#Simchat Torah massacre

[athymelyreply]

A highly recommended read. Full text of article under cut

On October 7, I was not hiding with my child in the safe room. My house was not burnt to the ground, and my husband didn't blow me a last kiss before his killer fired a fatal bullet.

I was safely at home in London where I have lived for over 30 years when my elderly peace-activist parents, Oded and Yocheved Lifschitz, along with 77 others members of the community, were taken hostage, barefoot and in their pajamas from their homes in the kibbutz where I was born and raised.

Israel's hostages in Gaza: A matter of life and death

Israeli peace activists who lost loved ones in the Hamas massacre stand their ground

What we can learn from released Hamas hostage Yocheved Lifshitz

For the past 229 days, together with the families of the other of hostages taken captive which now number 128, we have taken part in the fight for the lives of our loved ones.

A photo of the writer, Sharone Lifschitz's parents, Yocheved and Oded Lifschitz, who were both kidnapped by Hamas to Gaza on October 7. To date, only Yocheved Lifschitz has returned. Credit: Amiram Oren

In Nir Oz, my family's kibbutz, one in four people (117 in total), were either executed or kidnapped. We are still piecing together the events of that brutal day that Hamas terrorists and some Gazan civilians, perpetrated medieval levels of cruelty, driven by hate and revenge, blinded by radical religious ideology and super-charged with amphetamines.

Last month, at the "Seder in the Streets" event in New York, activist Naomi Klein spoke as if none of that ever took place. Instead, addressing hundreds who gathered for a combination Passover Seder and protest of the war in Gaza, she spoke of what she termed the "False Idol of Zionism", comparing Jewish support of it to the Israelites "worshiping" the golden calf and recalling Moses' rage seeing the spectacle.

Klein's interpretation seems to miss the point: Moses, unlike Klein, did not disengage. He did not give up on his people when they worshipped a false idol. Instead, without compromising his integrity and beliefs, he guided them through the desert for forty more years in their journey to become a nation. Klein, at this dangerous moment in history, is failing to lead her listeners to take responsibility, to engage and work towards a shared future in the region for Jews and Palestinians, one built on the preciousness of life on both sides and an understanding of the original intention of Zionism: the necessity for a safe home for the Jewish people.

"Seder in the Street" was also protesting the heartbreaking and ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank. Many in Israel, like my parents, would agree. Yet their plight and that of the other hostages – most of them civilians, from a baby boy of one year to a man of 86 - are not mentioned at Seder in the Streets or other gatherings of far-left pro-Palestinian Jewish activists.

My father, Oded Lifschitz, who is 83, and his friends who are also hostages, all in their late 70s and 80s, have worked for peace for decades. My mother, Yocheved Lifschitz, was thankfully released after 17 days of captivity.

Yocheved Lifschitz after being released from 17 days in Hamas captivity, in Tel Aviv, Israel in late October. Credit: Tomer Appelbaum

How much more effective these protests could be if activists abroad could act as a bridge between the pro-Palestinian movement and progressives fighting for peace in Israel?

Hamas, a terrorist organization which has been systematically stripping freedom, women's rights and democracy from the Gaza strip since 2006 are also strangely left out of the discussion. In fact, I see more criticism of the Hamas attack and crimes from moderate Palestinian voices than from prominent Jewish voices of the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States and Europe.

Klein is instead content in disengaging from Israel based on a distorted idea of Zionism and in so doing offers no solidarity with the moderate, progressive Jews living in Israel and for whom rejecting Zionism is irrelevant at this moment. Whether we like our government's policies or hate them as many do, Israel is home. Just as Canada is Klein's home, whether or not she likes the policies of the Canadian government or condones its mistreatment of its Indigenous population.

I consider myself pro-Palestinian. My family has always fought for a shared future for our two peoples, understanding this key point: our fates are interlinked. My parents have advocated for peace and equality for and with the Palestinians since the 1960s. We have united as a family to protest policies of the current Israeli government we find abhorrent. I wish for the Palestinians what I want for my own people: to live without bloodshed, in their own democratic state, as part of a negotiated two-state solution.

The facts are indisputable to Zionists and non-Zionists alike: There are about 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Jewish Israelis cannot be expected to reject the idea that they can and should have the right to live safely in Israel. Without Israel, where would they go?

Everyone who cares about what's best for the region must strengthen those who are working for a peaceful future. As my father always says, "You make peace with your enemies."

A Palestinian family rides on the back of a donkey-drawn carriage next to damaged buildings in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, in April.Credit: AFP

Thanks to international efforts to formulate a plan for the "day after" the war in Gaza, we are potentially closer to a long-term political agreement to lift us out of conflict than ever before. To help facilitate it, American and European progressives must distinguish between religious fanatics on both sides and those working toward a path of justice and peace for everyone in the region.

We must differentiate the liberal American pro-Palestinian activists from those who justify Hamas atrocities as acts of resistance. The dominant current narrative of the American far left, including the Jews among them, unwittingly aligns with Iran, and with antidemocratic and illiberal forces.

Instead of fostering hate and promoting disengagement from Israel, progressives abroad should help those in the region regain a sense that another future is possible and advocate for a negotiated political agreement that would create a state of Palestine established alongside the state of Israel. It won't be perfect, but it will be a good start.

The work of advocating for a different, sustainable future, must start with a call for the immediate release of hostages as part of a long-term agreement, backed by America and its allies, including moderate Arab states, that has the potential to transform the lives of Palestinians and Israelis by rescuing them from this ongoing tragedy. To fail to do so is to fail not just the hostages and their families, but to throw all the people of the region further into the abyss and undo the inspiring work of moderate forces within Israeli and Palestinian society.

In this, our darkest hour, we ask ourselves, who is our enemy? My enemy is the blind hate that seeks to erase the humanity of the other side. All of us who are horrified by what is unfolding in Gaza should work toward empowering the people of the region to move away from our common enemy. That's not Zionism, but rather the religious fanaticism we have within both our societies – Israeli and Palestinian – that threatens to engulf us all.

Sometimes, I want to shout at the news on TV, to remind people that their indulgent engagement in hatred of one side is so futile, so self-congratulatory. We can do better.

As we bleed and grieve, and in the case of families like my own – hang suspended between hope and despair for the fate of our loved ones, we must seek points of human connection between Jews and Palestinians, we must fight, not against one another, but for a practical solution that dismantles the status quo so that we can all survive – and live in freedom and security.

Sharone Lifschitz is a London-based filmmaker and academic originally from Kibbutz Nir Oz, whose parents were taken hostage on October 7. On Twitter: @Lifschitz_sha

[etz-ashashiyot]

There are specific images - some from photos or videos of that day, but also just several survivor narratives - that I absolutely cannot get out of my mind no matter how hard I try. There are just certain specific things that are so awful and so sadistic that I think about at least daily and often way more than that, that I just... can't hold.

I can hold a lot.

In my line of work, I read and hear horrifying things every day - things most people couldn't swallow and live their lives - but I can. I hold it, and I hold space for the survivors.

But this? I just keep playing it in my mind, over and over, I'm haunted by it.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to break out when you get stuck like this?

