  that would have “normalized” relations between Israel and several states of the Arabian Peninsula, complete with exchanges of ambassadors and new relations, were about to be signed. This landmark deal would have been followed by North African Islamic nations joining up. Precisely before the October 7 Hamas terror attack, normalization talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel were set to go. That hopeful move is gone with the wind.

That declaration of co-existence must have deeply displeased Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS and the other murderous bandit gangs. They would clearly have been cut out of the deal. (Kindergarten Lesson One: “Follow the Money”)

Meanwhile, back in Tel Aviv, the fearsome Netanyahu was set to appear in court and face criminal charges that could have seen him in the cooler for quite a while. That trial has also been set aside. A survey shows that 80% of the Israeli public puts the blame for the surprise attack on him, particularly as his government pointedly ignored multiple urgent warnings from Egypt that an attack was being prepared. Convenient, no?

Netanyahu: “This is our 9/11 moment.” Truer words were never spoken. And just like the exceedingly suspicious collapse of two huge (and hugely unpopular) office buildings in downtown Manhattan, purportedly after being slammed into by jetliners, the 7 October attack is looking more and more like a false flag – something to give Israel the excuse the finish the job in Gaza.

Cut to the airport in Riyadh. A group is hurrying along.

A British reporter waylays a Saudi government minister. (You have to feel sorry for these guys – bodyguards blithely bump them out of the way … an expensive woman companion might give them a cat-scratch or snatch the microphone out of their hands … their target might just ignore them completely, or glower and growl “No comment, creep”)

Luckily for this journalist, the Saudi – young-looking for a Minister, and quite fluent in English – is eloquent and to the point.

Roving Reporter: “Can I just ask you… What is the first thing that has to happen, to achieve peace, in your view?”

Saudi Minister: “Right now we need a ceasefire.”

Roving Reporter: “Beyond that – “

Saudi Minister: “We have to restart the peace process.”

Roving Reporter: “Is that possible?”

Saudi Minister: “It has to be possible. If we are not willing to overcome all the difficulties, all the challenges, all the history that is involved in this issue, then we will never have a real peace and security in the region, so we must restart the peace process. The Arabs have shown that they are serious, they are willing to engage. We hope that we can do it soon.”

Dear Reader – studying this historical tragedy, do you not get the sensation that the “Arab world”, such as it is, really finds the Palestinians a monumental annoyance, deranged relatives anxious to drag all of them into a no-win military confrontation? (Everybody has an eye on those 200 Israeli nuclear weapons tucked away in a Negev Desert “research facility”.)

Of course it is necessary to offer deep and sincere vocal support to Palestine, which was deeply wronged some 70 years ago. Who wronged them? Hmm, how about the same perfidious colonialists whose meddling wreaked tragedy in Nigeria, Malaysia, Kenya, India and on and on… Yes, John Bull did it. The Brits “set aside” a land for the persecuted Jews, land that happened to have been occupied for hundreds of years by farmers and herdsmen known as Palestinians. Just like Malaysia or Iraq or Pakistan: they bottled up enemy peoples in the same artificially-demarcated country, grab the resources and piss off. Thanks Olde Blighty.

Israel is a reality. Most countries in the world accept that as a fact. It may have been built on stolen land but so was the United States of America, Canada, Japan (ask the Ainu), People’s Republic of China (poor Tibetans), Australia (aborigines nod sorrowfully) and many others, if you reach far enough back into history. Israel, the reality, is not going away. Hamas, the troublemaking terror gang, may have picked up some neat tricks from the Israelis (BOOM goes the King David Hotel, brought down by future Israeli statesmen).

But times change. Nobody else wants this war. The Arabs are by and large interested in getting by in life, minding their own business and avoiding trouble. Even Iran, fingered as a troublemaker by Uncle Sam, doesn’t want war – especially nuclear war. Nobody wins then.

Hamas? Nuclear war? Bring it on. They are maniacs, as all the neighbors are fully aware. But this seems to be a festive age around the planet for such manias, even among the throngs of “useful idiots” parading through Europe, Australia and North America waving Palestinian flags. Ask those entitled kids whether they support the annihilation of Israel. Then they get coy and the weasel-words flow freely.

