Cause for Outrage

Building in Israel hit by rocket from Gaza 

The world gives us much cause for outrage. Just this morning, I learned that the illegitimately “re-elected” president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, had his air traffic controllers and his MiGs force a civilian airliner from Ireland, which was crossing Belarussian airspace en route from Greece to Lithuania, to land in Minsk so that a dissident Belarussian journalist passenger, facing the death penalty in Belarus, could be arrested.

That’s outrageous, but it’s not what I’m going to write about now. No. I’m going to write instead about some things that I find even more outrageous:

• About how, for most of the past couple of weeks, Palestinian terrorists (Hamas and Islamic Jihad) in Gaza launched about 4,000 rockets at Israeli cities and towns in a deliberate effort to kill Jewish civilians, including children and the elderly.
• About how those rocket launchers were deliberately and cynically sited in residential areas, so that Gaza’s civilians would serve as human shields against Israeli efforts to destroy the rocket launchers and the terrorists who operated them. (Hiding behind civilians in order to have an easier shot at the other side’s civilians is a double war crime.)
• About how pro-Palestinian demonstrators and others in the U.S. and Europe have not just made plain their sympathies for murderous Jew haters, but have chased and assaulted Jews in our own streets.
• About how pro-Palestinian members of Congress have pressured the Biden administration to force Israel to hold its fire before it had finished the job of grievously damaging the ability of the terrorists to start shooting at Jews again. (From much that I’ve been reading, it’s clear that radical, anti-Semitic members of “the Squad” — such as Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), poster ladies for left-wing anti-Semitism — have succeeded in substantially weakening the support for Israel of the Democratic Party’s moderates in Congress and, worse, among its voter base.)

I’m also outraged at how poorly reported and   understood is the fact that the Israeli Air Force (IAF), in striking at rocket launchers, other terrorist infrastructure and terrorist combatants (also deliberately hidden in civilian areas of Gaza), made herculean efforts to minimize and if possible avoid civilian casualties by making advance phone warnings and “roof knocking” (alerting the inhabitants of buildings housing Hamas infrastructure before bombing them), efforts unprecedented in the history of warfare anywhere in the world.

And at how poorly reported was the much-discussed disparity between casualties in Israel (few) and Gaza (many more) not being a result of Israeli indifference to Palestinian suffering but only a result of Israel’s ability to intercept most of the terrorists’ rockets. If not for Israel’s domestically developed Iron Dome anti-missile system, civilian casualties in Israel would have equaled or exceeded those in Gaza.

And also at how poorly reported was the fact that many of the Gaza casualties resulted not from Israeli fire, but from Hamas-launched rockets, aimed at Israel, that fell short of the border and landed in Gaza, killing their own civilians. By some estimates, one out of three Gaza rockets landed in their own territory.

I’ve been following these events closely — as I’ve been following the Israel-Arab conflict since the mid-1950s as a concerned American Jew — and for anyone interested, I’m listing several links that I believe shed valuable light on what’s been going on:

• Can America Be America When Jews Are Beaten in the Streets? (a very thoughtful piece)
• The New Furies of the Oldest Hatred (“On the right, the identitarians said the Jew lacked whiteness …. On the left, the Jew was said to have too much.”)
• Violent Attacks on American Jews Prove ‘Anti-Zionism’ is Anti-Semitism
• What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel (essential reading as background to almost anything you read in reports from Israel by the mainstream media)
• Let’s Talk About Reporting in War Zones (about the destruction of the Gaza building that housed the offices of AP and other media organizations)
• Palestinian Authority Admits IDF Warns Civilians to Evacuate Before Strikes
• The Bipartisan Consensus on Israel Broke, and the GOP Can’t Be Blamed
• Israel and Hamas in Their Own Words

Two final thoughts to keep in mind:

• Israel’s late Prime Minister Golda Meir: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
• Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more ‎violence. If the Jews put ‎down their weapons ‎today, there would be no ‎more Israel.”