[jacensolodjo]

Y'all after Ukraine was attacked by russia: well Ukraine IS a country of nazis I mean they have Azov right? what do you MEAN it's actually russia that has been murdering gay people and trans people and people of color and muslims and jews and-- Y'all after ~1000 civilians are murdered by Hamas: Yeah we're Team Hamas even though they have made statements saying the Holocaust didn't go far enough in absolutely no uncertain terms as to their meaning and they're best buddies with literal neo-nazis and have trained with neo-nazis and neo-nazis sing their praises and have murdered Palestinian Jews and and claim Jews are the cause of everything bad in the world and gee wouldn't it be nice if all the Jews were dead and--

for a crowd of 'yeah let's all punch nazis' you sure do stand up and get behind the actual nazis awfully quick instead

I want to believe at least with Hamas it is a whole mess of ignorance about what Hamas actually is. Which... honestly just makes me really twitchy because... did no one like... take a teensy little Google search to see what Hamas stands for first before going YAY HAMAS? Cause I've also seen people try to compare it to a bunch of other fights for independence and liberation and like how fucking dare you? How fucking dare you compare antisemitic terrorists to those freedom fighters? Especially when you boohoo Ukraine because of Azov but Hamas is hunky doorey when they are literally listed as an antisemitic terrorist organization w/o any quibbling whatsoever by numerous third party, independent worldwide organizations who make it their job to classify these things.

Which leads into... did y'all not see the part about 'civilians'? Not Israeli Defense Force bases. Not Israeli soldiers. Not even Israeli colonizers or whathaveyou. But literal civilians, many of whom were minding their own business at a literal celebration of Torah. Simchat Torah. A holiday now stained in blood just as much as Yom Kippur was 50 years ago. We can argue who should be settling where until we're blue in the face but I thought we agreed eons ago that civilians are off limits no matter what. They didn't do anything. Not every Israeli is a colonizer. None of them did anything to precipitate the attack. And even then, once again, violence against women is not okay no matter what group you are a part of! AND THERE WERE CHILDREN!!!! What could a CHILD have done?! It doesn't matter which side, a civilian is a civilian and rape is rape! I don't want to be a part of any liberation, support any kind of liberation, with those kinds of ingredients where rape is okay and the murder of civilians is greenlit. You can't tell me you do either. I have to believe you truly don't. You made a mistake. You misread something. You didn't read enough. You did something that caused you to miss the parts that said you shouldn't support Hamas. Okay. Accept it. Learn from it. Stop supporting them.

Bear that in mind when you see posts about how Jews in and outside of Israel are hurting and are now watching in shock and despair as their friends seem to be ignoring all of these facts.

Hamas and russia have many many many MANY things in fucking common and if that makes you uncomfortable then I'm sorry. If it makes you uncomfortable being told the people you thought were the freedom fighter good guy liberator types are actually murderous rapist antisemitic terrorists then maybe that's your own fault for not doing the legwork to find out before you went on a spree of 'yay Hamas'. Do yourself a favor and find a water hose before you burn that bridge between you and your Jewish friends.

And if you actually care about Jews AND Palestinians? Why are you pro Hamas if Hamas has been found to murder Palestinian Jews or indeed any Palestinian they find to be lacking in being a proper Palestinian? I don't know about you but I am so not here for the murder of Palestinians, Jew or otherwise. By anyone. So it IS a mistake, right, to say 'yay Hamas'? Right? We agreed, right, that we don't respond to atrocity with atrocity right? We agreed, right, that we don't murder hundreds of civilians in a surprise attack right? Civilians are civilians are civilians. If it's bad when Israel does something to civilians, it's bad when a Western country does it, then it's bad when Hamas does it. End of fucking discussion.

So yeah. Especially don't talk to the Ukrainian Jew and act like he has no right to be upset and hurt and watch two years in a row as people who should know fucking better are suddenly seeming to delight in the deaths of people they claim to care about and say are worth defending. Or if not delight, at the very least seem to be okay with it even though they should be completely against it.

This is not what liberation should look like. Hamas is not what heroes look like. You are being hypocrites.

And perhaps here's the main thing: This was not actually about politics at all. This was about the hatred of Jews. And it is absolutely 'your bad' you are so blinded by 'Israel bad' you decided any of this was inevitable, was bound to happen just for being Israeli, that it's okay to do. No amount of 'but Israel--' justifies what happened on Saturday. The largest single event massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and you're okay with it because 'but Israel'. At the end of the day that is what happened, innocent Jews were murdered during one of the most joyous holidays of the Hebrew calendar. Hamas didn't do it for the Palestinians. They did it because they want Jews to no longer be on this Earth.

[starlightomatic]

I understand the argument people are making about the ways that grief is politicized, and compassion racialized. As in, I do understand what people are saying when they point out the media humanizes Israeli death and normalizes Palestinian death. And I see how Palestinian death is normalized, and depersonalized. And abstracted. I see images of individual Israeli victims, smiling, posted by family; I see images of rubble in Gaza. Mass destruction, in its way, depersonalizes the victims.

And.

I do not think those who point out these dynamics understand how it comes off when you are reading it and you are Jewish. They look at this only from the big picture; how does media manipulate? Who do we humanize and mourn? Whose deaths do we expect, or worse, accept? How do race, power, and empire, play in? And end up saying what are actually very, very callous things about Jewish and Israeli death and pain.

There's an element here, also -- and I think I've heard this outright -- of "I cannot, and in fact refuse to, feel any sympathy for Israeli death and pain when the world does not show sympathy for Palestinian death and pain." As though it is the fault of the Israeli dead that this is the case -- because they are Israeli (or migrant workers who live in Israel, or Bedouins who live in Israel) -- and Israel is in many ways a tool of US imperialism -- and both Israel and the US have vested interest in the dehumanization of Palestinians. Your response, then, is to dehumanize everyone.

I know you are already fashioning the criticisms the I am a hand-wringing liberal begging you to consider "both sides" with no understanding of power dynamics, or imperialism, or settler colonialism. I could repeat the aphorism that moral consistency is not moral equivalence but that is not, actually, the point I want to make here.

When Jews in your life, and on your dash and social media feeds, publically mourn Israeli and Jewish death, it is not a ploy of the "Western media." When we express fear and alienation when people defend or deny violence against Israelis and Jews, it is not a PR stunt. It is not a demand that you care more about certain lives because they are "white." Jews in mourning are, right now, tools of empire and colonialism. We are not, ourselves, empire and colonialism. That you cannot separate us from the US military-industrial complex and the US media says more about you than it does about us.

And: I do not think you understand why we are mourning. Why millions of us are in grief, pain, and fear. Why so many of us have not gotten a full night of sleep since before October 7th. It is not only because many of us have lost friends and family members, or friends of friends. It is not only because a few days ago our news feeds were covered in picture after picture of missing people posted by their loved ones with a phone number to call if anyone knows anything, but now our news feeds are covered in picture after picture of people confirmed dead.

It's because this is beyond the individual. When one member of the Jewish people dies, it affects the whole. We have lost over 1300 people, a number that includes mostly Jews as well as the Thai migrant workers, Nepalese students, and Bedouins who live alongside us. This is the largest number of Jews killed at once since the Holocaust. We are not a large people; we number about 16 million. Every Israeli knows someone who died or was kidnapped, and many American Jews do as well. It affects us all. When 11 Jews were killed in Pittsburgh, the entire Jewish world shook and was shaken; sleepless nights and fear and horror. And now 1300. More than were killed in the Kielce progrom, a brutal massacre of Jews in Poland who had just returned from the death camps. More than were killed in the Farhud, a massacre of Jews in Iraq in 1941 on Shavuot, one of our holiest days (as in this attack, which happened the morning of Simchat Torah).