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“I have friends who are American Jews and friends who are Arab American and they both only feel the pain of one side and completely ignore the other. Even some people who are not directly connected to either side have decided to be hardcore for one side or the other,” he said.

Each side in the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East is pushing its narrative hard in America.

Well-funded pro-Israel groups are working to keep the focus on the 1,400 Israelis killed and more than 200 abducted by Hamas in its cross-border attack three weeks ago. Electronic billboards with the faces of the Israeli dead and disappeared are patrolling the streets of New York and other cities.

Groups such as the American Jewish Committee are also seeking to discredit discussion of the broader context of occupation and oppression, including the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank, as amounting to justification of the Hamas attack. They paint the escalating Israeli bombing of Gaza as a necessary and reasonable response even as the numbers of Palestinian civilians killed runs into the thousands.

The AJC was among those saying it was “shocked” by the UN secretary general António Guterres’s statement that the attack “did not happen in a vacuum” and that the “Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation”.

On the other hand, some supporters of the Palestinians celebrated the cross-border raid as a legitimate act of resistance against Israel while downplaying or denying the brutal slaying of civilians, including children.

The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari and the celebrated Israeli novelist David Grossman were among those who criticised American and European progressives, decrying “extreme moral insensitivity and political recklessness” for placing all the responsibility for the Hamas attack on Israel without condemning the killings and, in some cases, even justifying them.

Many other Palestinian Americans and their allies have shied away from talking about the attack at all for fear that acknowledgement of wrongdoing would be interpreted as endorsing the Israeli military assault on Gaza.

The result is that Americans on both camps have not only struggled to acknowledge the suffering on the other side but also to admit wrongdoing by their own.

Abu Sarah said he confronted entrenched views in trying to talk about a woman abducted by Hamas and people killed in the Israeli bombing of Gaza.

“I know Vivian Silver who is right now presumed a hostage in Gaza. She’s someone I worked with. If I post about her, I will get messages from some of my Muslim or Arab friends who are angry and saying, ‘Aren’t you seeing what’s happening in Gaza?’” he said.

“Or if I post about somebody who was killed in Gaza, I get crazy angry messages like, ‘No, right now you need to only worry about what Hamas did to Israel, and how could you talk about this? This supports Hamas.’ Literally. It’s just so hardcore.”

Abu Sarah, who grew up in the West Bank, travelled his own path from throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and seeing his brother die from internal injuries the family said were the result of torture while detained without trial in an Israeli prison.

“When I was in high school and there were suicide bombings, there were kids that would say, ‘I’m also for resistance, even armed resistance, but suicide bombing isn’t armed resistance, it’s killing kids, it’s killing women, and we shouldn’t be doing that.’ And then others would say, ‘No, we have the right to do whatever we can,’” he said.

“Growing up, I had this way of thinking. If I sympathise at all with anything Israeli, with anything Jewish, then I’m accepting this whole occupation. It took me a long time to come to understand I can be sympathetic, I can understand the pain, I can speak against our own violence and at the same time speak out against the occupation and speak out against Israeli violence. Those are not mutually exclusive.”

Abu Sarah said he has no problem condemning the Hamas attack but understands why others hesitate.

“I do accept that what Hamas did was horrific. I have personally no issue with saying it, but I know why people do,” he said.

Abu Sarah said some Palestinians struggled to believe that Hamas would have committed such terrible crimes against Israeli civilians, even though the group has a history of suicide bombings and killings of non-combatants.

“The other part is if I admit that Hamas did this, then am I justifying what Israel is doing in Gaza? If I say, it was horrible, it is absolutely unacceptable, then am I saying Israel’s response is okay?” he said.

Some Palestinian Americans say they are subject to a double standard in being asked to condemn Hamas before being permitted to talk about the bombing of Gaza. They say Jewish Americans are not expected to jump through the same hoops in condemning occupation before being heard about the deaths of Israelis.

Discussion is not helped by a barrage of misinformation and propaganda. Abu Sarah said he spends a lot of time pushing back against false claims including a video on social media that supposedly showed one member of Hamas telling another to rape a woman during the 7 October attack.

