Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 27, 2014

07/27 Links Pt2: Batman Rules of Warfare; Progressive Jews, Wake Up; The end of French Jewry?

From Ian:

Hamas will restart tunneling as soon as we leave, IDF officer says

Israel will not find all of the cross-border tunnels in Gaza during this operation. And if Hamas is able to secure ceasefire terms that give it sufficient room to do so, it will commence digging anew after this conflict is over, a former senior commander in the IDF’s Combat Engineering Corps said Sunday.
“We won’t find all of them,” said Col. (res) Atai Shelach, former commander of the elite Yahalom unit that tackles the tunnels, “and the moment we leave. they will start digging again.”
The Israeli army has found more than 30 tunnels that cross underground from Gaza to Israel. The channels are often wider than a man’s shoulders and close to six feet high; they are supported with hundreds of tons of concrete arches and frequently reach a maximum depth of 20 meters below ground level. Most of the tunnels are well lit and properly ventilated. Soldiers on the ground in Gaza have reported finding explosives and arms stashed within the tunnels and, on several occasions after thwarting underground infiltration attempts, have found Hamas operatives armed with zip ties and narcotic drugs meant to facilitate a kidnapping. (h/t Canadian Otter)

Progressive Jews, Wake Up

For those progressive Jews who have found solace in the myth that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, the events across the globe of the last few weeks have been a rude and discomforting awakening. And so they turned to their final recourse, the belief that America was different.
Sure, there was a pogrom at a synagogue in Paris, but, well, that’s Paris. Muslims and their neo-fascist and leftist allies might walk through the streets of Germany shouting anti-Jewish slogans reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, but, well, that’s Germany.
In San Francisco, if not for the police, some 30 pro-Israel protesters would have been brutalized by over 300 people demonstrating on behalf of the genocidal Hamas terrorists.

Danny Ayalon: Operation "Protective Edge"

One of those dead "civilians"

We have noted that the UN relies on three "human rights" NGOs - B'Tselem, PCHR and Al Mezan - to determine which of the people killed in Gaza are civilian and which are members of armed groups.

And we've shown that B'Tselem's methods in determining who is a "civilian" are laughable.

Hamas has been trying to hide the number of terrorists killed (as I said they would at the outset of the war.) But sometimes there are mistakes.

PCHR says:

At approximately 11:55 (Friday), an Israeli drone fired a missile at a number of Palestinian civilians in al-Zanna area in Bani Suhaila village. As a result, 2 civilians were killed: Mohammed Khalil al-Buraim, 25; and Mohammed Suleiman Hussein Sammour, 45. Four civilians were also wounded.:

Mohammed Khalil Samour al-Buraim, meanwhile, is being celebrated as a mujahid by the Abdel-Qader al-Husseini Brigades Storm Troopers. He was apparently a rocket launcher.

The UN's very flawed statistics get disseminated to the media and are never questioned.

Why?

Because more reporters are lazy and reflexively anti-Israel. Most European politicians that receive the statistics are predisposed to believing that Israel is targeting civilians.

So no one outside of us Zionists bother to do the research. And, of course, we are unreliable by definition, no matter how many times we have proven to be right.

A child being raised to hate in San Francisco (video)

From yesterday's anti-Israel rally in San Francisco:

Peace, love, flowers, progressiveness, child abuse and unbridled hate.

07/27 Links Pt1: Obama abandons Israel; Hamas fire rockets from school and cemetery

From Ian:

Don’t Cry for Us Israelis

I prefer that you – writers of these lies and libels - hate me and my country, if it means that you can save your tears for other peoples’ dead. We aren’t greedy for sympathy. After all, we got so much after the Holocaust, we prefer other people to have their share now. These days, we prefer to live, rather than have people cry over us and the injustices done to us.
So by all means, cry for the Palestinian people – men women and children – whose duly elected leadership has callously left them without protection from just retribution for their terrorist crimes. The leaders who took their people’s aid money and are living in Qatar in five star hotels building shopping centers for themselves. Who built terrorist tunnels under their homes, mosques, hospitals and schools, and recruited their sons to die for Allah, while they sit in bunkers waiting for the U.N. to rescue them.
Don’t cry for us, or our families, or our children, or grandchildren. Not this time. Not ever. Not if we can help it. Because this time, thank God, we have a country. We are armed. This time, with God’s help, we know how to protect ourselves from Nazis and their high-minded media cheerleaders.
I would like to end this with an expletive and a hand gesture towards the people I’m addressing. Please choose one you think would be fitting. I can think of many.

