By Edwin Black, contributor

| The HIll |

Yet another tenuous cease-fire with Hamas is hanging on by a thread and may be broken by the time this is published. Through the plumes of smoke, Jerusalem now sees a very different political landscape. Virulent mass anti-Israel marches roil through the world's capitals — in some cases, with tens of thousands of angry protestors. War crime proceedings are now openly threatened by official bodies, even though they are based on confused conflations of international law uttered with the blindfold of Lady Justice pulled down over one eye only. The worldwide media establishment is now captive to its own inability to proffer balanced questions of Hamas's representatives even as Israeli spokesmen are continuously pressed for impossible answers. Even the White House has joined the chorus of those who find moral equivalency in the conflict, treating Hamas as though it were Lech Walesa's Polish Solidarity.

Israel is looking high and low for friends, especially those with a connection to Congress. It has found them — not just in its traditional reservoir of support in the American Jewish community, but also in Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which has now been propelled to the front row of pro-Israel organizations.

The opening salvo of wartime support was seen at the group's Washington Summit, held late last month on July 21. At the very moment when the Jewish state was under the first of a series of crushing waves of global criticism for its involvement in Operation Protective Edge, CUFI roused its American heartland membership in loud, rollicking support of Israel. That night, firebrand evangelist Pastor John Hagee led some 4,800 foot-stomping, shofar-blowing Christian delegates, who had traveled from across the nation and from overseas, to witness a procession of grand podium speeches backed up by floor-to-ceiling video effects, syncopated Israeli music and incisive info sessions. Part tent revival and part political shout, CUFI's Washington Summit is patterned after the mega-gatherings staged by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the very same hall. At a time when the fog and dust storms of war make it hard for some to discern the good guys from the bad guys, CUFI speakers brought clarity and context to its attendees.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took time, via taped message, to thank the evangelical crowd for standing by Israel during its hourglass of need. He spoke from Israel, bunkered in a secure room. To thunderous applause, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) exhorted the Israelis in their Gaza strategy to "go as far as you need to go, and do what you've got to do."

The Convention Center conclave was more than lip service. The next day, CUFI's membership swarmed the halls of Congress to lobby their representatives from the heartland to stop funding the Palestinian National Authority until it ceases paying terrorist salaries and to stand with Israel in its fight against Hamas.

Days later, CUFI spent a small fortune in a national, multi-platform advertising campaign, purchasing full-page ads "about the true nature of Hamas." Aimed at constituents in key districts, the full-page ads ran in volleys that appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Denver Post, Chicago Sun-Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Arizona Republic, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, theHouston Chronicle, the Miami Herald, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News and The Seattle Times. Display ads were also purchased at top news, analysis and Christian websites, including Fox News, the Christian Post, Beliefnet, the Blaze and the Drudge Report. Email blasts to the group's 1.8 million members backed up the ad campaign.

Those ads, in large type, quoted from the Hamas Charter, starting with the document's first syllables that vow destruction of the Jewish state: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it."

CUFI declared that its campaign was launched to eliminate the moral confusion in the American media when it comes to the true nature and goals of Hamas. A dedicated CUFI Web page asked readers to email Secretary of State John Kerry: "Now is not the time to ease the legal and justified blockade of Gaza. Now is the time to destroy Hamas' terror tunnels, remove Hamas' missile stockpiles, and demilitarize Gaza."

Before the newsprint was dry, CUFI organized a tour of 51 leading pastors — one from each state and the District of Columbia — to travel to Israel for a four-day solidarity trip. Braving hundreds of rockets, the pastors donated blood to the Israel Defense Forces and visited the wounded. CUFI executive director David Brog declared, "We will tell everyone we meet that those shouting 'death to the Jews' on the streets of Berlin and Paris do not represent all of us. And, perhaps most importantly, we'll share what we see and learn with our members back home."