“I’m listening in Arabic and that’s not what he said. I’m not denying that we might have seen similar things happening but that’s not what he says. So I sent my friend a message saying that this is just not true. Their response was, ‘Well, I’m sure something like this happened so it doesn’t matter if it’s true,’” he said.

“So there is this feeling that I have to defend my people or the side I think is right even if it’s a lie. It’s a kind of tribalism.”

Discussion of the Gaza crisis is even testing groups established to foster dialogue, including the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom which works to create greater understanding between Jews and Muslims with more than 100 branches and thousands of members across the US.

The Sisterhood issued a statement denouncing “the heinous murder and hostage taking of innocent civilians by Hamas terrorists.

“As a sisterhood of Jewish and Muslim women, we hold multiple truths at any given moment. It is possible for us to acknowledge that murdering civilians is a war crime and firing missiles at civilians is also a war crime,” it said.

“It is possible for us to recognize that Palestinians are not Hamas and Israeli citizens are not their government. It is possible for us to grieve for our own dead and grieve for all those lost in this horrible cycle of violence. And be reminded that violence will always be met with more violence.”

But it turns out that is easier said than done when the discussion moves beyond condemnation of killing.

The president of the Sisterhood’s board, Roberta Elliott, is Jewish and lived in Israel for a few years. She described being as shocked by the Hamas cross-border attack as she was by 9/11.

“In the circles that I move in the United States every single one of us knows somebody that was killed or was taken hostage and so it strikes very close to home. I’m also a daughter of a survivor of the Holocaust,” she said.

“I live in somewhat of a Jewish and Muslim bubble. My closest friends are Muslims and across the board everybody was completely empathetic and also in the same shock as the Jewish community. So initially I had no issues with anyone saying anything untoward or that wasn’t totally on the same wavelength that I was.”

Then came the difficult issue of discussing the broader issues such as occupation and how the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, helped keep Hamas in power.

Elliott said she was on a conference call with like-minded American Jews committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. One woman complained that “everybody’s looking for context in this situation, that everybody wants to say Hamas killed 1,400 people but look what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians over the years”.

Elliott listened as the woman said that it would have been considered racist to look for context in the police murder of George Floyd by discussing whether officers were afraid because of high crime rates in Black communities.

Elliott, too, struggled with the framing.

“The one thing I did have conversations with my Muslim partners about was context. They said, ‘yes, what Hamas did was absolutely terrible but it has to be seen within the context of the occupation.’ I, more than most people, couldn’t agree with that more. The occupation has done horrible things to the Palestinians and, frankly, horrible things to the Israelis. We shouldn’t be occupiers after what happened to us during world war two,” she said.

“But there’s a very fine line about this whole context issue which I resonate to. Everybody’s demanding context here but in other situations, if you demand context, it’s being racist.”

The Sisterhood requires members to listen to each other without challenge or argument so that each person’s perspective is accepted at face value. The group’s cofounder, Atiya Aftab, a Muslim lawyer, said that can be a challenge.

“There’s this thinking that if I as a Muslim sit at a table with a Zionist, I am ‘normalising relations’. So even getting Muslims to the table is a challenge because Muslim-Jewish dialogue is often seen only within the current contemporary geopolitical situation which is Israel Palestine,” she said.

“Then once they’re at the table, the second challenge is having dialogue on tough issues. We started off focusing on the fact that Muslims and Jews have had a relationship for over 1,400 years. So let’s build that up. Let’s talk about what our commonalities are.”

Aftab said she was proud of the Muslims in the group because they “categorically condemned” the killing of civilians by Hamas. But she said the dialogue has only gone so far.

“I think the challenge is really acknowledging whether or not this level of violent response is appropriate, whether or not to admit this is a genocide. I think the challenge is acknowledging some of these things,” she said.

“The language that says the response in Gaza is wrong is tepid. They don’t use the language of genocide or inappropriate escalation. Those terms are much more difficult to hear and that’s the challenge of dialogue. I think people feel that I can’t criticise my own, I’m being disloyal.”

Aftab said that even within an organisation dedicated to listening, some people are unable to hear another view in the present circumstances.