Times of Israel Live Blog: PM: Hamas has breached the truce it claims to be asking for, PA slams Kerry for attending ‘friends of Hamas’ ceasefire talks

Israel rejects Gaza offer for 24-hour timeout as rocket fire persists; IDF death toll rises to 43; Israel, PA fume at Kerry for his ceasefire terms; Gaza death toll said to climb above 1,000, including hundreds of gunmen

Isi Leibler: Obama abandons Israel

The Netanyahu government is fully aware that Israel cannot accept a long-term cease-fire that ‎would enable Hamas to again attack Israel with missiles or renew their building of terrorist ‎tunnels into Israel.‎
The U.S. will also be committing another blunder if it seeks to recycle Palestinian Authority ‎President Mahmoud Abbas to resolve the impasse. While initially he had backed the Egyptian ‎cease-fire and was happy to see his "partner" Hamas under pressure, he has now decided to ‎throw his lot with Hamas and the radical jihadists. Israel can no longer contemplate ‎negotiations with the PA so long as it remains associated with Hamas. ‎
Defensible borders are now an absolute must. With the collapse of the artificial Arab nation ‎states created by the Sykes-Picot treaty in the aftermath of World War I, no borders are ‎sacrosanct, certainly not armistice lines that have never been formally recognized as ‎international borders. Under no circumstances can we contemplate returning to the ‎indefensible 1949 armistice lines. It is now also clear that should a Palestinian state emerge, it ‎must be totally demilitarized, with the IDF retaining security control. ‎
We should also cautiously seek to engage with Egypt and other pragmatic Arab countries that ‎are opposed to the jihadists and Muslim Brotherhood.‎

David Horovitz: John Kerry: The betrayal

When The Times of Israel’s Avi Issacharoff first reported the content of John Kerry’s ceasefire proposal on Friday afternoon, I wondered if something had gotten lost in translation. It seemed inconceivable that the American secretary of state would have drafted an initiative that, as a priority, did not require the dismantling of Hamas’s rocket arsenal and network of tunnels dug under the Israeli border. Yet the reported text did not address these issues at all, nor call for the demilitarization of Gaza.
It seemed inconceivable that the secretary’s initiative would specify the need to address Hamas’s demands for a lifting of the siege of Gaza, as though Hamas were a legitimate injured party acting in the interests of the people of Gaza — rather than the terror group that violently seized control of the Strip in 2007, diverted Gaza’s resources to its war effort against Israel, and could be relied upon to exploit any lifting of the “siege” in order to import yet more devastating weaponry with which to kill Israelis.
Israel and the US are meant to be allies; the US is meant to be committed to the protection of Israel in this most ruthless of neighborhoods; together, the US and Israel are meant to be trying to marginalize the murderous Islamic extremism that threatens the free world. Yet here was the top US diplomat appearing to accommodate a vicious terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction, with a formula that would leave Hamas better equipped to achieve that goal.

Dana Bar-on is a beautiful, young Israeli woman who lives in a tiny progressive kibbutz in the township of Nir Am directly on the northern border of the Gaza strip, just west of S'derot. Among the founders of kibbutz Nir Am is Dana's grandmother, Rachel Bar-on.

Dana is 27 years old and grew up under Hamas bombs.

If you honestly care about your Jewish friends and family in Israel then you must give this woman a fair listen. The video is only 10 minutes long, but the final five are what count the most, so please watch all the way through.

I find her words pretty remarkable, actually. This is someone who has run into bomb shelters since she was more-or-less a child. Yet, when she considers injured or killed Gazans due to the recent Israeli military activity in response to those bombs, she weeps.

She does not hand out candy to children upon learning of the killings of Arabs in war. She is not dancing in the streets at the prospect of dead Arabs. On the contrary, she seems injured in her soul.

One of the things that we must understand is that the enemies of the Jewish people use moments like this, moments of war, in order to spread the blood-libel. This is precisely why Hamas shoots all those rockets to begin with. They know that sooner or later Israel will have to respond and then western-left useful idiots will do nothing but scream and cry and moan and complain about those cruel, inhumane, barbaric, apartheid-loving Jews.

