VIA: The Daily Caller 7/20/2014

President Barack Obama stepped up his efforts Sunday to limit Israel’s gradual destruction of Hamas’ tunnel network in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza, which now conceals many of the rockets and jihadi units that attack Israelis.

In a morning call to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama “reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself [but] also raised serious concern about the growing number of casualties, including increasing Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza and the loss of Israeli soldiers,” said a 2.00 p.m. statement from the White House.

Israel’s government did not officially respond to Obama’s statement, which came after Israel ground units moved into Gaza to find the tunnels. The Gaza area is controlled by Hamas green-waving jihadis, whose mission is to destroy Israel because it is not controlled by Muslims.

The warring parties should comply with the 2012 ceasefire signed by Hamas, Israel and Egypt’s government, said the White House statement.

“Secretary of State John Kerry will soon travel to Cairo to seek an immediate cessation of hostilities based on a return to the November 2012 ceasefire agreement,” the statement said.

That 2012 deal was brokered by Egypt’s Islamist government, which was then aligned with Hamas parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama strongly backed the deal and also the Islamist government, until after the government failed to protect the U.S. embassy from Islamist rioters in September 2012.

The Islamist ceasefire deal opened Gaza’s border posts with Egypt. After the fighting ended, Hamas imported more weapons and construction material for its tunnel network, which are now being used to attack Israel.

Since the 2012 deal was made, Egypt’s pro-Hamas government has been replaced by a new anti-Hamas, anti-brotherhood government.

That new government has drafted a new deal, which would open the border posts “once the security situation becomes stable on the ground.” Hamas fears that Egypt’s new government will never conclude the security situation is stable enough to reopen the border, and will continue to block the movement of weapons in Gaza.

Egypt’s new deal would also allow Israel to launch drones strikes against Hamas military forces.

Israel accepted the new deal, but Hamas rejected it on July 16.

For at least a week, Obama has been pressuring Israel to not attack Gaza.

“Israel has the right to defend itself against what I consider to be inexcusable attacks from Hamas… [but] I believe further escalation benefits no one, least of all the Israeli and the Palestinian people,” Obama told Muslim attendees at a July 14 dinner in the White House.

“Israel has a right to defend itself from rocket attacks… But over the past two weeks, we’ve all been heartbroken by the violence, especially the death and injury of so many innocent civilians in Gaza —- men, women and children who were caught in the crossfire,” Obama said in July 16 statement to the media.

Obama’s deputy repeated that two-track message today — acknowledging Israel’s right to defend itself, while also criticizing Israel’s attack on the tunnel network.

Kerry sat for an interview on Fox News, but privately criticized Israel’s tactics in Gaza during an intermission. “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation,” he said in a quick phone call to an aide. “We need to get over there… it is crazy to be siting around.”

When asked to explain his off-air comments, Kerry said that Israelis “have a right to go in take out those tunnels, we completely support that… [and] we defend Israel’s right to do what it is doing in order to get at those tunnels.”

“Hamas has started this process of rocketing… [and now] is important for them to step up and be reasonable,” he said.

Obama’s July 20 intervention came as Israel ground forces pushed into the heavily populated Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza, which shields part of Hamas’ tunnel network from Israel surveillance and airstrikes.

The area is being strongly defended by Hamas jihadis carrying imported weaponry.

In overnight fighting, 13 Israel soldiers were killed, including seven in a troop-carrier which was destroyed by a land-mine, and three who were killed by an anti-tank missile.

Israel has urged local Arabs to leave the embattled neighborhood, but Hamas forces are reportedly blockading any civilian exodus.

“We urged the civilian population to evacuate for days, through leaflets, broadcasts, telephone calls… because we didn’t want to see innocent civilians caught in the crossfire between Israel and Hamas,” a military official told Israel media. “It is Hamas that ordered the civilians to stay put. It is Hamas that wanted those civilians to stay, so it would have a human shield for its terrorist machine.”

Hamas is also pressuring media outlets to showcase the resulting civilian casualties, especially of children, who are brought to a nearby hospital and morgue for easy access.

The civilian casualties caused by Hamas’ blockage of the exits include the “increasing Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza” cited in the White House statement

“What choice do we have?” Netanyahu asked in a July 20 press conference.

