Thursday, March 28, 2024

When it comes to war, Israel answers to something higher than world opinion - Andrea Widburg

 

​ by Andrea Widburg

Even as Israel is castigated for genocide, along with the demand that she surrender to Hamas, she fights her war with exceptional humanity.

 

In the topsy-turvy world of 2024, when good is bad and bad is good, Israel is fighting an existential war with exquisite concern for the well-being of enemy civilians—and the world responds by castigating Israel as a genocidal monster and demanding her surrender. What’s worst of all is the fact that the Biden administration is leading this evil parade. But Israel answers to a higher standard than the opinion of a fallen world.

Israel is a tiny, Jewish, liberal democracy in a sea of 250 million Muslims, most of whom are hostile to her in ways that range from mere hate to genocidal fury. Jews have occupied that same land continuously for 4,000 years. For around 1,900 of those years, they were colonized by imperial forces, usually Muslim. Barring the Druze and Bedouins, almost none of the Muslim Arabs in Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank have roots deeper than the 1830s.

On October 7, Hamas, which controls Gaza (land from which Israel withdrew in 2005, although Donkey Chompers AOC and her ilk seem unaware of that fact), launched a military attack against civilians in Israel. The goal wasn’t just to kill people. It was to torture them to death, especially women. Hamas did so with the full (and continuing) approval of a huge majority of Gaza residents.

Image: Israel delivers medical supplies to Gaza. X screen grab.

Because October 7 was a military invasion, Israel responded in a military way by going into Gaza to destroy Hamas—which, incidentally, is an Iranian puppet army. Iran is an enemy of the U.S., openly dedicated to its destruction, something that’s not obvious given Biden’s fealty to Iran’s needs.

Almost immediately, the world’s antisemites started screaming that any war that affected civilians—and the Gaza war does because Hamas is embedded among civilians—was “genocide.” They were helped by the fact that everyone, including the Biden administration, accepted uncritically the manifestly faked mortality numbers that Hamas published. Indeed, much of what we get from Gaza is theater:

 

 

The reality is that Israel is fighting the war with an exquisite regard for civilian safety. First, it’s shipping in massive amounts of supplies to support the people in Gaza—who, again, support Hamas. Indeed, when Israel raided Shifa hospital, a significant Hamas headquarters, the military brought along doctors to treat patients in the hospital.

I don’t know of any other military in history that does this. But Israel does so because she has a military doctrine called “Purity of Arms” that means that Israeli troops, whenever possible, must put the safety of enemy civilians ahead of themselves:

A fantastic John Spencer article (in Newsweek, of all places) explains how this doctrine plays out on the ground. I urge you to read the whole thing, but here’s a sampling:

In many ways, Israel has had to abandon this established playbook in order to prevent civilian harm. The IDF has telegraphed almost every move ahead of time so civilians can relocate, nearly always ceding the element of surprise. This has allowed Hamas to reposition its senior leaders (and the Israel hostages) as needed through the dense urban terrain of Gaza and the miles of underground tunnels it's built.

[snip]

Israel gave warning, in some cases for weeks, for civilians to evacuate the major urban areas of northern Gaza before it launched its ground campaign in the fall. The IDF reported dropping over 7 million flyers, but it also deployed technologies never used anywhere in the world, as I witness firsthand on a recent trip to Gaza and southern Israel.

Israel has made over 70,000 direct phones calls, sent over 13 million text messages and left over 15 million pre-recorded voicemails to notify civilians that they should leave combat areas, where they should go, and what route they should take. They deployed drones with speakers and dropped giant speakers by parachute that began broadcasting for civilians to leave combat areas once they hit the ground. They announced and conducted daily pauses of all operations to allow any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate.

The same article has so much more about Israel’s humanitarian way of fighting a still-brutal war. But the world doesn’t care. Prey to propaganda, ideology and, in Biden’s case, the need to win Michigan and Wisconsin, nothing Israel can do other than surrender to Hamas is good enough.

And I say “surrender” because a unilateral ceasefire without even getting hostages back allows Hamas, with Iran’s help, to regroup and come back stronger. This will happen even as the West, including America, refuses to honor Israel’s need to purchase ammunition and weapons, whether by slow-walking sales or refusing them entirely. (Ukraine, by the way, is not buying American weapons. We just hand them over.)

So, given the fact that Israel is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t, why does she harm her military advantage and put her troops in danger? Because I cannot believe that Israel is stupid enough to sacrifice herself for a world that despises her, I’ve got a different theory: I believe that Israel’s extraordinary humanitarian approach to warfare is because the Jews know that they answer to something higher than the baseness of world opinion. They are, truly, a Godly nation.

 

Andrea Widburg

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/when_it_comes_to_war_israel_answers_to_something_higher_than_world_opinion.html

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