Brog followed that declaration with an essay in The Times of Israel that articulated, "When we Americans fought Al Qaeda, we understood the moral distinctions between terrorists and a democracy seeking to defend itself from them. This moral clarity should not blur at ocean's edge. Israel is a democracy defending itself — and us — from the Palestinian equivalent of Al Qaeda, Hamas. We must stand unequivocally with Israel."

At a time when Jews in Europe are noiselessly changing their names, when Jews in America are questioning their identity and their safety in hushed tones, CUFI will not go quietly.

While some major American Jewish organizations are still typing press releases, pondering position statements and scheduling conference calls, CUFI has rushed in from the aisles to shake things up, joining StandWithUs and others in the front row of the pro-Israel community.

BY AFP August 11, 2014, 2:11 pm

|The Times of Israel|

72-hour ceasefire took hold in Gaza Monday, as Israeli and Palestinian negotiators headed to Cairo in search of a long-term solution to end over a month of deadly fighting.

The truce, which began just after midnight, was the fruit of days of Egyptian-brokered mediation to stem more than four weeks of violence.

Ten hours into the truce, the skies over Gaza remained calm, with no reports of violations on any side and signs of life emerging on the streets of the war-torn Palestinian enclave.

As the sun rose on Gaza City, shops and businesses began opening their doors and a handful of people could be seen doing their early shopping.

Outside a UN-run school, a clutch of cars and donkey carts waited to take some of the refugees back to homes they had fled during the fighting.

“We want to go back to see what happened to our house,” said Hikmat Atta, 58, who had piled his family into a small cart and was heading back to his home in the northern town of Beit Lahiya which they had left in the first days of the war.

But with the truce still in its early stages, he was not taking any chances.

“We’re just going back for the day, at night we’ll come back here,” he told AFP.

Egypt urged the warring sides to use the three-day lull to reach “a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire,” after efforts to extend a similar truce last week collapsed into a firestorm of violence, as Hamas fired a barrage of rockets at Israeli territory across the border.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it would give the two sides “another chance to agree on a durable ceasefire” while stressing the importance of addressing “the underlying grievances on both sides.”

Hamas, the de facto power in Gaza, has conditioned its agreement for any permanent agreement on Israeli lifting its eight-year blockade on Gaza.

“In the case of Israeli procrastination or continued aggression, Hamas is ready with other Palestinian factions to resist on the ground and politically.”

Veteran Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat arrived in Cairo late Sunday for talks with Egyptian and Arab League officials on behalf of president Mahmoud Abbas, an airport official said.

Meanwhile, an Israeli team arrived in Cairo on Monday, an Israeli official told AFP.

The team was to resume Egyptian-mediated talks it had abandoned on Friday after Hamas refused to extend an earlier truce and resumed its fire on southern Israel.

Israel had pledged to send its negotiating team back when the truce took hold.

Palestinian delegates in Cairo said they would be happy for Abbas’s Palestinian Authority to take over the reconstruction of Gaza and execute any agreement reached in Cairo.

Israel has no direct interface with Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.

“The national unity government and the Palestinian Authority will take over the execution of all that will be agreed upon during the truce talks,” Azzam al-Ahmed, head of the Palestinian delegation, told reporters.

“We are backing the setting up of a national body to be formed by president Abbas, which will take over the reconstruction (of Gaza),” said senior Hamas official Ezzat al-Rishq.

“The president of the body should be professional, credible and one who will be accepted internationally.”

The new truce deal followed a similar arrangement last week which had brought relief to millions on both sides of the border.

In the gap between ceasefires, warplanes hit more than 170 targets, killing at least 19 people, while the Palestinians fired at least 136 rockets at Israel, of which 93 hit and 13 were shot down, with the rest falling short inside Gaza, the army said.

According to Hamas Health Ministry figures, 1,939 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict. The UN says just under three-quarters of those killed in Gaza were civilians and around a third of the civilian victims were children. Israel says 750-1,000 of the dead are Hamas members and other gunmen. It also blames Hamas for all civilian fatalities, saying Hamas sets up rocket launchers and tunnel openings in Gaza neighborhoods and uses Gazans as “human shields.”