Ancestral trauma lives in our bones and memories. The knowledge of attackers entering house after house, going bed to bed killing residents from the youngest to the oldest, sparing not even the most defenseless, who could not have posed any threat to an armed fighter... it ignites our deepest fears. Makes them a reality. Jews have spent the past seven decades trying to convince ourselves we are safe in our beds; that no armed men will burst in. When hundreds lost their lives in just this way... it rocks the basic core foundations of Jewish felt safety. Anywhere in the world.

You are already formulating arguments that Hamas, no matter what they have done, is not Nazi Germany, and I know this. You are telling me that Palestinians have less power, are the ones being brutalized, colonized, killed by a military regime. I know this as well. You are ready to lecture me about the right to armed resistance, taunt me that rocking Jewish safety was exactly the point, or perhaps announce that none of this really happened at all, because a slide you saw on instagram told you it didn't. More than anything, you want me not to center myself in this; you want to imagine that it had nothing to do with Jewishness, that it's only a coincidence that Jews are the ones colonizing Palestine.

I am asking you to stop. To pause. To think for a moment that what you are framing as either a ploy of the Western media or the excuses of colonizers is something else. That people in deep collective grief and fear and trauma actually have a right to feel that grief. Trust, I know and see the ways that grief is being instrumentalized, how it is used to justify horrors in Gaza. I know. But it can only be instrumentalized because it exists.

Consider, for just a moment, that there is another narrative here beyond that of Western Imperialism, or resistance to colonization, or even of Zionism itself. And when you see Jews in pain as at worst an enemy and at best objects to feel nothing towards, you yourself participate in ugly dehumanization.

[elliebelliegirl]

okay following up though... i understand that you are jewish and Israeli but (not trying to attack you, just trying to understand) how can you stand with the state of Israel after seeing the numbers of atrocities that the IDF has committed - of course the hostages should be released, but palestine will cease to exist if this continues and this is an active genocide. people are being displaced and thousands have died. how can you in good conscience stand with the actions of Israel ?

im still assuming this is in good faith! i do appreciate that you're asking and not attacking, it's really nice change of pace tbh. please understand that my ethnicity and my political opinions are not the same thing and how i feel about the state of israel is divorced from my religious beliefs. i just also believe that my people have a right to live in our indigenous land. i also believe palestinians should be able to live in israel (many already do.) anyway, here's the deal.

first, im not israeli, but my family is. i was born and raised in the u.s. while most of my family is israeli, i am not (yet.) im an american jew with strong roots in israel.

second! israelis have been displaced since october, since the attacks by hamas, the governing body of gaza. they've been attacked and killed for years (the whole reason the iron dome exists is because missiles are such an active threat.) getting displaced or killed has happened to israelis and gazans. its terrible for everyone. i am human, and therefore uncomfortable with war, but i don't think it's a genocide. i am horrified by the deaths in gaza. i hate that innocents are being harmed. i don't want to add a however, but there's a big one- it's that the ratio of killed militants v.s civilians is unfathomably low. if israel wanted to kill everyone in gaza (which is 100% not the goal) they would be dead already. the war is active now only to eradicate hamas, which would be beneficial to gazans and israelis, and to rescue the hostages. israel has offered to end the war multiple times and hamas has refused.. because they refuse to return the people they kidnapped. the war could've been over months ago!!! months ago. israel did not instigate this war, and has repeatedly offered ceasefire deals. hamas is the one shooting these offers down. also, palestine wont just cease to exist.. im not sure what that part means, can you explain it? i want to understand you, too.

also. i have cousins in the idf. one of them was supposed to come over before last days on sukkot and couldn't make it in the end. over the weekend, october seventh happened. the next time we spoke, it was a phone call right after simchat torah ended. he was on his way to the airport, having been called back to israel to meet his unit in kfar aza and start collecting bodies. i only had a few minutes to tell him i love him and to stay alive on behalf of me and my siblings. the memory is so surreal. we turned on our phones for the first time in days to texts from our israeli family saying they were alive, not to watch the videos, not to look at the pictures. im still kind of stuck there on my couch, holding my siblings in a hug and wondering if someone who hadn't texted yet was dead. then we saw people celebrating the massacre. they haven't really stopped. so we knew we couldnt really count on anyone to protect us, and this was way before israel entered gaza. people were just happy jews were dead. don't know if this is a huge sidetrack, but. this is why i stand with israel. their goal is to keep my family alive. their goal is to keep as many gazans as possible alive. that is not the goal of iran and hamas. this goes further than zionism though, tbh. zionism is pretty simple as a principle 😅

[resplendent-ragamuffin]

Six Months Since

By Shoshana bat-Yehonatan

A poem for the six (Hebrew) month anniversary of the Simchat Torah Massacre. With thanks to the JPS, Koren, Metsudah, and other translations on Sefaria.org. Footnotes link to sources of quotes. Footnotes connect to sources which will be in reblog, because otherwise it's too long to post.

TW: RAPE

Six months has it been

Since the fields turned red without flowers

Now calaniot bloom where once my darlings danced

But still, my precious ones are gone.

I have no prophets to comfort me

No visions from God [1]

My king remains in exile [2]

How can I sing a song of God on alien soil [3]

In an alien tongue?

Yet I have been too long a stranger in a land not mine[4]—

Two thousand years, to a paltry hundred and twenty—

And I forgotten even how to speak the Holy Tongue

Let alone write in it.

I have neither wit nor words to sing my grief.

And so I turn to those before me

As they turned to those before them

And say,

“God, open my lips, and let my mouth declare my grief.” [5]

Oholiva cries [6]

And Ohola wails [7]

This year was pregnant[8] with a second month of joy

Instead she wails in travails unending

“When will my children return?” [9]

Oh wall of Fair Zion [10]

Shed tears like a river [11]

Cry out in the night and pour your heart out like water [12]

Rachel’s eyes are red as her sister’s [13]

As she weeps over the fate of her children [14]

Six months it has been

Since they ravaged women in Zion [15]

Maidens in the towns of Judea [16]

Since their hands tore my princes apart

No deference shown to elders [17]

On this day six months ago

My infants were taken captive before the enemy [18]

The joy of our hearts was seized

And our dancing turned to mourning [19]

For the youths are gone from their music [20].

Now my eyes shed rivers of water [21]

Over the ruin of my people’s daughter [22]

Bitterly I weep in the night [23]

My cheeks wet with tears [24]

There is none to comfort me: my friends have betrayed me [25]

I cry:

Behold my agony! [26]

My priests and my elders have perished in the city [27]

The elders strewn like dust on the ground [28]

Those whom I dandled and reared my foe has consumed [29]

“This is the day we hoped for! We have found it, we have seen it!” [30]

My maidens and youths have gone into captivity! [31]

“It is your doing.” [32]

Blood on her legs, her nakedness seen, [33]

Zion reaches out for comfort [34]--

“Away! Unclean!” [35]

She can only shrink back and sigh [36]

“May it never befall you.” [37]

The nations have resolved “They shall stay here no longer” [38]

We wander and wander [39]

But where are we to go?

How can I bear to see the destruction of my kindred? [40]

“My life as my wish, my people as my request,” [41]

I begged my Husband [42]

“For we have been targeted, my people and I, to be destroyed, massacred, and exterminated.” [43]

But the King turned His face from me.