“We try to target the rocketeers… And all civilian casualties are not intended by us but actually intended by Hamas who want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because somebody said they use telegenically dead Palestinians for the cause,” Netanyahu told CNN. “They want ‘the more dead, the better.’”

The Hamas attacks on Israel violate international law because the rockets are too inaccurate to hit military targets. Nearly all of the attacks have been blocked by Israel’s forces and its Iron Dome anti-missile system.

Since 2012, when Egypt’s Islamist government failed to protect the U.S. embassy in Cairo, Obama has reduced his involvement in Middle East politics. However, he’s still trying to broker a peace deal between the the Jews in Israel and the Middle East Arabs, almost none of whom favor the existence of Israel.

TIME

What does it mean to say that casualties are “disproportionate”?

On “NBC Nightly News” on July 12, David Gregory spoke of growing pressure from the United Nations for a ceasefire in Gaza. He noted that the United States and many other nations believed that Israel had a right to self-defense. Nonetheless, Gregory reported, these countries were likely to be sympathetic to calls for a ceasefire because of the “disproportionate” number of casualties between the two sides. Among the residents of Gaza, the death toll then exceeded 100, while Israel had suffered dozens of injuries but no casualties.

Mr. Gregory was simply reporting the news, but I found his comments disturbing, nonetheless. What does it mean to say that the casualties are “disproportionate”? And is that really the moral issue that we need to be concerned about?

The implication of the “disproportionality” claim is that, given their losses, the people of Gaza are the real victims. But morally and politically, this is an intolerable and distorted interpretation of the realities in the region.

The reason that Hamas has not killed more Israelis is not because they haven’t tried. In the seven years during which it has controlled Gaza, Hamas and its proxies have fired more than 5000 rockets into Israel; almost 800 have been launched just this past week. Each one has been aimed at civilians and intended to murder and maim. The reason that more Israelis have not died is that the weapons are mostly crude and inaccurate and that, over time, Israel has prepared herself with shelters, warning sirens and an anti-missile system. In addition, Israelis have been just plain lucky.

But that luck could change at any moment. If a single rocket were to hit a school or a mall, the number of dead could balance out in a flash. Then, to be sure, you would have “proportionality,” but there is no moral calculus by which additional dead civilians is a preferable outcome.

For Israel, the fundamental issue is the responsibility of its government to protect its citizens. As missiles have fallen on her cities over the years, the government has not succeeded in providing that protection. The reasons are many, including sensitivity to American wishes and a concern for world opinion; but the desire not to hurt the innocent is the most important. Now, however, as children in the south continue to live in terror and civilians throughout Israel flee to shelters several times daily, Israel’s leaders have concluded that they must act.

There is something bizarre, in fact, about the idea of “proportionality” being used as a moral criticism against Israel. A proportional response by Israel to the attacks of the last seven years would mean that every time a rocket is fired by Hamas at an Israeli civilian center, Israel would respond by firing a rocket at a civilian center in Gaza. Israel, of course, rejected that, then and now. Still, when Hamas violated the ceasefire yet again and got its hands on longer-range rockets, something had to be done.

The best way to evaluate Israel’s action is to imagine how we as Americans would respond to similar provocations. Assume the following: a terrorist group embedded in Mexico that the Mexican government refused to disarm is firing missiles into Houston night after night, endangering American lives. Our government would not wait a week or a month; indeed, it would not wait a single day before taking action to assure the well-being of her citizens. In fact, we need only remember how American forces flew half way around the world to engage in a war in Afghanistan against terrorists who carried out an attack on American soil. The talk then was not of proportionality, but of providing security for our country and stopping those who wished to do us harm.

Of course, let us not think for a moment, God forbid, that we can be indifferent to the death of innocents. The death of any child, Israeli or Arab, Muslim or Jew, is an unspeakable tragedy that rends the heart. Israel must do everything humanly possible to avoid the civilian casualties; already she issues warnings and calls for evacuation of areas about to be attacked, and must do more. Still, for any country, morality begins with a reasonable measure of security for her own citizens, and it is not right to say that Israel must protect Palestinian civilians at the cost of abandoning her own.