“I do see people walking away because I think this is a very hard topic to dialogue on because it’s very emotional. It’s a shame but I can understand why people need to walk away sometimes. We have to take care of our own mental health, we have to take care of ourselves,” she said.

Source: The Guardian

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On Wednesday night, Joe Biden basked in the pageantry of a state dinner – white-jacketed violinists, golden chandeliers dotted with pink roses, a vivid wall display of 3D paper flowers. But soon after toasting the Australian prime minister in a pavilion on the White House south lawn, the US president had to step away to be briefed on a deadly mass shooting in Maine.

The presence of Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, was a reminder of another, even darker shadow. Even as Biden and guests savoured butternut squash soup, sarsaparilla braised short ribs and hazelnut and chocolate mousse cake, Israeli bombs were raining down on the people of Gaza, posing one of the biggest tests yet for the 80-year-old commander-in-chief.

Biden took office in January 2021 articulating four crises – the coronavirus pandemic, economic strife, racial injustice and the climate – but as many of his predecessors discovered, the one guarantee of the job is the unexpected. Since Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on 7 October, the president has found himself in the crucible of a Middle East war that is killing innocents and threatening a broader conflagration.

Biden’s been at the top of his game – pitch perfect, morally clear, decisive – but there are real risks to having no daylight between the US and Israel

Author Chris Whipple

Biden has given Israel full-throated support and urged Congress to send the US ally $14bn in military aid. He has stressed that Hamas does not represent the vast majority of the Palestinian people and pushed for humanitarian assistance. But he is resisting calls for a ceasefire. He is trying to thread a diplomatic needle, knowing that each decision reverberates around the world and one mistake could cost him re-election next year.

“Biden’s been at the top of his game – pitch perfect, morally clear, decisive – but there are real risks to having no daylight between the US and Israel,” said Chris Whipple, author of The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House. “We’re starting to see that now with all the civilian casualties that are mounting.”

“It reminds me of Colin Powell’s old Pottery Barn rule: if you break it, you own it. Along with Israel, the US is going to own the spectacle of Palestinian civilians being killed no matter how ‘surgical’ the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] claims to be and we’re already seeing that.”

Biden’s allegiance to Israel is written in his political DNA. He was born during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt when, in Europe, the Nazis were systematically murdering 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Biden has said how his father helped instill in him the justness of establishing Israel as a Jewish homeland in 1948.

His long political career has long included deep engagement with the Israeli-Arab conflict in the Middle East. He has often told the story of his 1973 encounter with Israel’s then prime minister Golda Meir who, on the cusp of the Yom Kippur war, told the young senator that Israel’s secret weapon was “we have no place else to go”.

During 36 years in the Senate, Biden was the chamber’s biggest ever recipient of donations from pro-Israeli groups, taking in $4.2m, according to the Open Secrets database. As vice-president, he mediated the rocky relationship between Barack Obama and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Brett Bruen, a former global engagement director for the administration, recalled: “I remember in the Obama White House how pissed off we were at Netanyahu for coming to town and addressing a joint session of Congress without so much as a heads-up. The animosity towards Netanyahu among the current national security staff at the White House is palpable and yet obviously it isn’t about personalities, it isn’t about politics – it’s about the principles that are at stake here.”

Biden’s own relationship with Netanyahu is hardly uncomplicated. He recently recalled how, as a young senator, he had written on a photo of himself and Netanyahu: “Bibi, I love you. I don’t agree with a damn thing you say.”

That point was illustrated in recent months with the White House echoing Israeli opponents of Netanyahu’s plan to curb the powers of the country’s supreme court. All that was put aside, however, after 7 October when Hamasgunmen killed 1,400 people and took more than 200 hostages.

Standing beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Biden gave one of the most visceral, heartfelt speeches of his presidency, denouncing “an act of sheer evil” by Hamas and insisting “the United States has Israel’s back”. It was received rapturously in Israel and helped to quell any scepticism about where the president stood.

Biden then travelled to Israel, marking his second visit as president to an active war zone not under US military control after a trip to Ukraine earlier this year. In Tel Aviv, he met Netanyahu and his war cabinet and displayed his celebrated empathy as he comforted victims’ families.