My dear ones were purer than snow [44]

Ruddier than rubies or coral [45]

Their bodies lovely as sapphire [46]

Now their faces are darkened with ash [47]

Unrecognizable amid the ruin of the streets [48]

See, God, and behold to whom You have done this! [49]

Look at me, answer me, Oh God! [50]

How long will You hide Your face from me? [51]

I have no prophets now to comfort me

And must take my comfort from those before:

You promised “God will restore your captives.” [52]

Return them, God, and let them come back [53]

Renew our days as of old. [54]

[mariacallous]

“Did Israel Avert a Hamas Massacre?” That was the question posed by the headline of a Vanity Fair exposé published in October 2014. The investigative report laid out a sophisticated plot by the Islamist terror group to kill and kidnap Israelis on the Gaza border. The plan: to use underground tunnels to infiltrate nearby civilian enclaves on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, when the communities would be at their most vulnerable. As one intelligence source put it, the operation had two goals: “First, get in and massacre people in a village. Pull off something they could show on television. Second, the ability to kidnap soldiers and civilians using the tunnels would give them a great bargaining chip.” The Israel Defense Forces subsequently confirmed this reporting to other media outlets, but not the specific date.

The tunnels were real. But at the time the massacre-that-wasn’t received little additional media coverage. It seemed too cinematic and convenient. Maybe it was a Hamas pipe dream that was never operational. Or maybe it was a worst-case scenario concocted by the Israeli security services and leaked to the media to justify their own ever-expanding countermeasures. Years passed without a mass border incursion, the tunnels were gradually detected and blocked, and I came to the conclusion that the skeptics were right about the plot being too lurid even for Hamas.

I was wrong. Last week, Hamas executed something quite like the attack on the Gaza border that it had planned all those years ago. Instead of tunneling underground on Rosh Hashanah, it invaded aboveground on another Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah. Some 1,500 terrorists stormed nearby civilian communities by land, air, and sea. They murdered babies in their cribs, parents in front of their children, and children in front of their parents. They burned entire families alive. They decapitated and mutilated their victims. They wore body cameras and documented their destruction as though it were a video game. They executed a grandmother in her home and uploaded the snuff film to her Facebook page. They deliberately targeted elementary schools. They kidnapped toddlers and a Holocaust survivor. They paraded a battered, naked woman through the streets of Gaza like a trophy. All told, they murdered more than 1,300 Israelis, almost all civilians, and abducted some 150 others, including babies and the elderly. The death toll continues to rise as rescue workers recover more remains and reassemble mangled corpses for identification.

Somehow, few saw this eruption of inhumanity coming. Several months ago, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, then the European Union ambassador to the Palestinians, performed what he called Gaza’s first paragliding flight to advocate for a future where “anything is possible in Gaza.” Hamas terrorists would later use paragliders to massacre more than 250 civilians at an Israeli music festival, which is presumably not what the envoy had in mind. And he wasn’t the only one naive about the Hamas regime’s intentions.

The consensus was that Hamas was a mostly rational actor that could be reasoned with. To hawks, although the group was an anti-Semitic Iran proxy, it could be deterred through political and economic incentives, because it felt responsible for the welfare of the Gazan people. To doves, Hamas was a quasi-legitimate national resistance movement whose occasional bouts of violence were simply intended to draw attention to that struggle.

Successive Netanyahu governments and security officials, far less sympathetic to the Gazan plight, nonetheless spent recent years lifting economic restrictions on the enclave, granting thousands of work permits for Gazans, and transferring hundreds of millions of Qatari dollars to Hamas in exchange—they thought—for relative quiet.

But it turned out that Hamas wasn’t being pacified; it was preparing. The group was less committed to national liberation than to Jewish elimination. Its violence was rooted not in strategy, but in sadism. And in retrospect, well before the Rosh Hashanah plot, the signs of Hamas’s atrocious ambitions were all there—many observers just did not want to believe them. What Hamas did was not out of character, but rather the explicit fulfillment of its long-stated objectives. The shocking thing was not just the atrocity itself, but that so many people were shocked by it, because they’d failed to reckon with the reality that had been staring them in the face.

First, there is Hamas’s notorious charter, a Frankensteinian amalgam of the worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the modern era—the very same that have motivated numerous white-supremacist attacks in the United States. “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” the document opens. “It needs all sincere efforts … until the enemy is vanquished.” The charter goes on to claim that the Jews control “the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.” According to Hamas, the Jews were “behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about,” as well as World War I and World War II. The charter accuses Israel of seeking to take over the entire world, and cites as proof the most influential modern anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian fabrication that purports to expose a global Jewish cabal.

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” Hamas declares in its credo. “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews.” In case anyone missed the point, the document adds that “so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” In 2017, Hamas published a new charter, but pointedly refused to disavow the original one, in a transparent ruse that some respectable observers nonetheless took at face value.

In any case, Hamas communicated its genocidal intentions not just in words, but in deeds. Before it took control of Gaza, the group deliberately targeted Jewish civilians for mass murder, executing scores of suicide bombings against shopping malls, night clubs, restaurants, buses, Passover seders, and many other nonmilitary targets. Today, this killing spree is widely blamed for destroying the credibility of the Israeli peace movement and helping derail the Oslo Accords, precisely as Hamas intended. And it did not stop there. Since the group took power in Gaza, it has launched thousands of rockets indiscriminately at nearby civilian towns—attacks that continue at this very moment and that have boosted the Israeli right in election after election.

Hamas’s anti-Jewish aspirations were evident not only from its treatment of Israelis, but from its treatment of fellow Palestinians. Despite being the putative sovereign in Gaza and responsible for the well-being of its people, Hamas repeatedly cannibalized Gaza’s infrastructure and appropriated international aid to fuel its messianic war machine. The group boasted publicly about digging up Gaza’s pipes and turning them into rockets. It stored weapons in United Nations schools and dug attack tunnels underneath them. (Contrary to what you might have read on social media, Gaza does have underground shelters—they are just used for housing Hamas fighters, smuggling operations, and weapons caches, not protecting civilians.)

When dissenting Gazans attempted to protest this state of affairs and demanded a better future, they were brutally repressed. Hamas has not held elections since 2006. In 2020, when the Gazan peace activist Rami Aman held a two-hour Zoom call with Israeli leftists, Hamas threw him in prison for six months, tortured him, and forced him to divorce his wife. Why? Because his vision of a shared society for Arabs and Jews, however remote, was a threat to the group’s entire worldview. Jews were not to share the land; they were to be cleansed from it.

Simply put, what Hamas did two weekends ago was not a departure from its past, but the natural culmination of its commitments. The question is not why Hamas did what it did, but why so many people were surprised. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, quick to discern anti-Semitism in any effort to merely label Israeli products from West Bank settlements, somehow overlooked the severity of the genocidal threat growing next door. Journalists like me who cover anti-Semitism somehow failed to take Hamas’s overt anti-Jewish ethos as seriously as we should have. Many international leftists, ostensibly committed to equality and dignity for Palestinians and Israelis alike, somehow missed that Hamas did not share that vision, and in fact was actively working to obliterate it.