Israel has lost 64 soldiers and three civilians in the fighting. Eleven of the soldiers were killed by Hamas gunmen emerging from cross-border tunnels dug under the Israeli border.

Hamas has fired over 3,000 rockets at Israel, including some 600 from areas close to schools, mosques and other civilian facilities, the Israeli army said.

The resumption of fighting had put Netanyahu under increased pressure from hardliners to send ground troops back in to Gaza to topple Hamas.

BY RAPHAEL AHREN August 6, 2014, 10:04 pm Updated: August 6, 2014, 10:09 pm 

|The Times of Israel|

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday night set out a moral justification for the way the IDF has dealt with the Hamas strategy of firing rockets at Israel, and tunneling under the Israeli border, from the heart of Palestinian residential neighborhoods in Gaza.

Arguing that Israel’s battle over the past month against terrorists in Gaza using civilians as human shields came during a critical test period, he said it would be a “moral mistake” as well as a practical one to not take action against terrorists operating from mosques, schools and other civilian areas.

Such behavior would represent “an enormous victory for terrorists everywhere,” he said, and would result in more and more civilian deaths around the world.

“What’s happening now is not only a test for Israel but for the international community, for the civilized world itself, [for] how it is to defend itself,” Netanyahu declared at a press conference on the second day of a 72-hour ceasefire that began on Tuesday morning.

Terrorists must not be allowed to “fight from civilian areas with impunity” and rely on world condemnation of the victimized nation — in this case, Israel — for responding to attacks, he warned.

The prime minister blamed Hamas for Gaza’s civilian deaths, due to its rejection of various ceasefire proposals throughout the campaign and its deliberate basing of its military infrastructure in the heart of Gaza population centers.

Palestinian sources in Gaza say that over 1,800 people were killed in the past month during Operation Protective Edge; Israel says it killed some 900 combatants, and Netanyahu stressed that Israel “regrets” every civilian death. Israel entered the campaign in order to stem rocket fire from Gaza at Israeli towns and cities as well as to destroy a network of tunnels, dug by Hamas under the border, and used to launch attacks inside Israeli territory.

“Ninety percent of the fatalities could have been avoided had Hamas not rejected then the ceasefire it accepts now,” he said of an Egyptian ceasefire proposal that Israel accepted three weeks ago. “Hamas needs to be blamed for these deaths, ostracized from the family of nations.”

Israel’s response to the Hamas rocket and tunnel threat was “justified and proportionate” Netanyahu asserted, adding that “every civilian casualty is a tragedy — a tragedy of Hamas’s making.”

It would have been “disproportionate” not to act, he reasoned, and therefore “to get our people killed.”

Hamas fired over 3,000 rockets at Israel, including 600 from near to schools, mosques and homes, the Israeli army said Tuesday. Hamas gunmen also killed 11 IDF soldiers when emerging into Israel from its cross-border tunnels. Netanyahu said Wednesday that the Hamas “death squads” had planned much larger attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians through the tunnels, and that demolishing them, as Israel has done in recent weeks, was a strategic necessity. In all, Israel lost 64 soldiers and three civilians in the campaign.

The prime minister presented evidence to back up his assertions of Hamas’s reliance on Gazans as human shields, showing footage of what he said were mortars fired from near an UNRWA elementary school for boys. He also described a “terror tunnel” near a school and many tunnels dug from inside homes.

“I think it’s very important for the truth to come out,” he said, devoting a section of his press conference to remarks in English, taking questions from foreign journalists, and saying Hamas had subjected foreign journalists to intimidation in Gaza in recent weeks.

He also screened footage from indian, Finnish and French TV of Hamas firing rockets from civilian areas, including the outskirts of Gaza City’s main hospital — footage that was only broadcast in the last few days.

Netanyahu offered condolences for the Palestinian citizens harmed or killed during the operation.