He compared the 7 October assault to the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US that killed nearly 3,000 people. But he added: “I caution this: while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

Biden’s gambit was widely reported to be a public embrace of Netanyahu while trying to restrain him behind the scenes – including with US military advisers – so as to mitigate the civilian death toll, avoid complicating the release of American hostages and prevent the war from spreading into a regional conflict.

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “He has chosen the classic diplomatic course of amity and unity in public and candour in private. I think Israelis understand and appreciate that. ”

The president was said by officials to have asked Netanyahu “tough questions” about what would come in the days, weeks and months after a ground invasion of Gaza. Egypt and Israel agreed to allow a limited number of trucks carrying food, water, medicine and other essentials into Gaza via the Rafah border crossing.

Back in Washington, the president then tried to sell his mission to the American people, using the ultimate bully pulpit, an Oval Office address, to make a direct connection between Israel’s fight against Hamas and Ukraine’s war against Russia. The commander-in-chief said: “American leadership is what holds the world together … To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it.”

But the president is under pressure for a balanced approach from Arab leaders in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and beyond who have seen major protests erupt in their capitals over the crisis in Gaza.

In theory, the crisis could turn Biden’s political weakness – his age – into an asset that points to his unrivalled foreign policy experience. Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, said: “He gets it. He understands it. He understands what I think he sees as the end game here … There’s a lot of balls in the air but if anybody understands how to basically work his way through that, it’s Joe Biden.”

Keeping all the balls in the air at once can be tricky. At a Rose Garden press conference on Wednesday, he said “there has to be a vision of what comes next” – a two-state solution – and expressed alarm about extremist settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, “pouring gasoline on fire”.

But under questioning, he also angered some on the left by questioning the death toll in Gaza: “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”

The Gaza-based health ministry – an agency in the Hamas-controlled government – says 7,028 Palestinians, including 2,913 minors, have been killed by the bombing. Shortages of water, electricity, fuel, food and medicine are making the humanitarian situation more catastrophic by the day and prompting a global outcry against Israel’s tactics – and the US’s unwavering support for it.

Many Palestinians and others in the Arab world regard Biden as too biased in favor of Israel to act as an evenhanded peace broker. His blanket refusal to join calls for a ceasefire also risks alienating elements of his own Democratic party coalition, exposing a generational divide between Biden, who grew up knowing Israel as a vulnerable country and safe haven for Jews, and younger progressives who associate it primarily with the oppression of Palestinians.

Could 2, 3, 4 million progressive voters not turn out, not vote for Biden because of this? That’s absolutely possible

Matthew Hoh of the Eisenhower Media Network

A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that only 48% of Gen Z and millennials believe the US should publicly voice support for Israel. Protests demanding a ceasefire have erupted on university campuses across the country. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, told supporters: “President Biden, not all America is with you on this one, and you need to wake up and understand. We are literally watching people commit genocide.”

Rae Abileah, a strategy consultant based in Half Moon Bay, California, argues that Biden’s words do not match his actions, which are pouring fuel on the flames. She said: “My message to President Biden, as a Jewish clergy person with family who are in Israel, is to say my grief is not your weapon. Do not use my faith or my grief to justify $14bn of military aid going to kill innocent lives.”

“The big thing we have to talk about around Biden’s policies right now, and the policies of 10 US senators who flew to Tel Aviv as well, is that this is putting the blood of children in Gaza on our hands as American taxpayers. This is our responsibility. This is not about a war of Israel attacking Gaza; this is enabled with our money.”

In addition, Biden is facing a backlash from Arab Americans and American Muslims. Haroon Moghul, an American Muslim academic and preacher based in Cincinnati, Ohio, said: “I voted for Biden in 2020. I thought he would be the adult in the room and right now all I see him doing is taking American resources, American political capital, American goodwill and throwing all in with the most radical Israeli government in history.”

Biden’s job approval rating among Democrats has fallen 11 percentage points in the past month to 75%, according to pollster Gallup, the party’s worst assessment of the president since he took office. Gallup cited Biden’s immediate and decisive show of support for Israel as turning off some members of his own party. He is likely to face former president Donald Trump in an election a year from now.

Matthew Hoh, associate director of the Eisenhower Media Network, who served as a US Marine Corps captain in Iraq, said: “Could 2, 3, 4 million progressive voters not turn out, not vote for Biden because of this? That’s absolutely possible.”