Today, in the ashes of the worst anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, some analysts have admitted their error of sanitizing Hamas. “It’s a huge mistake that I did, believing that a terror organization can change its DNA,” the former Netanyahu national-security adviser Yaakov Amidror told The New York Times. Others on the left have clung to their tortured conception of Hamas as a rational resistance group, despite it having been falsified by events. Perhaps some fear that acknowledging the true nature of Hamas would undermine the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. But in actuality, it is the refusal to disentangle Hamas’s anti-Jewish sadism from the legitimate cause of Palestinian nationalism that threatens the project and saps its support.

In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus, but he wasn’t buying it. “Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,” Brown wrote, “and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.” Two years later, the Times published another news item on the future architect of the Holocaust: “Hitler Tamed by Prison.” The Austrian activist, the piece said, “looked a much sadder and wiser man,” and “his behavior during his imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he] was no longer to be feared.”

Many got Hamas wrong. But they shouldn’t have. Again and again, people say they intend to murder Jews. And yet, century after century, the world produces new, tortuous justifications for why anti-Jewish bigots don’t really mean what they say—even though they do.

[girlactionfigure]

Dastardly David, Gentleman Goliath and the Underdog Syndrome

It’s natural to cheer on the underdog – after all, who can’t help but encourage the plucky young bloke taking on a vastly more experienced and far bigger pugilist in the ring, only to win through sheer determined effort and some clever moves, whilst he leaps nimbly from foot to foot?

The classical underdog story is David and Goliath; the former, a fresh-faced youngster with nothing but a slingshot, standing up to the barbarian behemoth Goliath covered in armour and wielding a giant sword. The irony is that David is a young Jew and Goliath an older Philistine, and today we have the positions reversed with David being the poor, battered Philistine standing up to the incredibly powerful Israeli Goliath.

Naturally, the uninformed will want to root for David since all he has to counter Goliath’s weapons are some AK47 rifles, a few machine guns and some harmless rockets. Goliath, on the other hand, has a fearsome array of weapons, including laser-guided 2,000lbs bombs, tanks, drones, F-35 aircraft and that’s just for breakfast. The brave Philistine fighters are putting up a valiant fight against their arch-nemesis and oppressor, who despite his incredibly overwhelming and ferocious weapons has apparently failed to beat him to the ground.

Let’s drop the metaphor, since we are basically past it at this juncture. All the supporters of the Gazans would have you believe is that Israel is wantonly slashing and burning its way through Gaza, killing everything in sight and razing every building it sees to the ground. Ever since the grotesque, libelous letter was published by the Lancet (https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1810322594215628816), the civilian death toll has sky-rocketed from the original and already ludicrous figure of 37,000 (debunked here: https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1808866740727578891) to a stratospheric 186,000.

Is Israel a hulking, destructive and mass-murdering Goliath? Are Hamas and ordinary Gazans embroiled in active fighting a fresh-faced David? Let’s see.

On the 6th of October 2023, there was still a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. No-one seriously expected a direct attack on Israeli soil; hence people went about celebrating Shabbat and Simchat Torah as usual, and a peace music festival was held in a field less than 2km from the Gaza border. When the attack commenced, the police, army and other forces had a hard time believing it was actually happening.

By the time the full extent of the horror was understood, 1,200 lives had been in lost in a brutal spree of pillaging, raping, murdering, torturing and hostage-taking. Israel and World Jewry was in shock. Not since the mind-numbing inhumanity of the Holocaust had Jews experienced such a horrific episode. The carnage, the delight terrorist took in their appalling, revolting attack was simply incomprehensible.

Needless to say that accompanying the shock and grief was a seething rage. Despite having given Gazan’s autonomy in 2005 at the ignominious expense of over 10,000 Jews, all that the so-called Palestinians (https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1811151386425577479) had repaid in gratitude was death, destruction and violence. This was the final straw.

At this juncture, Israel had a casus belli of epic proportions. They could have quite rightly razed Gaza to the ground in their attempts to retrieve their hostages and wipe Hamas off the face of the earth. Moreso, GoPro videos that Hamas themselves published online showed Gazans in civilian clothing participating in the massacre. Whilst this did not make all the Gazan civilians complicit, it certainly broadened the scope of culpability. After all, now they were seeking much more than simply the estimated 45,000 Hamas terrorists; now they were after thousands of Gazans who either participated directly in the slaughter, took civilians hostage or dragged their bodies through the streets.

It's worth considering what the IDF brings to the table in terms of military capability. The air force alone consists of over 300 aircraft gen-4 and gen-5 fighters, equipped with Israeli-developed avionics and sensors unique to the IDF, capable of launching sophisticated missiles and guided gravity munitions. They have hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces, 169,000 active personnel and a reserve army of roughly 465,000. The Israeli Navy has a slew of sophisticated surface and submarine vessels capable of firing shells and launching missiles from great distances. Given the will on the part of the Israelis, Gaza could have been flattened into rubble in a matter of a couple of hours; by the time the world would have commenced protesting, the strip would have been a smoking ruin, its citizens bombed to kingdom come.

Yet this did not happen. Much everyone’s surprise, the Israeli government sat on its haunches for three weeks. Some small operations were carried out almost immediately, but the full ground invasion took three weeks to mobilise. During that process, the IDF formulated a plan that would require the mass movement of citizens in the strip, and in order to execute this plan they undertook heretofore unheard-of steps to prevent as many civilians dying as possible, employing leaflet drops, robocalls, text messages and direct calls by specially trained IDF members. Israel has formidable electronic capabilities that according to John Spencer, Chair of Urban War Studies at the MWI, West Point, no other army has. They employed all of these in their efforts to prevent a slaughter.

As the war drew on, the IDF realised that Hamas were using the IDF’s strengths and morality against them, ensuring higher casualties than were predicted. For example, Hamas prevented their own citizens from following evacuation orders in order to use them as human shields (https://reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-tells-gaza-residents-stay-home-israel-ground-offensive-looms-2023-10-13/); when people were evacuating Hamas shot at them. When the IDF attempted to shield the evacuees, Hamas attacked the soldiers protecting the civilians. Hamas even faked IDF leaflets telling citizens that evacuation corridors were only for emergencies. When it comes to distributing aid, Hamas are not below hijacking the lorries and preventing their own people from accessing food, hygiene supplies and other basic requisites. People who protested that Hamas had gone too far should surrender were beaten or shot. There is nothing new about this; when Hamas took over the Gaza strip in 2007 they engaged in fratricide at an appalling level (https://theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/15/israel4), and they have consistently used their own citizens as human shields (https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.pdf).

In order to counter these tactical abuses of civilians, the IDF developed new strategies, employing sophisticated electronics to scan known Hamas phones, using long range ID systems and filtering civilians for terrorists using human intelligence.

Hamas in the meanwhile were abusing every possible law they could; aside from holding civilian hostages captive (including babies) as bargaining chips, they fought the IDF in civilian clothing from inside civilian structures. The Gaza Metro – a network of over 600km of tunnels – allowed them to pop out almost anywhere, from under houses, mosques, hospitals and schools, run into a building and break out the weapons cached there. They would manoeuvre into position, take some shots and then drop their weapons to join the civilians in the area. Almost every building the IDF has entered has contained weapons; even protected status buildings such as hospital, schools and mosques are riddled with armaments and explosives (https://cbsnews.com/news/israel-photos-hamas-gaza-weapons-un-facilities-including-schools/ https://youtube.com/watch?v=7gLABy9s8Zc https://thecipherbrief.com/a-look-inside-hamass-weapons-arsenal). Hamas are not beyond using captures Israeli uniforms to disguise themselves as IDF soldiers, allowing them to manoeuvre in the open. They cynically baited the IDF into believing a WCK convoy was a Hamas one by firing off guns from on top of the vehicles (https://breitbart.com/middle-east/2024/04/06/report-hamas-may-have-baited-idf-into-striking-wck-convoy-in-error/). If there is a humanitarian or warfare law or custom that Hamas has not broken, it is because it is so obscure that practically no-one has heard of it.