“Israel deeply regrets every civilian casualty, every single one. We do not target them. People of Gaza are not our enemies. Our enemy is Hamas,” the prime minister said.

The decision to pull forces out of Gaza last weekend was made only once the 30-plus sophisticated Hamas tunnels had been destroyed, he said. Netanyahu added that Israel was working “to create technological means to locate new tunnels that will reach into our territory.”

Netanyahu stressed the need to prevent Hamas from rearming. That, he said, is the way “to prevent this conflict from bring repeated.”

With regard to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s role in negotiating a truce, Netanyahu said that the PA had played a part in talks and would continue to do so. Hamas seized control of Gaza from the PA in a violent takeover in 2007.

“We have cooperated and are cooperating with the PA,” he said. “We’re prepared to see a role for them [in] the reconstruction of Gaza, humanitarian aid, security questions. The ceasefire agreement was coordinated with them.”

Despite reports of bitter differences between Israel and the Obama administration throughout the war, Netanyahu thanked US Secretary of State John Kerry for his support, saying he had another “very good” conversation with Kerry on Wednesday afternoon. He welcomed Kerry’s calls for the disarmament of Gaza-based terror groups.

He also praised the “iron discipline” of Israelis — a play on the “Iron Dome” which intercepted hundreds of the Hamas rockets — and lauded the Israel Defense Forces.

“The IDF is an amazing army,” he said. “It’s a strong army [and] had major achievements. It stood and stands by all the requirements. The entire nation is behind the IDF, during peace and during war.

“I am proud of the IDF. I am proud to be the prime minister of such a united people.”

BY AVI ISSACHAROFF| August 5, 2014, 3:06 pm
|The Times of Israel|

What began on June 12 at the junction outside Alon Shvut, in the Etzion bloc of the West Bank, with the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers, may have concluded at the nearby settlement of Alon Shvut, where the last rocket fired by Hamas from Gaza — minutes before the ceasefire came into force on Tuesday morning — hit the earth.

One long line connects that abduction-murder with the descent into conflict that Hamas deliberately instigated against Israel from Gaza. The Islamist organization wanted to escalate the situation against Israel, and to a certain extent, against the Palestinian Authority, in order to boost its standing among the Palestinian and wider Arab public and to ensure the economic survival of its rule in Gaza. It is of course too early to determine whether the current ceasefire will prove longer-lasting than its predecessors. Predictably, in the last few minutes before 8 a.m., Hamas launched rocket salvos in numerous directions. One rocket landed in the Palestinian city of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. Apparently nothing had changed.

Nonetheless, the announcement of a ceasefire by the Middle East’s responsible adult, Egypt — this time in consultation with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, rather than unilaterally — may indicate a greater likelihood of success. The Egyptians this time did one thing differently from three weeks ago, when their ceasefire proposal was rejected by Hamas — they brought Hamas representatives to Cairo, and gave the rulers of Gaza the sense that Cairo was speaking to them rather than spitting in their faces. Furthermore, the fact that all Palestinian factions accepted the Egyptian framework, and abandoned the Qatar-Turkey channel, marks a significant victory for Egypt in the struggle for regional primacy, and to some extent makes it more difficult for Hamas to evade ending the conflict.

The critical question for Hamas surrounds what it will manage to achieve in the indirect negotiations now getting underway in Cairo between the Israeli delegation and the Palestinian delegation (with its Hamas and Islamic Jihad representatives). The very fact that Hamas accepted the Egyptian umbrella and the Cairo formula — providing for an immediate cessation of hostilities, and negotiations only after that — marked a humiliating defeat of sorts. For almost three weeks Hamas had insistently rejected the proposal for an unconditional ceasefire with its demands to be addressed only afterwards. But on Monday night, it changed course.