This, of course, serves not only to undermine Israeli legitimacy among the nations, but also provides justification for violence against us throughout the world.

So, when people on the left claim that "Palestinians" have every right to "resistance" what they are really saying is that the genocidal racists in Hamas have every right to try to kill Dana Bar-on.

And, yet, somehow, they still expect - and most astonishingly enough, receive - the financial, moral, and political support of western-left Jews.

The injustice could hardly be more profound.

Dana's kibbutz in Nir Am was right next to a tunnel exit in which the IDF fought it out with Hamas fighters just the other day.

Here is the location of Nir Am:

As you can see it is even closer to the Gaza Strip than is S'derot and just across the road from that community.

According to wiki, as of 2007 it had a population of 281 souls and was established in August of 1943 out of Gordonia, a Polish Zionist youth movement grounded in traditional virtues of labor and of the resurrection of the Hebrew language.

According to the Negev Informational Centre:

Nir Am is a secular agricultural kibbutz in expansion, with 110 families.

Nir Am is a well-tended community with lovely green corners, located in geographic area inspiring love toward the place and desire to tour the region. The population of Nir Am is a multi-cultural one, because throughout its existence the kibbutz absorbed graduates of various youth movements in Israel, Latin America, France and Northern Africa, which generated an atmosphere of cultural openness and pluralism. Nir Am is considered as a renewing kibbutz, which endorses communal perception shared by the members and permanent residents of the kibbutz. Nir Am's absorption program, from its physical and social aspects, aspires to create a community in which all the local people would feel as partners.

Clearly she belongs to a gang of Zionist fascists.

Who would want to live near such scum.

Dana's mother, Marcell Bar-On, speaking at a Vanguard dinner in 2008, said this about what Hamas was doing to kibbutz Nir Am:

The attacks are unprovoked, unpredictable, and continuous, and their effect has been close to catastrophical for us, both economically and psychologically. It is difficult for me to describe our day-to-day reality. No words could adequately paint the picture of life in a war zone. Our every action, our every waking moment, is geared toward minimizing the impact of living under enemy fire. Our first concern is always for our elderly and our children. My son Gabi, who turns ten in December, was three years old when the bombings started, and doesn’t remember life without Kassam bombs.

This, by the way, is another of Dana's videos. It appears to be a rather new compilation that it includes material from 2008 when she would have been around twenty years old.

A rocket actually hit near her house in 2008 and the family reaction is recorded in the video.

This is all new material to me. I picked up Dana's story last Wednesday, the 23rd, through the Elder who got it from Israelycool.

She notes at the end of this video that since 2005 8,000 rockets have been launched at herself, her friends in Israel, and her family.

To my mind, however, the most chilling part of the video is when she talks about the tunnels. This is a person who has lived most of her life under perpetual rocket fire and now the enemies of the Jewish people are crawling right up out of the ground near her house with an intent to kill her, her family, and her friends.

I can think of no more compelling reason for Israel not merely to degrade Hamas' ability to shoot rockets at Israelis, nor merely to close up those terror tunnels, but to eliminate Hamas completely.

If you wish to learn more about kibbutz Nir Am or the Bar-on family, this article from the The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, surprisingly enough, is a good place to start. In the mean time, we should bring Dana to the United States to talk to college students.

I think that is a fine idea.

UPDATE: Her kibbutz was evacuated.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Aaron Klein, who has extensive contacts among Gaza terror groups, reports:

Hamas killed at least 25 Palestinian civilians it suspected of collaborating with Israel, according to sources close to Gazan jihadist organizations.

The sources, close to both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad groups, told WND that most of the extra-judicial killings of suspected collaborators took place during a brief “humanitarian” cease-fire four days ago.

The so-called collaborators were accused of leading Israeli troops to smuggling tunnels and providing intelligence on Hamas’ infrastructure inside Gazan cities.

The sources said Hamas publicly blamed the killings of the Palestinian suspects on Israel, claiming the civilians were murdered Sunday during an Israel Defense Forces “massacre” in the Shujaiyeh neighborhood of the Gaza Strip.

The sources further said the civilian suspects murdered by Hamas were publicly celebrated by Hamas as martyrs killed by the Jewish state.

I had seen previous reports of 9 collaborators executed.

In May, Hamas executed two alleged spies.

Yet another reason to take the civilian casualty figures from Gaza with a large grain of salt.

