It’s been more than six months and the back and forth, on and off talks between Israel and Hamas through various intermediaries seem to be getting nowhere fast.
Even more interesting and frustrating is how Israel, the U.S., Egypt, and Qatar find themselves sitting around, waiting for the violent Hamas leaders to make counter-offers and decisions, which have so far led them to rejecting every proposal set forth since November, 2023.
Frankly, I feel that everything should be done to arrange for the release of the hostages and for Israel to reach a settlement with Hamas so things can move forward so we can begin to put this nightmare behind us.
In a sense, you can surmise that not unlike the agitators and miscreants on college campuses around the country, I too am in favor of Israel agreeing to a ceasefire to get the poor hostages (at least the living ones), back home to their families.
It’s vital to understand that these are terrorists we’re talking about, and so loathed and mistrusted are they by their fellow Arabs in Egypt and Jordan that these countries refuse to allow any Palestinian to cross their border and enter their territories.
In other words, my position is that any agreement made with Hamas is not valid, will not hold up, and once the Israelis achieve their objectives, they are not obliged to adhere to any of it once the hostages are released.
I find the situation reminiscent of the Arab terrorists who murdered the Israeli Olympic team in the 1972 Munich Olympics where ultimately, every terrorist who participated in that massacre was eventually hunted down by the Mossad and eliminated.
The Israelis made no deals with the terrorists 54 years ago in Munich, and there are no deals that should be made today. There is nothing to be ashamed of when stating unequivocally that the entire Hamas organization from top to bottom should be killed.
Lance Morrow wrote in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal in a piece entitled, “The Grim Arithmetic of a Just War,” about the mathematics of war. He made numerous calculations about the number of casualties in wars over the last hundred years. The key lesson from Morrow’s essay is that it is wrong for Joe Biden and Antony Blinken to be overly concerned about the number of Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza so long as the Israelis complete their goal of the destruction of Hamas.
He points out like others before him that when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, 2,400 U.S. troops were killed in the surprise attack. In response, Morrow points out that in the course of the war with Japan, U.S. forces killed over 4 million civilians and soldiers with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The end result was that Japan was forced to surrender.
The U.S. military calculation at the time was that the Japanese leadership would never have surrendered without the devastation wrought by the lethal bombing by a weapon the world had never seen before, but was so badly needed to end the war. And yes, civilians were certainly part of that equation.
And that is true in regard to other wars and battles, including in the Middle East. In 1970, when arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat set his sights on Jordan as a Palestinian state, King Hussein in what has become known as Black September, murdered 40,000 Palestinians. Not only did no one bother asking how many of those killed were enemy combatants and how many were civilians, half a century later, the topic is never discussed and no one ever dares inquire about the breakdown of the casualties. It is a closed case.
The Israeli objective from the start of the war was the total elimination of Hamas, including its evil leadership. It is only the cognitively-confused, misdirected Biden administration that is concerned with the idea of innocent civilians in Gaza and how many meals a day they are receiving and if there is a proper balance between their protein and carbohydrate intake.
What kind of a diet were the Japanese in Hiroshima on when they were pulverized by the atomic bomb during World War II? Where was the concern for the Syrian civilians when Barack Obama said the use of chemical weapons in Syria was crossing a red line? Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian President, then went ahead and gassed thousands of Syrians to death in the city of Ghouta, a city where there was a hint of opposition to his dictatorship. That assault on civilians did not involve Israel, so it evaporated from the public imagination rather quickly.
Any loss of life is a tragedy, especially when the victims are being used as human shields or political pawns by a leadership hoping to maximize the number of deaths in the population they purport to lead. The point that Morrow made in the WSJ last week is that even though the morality of the IDF is unparalleled, it does not have to be Israel’s concern that the Hamas leadership hopes for either real or imagined civilian casualties in Gaza.
Which begs the question: If much of the world is unconcerned about the way the Hamas leadership disregards the welfare of their own citizens in Gaza, why are Joe Biden and Tony Blinken so concerned with this matter?
The headache for Biden is that while his administration is doing everything to hinder the Israelis from achieving a total victory over Hamas, the American people are overwhelmingly in favor of a total and decisive Israeli victory.
Time is not on the side of Biden and his cohorts in the Swamp. He and his administration have been failing the country from day one of his presidency. Now, with the input no doubt of Barack Obama, this may be the administration’s last chance to take down Bibi Netanyahu and score a victory for the terrorists in their never-ending war against the Jewish state.
A story reported on Axios earlier this week stated that the U.S. is holding up a shipment of ammunition to Israel. This is America’s greatest and only true democratic ally in the Middle East, and the current U.S. administration seems to prefer that authoritarian terrorists gain the upper hand over Israel. This knowledge is certainly troubling, and no doubt encourages the leaders of Hamas and Iran, fueling their intractable position of holding onto the hostages, a deadly miscalculation on the part of our State Department.
Which brings us back to the asinine matter of the rioting on hundreds of American college campuses. We’ve heard it said time and again that if these were KKK encampments or protests, the national guard and perhaps even the U.S. military would be called into action to deal with the matter. But its Jews and Israel, so let’s take it slow and see how it goes.
A few days ago, we observed Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Actually, a day like this might be obsolete presently because with ignorant, empty-headed college kids rallying for terrorists and calling for thousands of October 7ths where Jews are tortured and murdered, it becomes unnecessary to think back too far when it is paraded directly before our eyes each and every day.
All the TV news tickers on the screen these days display subject matter referencing anti-Israel this or anti-Israel that. For now, university graduations are being cancelled, while those that are taking place are being disrupted by pro-Hamas supporters. It’s a terrible situation that has college presidents and elected officials completely baffled about how to deal with issues involving free speech, disagreeing with Netanyahu’s policy on Hamas, and despising anything related to Jews. It’s a fine mess we are in.
Next week we will be observing Yom HaZikaron, the day on which we stop everything to remember and recall all those who lost their lives in defense of the state of Israel. For the first time, this will include those who were murdered on October 7th.
That day usually flows seamlessly into and with a reversal of emotions into Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day on the 5th of Iyar.
This year it will include mixed emotions. In the meantime, hopefully Israel will be smart enough to make any deal possible with Sinwar, Haniyah, Mashal, etc. that calls for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages. It’s even okay if the U.S. guarantees the deal. Pretty soon, Biden and Blinken will be electorally gone and the Hamas leaders gone too, by a different route.
Happy 76th Birthday. Am Yisrael Chai!
Read more of Larry Gordon’s articles at 5TJT.com. Follow 5 Towns Jewish Times on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for updates and live videos. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome at 5TJT.com and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