The issue was never “proportionality”; it is the suffering and dying of too many Arabs and Jews. And while there is much that is complicated about the Middle East, ending the violence in Gaza is not complicated. Hamas needs to halt the missile attacks and provide credible assurances to Israel and the world that they will not be resumed. If the rockets stop, quiet can come tomorrow. And tomorrow is not soon enough.

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, a writer and lecturer, was President of the Union for Reform Judaism from 1996 to 2012. His writings are collected at ericyoffie.com.

In the 1960's, Liberals were among some of Israel's strongest supporters, but have since become some of Israel's staunchest opponents. In his new book, Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel, Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, explores the reasons behind this change.

Last month's vote by the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. to divest from three American companies whose products are sold to Israel was a recent example of the animus toward Israel commonly found on the Left

In an email interview with The Christian Post, Muravchik says that opposing Israel and supporting Palestinians fits with a new Leftist ideology that views modern political struggles as between race and ethnic groups, with the predominantly white West against the non-white rest of the world. This viewpoint has surpassed the previous class-based, rich versus poor, categories as the predominant ideology of the Left, he argued.

Despite this change on the Left, Muravchik does not believe that Democrats will change their support for Israel because American voters are strong supporters of Israel.

Muravchik also spoke about the anti-Israel sentiments found among some liberal Evangelicals and the bias in media coverage of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Here is the full transcript of that interview:

CP: Why, today, are conservatives generally pro-Israel and liberals generally pro-Palestinian?

Muravchik: Leftists/liberals/progressives believe that the great moral drama of our era is "the rest against the West" or the "people of color" against the "white man." This has replaced poor-against-rich or worker-against-capitalist as the core idea of progressive thought. Seen through that lens, Israel (the "Western," "white" guys) is automatically wrong and the Palestinians (the "anti-colonialist" "people of color") are automatically right. On the other side, conservatives value Israel as a free country, a democracy, and an ally of the United States.

CP: U.S. foreign policy toward Israel has remained remarkably consistent across presidential administrations. Do you see that changing?

Muravchik: The U.S. will remain pro-Israel because polls show that the American public is strongly pro-Israel. President Obama has been cooler toward Israel that any other president in recent memory, saying in his first year that he wanted to "put daylight" between the U.S. and Israel, and he has done that, but still he has not changed U.S. policy radically.

CP: What would we see from the Democratic Party today if there were no strong pro-Israel forces within its coalition?

Muravchik: Support for Israel by Democratic politicians has less to do with any "forces" in the "coalition" than with the simple fact that U.S. public opinion is firmly pro-Israel. The Left, however, is now anti-Israel and it does its best to push the party in that direction.

We saw its influence at the 2012 Democratic convention when the draft platform was much less pro-Israel than in the past, and the Obama team had to pull out all the stops — and go through three votes — to change the wording because they feared it would cost votes.

CP: Last month, the Presbyterian Church (USA), a Mainline Protestant denomination, voted to divest from three American companies whose products are sold to Israel. What is the source of this strong anti-Israel sentiment among Mainline Protestants?

Muravchik: In the 1960s and 1970s the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, and the leadership of some of the individual Mainline Protestant denominations turned sharply to the Left. To an outsider it looked as if they were replacing religious faith with political messianism. They embraced "revolutionary" forces in Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other "third world" places even though those forces were both anti-human and anti-God. And they embraced Palestinian "revolutionaries" in the same spirit.

CP: In the United States, the strongest supporters of Israel have been Jews and Evangelicals. Recently though, there have been some vocal anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian sentiments from liberal Evangelicals. Has anything surprised you about this phenomenon?

Muravchik: It is not surprising for Evangelicals to be liberals. This faith does not require any particular political persuasion. But a genuine liberal must be pro-Israel. Israel — and not its enemies — is democratic, observes freedom of speech and worship, tolerates minorities, sanctifies the rights of women, and constantly reaches out to the other side with humanitarian gestures, such as the six Gazan babies who were transported to Israel this week, amidst the rocket fire, for free operations to repair congenital heart defects. To be anti-Israel is not to be liberal; rather it is to embrace the worldview of the radical Left which is totalitarian, anti-freedom, and anti-faith. It surprised me greatly to see some Evangelicals join that camp.

CP: What do you think about the media coverage of the current conflict taking place between Israel and Hamas? Some conservatives have complained that the coverage is unfairly biased against Israel.

