While keyboard warriors across the West pump out Hamas and Iranian propaganda, it has been clear to all who understand Israel that the terror group signed its own death warrant on October 7.
This is not about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor about radical Zionism. The main Israeli opposition parties support the war.
Israelis will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Hamas after it crossed into Israel on October 7 to murder innocent civilian women, children and old people on the Sabbath.
On October 14 last year, a week after Hamas’s brutal murders of 1200 people, this column said Israel – a country that swapped 1027 terror prisoners for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in 2011 – would struggle with the idea of losing 250 of its people to Islamist hostage takers.
A country shaped by the Holocaust sees Israel as the only place on earth where Jews can live in their own homes in safety.
Hamas was counting on just such an Israeli reaction and has been successful in shaping world opinion against Israel by using Gazan civilians as human shields.
Israel’s critics, who imagine this is a war against Palestinian civilians, should know Israel could have flattened Gaza in a week. Hamas’s leaders have promised repeats of October 7. Nor is it just Hamas.
Check the November 5 interview on Memri TV with Khaled Barakat, a Canada-based Palestinian activist and former People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine official. He says the only solution to the Palestinian problem is the end of Israel.
“Who supports the two-state solution? Arab reactionary regimes, liberal Zionists, fascists and some delusionists,” Barakat says.
Israel’s greatest historian and regular critic, Benny Morris, had similar thoughts about a two-state solution in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on March 29.
A one-time supporter himself, he now thinks Israelis will never agree to the plan the Palestinian leadership has rejected so many times.
History will be kinder to the IDF and to Israel than to the many useful fools in the West who knowingly repeat the propaganda of an Islamist group with direct historical links to the Nazis through its antecedents in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
David Kilcullen, this paper’s pre-eminent military analyst, on March 26 argued – as many others have – that Israel has in fact done its best to limit civilian casualties given Hamas fighters are embedded with civilians.
Yet UN Rapporteur and ABC favourite Francesca Albanese after last week’s killing of aid workers, including Australian Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, argued on social media platform X that Israel is deliberately murdering aid workers.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari immediately promised an independent investigation, apologised to the world and spoke directly with Spanish chef Jose Andres, founder of the aid group World Central Kitchen. Hagari expressed the IDF’s condolences to the families of the victims and to WCK.
Albanese, a UN employee, wrote: “Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed WCK workers so that donors would pull out & civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly.” There is a word for that kind of thinking, but here Antoinette Lattouf was quick off the blocks, retweeting the Rapporteur’s libel.
By Wednesday, IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi was profoundly sorry about the attack, which happened in darkness. He praised the courage of WCK workers.
An overwrought interview by ABC RN Breakfast fill-in host Sally Sara on Thursday showed just how hostile some journalists are to Israel. Questioning Israeli government spokesman Avi Hyman, Sara insisted Gazans were racked by famine. She would not accept that the IDF, on the ground, disputes this, nor Mr Hyman’s correct view that arguments about famine are in fact future projections.
Her next interviewee, Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, at the end of the 17-minute segment actually confirmed the famine numbers were in fact future projections.
Israel critics who claim the aid workers were deliberately targeted seem to have missed the many references by Israel last Wednesday and Thursday to the “millions of meals” that WCK has supplied in Gaza and Israel throughout the war. These meals were delivered without aid workers being targeted.
Sara should have known Israel prefers WCK precisely because it is not staffed by UN aid workers, some of whom Hyman pointed out were involved in the killings on October 7 and 1000 of whom are known to be Hamas members.
Last October, US President Joe Biden urged the media to be careful using figures provided from within Gaza, where all ministries are controlled by Hamas.
The Gaza Health Ministry claims 33,000 people have keen killed in this war. The IDF says it has killed more than 15,000 fighters. The UN says more than 13,000 children have been killed. Can this really mean the total of all other casualties – non-combatant men, women and the elderly is 5000?
Tablet magazine on March 7 published an analysis by Professor Abraham Wyner of the University of Pennsylvania. He believes the numbers are not real.
He argues the death toll has been growing “with almost metronomical linearity”.
In the first month of the war, “the daily reported casualty count … averages 270, plus or minus 15 per cent. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less,” Wyner wrote.
“Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that track the variation in the number of women.”
Because high casualties should follow days when residential buildings have been hit, there should be a correlation between high and low numbers of casualties of women and children, Professor Abraham argues. There is no such correlation in the Gaza Health Ministry numbers.
“Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real.”
The Western media’s aid picture is also misleading.
Israel attributes aid distribution problems inside Gaza to the inability of UN aid workers to move food trucked in, and to Hamas’s theft of supplies that do arrive.
Israel says 50 per cent more food trucks are arriving today than before the war. It says 184,500 tonnes of food have arrived since the start of the war. It is sending more than 1000 food trucks a week into the territory.
As Avi Hyman told RN: “No one from Hamas is starving.”
If Hamas stopped stealing aid, Gazan civilians would not be facing shortages. UNRWA’s own daily aid numbers confirm what Israel says.
The great tragedy of Palestinian displacement will only accelerate after this war, just as Palestinians lost territory and power over their own lives each time they attacked Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973.
Israel will not stop its war before cleaning out the tunnels of Rafah, whatever our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong say.
The Biden administration is right to demand more care of civilians by Israel’s troops on the ground. But it is also right to state that the US will continue to support Israel’s campaign against Hamas.
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