40 Lessons from Hamas’ War Against the Jews

by Steven Plaut


1.      Nice fences do not stop missiles, rockets, and mortars.

2.      Complete removal of Israeli forces and Jewish settlers from an area merely signals Israeli weakness and invites escalated Arab terror and aggression.

3.      Hamas (and Hezb’Allah and ISIS) cannot be defeated with air strikes.  There is no effective alternative to ground invasion and ongoing military control of the ground retaken.

4.      Unless the Israeli military controls the ground on the other side of fences, those fences achieve nothing.

5.      Goodwill gestures by Israel increase terror.

6.      Goodwill gestures by Israel never produce moderation of Arab goals and demands.  They also do not win Israel friends in the West but rather encourage outbursts of anti-Semitism.

7.      Terror is not caused by Israeli settlements but by the removal of Israeli settlements.

8.      Terror is not caused by Israeli military occupation but by the removal of Israeli military occupation.

9.      It is impossible for two sovereign entities to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

10.      No matter how many concessions Israel makes, the world will always justify Arab terrorism because there will always be still one more capitulation Israel failed to make.

11.      No matter how nice Israel is to its own Arab citizens and no matter how many affirmative action programs it implements, Israel will always be accused of being an “apartheid regime.”

12.      The Israeli far left is an openly anti-Semitic movement that seeks Israel’s destruction and automatically endorses the enemies of Israel in nearly all things.

13.     The Likud is too cowardly to defeat the terrorists.

14.       The real enemy of Israel is not Arab fascism but Jewish leftism.

15.       Much of the world has no qualms about seeing Jewish civilians murdered by terrorists.  In fact it celebrates these Jewish deaths and complains that there are too few of them.

16.       The Israeli Left will oppose every conceivable act of Israeli self-defense.

17.       Israeli niceness and flexibility fan anti-Semitism.

18.       Arab terrorists do not morph into statesmen.

19.       Israel bashers do not care about dead Arab civilians, other than as a useful tool with which to bludgeon Israel.

20.      Many on the worldwide Left would not raise an eyebrow if Israeli Jews were shipped off to concentration camps in cattle cars – except perhaps to demand improved rail service.

21.      The vast majority of Israeli Arabs and nearly all Israeli Arab politicians support terrorism and wish to see Israel destroyed.

22.      There are hundreds of Jewish professors in Israel who serve as an academic Fifth Column and who collaborate with the enemies of their country.  They are the moral equivalent of American and British jihadis who fight for the ISIS.

23.      The Arabs will not accept an independent Israel within any set of borders, no matter how small. Hence reducing Israel’s territory does nothing but signal weakness and destructibility.

24.      The only country on earth expected to respond to the mass murder of its civilians by turning of the other cheek is Israel.  The only country on earth that has spent years trying to defeat aggression and terrorism by turning the other cheek is Israel.  It failed.

25.      No matter how Israel responds to aggression and terrorism, it will always be denounced as a “disproportionate” response.  The only “proportionate” response is complete capitulation by Israel.  If an Israeli coughs in the general direction of Gaza, this would be a disproportionate war crime and act of genocide.

26.      Those who claim that anti-Zionism is different and distinct from anti-Semitism tend, on close inspection, to be anti-Semites themselves.

27.      The only people on earth whom the Left believes should be denied the right to self-determination and self-defense are the Jews.

28.      “Palestinians” are not a nation in any true sense of the term and never were. They are simply Arabs who happened to migrate or infiltrate into Western Palestine.  They have no “right” to statehood.

29.      Israeli leftists, rather than learn from the failures of their policies and “ideas,” will always complain that their policies have not been applied thoroughly enough.

30.      The moral and legal responsibility for every single Arab civilian killed or injured in the Middle East conflict rests squarely on the shoulders of the Arab terrorists and their Western amen choruses.

31.      There is no moral or legal reason for Israel to refrain from attacking terrorists and murderers when they hide among civilians.

32.     Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is NOT an apartheid regime.

33.      Palestinians are the Sudeten Germans of the Middle East.

34.      There are no non-military solutions to the problem of terrorism.

35.       One can only make peace with one’s defeated enemies.

36.      There are no significant differences between the agenda of the PLO and the agenda of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Moslem Brotherhood, and ISIS.

37.      One cannot make peace by pretending that war does not exist.

38.      One cannot buy off anti-Semites and Islamofascists with trade concessions and subsidies.

39.       The only way to stop terrorism is to kill terrorists.

40.       No terrorist has ever murdered anyone after he was executed.


Steven Plaut is a native Philadelphian who teaches business finance and economics at the University of Haifa in Israel.  He holds a PhD in economics from Princeton.  He is author of the David Horowitz Freedom Center booklets about the Hamas  and Jewish Enablers of the War against Israel.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/40-lessons-from-hamas-war-against-the-jews/

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