All of this has slowed down the progress of the IDF. Instead of taking days, the war to date has been dragged out for almost nine months at the time of writing. Whilst the death toll of Gazans has been enormously exaggerated (https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1808866740727578891), the destruction has been widespread. At least 16% of Gaza lies in ruins. Whatever economy they had prior to the 7th has essentially evaporated. It will be a decade at least before they have a chance to enjoy self-rule, and since Israel will certainly not rebuild Gaza and perhaps claim reparations as well, the reconstruction will progress at snail’s pace.

This does beg the question: what did Hamas have in mind when they attacked Israel on the 7thin such a brutal, barbarian and animalistic fashion? Did they not expect a response of these proportions?

To answer this, some background of the situation must be fleshed out. On the 6th, Israel was a terribly divided country, across political and religious lines. Proposed changes to the judiciary led to mass protests, and Yom Kippur prayers in the centre of Tel Aviv were disturbed by a small rabble. The country was deeply mired in conflict, and even a group of soldiers refusing to serve in protest, which came as a shock to a country whose army is almost sacrosanct.

Hamas and probably the IRGC as well saw this as a serious opportunity to hit Israel hard, expecting an overwhelming attack to weaken Israel’s morale sufficiently to perhaps mount several more such incursions. In the past, Israel’s response to Hamas terror ranged from weak to lukewarm. Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009) ended after three weeks with a mutual ceasefire; the conflict resulted in roughly 1,400 Palestinian and 13 Israeli deaths. Some 46,000 homes were destroyed, making more than 100,000 people homeless. Operation Protective Edge 2014 lasted for seven weeks with 2,000 Gazan deaths and a total of six Israeli civilians who were killed as a result of the conflict. Neither operations resulted in a decisive victory.

What is clear is that Hamas never expected such wide-spread devastation. Instead, they probably forecast another short war with Israel in disarray. Hamas would mount several incursions, capture as many hostages as they could during the operations and then withdraw to negotiate for thousands of prisoners in Israeli jails to be freed. They would be able to flee to their tunnels at any time, making the process of hunting them down almost impossible.

This plan backfired horribly for Hamas. From the very first moment, they broke every rule of armed conflict. The bestiality and brutality of the attack achieved the exact opposite of what they expected. Not only did it shake Israel out of its torpor, but it also united the country and world Jewry in a way they had never been united previously.

Within a matter of days, reservists responded with a 140% turnout; commanders were frustrated at the lack of readily available equipment for their soldiers since no-one predicted such a response. As of 9th April 2024, donations from the Diaspora raised $1.4 billion (https://timesofisrael.com/donations-to-israel-since-october-7-topped-1-4-billion-government-reports/) and Israel Bonds sales raised a further $1.7 billion.

Israel now swore to do what they had never done before: utterly destroy Hamas. However, they made it clear that this was not going to be revenge, it was going to be justice.

Where Hamas broke every possible rule and acted like rabid barbarians, Israel took every possible step to reduce collateral damage and the expected carnage. Where Hamas simply raped, butchered and pillaged, Israel kept the IDF on a tight leash. Soldiers had very strict rules of engagement and monumental efforts were undertaken to keep civilian life functioning as well as possible under war conditions. As John Spencer writes (https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1812183672734589372): “Israel has gone above and beyond what is traditionally required of armies. In Gaza, they faced 40,000 enemy defenders in dense urban terrain featuring some 400 miles of deep buried military tunnels a depth of 15 to over 200 feet deep purposely built under civilian and protected sites. The defenders were equipped with over 15,000 rockets and a full array of small arms, mortars, and improvised explosive devices. The enemy had defenses that took at least fifteen years to prepare and fortify. Hamas held over 200 hostages, disguised themselves as civilians, and used ordinary Gazans as human shields to manipulate external actors, especially the United States, to stop Israel from escalating and instead to push for a ceasefire. Largely because of Egypt, there was almost no possibility for the 2.2. million civilians in Gaza to completely flee the war zone by land.”

Ultimately, Israel at war is the consummate gentleman; moral, considerate and firm in its mission to protect its people. Hamas, conversely, are the very embodiment of evil, with a callous disregard for its own people and cynically abusing the laws and customs of war for their own nefarious gains. Hamas is no fresh-faced David with his little slingshot. Hamas is a wildly immoral and bestial death cult with absolutely no regard for the very people that elected them.

Despite all this, the world does not see Hamas in its true light. Gazans are painted as innocent victims who are suffering under the brutality of the Israeli war machine. The appalling crimes against humanity that Hamas committed are either brushed under the carpet or denied outright, despite the copious evidence supplied by Hamas themselves. The incredible efforts of the IDF to prevent civilian casualties, and the unspeakable attacks Israel suffered are not simply ignored but distorted all out of recognition.

Why is this? How is it that the picture has been so successfully reversed?

Behind all of the various theories that might explain this is the IRGC and other bad actors, as discussed in this post: https://x.com/daniepstein_com/status/1807676708734042189.

What allows these machinations to succeed is partially due to the nature of people wanting to cheer on the underdog. This is the cognitive dissonance of beer glasses – the mind only shows you what you want to see, not what you actually observe. It is also the fact that Jew-hatred has festered at every level since the very founding of Jewry, and this war has allowed Jew-haters across the globe to sanitise their anti-Semitism through the filter of anti-Zionism, which they then vomit onto their sheeple audiences through the medium of social media. The confluence of these impulses results in a narrative that paints the victim as the oppressor, and elevates raping, murdering, butchering and hostage-taking barbarian troglodytes to near-sainthood.

This is not a David and Goliath conflict. This is a conflict of barbarianism versus civilisation.

And it’s coming to the West.

[eretzyisrael]

The US Holocaust Museum's article on the mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen who murdered up to two million Jews, describes how the shootings morphed into the initial gassings: "The mass shootings were resource-intensive, requiring many shooters and escort guards as well as guns, ammunition, and transport. Concerns about the inefficiency of the shootings and their psychological impact on the shooters led to the development of special vans outfitted with engines that pumped carbon monoxide into sealed passenger compartments. " 

The only psychological impact we have seen in the Arab world to the deliberate slaughter of hundreds of innocent Jews in a single day is an overflow of happiness and glee.

The German people and other antisemites in Eastern Europe who enabled the Holocaust with their centuries-old hate of Jews were not, on the whole, gleeful about the killings (unless they could directly profit by stealing the Jews' possessions.)  They looked at murdering Jewish children the same way they looked at someone exterminating rats and mosquitoes - a dirty but necessary job. The gas chambers murdered the Jews while protecting the ":civilized" Germans from having to witness their deaths. 

The Arabs, on the other hand, revel in trading videos of dead Jews like baseball cards.

Germans didn't hand out sweets on the street corners for every dead Jew. The Palestinians do - and not one of them says publicly how disgusting this is.