We previously discussed how Human Rights Watch was claiming a very restrictive definition of "human shields" contrary to the clear definition given by the ICRC, to clear Hamas of that charge.

A little further research shows that not only does HRW often use the correct definition of human shielding for other conflicts, but it has tightened up its definition over the years for Israel's enemies.

Here is Human Rights Watch, February 19, 2014, discussing a reported drone attack by US forces against a wedding in Yemen:

The legality of the December 12 attack hinges on both the applicable body of international law and the facts on the ground. If international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, applies to the December 12, 2013 attack, only valid military objectives such as AQAP leaders or fighters could have been lawfully targeted. The burden is on the attacker to take all feasible precautions to ensure that a target is a combatant before conducting an attack and to minimize civilian harm.

Had AQAP members deliberately joined the wedding procession to avoid attack they would have been committing the laws-of-war violation of using “human shields.”

In this case, HRW says that the terrorists merely need to purposefully place themselves around civilians. When Israel is the enemy, HRW says that the civilians must be coerced.

That wasn't always the case. HRW tried very hard to excuse Hezbollah from the accusation of human shielding in Lebanon in 2006, but the excuses they used - feeble as they were - do not apply to Hamas in 2014:

A key element of the humanitarian law violation of shielding is intention: the purposeful use of civilians to render military objectives immune from attack.

As noted above, we documented cases where Hezbollah stored weapons inside civilian homes or fired rockets from inside populated civilian areas. At minimum, that violated the legal duty to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians the hazards of armed conflict, and in some cases it suggests the intentional use of civilians to shield against attack. However, these cases were far less numerous than Israeli officials have suggested. The handful of cases of probable shielding that we did find does not begin to account for the civilian death toll in Lebanon. (The related issue of Hezbollah's illegally using several UN posts near the Lebanon-Israel border as shields is discussed in the next section.)

In addition to its own research, Human Rights Watch carefully reviewed local and international press accounts, IDF and Israeli government statements, and the work of various independent think tanks to evaluate allegations of human shielding by Hezbollah. While the Israeli government and certain commentators have described Hezbollah shielding as widespread, they have not provided convincing evidence to support such allegations.[111] The Israeli government provided some video footage taken from drones showing Hezbollah fighters firing rockets from what appear to be civilian structures, or entering such structures, but the footage gives no indication whether these structures were inhabited by civilians or located in then-populated areas.

The Israeli government's allegations seem to stem from an unwillingness to distinguish the prohibition against human shielding-the intentional use of civilians to shield a military objective from attack-from that against endangering the civilian population by failing to take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm, and even from instances where Hezbollah conducted operations in residential areas empty of civilians. Individuals responsible for shielding can be prosecuted for war crimes; failing to fully minimize harm to civilians is not considered a violation prosecutable as a war crime.[112]

To constitute shielding, there needs to be a specific intent to use civilians to deter an attack....

HRW disingenuously gives examples of Hezbollah firing rockets from fields nearby villages and of only taking over uninhabited homes, in order to protect Hezbollah from the charge of war crimes:

While failing to take precautions to protect civilians violates humanitarian law, intentionally making use of civilians to render military forces or a place immune from attack is considered to be the more serious violation of "shielding." Because the definition of shielding incorporates the concept of intent, any individual ordering shielding would almost invariably be committing a war crime.

Well, guess what: Hamas explicitly instructed Gazans to not evacuate their homes (and UNRWA schools) in Hamas-stronghold neighborhoods when Israel warned them to. Here is the webpage of the Ministry of the Interior where they tell Gazans to ignore Israeli warnings and stay in their homes.

HRW, instead of condemning what are clearly cases of human shielding under international law and under their own definitions, is going out of its way to excuse Hamas, downplay their war crimes - and endanger Gazans. In this case we see that twice HRW changed their definition deliberately to excuse first Hezbollah and then Hamas - moving the goalposts as each terror group gets more depraved.

What kind of a "human rights" group tries so hard to excuse violations of human rights?

(NGO Monitor has documented many other examples of HRW's fluid definitions of "human shielding" to defend terrorists from the charge when Israel is involved.)

The hand grenade that saved a life

Israeli media reported on an unusual incident last week where an IDF soldier was shot by a Gaza sniper with a Kalashnikov.

The bullet was blocked - by the soldier's hand grenade.