Source: The Guardian

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There’s now a kibbutz named after Truman in Israel, and the US provides billions in military support to Israel each year.

Israel has played an outsized role in US policy, and not just because most recent presidents have tried to play the role of peace maker between Israel and Palestinians and move toward a two-state solution.

I talked to three presidential historians about the US and its relationship with Israel. Douglas Brinkley is CNN’s presidential historian and a professor at Rice University, Julian Zelizer is a CNN contributor and a professor at Princeton University and Mark Updegrove is president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. They each gave me some perspective on the US relationship with Israel.

President Dwight Eisenhower became infuriated at Israel

Along with France and the United Kingdom, Israel attacked Egypt in 1956 in an attempt to seize the Suez Canal and overthrow Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eisenhower pressured the countries to remove their troops – which they eventually did.

President John F. Kennedy was concerned about Israel’s nuclear ambitions

Kennedy engaged in a quiet pressure campaign to let US inspectors into its nuclear sites and halt an Israeli nuclear program. Israel is thought to have developed nuclear weapons in the 1960s, although it has never formally acknowledged them.

President Lyndon Johnson used the hotline to calm the Soviets during the Six-Day War 

Johnson helped supply Israel in the years preceding the Six-Day War, in which Israel seized land from its neighbors. Egypt, as a result, closed the Suez Canal for years. Johnson agreed to sell some military equipment to the Israelis which was a shift in US policy at the time. 

“This was a very much a product of Cold War tension,” Updegrove told me. “I think there was a great concern that that would escalate beyond Israel, Egypt and Syria to being a much larger battle.”

The Six-Day War marked the first official use of a special hotline between Washington and Moscow. The teletype machines were installed to ease tensions between the nuclear superpowers after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets initiated contact, and Johnson told them not to be alarmed by US military activity in the Mediterranean.

President Richard Nixon airlifted supplies to Israel and engaged in ‘shuttle diplomacy’

Nixon ultimately supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a key moment that may have saved the country.

“Most historians of that region think that the US munitions support was essential to Israel’s survival at that point,” Zelizer said.

Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, also engaged in so-called “shuttle diplomacy,” engineering an end to the war and ultimately reopening the Suez Canal under President Gerald Ford.

Biden had his initial firsthand encounter with Israel and the Middle East at this point, as a young senator, when he visited Egypt and Israel before the 1973 war. He has told versions of the story many times, always listing it as a pivotal moment for him. 

Nixon’s support for Israel was also costly

“He did damage to his own presidency,” Brinkley told me. “Because the Arab nations created the famous Arab Oil Boycott and American gas prices spiked up. Due to Nixon’s support of Israel, it created an energy crisis in America.”

President Jimmy Carter brokered peace between Egypt and Israel

Carter brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat together for the Camp David Accords, which created a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt, its Arab neighbor to the South.

Today, Israel enforces its borders on the Gaza Strip, but so does Egypt. That more than two million Palestinians live in the 140 square-mile strip without the ability to easily leave is why it is today frequently referred to as the biggest open-air prison on earth.

Carter failed to release hostages held by Iran

If securing peace was between Israel and Egypt was Carter’s triumph, his failure was not securing the release of American hostages held in Iran. So there may be some irony now that Biden is being targeted by Republican presidential candidates as bearing responsibility for the current war in Israel because he bought the release of five US prisoners held in Iran by agreeing to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian funds held by South Korea. The Iran hostage saga during the Carter presidency captivated the American public for more than a year.

A Palestinian state was one of Carter’s post-presidential missions

At the moment Sadat was assassinated in 1981 Carter knew his work was incomplete.

“He realized that Sadat had really paid, given his life for Camp David,” Brinkley said, adding that Carter kept a photo of Sadat in his wallet. “And so, Carter, as ex-president, really went full bore into trying to create a Palestinian homeland.”

That kind of activism for Palestinians would be welcome on the left wing of today’s Democratic party.

Marines were bombed in 1983 on an Israel-related peace mission.

