From The River To The Sea

"We are getting more and more phone calls and conversations of concerned people — if it’s Israelis who invest in Ireland and are concerned about their investment, if it’s Israelis who have relocated to Ireland into different tech companies and either are requesting to be relocated somewhere else or asking to return to Israel."

"I think it sends the wrong message about the location and the centrality of Ireland as a tech hub when there are more and more people who are concerned about moving to Ireland. I don’t think that this is the message that Ireland wants to send to the world … And this is not what we want to see."

"[Many Irish sympathize with Israel] behind the scenes. I think there is a lot of potential in our bilateral relations, if it’s cybersecurity or health care, climate change. I hope to be given that opportunity to continue that."

Israeli Ambassador to Ireland, Dana Erlich

Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington

 A March poll by the Palestinian polling group elicited the data that seven in ten Palestinians approved of the October 7 sadistic barbarity that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist operatives inflicted on southern Israel's kibbutz residents. Poll results rendered the information that Palestinians in the West Bank outdid their Gaza counterparts with a greater number supporting Hamas as the duly constituted government in both territories.

Israelis, looking back in appalled anger at the carnage wrought by the Palestinian terrorist operation of October 7 are almost equal in numbers in rejecting a renewed Palestinian enclave in  Gaza. It seems that in the West, in European countries in particular, Hamas and the other Palestinian terror groups are not held in any judgement. Israel, on the other hand, is held to a standard not expected of Palestinians. When Palestinians invoking their 'refugee' status as 'victims' everlasting as long as Israel exists, commit to the goal of destroying Israel, their ongoing violence against Israel and its population is considered irrelevant.

 

Israel's responses to deadly raids, however, are viewed through the magnified lens of international demands that restraint be the order of the day, not the wholesale intention of responding militarily to the rocket barrages, and suicide missions -- and above all the October 7 sadistic savagery with its death count, determined to prevent the promise of more October 7s, until Israel is destroyed -- by taking the initiative to destroy first those whose unremitting violence against Israeli existence must be final and complete.

 

Ireland has led the way in persuading Spain and and Norway -- all three countries known to be hostile to Israel -- to formally recognize the 'State of Palestine', rather than await a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority government on mutual recognition and a corresponding decision on conditions both agree upon, setting standards and boundaries as well as pledges of non-hostile cooperation. Israel has been available for talks in the critical issues involved, the Palestinians have evaded them.

Choosing instead their slow and steady scheduling of the poisoning of Palestinian minds against their Jewish neighbours, inculcating in those minds the need for 'resistance' against the 'occupation'; an occupation necessitated by the urgent call to protect Israelis of all ages against lethal attacks that Palestinians are taught by their governments it is their duty to carry out to martyrdom in the greater interests of opposing Israel's presence and committing to killing Jews.

Sovereignty recognition must pass some elemental standards, not the least of which under international law a state must have fixed borders, a permanent population, uncontested government with control of its security and commitments to amiable foreign relations. In light of the most recent of the ongoing attacks against Israel and its people, to proceed at this unresolved juncture to recognize a Palestinian state that refuses to negotiate with the neighbour it threatens, to agree on boundaries and future relations is beyond premature.

Granting that status for the Palestinians is not only premature, it represents a reprehensible decision to reward savagery committed against a neighbour where 1,200 lives of Israeli citizens were extinguished on one fateful day of carnage dedicated to terrorizing, slaughtering and hostage taking. Neither Palestinians, nor now Israelis favour the two-state 'solution' the West is anxious to hasten to reality, seemingly to solve a brutal, unresolved issue of two peoples rivalling one another in a competition for territory.

 

Israelis settled for a state on a small portion of their historical ancestral land mass; Palestinians rejected outright the opportunity offered them through the Partition Plan of the United Nations in 1947. Consistently since then when war after war broke out as surrounding Arab states attempted to dislodge the Jewish State from the Middle East, Israel successfully clung to its territory, militarily defeating its enemies and frustrating Palestinian aspirations to achieve a state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea.

 

Which is to say, without a presence of an Israeli state, leaving the entire area to the Palestinian Arabs. That remains the goal of both Fatah (West Bank Palestinian Authority) and Hamas (Gaza Strip). Fatah and Hamas oppose one another with a hostility born of ideological differences and factional rivalry. Their only area of agreement is the destruction of the State of Israel. That part of the West that is amenable to granting State status to Palestinian aspiration is effectively agreeing that the use of violent sadism was justifiable and awaited reward.

 

Countries that would never tolerate violence against their claims to sovereignty and against their populations, appear to feel that having suffered the intolerable, Israel should merely shrug and count its losses to satisfy the demands of a global community fixated with the entitlements and inalienable rights of a Palestinian population that chooses its method of persuasion, trumping lethal violence over the negotiating table. In the process the pretense for consumption by the West, frequent appeals to victimhood. Appealing for help from the international community to bypass normal international standards to qualify for statehood.

 

Looking ahead to the eventual agreement on statehood for 'Palestine', the issue of who would govern is critical to relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinians make no secret of the fact that the majority reject 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected to his position as President decades ago, with no election keeping him in office for the past 20 years. Their choice of governance has been stated time and again in their admiration for Hamas's agenda. 