Gaza casualties by age and gender

In the comments, Vandoren pointed to tabulated data of Gaza casualties based on the Hamas ministry of health numbers as of a day or two ago.

Here is the demographic breakdown by age and gender, showing a rough bell curve heavily favoring males in their late teens, 20s and 30s.

Here is the total casualties compared with Gaza's demographics.

If IDF actions were "indiscriminate," these two sets of data would track closely together. As you can see...they don't.

Keep in mind that these statistics include many people who were killed by Hamas rockets that fell short or secondary explosions from booby trapped houses and the like. The victims of those are far more likely to reflect a distribution in line with the demographics, so a very high percentage of those killed by Hamas actions would be children.

If anyone actually objectively researched the actual number of deaths that can be attributed to the IDF - a highly unlikely scenario in Gaza - then the difference between the demographics and actual dead in Gaza would be even more striking.

UNRWA supplies found in terror tunnel

IDF troops discovered a massive terror tunnel underneath Gaza, that was dug 25 meters deep and had entire underground rooms built to withstand airstrikes.

In these bunkers they found large bags of UNRWA aid.

Clearly UNRWA doesn't hand out these large sacks of rice and other goods directly to Gazans, these sacks could only be obtained from UNRWA employees themselves - who are clearly part of the Hamas tunnel digging teams.

(h/t Yenta)

07/26 Links: Paris's Kristallnacht; Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Terror Tunnels

From Ian:

Paris's Kristallnacht

This was the first time since World War II that an anti-Semitic pogrom took place in France.
Almost all French politicians adopt an attitude of appeasement toward the enemies of Israel and Jews. They act as if they did not see that the hate speech that France finances in the Middle East is now spreading throughout France itself.
No major French television report speaks of Hamas's genocidal Jew-hatred or of the use of Arab women and children as human shields. Criticizing radical Islam on public television is now almost impossible. Members of the Israeli government are never interviewed on French television.
French politicians know that 70% of all the inmates in French prisons are Muslims, and that these prisons have been transformed into recruiting centers for jihadists.

Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Terror Tunnels

As the death toll of Operation Protective Edge rises, the deaths of children are firmly in the spotlight—and rightly so. It pains all reasonable people to hear of children dying as the consequence of war. Hamas and its supporters display gruesome pictures of dead and wounded children in order to gain sympathy for their portrait of Israel as the villain intent on killing Palestinians. In response, Israel cites the need to stop Hamas from firing thousands of rockets at its own children, who are being forced to live in bomb shelters, as well as the need to eliminate the tunnels that Hamas dug into Israel in order to carry out terror attacks against Israelis. One tunnel opening was found underneath an Israeli kindergarten.
But who built those tunnels? The answer is Hamas, of course—using some of the same children who are now trapped under fire in Gaza.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”. (h/t Yenta Press)

"Among the Palestinians, they tell you straight out, 'I want to get rich.'"

Another source of wealth for Hamas leaders was taking over land. "They took over land mainly near the sea in good areas, such as the former Gush Katif, then sold it. In effect, they are the cat guarding the cream - the land - so they were able to take over land and loot it for themselves," Elad explains.
In addition, there is a system in the Gaza Strip of fictitious recruitment of workers for Hamas for the purpose of obtaining pay slips from people overseas paying for it. "They get the payments from overseas according to the workers' names. It has recently been discovered that there are hundreds of fictitious names of soldiers and officials supposedly in Hamas. Actually, the leaders and officials put the money in their own pockets," Elad asserts.
According to various sources, some of Mashaal's money came from the "Syrian fund." Elad explains: "According to these accusations, following an investigation by the US federal authorities, Mashaal was accused of embezzling the entire Syrian fund. There was a separate fund in Syria for Hamas; Mashaal controlled all the movements in the fund when he lived there. As soon as he left Damascus, he took the Syrian fund, which was worth several billion dollars, and distributed it to himself and others. It is believed that Hamas had $1.5-2.5 billion in assets in Syria, which Mashaal took." (h/t Yenta Press)

Times of Israel Live Blog: IDF toll rises to 42 with 2 more deaths; Hamas breaches truce, resumes rocket fire

Kerry meets int’l counterparts in Paris to push for long-term ceasefire after Jerusalem rejects his previous proposal; Gaza death toll said to climb to 1,000 — including Hamas gunmen — as Gazans stock up, recover bodies during lull