Hamas

Sunday

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Hamas’s rockets are killing Palestinians too

From our UK edition

Israel’s military action in Gaza is widely reported daily across the world. Images of hundreds of rockets lighting up the skies over Israeli cities and of the rubble of destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip are once again part of the daily cycle of print and broadcast news. But most reports are thin on details of Israel’s military activities. What exactly are their aims? How are they pursuing them? And how much success are they having? Often Israel’s military activities seem baffling to the wider world. The country’s reluctance to give a detailed, running-commentary on every strike frustrates journalists and citizens, who then assume the worst of motives for these unexplained acts.

Saturday

Arieh Kovler

Inside Israel’s Iron Dome

From our UK edition

A dramatic photo from the Gaza strip taken in the early hours of Friday morning looks like something out of a Marvel film. On the right, rockets fly from Gaza. The gentle trajectory of their parabolic curves shouldn’t fool anyone: these are unguided explosives travelling at hundreds of miles an hour towards an Israeli town. On the left, each one snaking a unique, winding path, interceptors from Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket system shoot up to meet the missiles. In 2001, when Hamas started firing rockets from Gaza into Israel (and, at that time, the still-extant Israeli settlements in Gaza), the terrorist organisation introduced a new weapon that would change the strategic picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Friday

Jake Wallis Simons

Revealed: How Israel tricked Hamas

From our UK edition

I received a message from a trusted contact in Israel yesterday telling me that no ground offensive was planned in Gaza. This was despite the fact that heavy armour and infantry reservists were massing on the border. I decided to hold the story and break it in the morning. Within hours, however, the official Israeli army Twitter account had suggested to the world that ground troops had gone into action. ‘IDF (Israel Defence Force) air and ground troops are currently attacking in the Gaza Strip,’ it said. Nobody noted the careful ambiguity. Within minutes, the news had spread across the world. ‘Israel goes in,’ screamed the MailOnline, the world’s biggest newspaper website.

hamas
Dominic Green

Democrats for Hamas

The truly multiracial coalition in the US these days isn’t the Democratic party. It’s the anti-Semitic mass movement that takes to the streets of blue-state cities every time Israel defends itself against terrorism. Israel will no doubt survive the latest barrage of disapproval from people with a bottomless supply of personal pronouns and malicious memes. But this is a problem for American Jews today — and it will be all of America’s problem tomorrow, because the overrunning of the public square by anti-Jewish cranks and conspiracy theorists is a perennial warning sign of social breakdown. Spend a few minutes in the open sewer that is social media, and you are left in no doubt. The Democratic left has become thoroughly ‘Corbynized’, overtaken by the hard left.

Thursday

Roger Kimball

How are we enjoying the Biden presidency so far?

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than four months into the Biden-Harris deep-state maladministration and we have roaring inflation, the most disastrous jobs report in recent memory, rising unemployment, spiking gas prices, an imploding stock market, devastating cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and a janus-faced crisis on our Southern border in which tens of thousands of disease-ridden illegal migrants are huddled into cages while thousands more fan out across the fruited plain taking jobs from Americans even as they infect us with COVID. Quick work, Joe! And of course that is just the tip of the proverbial North Atlantic iceberg into which His Senileness is steering the ship of state.

biden

Saturday

Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf

Western states have failed the Palestinian ‘right of return’

The issue of Palestinian refugees, and the Arab and Palestinian demand that those refugees be allowed to exercise what they call a ‘right of return’, attracts scant attention. Neither Israel’s leaders nor its public, and certainly not the international community, spend very much time discussing it. This is in stark contrast to other core issues. For example, there is endless discussion of the settlements and the military occupation of the territories, which are indeed important; but the Palestinian refugee issue has barely been subjected to any real strategic discussion. There have been no serious attempts at a resolution, or even efforts to place it on the agenda.

palestinian