 

Ireland, Spain and Norway would never agree to live alongside another state with destructive tendencies and an agenda that included ongoing violence against a neighbour. Yet they deem it acceptable for Israel and they prefer to force the matter by supporting a Palestinian State that is loathe to bargain in good faith with Israel, since to do so would be to forego their ambition to have free reign from "The River to the Sea" in perpetuity.

 

 

Taming the Untamable

"I parked my motorcycle at the bus stop. As I was leaving the bus stop, I heard a loud noise. I thought it was a traffic accident."

"The terrorist chased me. I shot him and he fell. My legs were shaking. I was praying that the bullet would fire, because if it didn’t I was dead."

"I saw him come out [of the car] with a knife — someone huge, big, a really frightening person — and stab the first person he met near the car. I thought it’s a fight between drivers."

"[But then, the terrorist] left the victim and started running at others to stab them… I pulled out the gun, he saw me. He started running toward me. There was another elderly man near me. I took a few steps back to cock the gun. As he came near me I took him out. He still didn’t fall."

"He continued to try to stab the man who was by me… so I hit him with another shot, and then he sat down and I took him out with two more bullets."

Kobi Yekutiel, civilian responder, Tel Aviv

Police and rescue forces at the scene of a car ramming and stabbing terror attack in north Tel Aviv on June 4, 2023 (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

 A pickup truck driven by a Palestinian rammed into a crowd of people at a bus stop in northern Tel Aviv. Eight people sustained injuries, some serious. Among them a pregnant woman who lost her pregnancy. The attacker was claimed as one of their own by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas. Driving the truck directly at passersby, hitting them, he emerged from the vehicle and began stabbing people. One of the witnesses to the attack, Kobi Yekutiel, used his personal firearm to stop the attack.

Just the latest of many attacks, whether vehicular homicide, stabbing or by firearms that take place suddenly on the streets and at the border crossings against soldiers, police, and Israeli civilians waiting at bus stops, students on their way to school, in a volatile outburst of violence. The man has been identified as Abdel Wahhab Issa Hussein Khalayleh, from a village near Hebron in the southern West Bank.

The attack happens to be coincidental to the Israel Defence Forces' days'-long operation in the West Bank city of Jenin, and its accompanying 'refugee camp' known as a hotbed of Islamic Jihad and Hamas terrorist activity. Many of the planned attacks taking place in the past year have been hatched and pursued by Jenin-based terrorists-in-training to earn their stripes as graduates of the Palestinian School of Lower Education, specializing in attacks against Israeli civilians identifiable as Jews.

These ongoing attacks represent the reason that the government of Israel dispatched the country's military to make a stab a clearing away the ticking human time bombs in Jenin. Previous such smaller raids have been brief and deadly. The current raid has been of longer duration, with more depth and intent on destroying weapons caches and weapons-manufacturing depots, as well as having the intention of arresting and placing identified terrorists out of active commission.

"At these moments we are completing the mission, and I can say that our extensive operation in Jenin is not a one-off."

"We will continue as long as necessary to cut out terrorism."

"If Jenin returns to terror, we will return to Jenin – and it will happen much faster and with much greater power than what people might imagine. Whoever does not understand this today, will understand it very soon."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

The 12 Palestinians who met their death during the large military operation, along with the 120 arrested since Monday were all verifiable combatants. Countless others during the raid of Jenin hid in safe houses among the population, with the intention of emerging as soon as the Israeli military left the area. Their command-and-operation post, shared by Islamic Jihad and Hamas, was destroyed, weapons caches gathered, and a weapons production facility put out of business. The IDF dug up roads under which mines had been installed.

 

Tires were set on fire on a street during the operation on Jenin.

 

"The operation in Tel Aviv is the first response of the resistance to what is happening in Jenin", Khalid al-Batsch, an official with Palestinian Islamic Jihad announced. Jenin has distinguished itself in the past year as a hotbed of terrorism, the 'refugee camp' area in particular. In 2002 conflict took place in Jenin, lasting over a week, resulting in 50 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers dying; an event known as the Battle of Jenin.

 

An "underground shaft used to store explosive devices in the heart of the Jenin Camp" was dismantled by the Israeli army. IDF soldiers also destroyed "two operational situation rooms belonging to terrorist organizations in the area ... a grenade launcher in the area of Jenin, and confiscated weapons and military equipment". "There is no point in the camp that we have not been, including the centre", explained Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the IDF.

It was anticipated soldiers would continue to engage with armed militants throughout Tuesday. One Israeli military official stated that it was assumed that 300 armed combatants remained in Jenin, mostly sheltering themselves from discovery by IDF troops. Some 4,000 Palestinians had fled the camp overnight for shelter with family members in the city itself, according to Jenin's mayor. 

 

This military operation with the intention of clamping down on newly-formed militias in the Jenin camp and surrounding areas has had its limited success.

Yet nothing, it seems, will dissuade Palestinian youth from their aspirational plans to become the next 'heroes of the resistance', spurred on by the Palestinian Authority which claims to be cooperating with Western expectations that his government is a suitable partner for peace. The PA's Fatah military 'division', in fact, not only spurs ongoing violence and indoctrinates children into hate against Jewish 'occupiers', but it also joined the more obvious terrorist groups in the Jenin conflict.

People walk on a street as Israeli troops start withdrawing from Jenin, in the West Bank, July 4, 2023. (credit: RANEEN SAWAFTA/REUTERS)