The Palestinians aren't embarrassed at their glee. Much of the larger Arab world is gleeful as well. People have rightly noted that Simchat Torah was Israel's 9/11 - but this is not only true from the victims' side but from the attackers' side as well. The same spontaneous celebrations that broke out in Arab capitals on September 11, 2001 are being seen from Muslims living in Western capitals, today, because so many Jews were slaughtered. As I noted earlier today, one Al Jazeera columnist said that the entire Muslim world was celebrating, saying the massacre and rapes "inspired hope in the hearts of the Palestinians at home and abroad, and in the hearts of the Arab and Islamic peoples, in an unprecedented way."

Palestinians will be writing poems and songs celebrating their murder of Jews for years and decades to come.

[sugarspunfaerie]

The Simchat Torah massacre hits a certain way when you know it happened on your birthday.

I turned 25 that day. I didn’t even know it happened because I was barely online (except maybe on Discord). It wasn’t until the next day when I found out about it… I was speechless. I still am.

I was horrified by the way leftists responded to it; including people I once looked up to.

I felt betrayed & very alone.

A pogrom happened on my birthday. Honestly, I think I would've taken it much worse if I learned about it the day it happened. It does not change the fact that I was & still am horrified & feel betrayed by many people I thought I could rely on.

Then I saw how much the Jewish community came together & I feel like I'm more connected to the community now. I want to get involved with my shul more. I'm in a few of their FB groups that focus on different issues & I would love to volunteer in person.

I'm going to be looking at my birthday very differently now. I will be looking at it as "I've made it another year" as well as remembering those that were murdered on Simchat Torah.

My bond to Judaism is stronger than ever.

[dragoneyes618]

“Occupied Gaza.” Prior to October 7, there were roughly two million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in Gaza. Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them. It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals. Hamas cancelled all future scheduled elections. It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations.

So Gaza has been occupied by Hamas, not Israel, for two decades.

“Collateral Damage.” Hamas began the war by deliberately targeting civilians. It massacred them on October 7 when it invaded Israel during a time of peace and holidays. It sent more than 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities for the sole purpose of killing noncombatants. It has no vocabulary for the collateral damage of Israeli civilians, since it believes any Jewish death under any circumstances is cause for celebration.

Hamas places its terrorist centers beneath and inside hospitals, schools, and mosques. Why? Israel is assumed to have more reservations about collaterally hitting Gaza civilians than Hamas does exposing them as human shields.

“Disproportionate.” We are told Israel wrongly uses disproportionate force to retaliate in Gaza. But it does so because no nation can win a war without disproportionate violence that hurts the enemy more than it is hurt by the enemy.

The U.S. incinerated German and Japanese cities with disproportionate force to end a war both Axis powers started. The American military in Iraq nearly leveled Fallujah and Mosul by disproportional force to root out Islamic gunmen hiding among innocents. Hamas has objections to disproportionate violence—but only when it is achieved by Israel and not Hamas.

“Two-state solution.” Prior to October 7, there was a de facto three-state solution, given that Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza were all separate states ruled by their own governments, two of which were illegitimate without scheduled elections.

It was not Israel, but the people of Gaza and the West Bank who institutionalized the “from river to the sea” agenda of destroying its neighbor.

Israel would have been content to live next to an autonomous Arab Gaza and West Bank that did not seek to destroy Israel in their multigenerational efforts to form their own “one-state solution.”

“Ceasefire.” The so-called international community is demanding Israel agree to a “ceasefire.” But there was already a ceasefire prior to October 7. Hamas broke it by massacring 1,200 Jews and taking over 250 hostages.

Hamas violated that peace because it thought it could gain leverage over Israel by murdering Jews.

Hamas now demands another ceasefire because it thinks it is no longer able to murder more unarmed Jews. Instead, it now fears that Israel will destroy Hamas in the way Hamas sought but failed to destroy Israel.

Did Hamas call for a cease-fire after the first 500 Jews it massacred on October 7?

“Ramadan.” Joe Biden believes that the Muslim religious holiday of Ramadan requires Israel to agree to a ceasefire.

But did either Hamas or any other Arab military ever respect Jewish—or even its own—religious holidays?

The October 7 massacre was timed to catch Israelis unaware while celebrating the Jewish religious holidays of Simchat Torah, Shemini Torah, and Shemini Atzeret on Shabbat.

Moreover, Hamas’s surprise attack was deliberately timed to commemorate the earlier sneak Arab attack on Israel some 50 years earlier.

On October 6, 1973, the Israelis were the target of a surprise attack when celebrating the religious holiday of Yom Kippur. Arab armies also assumed they would achieve greater surprise when attacking during their own religious holiday of Ramadan.

So, Arab militaries fight opportunistically both during Jewish and their own Islamic holidays. Egyptians and Syrians still boast of their 1973 surprise attack on Israel as the “Ramadan War.”

Only Westerners, not Arabs, believe there should be no war during Ramadan.

“Civilian Casualties.” Israel risks the lives of its soldiers to prevent civilian deaths. Hamas risks the lives of its civilians to prevent terrorists’ deaths. Israel considers it a failure, and Hamas considers it globally advantageous when more civilians die than its soldiers.

“Foreign Aid.” The Biden administration threatens to cut off or slow-walk aid to Israel if it continues to retaliate against Hamas even though they started the war. So the administration promises to give more aid to Gaza after the October 7 Hamas massacres than it gave to Gaza before them.

“Prisoners.” The international community that favors Hamas, nevertheless, knows it would be safer to be a prisoner of Israel than of Hamas. It knows women are not going to be raped in custody by Israelis but are by Hamas. And the unarmed are more likely to be mutilated and decapitated by Hamas than Israelis.

Is the international community more likely to charge Israel than Hamas for war crimes because the Jewish state seeks to avoid civilian deaths that Hamas finds useful?

[sourcreammachine]

so the UK government is planning to change the definition of extremism after NINE people were arrested at the London Palestine march, out of one hundred thousand attendees

yeah, if the charges against the arrested are correct then those were hate crimes, unambiguously - chanting about a historic massacre of jews. but with the Tories’ abhorrent PCSCA on the books and in force, which treats fundamental acts of protest as crimes, it’s remarkable that this event ended with that few arrests. this was without question a peaceful and honest outcry in a democratic society

so, the met and Braverman’s draconian powers failed this time. so Gove announces they’re changing what extremism is defined as, ie so the PCSCA acts better next time. fucking hell

i cannot stress this enough. the UK government must not be given this enabling act, not for Cruella, not for Rishi, not for Keith, not for no one.

