The news or at least the way the news is covered is not what it used to be. Previously, it was world events that dictated the news cycle. Now, at least in the last few years and especially of late, it seems that the news cycle is dictating world events. And this is especially true regarding the current Israel-Hamas war.
The most immediate example that comes to mind is the wall-to-wall coverage of the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas rallies that seem to be the darling of the news media.
Yet the media and the newsmakers seem entirely indifferent about the murder of 1,400 people in southern Israel on October 7. Now, almost seven weeks later, they are unperturbed by the fact that mostly Jews are being held somewhere beneath the cavernous, winding city that has been constructed below Gaza.
It is not as if Israel had no idea that this type of troubling construction project was continuing without end. The powers that be in Israel miscalculated beyond anyone’s wildest imagination about the dangers of it, and now we see the costly and tragic result.
The common accepted response to the Hamas assault on Israel from President Joe Biden on down is that, under these circumstances, Israel has a clear and absolute right to defend itself to the extent it sees fit.
There are few world leaders who disagree with this assessment aside from Turkish President Erdogan, who, as of late, had been making peace overtures to Israel which we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt were fake and deceptive. Over the last few days, Erdogan has referred to Israel as a “terrorist state” and called for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map. So much for that kind of friendship.
To date, as you might be aware, the United Nations has failed to condemn the Hamas attack and the murders and kidnappings of so many innocent Israeli civilians. In fact, some member states have suggested that it was Israel who provoked the Hamas assault, and Hamas was, in fact, fighting in self-defense. There is so much evidence of vicious brutality, including clear examples of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the form of rape and other forms of sexual violence against women, something the U.N. should forcefully denounce. Yet the UN and its agencies remain mute on this matter.
The most absurd and frankly oddest position seems to come from Francesca P. Albanese, the U.N. officer overseeing the Palestinian Territories. At a forum in Australia last week, Albanese stated that it is not possible to classify Israel as defending itself against Gaza because Israel is an “occupying force” and the Gaza Strip does not have statehood. And a member state, Israel, cannot claim to be defending itself against a state that does not exist, and certainly cannot claim to be defending itself when (according to the U.N.) it is an occupying force.
This contorted reasoning is a type of reverse Talmudic logic, absurd to the extreme, especially when considering that none of the U.N. claims are true.
It is true there is no entity known as “Palestine” that is recognized anywhere in the world except at the U.N. So, it is curious that when it serves their purposes, all of a sudden there is no Palestine except for the fact that there is a seat at the U.N. for Palestine in the General Assembly and there are ambassadors of Palestine located in a large array of countries around the world.
The obviously Israel-hating U.N. representative also claims that since Israel is what she refers to as an “occupying force” in Gaza, then it would conceivably be impossible for Israel to defend itself against itself, according to Albanese’s logic.
The flawed argument here is that Israel has not been in Gaza in any fashion since 2005, when its Jewish residents were forcibly extracted from their homes and forced into residential limbo that for some has lasted about a decade.
Then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was so certain this was a bold move required of an Israeli Prime Minister and it was sure to bring an end to the war between the Arabs and Jews. Little did the once-great military strategist and warrior (then in his mid-70s) realize, but his move was going to be the catalyst of what would eventually become the largest and most brutal death toll inflicted on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
If you are a connoisseur of news, and these days it is difficult not to be, it rapidly became clear that the media deck is once again stacked against the Jewish state. Israel’s global image is one of geographic smallness but also of smartness and military might. And it seems that a large part of the world resents this.
The unfortunate and unsettling history of our people is the way we were horribly victimized during the Holocaust. That six million Jews were systematically murdered is a statistic that is so difficult to grasp, that unless one has family that experienced these horrors, it is difficult to view it on an individual basis.
Instead, all these years later, it still remains an unimaginable tragedy and horror that can only be viewed from a chronological distance.
Now, just six weeks after the shocking murder of more than 1,400 people in southern Israel, we are dealing with a significant anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic crowd that has the gall to suggest that the horrors we witnessed might not have happened at all.
As for the future of Gaza, it was only a few days ago when Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas denied the massacre of October 7 on his PA social media page and instead blamed Israel for gunning down more than 300 concert attendees at the Gaza border!
Prime Minister Netanyahu stated unequivocally that pronouncements of that kind disqualify Abbas of any leadership role in whatever is rebuilt and reconstituted on the Gaza Strip.
In the meantime, Israeli humanitarian efforts in Gaza are growing and are met by more and more Hamas hostility and brutality. The Biden Administration’s policy on matters in Gaza is desultory and confusing. Fundamentally, the United States has grown accustomed to fighting wars to a draw, and nowhere do we see this policy more blatantly than in the current Israel-Hamas conflict.
The U.S. high-tailed it out of Vietnam and then again more recently out of Afghanistan, with great expenditures of both blood and treasure. From the outset of the Gaza War, Netanyahu made it clear that Israel was in this battle to win. There would be no backing down and no compromise. But six weeks later, we see the U.S. actively trying to mute the Israeli response to the war initiated by Hamas.
And to our great misfortune, while Israel is unified in its approach to eliminating Hamas, there remains a divide even in Netanyahu’s unity war government. To that end, and under U.S. pressure to not win too decisively, Israel has conceded to shipping fuel to Gaza to keep the lights and air-conditioning working in the tunnels where Hamas leaders continue to direct their ragtag forces to murder IDF soldiers and any Jews they can reach.
Is this any way to win a war?
