{"id":110108,"date":"2024-01-22T18:05:50","date_gmt":"2024-01-22T16:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=110108"},"modified":"2024-01-22T09:31:47","modified_gmt":"2024-01-22T07:31:47","slug":"22-05-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=110108","title":{"rendered":"The West\u2019s lethal error in the war against Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The West\u2019s lethal error in the war against Israel<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

MELANIE PHILLIPS<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The distinction between Hamas and \u201cordinary\u201d Palestinians is largely spurious.<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

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\nPhotos of Israeli civilians kidnapped by Hamas terrorist on Oct. 7, and taken back into captivity in the Gaza Strip, on display at the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver, the site of the opening plenary of the Jewish National Fund-USA annual conference, Nov. 30, 2023. Photo by Carin M. Smilk.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In the current war in the Middle East, it\u2019s a given that a distinction must be drawn between Hamas and the \u201cordinary\u201d Palestinian Arab residents of Gaza.<\/span><\/p>\n

This distinction, however, is largely spurious.<\/span><\/p>\n

An\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The\u00a0<\/em>Washington Free Beacon<\/em>\u00a0that drew upon interviews given to Israeli TV by freed hostages has confirmed that ordinary Gazans were deeply involved in the Oct. 7 pogrom and subjected the hostages to cruelty, abuse and starvation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nili Margalit\u00a0recounted<\/a>\u00a0how Gazan \u201ccivilians, regular people\u201d took her hostage at knifepoint in the Oct. 7 attack. Margalit said a \u201cboy \u2026 17, maybe 18 years old\u201d and an \u201colder man with the knife\u201d broke down the door of her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz and forced her, barefoot and in pajamas, into a stolen golf cart.<\/span><\/p>\n

Margalit said she saw a \u201cmob, thousands of people,\u201d including \u201cwomen and children,\u201d pouring across Israel\u2019s breached border with Gaza less than two miles away.<\/span><\/p>\n

She saw two boys, one \u201cno more than four or five years old\u201d and the other 15 or 16, riding an all-terrain vehicle that belonged to her father, a cattle breeder who was among those murdered that day. The boys had apparently already made one trip from Nir Oz to Gaza and were returning for another round of carnage.<\/span><\/p>\n

A number of the freed hostages said they spent part of their captivity in family homes, hospitals and other civilian sites in Gaza where they were locked into rooms, starved and ill-treated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mia Schem, who was shot in the arm and abducted from the Supernova music festival, said her captors brought her directly to a hospital in Gaza as she was bleeding to death.<\/span><\/p>\n

Schem then received no further treatment or even pain medication. She was taken to a private home where a man and his family held her captive with \u201cpure hate,\u201d forbidding her to speak, cry or move. She would go days without receiving food and was never allowed to bathe.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bad as their conditions were, the hostages\u2019 captors repeatedly told them that their lives would be at risk if they were discovered by ordinary Gazans. The hostages hardly needed any such warning.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sharon Aloni Cunio\u00a0recalled<\/a>\u00a0how she and her twin three-year-old daughters were mobbed on Oct. 7 as terrorists brought them into Gaza on a tractor from their home in Nir Oz. \u201cPeople start beating everyone who was sitting on the tractor\u2014just beating us, from all sides. It was horrific,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The testimony of the freed hostages carries particular weight because these aren\u2019t extreme nationalists. They are Israelis who, in general, were until Oct.7 the most fervent believers in peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian Arabs, ferrying Gaza residents to hospital in Israel and establishing many bonds with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

They believed that whatever the failings of Palestinian leaders, the Palestinian people just wanted to live alongside them in peace and security. Now they say something very different. \u201cI experienced hell. Everyone there are terrorists,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Schem. \u201cThere are no innocent civilians, not one.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Agam Goldstein-Almog, who was abducted with her mother and two younger siblings after Hamas murdered her father and elder sister in their homes in Kfar Aza, said: \u201cIf we previously believed that there was a chance for peace, we\u2019ve lost all faith in these people, especially after we were there and among the population.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Nor are most Arabs living in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria any different. Between Oct. 7 and Jan. 15, Rescuers Without Borders recorded more than 2,600 attacks targeting Israeli civilians and soldiers, including 760 cases of rock-throwing, 551 fire bombings, 12 attempted or successful stabbings and nine vehicular assaults.<\/span><\/p>\n