the main point of the PCSCA was to stamp out climate protests and other bothersome groups. if the government gets to redefine extremism, protesting in this country is going to be far more difficult. not to mention the monitoring that comes along with the extremist label. the climate protests, the Sarah Everard protests, BLM, the republic movement, central strike demonstrations, pride, trans vigils, they can all end with far more mass arrests, criminal records and monitoring. no Princess can try to sanitise that

and if the label is broadened far enough for this measure to achieve what it wants, then it’s crying-wolf. antisemitism IS roaring high in this country, and we need community solidarity and state action to counter it to save lives, livelihoods, and the British Jewish communities that mean so much. by swamping the definition of criminal antisemitism with criticism of the IDF and Israeli State, via the definition “support for Hamas” [citation needed], congratulations, it’s far harder to recognise, counter and fight the actual antisemitic problem in this country. it’s dead-catting every jewish person in britain

i’ve been silent about this month’s events so far. i’ve been disgustingly silent. because i saw 1,400 innocent people slaughtered in the Simchat Torah Massacre, and 200 kidnapped, and i felt the need for justice. in a just world, this would be a just cause, one of the most just you can imagine. the planners and perpetrators of this horrific attack would’ve needed to be dragged to The Hague and left to rot forever. i kept silent because of cognitive dissonance, no more no less. i was outraged and in mourning. i wanted justice, and i wanted it so bad that i could put aside the fact that this is not justice, and it never would have been with an IDF pursuing its everyday atrocities

the Simchat Torah dead are never going to be done justice. they are being used. the IDF, SOI, Netanyahu, Likud and their enablers are waging something beyond retribution. this is genocide. Gaza is being blitzed and butchered. annihilation and death is the end goal. and my government is planning to define believing that fact to be extremism. they couldn’t move their arses about hate law after Brianna Ghey, or the Plymouth Incel, or Finsbury Park, or Jo Cox, but apparently not wanting 2 million people to be bleached off the face of the earth needs to be stamped out

[goldsperyid]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyHCU26N29y/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

250 dead, over 50 hostages, children and the elderly defiled and slaughtered, young girls have been raped, their bodies paraded through the streets, I've been in and out of a shelter all day. So many people are missing.

I woke up at six thirty on a holiday, on Simchat Torah, on a Shabbat, on the fifty year anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, to an unimaginable catastrophe. I had to say yizkor for my mother today, and all the while I was praying for the souls of soldiers who died as I was speaking, of children mowed down by lunatics, of a teenage girl who's horrifying debasement is being paraded over social media by people celebrating her murder.

I'm sick of you all. I couldn't care less about them. This is a pogrom, it's a massacre, this is what from the river to the sea means , it's the lawless slaughter of Jews. Shut up from your high horse safe in Europe or America. We, as Jews, are defending ourselves, because we learned a very very long time ago that no one else will.

[pargolettasworld]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK4gWwfGiPM

This is another kina, a lament to be sung on Tisha b’Av.  It’s brand-new, composed in 2023, by Israeli composer Yagel Haroush.  This one isn’t a lament for a Temple, or a medieval Crusade, or even for the Holocaus.  This one is about the Simchat Torah attack on October 7, 2023.  The lament is specifically for Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the first sites of Hamas’s attack.  It remembers the day as a holiday, describes how a day of joyful celebration turned into the horror of mass murder and abduction, and recounts the physical invasion and the kidnapping of hostages.

Be’eri had about 1200 residents before the massacre, most of them lefty peace activists, including Vivian Silver.  About ten percent of its residents were murdered in the attack, leaving Be’eri literally decimated.

[lightdancer1]

Wrapped up this book, now back to another Habsburg WWI experience:

In October an Arab nation attacks the Israelis when they were blithely convinced by continuous victories that no such attack was possible. In this case it's October 1973, the attack was an interstate war, the last of the Arab-Israeli Wars, fought in the wake of Israel crossing the nuclear line and had the Arabs gone further in winning nuclear weapons would have been used by the state of Israel. This is the most obvious reason there has been no further interstate war since.

The war was a key Cold War flash point that saw the US reach its highest Defcon state of the entire war in the middle of Watergate, giving the late Henry Kissinger, one of the world's worst people, a free hand to conduct the US side of things as he willed. In the opening states both Syria and Egypt achieved victories against Israel that the Israelis were willing to pretend Arabs could not, because they mistook the lessons of their earlier war to overstate the effectiveness of the IDF, which at best is a third rate force surrounded by sixth rate ones.

Unlike the current war in Gaza the 1970s IDF, a veteran of four wars, five if one counts the War of Attrition as a separate conflict, was a veteran force committed to wage conventional wars against conventional armies. Between this and the Arab states having finally planned a war but not quite sloughed off bad habits from all the defeats, Israel turned the prospect of defeat into a stalemate that made possible the peace agreement of 1979.

The lesson here for Golda Meir and the Israeli Labor Party is not one lost on Likud and Netanyahu, a war turned around from near defeat to partial victory doomed a woman whose own fatal surprise cost far fewer lives than the Simchat Torah Massacre did. This is one of the challenges too many people are simply unwilling to deal with, that the Israel of 2023, unlike that of 1973, is led by a fascist who has little to lose and is fully aware of that.

8/10/

[girlactionfigure]

Israel's Chief Rabbis David Lau (left) and Yitzhak Yosef (center) sell the state's chametz in Jerusalem ahead of Passover, April 21, 2024. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.

Arab Israeli buys state’s chametz for $150b Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich authorized the chief rabbis to carry out the transaction.

At the instruction of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the chief rabbis of Israel sold all of the chametz (leavened foods) owned by the state to an Arab Israeli businessman in accordance with the laws of Passover, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel announced on Sunday. Halachah, or Jewish religious law, forbids the eating or ownership of leavened products during the seven-day holiday, in keeping with the story of the Exodus from Egypt. Passover starts at sundown on Monday. The sale has “halachic and legal validity and allows the citizens of Israel to properly observe the commandments of Passover without the fear of chametz remaining in their possession,” the Chief Rabbinate said. Hussein Jabar, 64, from the Arab town of Abu Ghosh west of Israel’s capital, paid a deposit of 20,000 shekels ($5,300). After the holiday, he will be offered the possibility of completing the transaction, which has an estimated total value of $150 billion. “The ceremony took place at 11 a.m. at the Chief Rabbinate of Israel in Jerusalem. It felt very dignified. It made me proud and it was moving,” Jabar told JNS on Sunday night after signing the agreement. “I put together a team of experts in the food and catering business from Abu Ghosh. We are about 10 people, and we designed a plan to raise the money. Hopefully, this year, we will make it happen,” Jabar said.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich sells the state’s chametz in Jerusalem, April 21, 2024. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90. If Jabar and his partners fail to raise the total amount before the end of Passover on the night of April 30, the ownership will revert to the state. Jabar took over the task some 28 years ago after the previous buyer, also from Abu Ghosh, was relieved of his duties when it was discovered his maternal grandmother may have been Jewish. At Jerusalem’s Ramada Hotel, where he has worked for about 40 years, Jabar met with Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, then-Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, who suggested he take the job. Jabar said on Sunday, “My family is really happy for me. They love it. By doing this, I feel that I am creating a connection between the Jews and the Arabs in Israel, bridging the gap between both communities.” As Israel enters its seventh month of war in Gaza triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of some 1,200 people, Jabar expressed a wish for quieter times. “I hope we will soon have peace and only good news for everyone. I wish the people of Israel a kosher and happy Passover,” he told JNS. As part of the ceremony, Smotrich authorized the chief rabbis, Rabbi David Lau and Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, to carry out the transaction on behalf of the state. “Since the holiday of Simchat Torah, when the terrible disaster happened to us, we have been praying for the success of the security forces,” said Yosef. “We need to continue to pray for our soldiers, who give their lives and fight on the northern and southern borders and wherever they are.” Lau said, “Our neighbors want to destroy us and make us forget the joy, but the entire nation of Israel has stood up to fight for its home, for our essence as the Jewish people— we are not ready to give up on that.

By Amelie Botbol & Akiva Van Koningsveld