That shift signals the difficult position in which Hamas now finds itself. It still has plenty of rockets, and its leadership is unharmed. But its military infrastructure is severely damaged. And worse, the civilian infrastructure of Gaza is devastated. Thousands of homes have been completely destroyed, and tens of thousands partly destroyed. There are over 1,800 people dead — Israel says hundreds of them are Hamas fighters — and more than 9,500 injured. If, after all that, the negotiations in Egypt end without Hamas managing a significant achievement related to the lifting of the blockade, it would be a grave blow to the organization’s standing in Palestinian public opinion.

Another aspect that will determine Hamas’s status concerns its capacity to rehabilitate the Gaza Strip. The fact is, however, that no Palestinian hierarchy — neither the PA nor Hamas — could likely manage this project. The damage done to Gaza stands in the billions of dollars, and Hamas certainly cannot fix it alone. The PA has already initiated an international gathering to deal with rehabilitation. The PA government — the joint Fatah-Hamas-backed government with which Israel refused to cooperate — is promising to try to renew electricity and water supplies. But the rebuilding process will take years. The thousands upon thousands of residents of Shejaiya, Beit Hanoun and other areas, who will have to live in tents in the interim, are unlikely to step up their support for Hamas, or for the PA, without new housing.

Unless there is dramatic and immediate rebuilding and rehabilitation of Gaza, indeed, those who profit most from the widespread devastation are unfortunately likely to be organizations still more extreme. Already active active in Gaza, these groups will find fertile ground to recruit. Small groups and factions affiliated with al-Qaeda, which make Hamas look like a Boy Scout movement, are also likely to try to renew their fire on Israel in the next few days, mainly in order to embarrass Hamas.

Which raises the question of what Israel would then do. Will it renew its campaign in Gaza, or return to the old policy after Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, which regarded Hamas’s control of the Strip as a security interest and protective force for the State of Israel?

It’s difficult to imagine the terror that the people of Israel must live with every day. For Israelis, at any given moment a missile might be detected, rocketing toward a residential neighborhood; a bomber might detonate him or herself in a crowded public place; and terrorists sent by Hamas might infiltrate their borders through secret tunnels to kidnap or kill their children.

Thousands of miles away, it might be convenient to criticize Israel for having the temerity to defend itself against these murderous terrorist attacks.

Those of us who have been to Israel and have seen the effects of these attacks first-hand have a deeper understanding of what the Israeli people are being forced to endure.

On my own visits to Israel, I’ve visited with families who were afraid to let their children play outside, and seen the fortified playgrounds where they can go. I’ve seen the rubble of structures brought down by missile strikes and looked in the eyes of people who live with the threat of violence day-in and day-out.

The conflict between Hamas and Israel is merely one part of a much-larger conflict, one with far-ranging implications that can affect the lives of every person on the globe.

To begin, anyone tempted to suggest Israel has used a disproportionate amount of force to defend itself needs to remember the origins of this latest round of violence. It’s Hamas that continued to launch rockets, despite Israel’s willingness to discuss and abide by multiple cease-fires. It’s Hamas that uses Palestinians as human shields to protect its leaders and its arsenals, and to preserve its extensive system of tunnels. And it’s Hamas that would, if given the opportunity, take the life of every Israeli within range of its thousands of rockets.

Israel needs more than our passive support—it needs our vigorous support. The overwhelming success of the Iron Dome defense system has been the only thing to prevent the deaths of thousands of Israelis, and changes nothing in Hamas’ deadly intent. And under the circumstances, Israel’s response has been anything but disproportionate. In fact, Israel has taken extraordinary – even unprecedented – measures to protect as many lives as possible in its efforts to disarm and disable Hamas.

The United States must take the lead in bringing the international community together to demand the total removal of every missile in Gaza, as well as the complete destruction of the tunnel network being used by Hamas terrorists. To facilitate this, the United States must use the tools available to us diplomatically and continue to support the actions of the Israel Defense Forces. Should the international community fail to join us in sufficient numbers, the United States should block actions in the United Nations aimed at preventing Israel from defending itself.