Ronald Reagan emphasized closer ties with Israel, a path that contributed to tension for US personnel in the region. US Marines were sent to Lebanon as part of a peacekeeping force after Israel invaded to pursue members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The US Embassy and the US Marine Barracks were both bombed in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983.

Hezbollah, the terrorist group with ties to Iran, then in its infancy, was found liable for the barracks attack, which killed 241 US servicemembers. US courts ruled that families of victims of the bombing should get $1.75 billion in Iranian funds that were held in a New York Citibank account.

The Iran-Contra Affair also involved Israel

The 1980s scheme to sell missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon is a consequential moment because it nearly brought down Reagan’s presidency.

What many people may have forgotten about the affair is that Israel operated as the middleman. The larger scandal was that Reagan administration officials then used proceeds from the sale of arms to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. In his 1990 memoir, Reagan said Israel instigated the hostage trade operation.

“It’s not all a linear kind of history,” Zelizer said. “But I think all of this has consequences on different elements of policy in the region.”

There have been multiple peace efforts

President George H.W. Bush tried to ensure US funds would not be used for West Bank settlements, causing some tension with Israel. He also tried to bring Israelis together with other nations to begin a Middle East Peace Process in Madrid, which included Palestinians, who were recognized as members of the Jordanian entourage. It was separate talks, not facilitated by the US, that yielded a normalization of relations between Israel and neighboring Jordan and the Oslo Accords, between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

President Bill Clinton convened multiple summits

Clinton came closest to brokering peace between Israel and Palestinians. Drafting on the Oslo Accords in 1993, Clinton stood behind an historic handshake between then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzahk Rabin. The Middle East leaders, along with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But their agreement, which set up the Palestinian Authority as a nominal government for Palestinians, left the issue of Jerusalem undecided and did not lead to a lasting peace. Rabin was later assassinated by a far-right Israeli extremist. A follow-up effort between Clinton, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, convened at Camp David, failed to produce an agreement.

President George W. Bush was focused elsewhere after terror attacks

“After 9/11 There’s a big shift,” Zelizer said. “I think that’s when you start to see a diminished standing for a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement as a priority. The focus is counterterrorism for George W. Bush.”

At the outset of the Bush administration, Palestinians rose up against Israel in what’s now called the Second Intifada. At the time, Israel was embracing right wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who encouraged more Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The international community, including the US, has long considered the settlements to violate the Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its own citizens into occupied territory.

Bush did push a Roadmap for Peace

Bush, Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas did agree to pursue the Roadmap for Peace, another attempt at pushing toward a two-state solution that ultimately failed but did see Israel remove its troops from Gaza. That was something Bush discussed with Sharon during a friendly meeting at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, although the men disagreed over the construction of West Bank settlements.

President Barack Obama referred to an Israeli ‘occupation’ 

Obama tried to hit reset with the Middle East after the Bush years. He continued to support Israel, but he described Israel’s presence in the West Bank as an “occupation.” He was more forcefully opposed to the construction of new settlements in the West Bank. He engineered a summit between then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas at the White House, but the effort ultimately failed. After Trump was elected, the US representative at the UN Security Council declined to veto a resolution condemning settlement construction.

Netanyahu tried to kill Obama’s Iran deal

Obama and Biden negotiated with other world leaders to lift certain sanctions in exchange for Iran abandoning its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Netanyahu was so vehemently opposed that Republicans asked him in 2015 to address the US Congress in an attempt to stop it.

President Donald Trump sided with Israel

It was Trump, a vocal Netanyahu ally, who would ultimately end the Iran nuclear deal. Trump also effectively took Israel’s side in negotiations with Palestinians, moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, a controversial decision, and endorsing the annexation of West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements into Israel. 

“Trump really accelerates a shift and cements kind of the abandonment of a two-state solution,” Zelizer said, adding that Trump, now running again for the White House, has made support for Israel more political inside the US. “He is elevating this issue as a partisan issue, where presidents have really tried to avoid that.”

Trump’s Abraham Accords were a major breakthrough, but avoided the Palestinian issue

Arab nations including Bahrain and the UAE and later Morocco and Sudan recognized Israel. It was a major development, but one that did not address the problems of Palestinians, who lost leverage.

