PDavidHornik

What is Hamas's game?

Notice that Hamas keeps shelling southwestern Israel relentlessly and is inviting and goading Israel into a fight. Hamas wants Israel to invade Gaza. Why? Some possible reasons:

1. Based on Israel's performance against Hizballah in Lebanon in 2006, Hamas is not deterred; it doesn't think Israel will defeat it in a confrontation, or at least that it, Hamas, will emerge in an acceptable condition without grave damage.

2. Hamas is coordinating with other actors like Hizballah, Syria, and Iran to turn an Israeli invasion of Gaza into a larger war involving some or all of those parties. In other words, Gaza is bait. (Not likely that Iran would want to get involved now before having nuclearized; unless, of course, it has already nuclearized.)

3. As in the parable of the scorpion who stings you even when it's to his own clear disadvantage, Hamas is a scorpion and cannot stop itself from attacking Israel whatever the rational, cost-benefit calculations.

4. Hamas is aware that Israel would defeat it militarily but counts on world opinion--meaning particularly the U.S., the EU, and the UN--to rescue it from an Israeli invasion that would inevitably cause harm and destruction to Gaza Arabs ("Palestinians").

All are plausible; the truth may lie primarily with one of them, or with some combination. What is ominous, and what Israeli policymakers and planners are presumably taking into account, is that Hamas wants this confrontation and does not fear it.

Abbas will get away with it

He'll get away with everything he says here. Bragging that he fired the first bullet for the PLO organization of mass murderers, smugglers, and thieves, bragging (correctly) that his PLO taught and trained all the subsequent terrorist organizations including Hizballah, expressing his desire to reunite with Hamas, threatening future violence against Israel, negating Israel as a Jewish state.  Bush, Rice, Olmert, and Livni will continue to come to him fawningly with dollars, weapons, bullets, and military trainers.

Thank you Bret Stephens

The foreign affairs columnist of the Wall Street Journal, and former editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, talks logic and morality in this video, and tries to make a chink in the world's evil callousness and hypocrisy.

It's not only Kosovo

Costa Rica, once friendly to Israel, has also recognized the "state of Palestine." It's a great way of furthering the global jihad: claim that some Muslims living in a certain place with a violent, backward, intolerant culture have a unique national identity that can only be satisfied with sovereignty; watch the Western countries fall into line to "recognize" the newly proclaimed entity. In protest, Israel has gone so far as to postpone--not cancel--a meeting with Costa Rican officials. But there's not much Israel can do about this "recognition" now that the Israeli Left and wishy-washy, Leftward-collapsing Israeli "Center" have been pushing the "Palestinian cause" obsessively since the early '90s. They reap what they sow, but they take the rest of us along with them.

Solidarity with Sderot

The admirable, heartwarming side of the Israeli people. They need leaders who can speak to their common sense and strength instead of to their weaknesses and wishes. For a decade and a half we've had almost solely the latter kind.

"Apartheid state"

A reader has a nice letter in today's Jerusalem Post--

Sir, - I'm confused. [Former Israeli Arab Member of Knesset] Azmi Bishara is in Canada calling us an apartheid state ("Israel's creation was 'armed robbery,' Bishara tells Toronto apartheid parley," February 19). In the same issue we read that [current Israeli Arab cabinet minister] Ghaleb Majadle had life-saving surgery in Hadassah University Hospital [in Jerusalem] ("Month-old bump on the head necessitates surgery for Majadle"). The culture and sport minister, like thousands of Arab citizens, found help in an Israeli hospital.

Bishara reportedly said that "Palestine" is the only apartheid regime left in the world... maybe he was referring to the Palestinian territories, where Jews fear to even enter?

SHARON ALTSHUL
Jerusalem

Yes, don't we remember how under South African apartheid there were all those black South African parliamentarians and cabinet ministers, and black citizens with full civil rights getting treatment in the best hospitals. "Apartheid" regarding Israel is a calumny on the level of the worst historic libels against the Jewish people. But a genocidist like Bishara, who collaborated with Hizballah and called for Israel's destruction while still a Member of Knesset, can always find ready audiences in the West.

Meanwhile as the letter-writer mentioned, any Israeli who strays into a Palestinian town is under grave and immediate danger of being lynched by a spontaneous civilian mob. When Israel left Gaza it had to remove every last Israeli civilian and exhume every last Israeli grave so that Gaza would be "pure"--a gesture that has been requited with thousands of rockets and mortars on Israeli civilians. The idea of a similar but  vastly larger ethnic cleansing of Israelis from the West Bank is backed by current  Israeli and American leaders, trembling before the power of jihad and petrodollars.

Brownback talks sense

Senator Brownback is just a little too upbeat about Jordan, which is indeed a relatively moderate Arab regime--but there's no such thing as real stability in the Arab world, nothing you can count on. However, he speaks truth about the "Palestinians" and the "Palestinian state." Will there ever be a U.S. president who has such fidelity to the truth on these issues?

Autistic city

Shaul Rosenfeld writes perceptively about the "ideological autism" of my city, Tel Aviv, whose council last week voted to sustain a twin-city agreement with . . . Gaza. The agreement was originally signed in 1998, when things were bad enough in Gaza; today, most of the people on the council see nothing wrong with continuing this one-sided "agreement" of very unrequited love for the openly genocidal, Hamas-run  entity now relentlessly attacking Israeli civilians with rockets.

Rosenberg notes that "This is of course not the whole of Tel Aviv, and not even the majority of Tel Aviv, yet it is certainly a hard core with significant membership and belonging to a particular political camp that safely dwells in the first Hebrew city." I think he means the Left, which sets the cultural and political tone here even though much, probably most, of the population is sane and can tell the difference between amity and total, murderous enmity.

John Stuart Mill gets it right

The great liberal philosopher said:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

The Mughniyeh assassination

Kenneth Timmerman speculates that, among other possibilities, Iran was behind it because they didn't  want Mughniyeh to spill what he knows about Iran's involvement in 9/11. Bruce Reidel says the signs point to an Israeli Mossad job.

If it was Israel, this is another impressive achievement after the bombing of the Syrian facility in September. We have an execrable prime minister; Defense Minister Ehud Barak is a political miscreant but has proven ability in the defense and security sphere; in Meir Dagan we have a highly realistic and capable Mossad director. Next targets: Nasrallah; Ahmadinejad.

Fighting these Nazis piecemeal is, no doubt, dangerous. They have to be defeated. The U.S. and Israel need leaders who understand that; no one else will do it.