Muravchik: The coverage is biased, especially in The New York Times, which once was fair and balanced but today filters the whole world through a leftish lens. And of course the Times influences others.

In addition to simple bias, another factor is at work. Israel is an open society, with a press that watchdogs the government and washes the country's dirty linen in public. Many stories in the U.S. press that show some of the bad side of Israel originate in the Israeli press. There is nothing remotely comparable on the Arab side. There is no press freedom, and if someone in Gaza wants to reveal Hamas's nasty deeds, it's as good as his life.

The Daily Caller 7/14/2014

Don’t believe everything you read — especially as it relates to Israel.

As Israel’s latest war with the Palestinian terror group Hamas continues with no clear end in sight, it’s worthwhile to debunk some of the myths that have been perpetuated about the conflict.

Myth 1.) The current conflict between Israel and Hamas is part of a “cycle of violence”

The media love to use language that projects evenhandedness, but the current conflict is not merely a tale of tit-for-tat. As others have noted, if Hamas unilaterally stopped attacking Israel, Israel would have no reason to attack Hamas. But if Israel unilaterally stopped attacking Hamas, Hamas would continue to attack Israel.

The difference lies in the stated goals of both entities. Israel was not founded to destroy Palestinian Arabs. If Hamas had no beef with Israel, Israel would be happy to go about its business creating one of the most remarkably innovative societies in the world.

Hamas, conversely, was founded upon a charter that not only calls for the destruction of Israel, but the murder of all Jews. Perhaps if Hamas had a more uplifting mission, Gaza would be a seaside paradise today instead of a hell hole.

Myth 2.) Hamas is attacking Israel because of Israel’s occupation of its territory

We can debate whether the phrase “occupied territory” applies in the West Bank — I think it’s pretty clear that “disputed territory” is more accurate — but it sure doesn’t apply to Gaza. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

Since then, Hamas won the most seats in a parliamentary election and ultimately kicked out the rival Fatah party from Gaza through force, before proceeding to turn Gaza into one big terror haven. Last month, Hamas and Fatah reconciled and came together in support of a unity government. Nonetheless, Hamas still effectively controls Gaza.

Myth 3.) The higher casualties on the Palestinian side prove Israel is the bad actor

This is idiocy.

It is true that far more Palestinians have been killed and injured than Israelis in the current conflict. But that’s because Israel, fortunately, is much stronger. There’s no doubt that if Hamas had the power Israel did, we would be witnessing a second Holocaust.

But we don’t judge what side is in the right and what side is in the wrong by a simple casualty count. In the 1991 Gulf War, for instance, America and its allied coalition took fewer than 500 casualties in battle compared to an estimated 20,000 or more it inflicted. Were the U.S. and its coalition allies therefore bad actors for taking action to reverse Iraqi aggression? Of course not.

Let’s be clear: Don’t think because Israel hasn’t taken many casualties, its population isn’t suffering. Well over half Israel’s population is within range of Hamas’ rockets and could, at any moment, be targeted. Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield is effective, but not full proof.  There is no country that would tolerate that kind of constant threat to its civilian population.

Myth 4.) Israel is perpetrating a genocide

Perhaps the most ludicrous charge is that Israel is perpetuating a genocide against the Palestinians.

“It’s genocide. It’s called genocide,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said of Israel’s actions. “What can I say about Abu Khdeir? Shall we recall Auschwitz?” he added, referencing the brutal death of an Israeli Arab at the hands of Jewish extremists who have now been arrested by Israel.

Where to begin? First, it’s especially rich for Abbas to be referencing Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz since his PhD dissertation was chock full of Holocaust denial. But if Israel is perpetuating a genocide, it is the most inept genocide in world history.

Israel has the power to indiscriminately level entire Palestinian towns and villages if it so desired. But it hasn’t. In fact, Israel tries its best to avoid civilian casualties, which is the crucial difference between itself and the other side. Israel even warns Palestinian civilians to leave buildings it is about to target. No need to grab a history book: The Nazis never did that.67=

Unfortunately, Hamas has encouraged its own people to ignore the Israeli warnings and stay in the soon-to-be destroyed buildings. As grotesque as that sounds, it’s not surprising. Hamas has a long history of using civilians as human shields.