The IDF has been fighting heavy battles in these territories to thwart attacks and destroy terrorist infrastructure. In recent weeks, it\u2019s been investigating possible infiltration tunnels discovered near Jewish communities in the\u00a0Hebron Hills<\/a>\u00a0in Judea and\u00a0Shiloh<\/a>\u00a0in Samaria\u2019s Binyamin region.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Palestinian Authority has never condemned the Oct. 7 pogrom; on the contrary, its main party, Fatah, has repeatedly extolled the atrocities. A\u00a0poll<\/a>\u00a0published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed support for Hamas in Judea and Samaria more than tripled after Oct. 7, with no fewer than 82% of Arabs there supporting the attack and 70% of them supporting the \u201carmed struggle\u201d against Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

In any moral universe, a set of people bent upon exterminating another would be treated as pariahs by the international community and their rights would be considered forfeit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet America is even now insisting that the \u201croute to peace\u201d is through a Palestinian state that must be ruled by a \u201crevitalized\u201d and \u201creformed\u201d P.A.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s zero chance of any such reform. Such a state would merely revitalize the capacity of the Palestinian Arabs to inflict yet more genocidal attacks on Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n

America and Britain remain wedded to the \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d because they refuse to acknowledge that this conflict is not over a division of land. Instead, it is a war of annihilation against the Jewish homeland that has lasted for almost 100 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, the reason the conflict still endures is the behavior of the West itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Led by Britain in the 1930s, the West has consistently rewarded and incentivized Arab aggressors bent on destroying Israel, while it has prevented Israel from taking the measures necessary to see off the threat once and for all.<\/span><\/p>\n

The essential prerequisite for any solution is for the West to withdraw support for Palestinian aggression and unequivocally back Israeli self-defense. Deprived of both Western funding and validation, the Palestinian agenda would fall apart.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, the West continues to promote the murderous fiction that there are \u201cgood\u201d Palestinians who deserve a state of their own\u2014which would be a terror state with Israel at its mercy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The West\u2019s lethal error goes even deeper. America and the U.K. have failed to realize that, just as Hamas can\u2019t be divorced from the Palestinians but are part of the same genocidal entity, so the war against Israel is merely the most neuralgic element of a civilizational war between the Muslim world and the West.<\/span><\/p>\n

That war was declared in 1979, when the Islamic revolution in Iran galvanized and radicalized Sunni as well as Shi\u2019ite Muslims across the world, helping to create al-Qaeda.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new Iranian regime declared war on the West and has prosecuted that war ever since with virtually no pushback. Instead, Western appeasement has helped finance and bolster Iran\u2019s terrorism, proxy wars and quest for hegemony.<\/span><\/p>\n

That catastrophic strategy, combined with the West\u2019s continued financing and support of the Palestinian agenda, enabled the Hamas pogrom and onslaught on Israel from multiple fronts in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Judea and Samaria.<\/span><\/p>\n

This already metastasizing conflict is feared to presage a world war in which Russia and China join Iran against a West which has shown such lamentable enfeeblement in the Middle East.<\/span><\/p>\n

Britain and America do not only insist that \u201cbad\u201d Hamas is different from the \u201cgood\u201d Palestinians. They similarly claim that al-Qaeda, ISIS and other radical Islamists are merely rogue actors in an otherwise unthreatening Muslim world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Both Britain and America have accordingly failed to recognize how jihadis intent upon conquering the West for Islam\u2014as Hamas has said is its own ultimate aim\u2014have tunneled into British and American democratic structures and institutions as devastatingly as they have tunneled into Israel from Gaza and Lebanon.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a result of myopia, muddled thinking and moral cowardice, America and Britain are not just aiming to ensure that an Israel they protect from outright annihilation will nevertheless continue to twist in the murderous Islamist wind. They have also advertised to the enemies of civilization that the West itself is ripe for conquest.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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MELANIE PHILLIPS<\/strong> – Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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The West\u2019s lethal error in the war against Israel MELANIE PHILLIPS The distinction between Hamas and \u201cordinary\u201d Palestinians is largely spurious. . Photos of Israeli civilians kidnapped by Hamas terrorist on Oct. 7, and taken back into captivity in the Gaza Strip, on display at the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver, the site of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110108"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110108"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110127,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110108\/revisions\/110127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}