Biden, despite his differences from Trump, has not materially changed policy and indeed has pushed for Israel and Saudi Arabia to normalize their relations.

The future of further such peace efforts with Arab nations could now be in doubt as Israel continues to bomb the Gaza Strip in its effort to punish Hamas.

Source: CNN

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The father of three in Orange County, California, said he has tried to keep his children, ages 10, seven and four, from watching or reading news, but they are still coming home from school with questions about the conflict in Israel and Gaza. 

One of them has asked if they were going to be kidnapped, Rettinger said. 

“It’s horrible for any family to have to explain to children that people hate them because of who they are,” Rettinger said. “And to have to kiss your kids goodbye every day with worries.” 

Like Rettinger, many Jewish people in the United States have become more vigilant and concerned about their safety as deadly fighting intensifies between Israel and Hamas, a Palestinian militant group. 

The ongoing crisis follows a large-scale assault carried out by Hamas last weekend that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and wounded thousands. Israel responded with military airstrikes that have killed at least 1,500 Palestinians in Gaza, including 500 children, according to the Palestinian health ministry. 

Oren Segal, vice president for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said it’s a “very painful time” for Jewish people in the US, who were already facing an increase in hate crimes, and now worry for relatives or friends in Israel. 

“The level of hatred that we already were dealing with on the ground, combined with what people are seeing online, just kind of all came together at the worst moment – perhaps, one of the worst moments in Israeli history,” Segal said. 

In recent years, there has been a rising number of antisemitic speech and attacks in the US. While incidents in the US can’t be solely attributed to a group or ideology, there have been increased coordinated efforts by known White supremacist groups to spread antisemitic propaganda, according to a March audit of antisemitism by the ADL. 

Antisemitic incidents in the US tracked by the ADL reached their highest level in 2022 with nearly 3,700 reported cases. The incidents include assault, vandalism and harassment of Jewish people or those perceived to be Jewish, the organization said. 

The group has tracked antisemitic incidents since 1979 based on information provided by victims, law enforcement, local media and community leaders. 

This year, the ADL said there have been numerous swatting incidents and bomb threats targeting places of worship over consecutive weekends, widespread online harassment, and an increase of antisemitic speech in the public comment portion of city council, county board and other local government meetings. 

In some instances, the remarks directly target local officials who are Jewish, the organization said. 

“All that was the foundation in which many in the Jewish community were already feeling unsettled,” Segal said. 

Boosting security measures 

Law enforcement across the country have increased security around institutions at the center of Jewish life, like synagogues and schools. 

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul said Thursday that law enforcement will “ramp up” security amid a generic call from a former Hamas leader for protesters to stage demonstrations Friday. 

The messaging is consistent with previous Hamas messages calling for demonstrations. There was not a specific call for violence, beyond a general call to show anger. 

The Jewish Security Alliance of New York-New Jersey, a coalition of nine groups serving the Jewish community, has advised institutions to remain open but encouraged them to follow several security measures, including limiting building access, conducting sweeps of the building’s perimeter and ensuring all cameras are on and properly recording. 

Segal noted he is concerned about a potential surge in antisemitic incidents in the US, despite President Joe Biden and other leaders showing their support for the Jewish community. 

“What we know is that whenever there’s a conflict (in Israel), the risks here go up,” Segal said. 

Rettinger said the private Jewish school his children attend sent letters to parents this week detailing additional security measures and advised parents to remove social media apps from their children’s phones to prevent them from viewing graphic images of war. 

While he was reluctant to send his children to school on Friday, Rettinger said he refuses to live in fear. 

“It’s scary,” he said. “But we can’t live a fearful life.” 

Michael Igel, chairman of the Florida Holocaust Museum, said he is intensifying security measures around the museum to keep his staff and patrons safe. 

Igel, who is the grandson of Holocaust survivors, said he never imagined he would see another massacre of Jewish people in his lifetime. But he’s calling on the Jewish community to unite. Allies, he said, can support them by taking a stand against the massacre. 

“I can’t underscore how difficult and painful it is,” Igel said. “These are innocent people being murdered in their homes.” 

But Igel also had a message for the Jewish community in the US. 

“Continue to be careful, but please don’t hide,” he said. 

Source: CNN

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