Israel’s Response to Terror

by Nils A. Haug  | Gatestone Institute | July 18, 2024

Despite Israel’s compliance with humanitarian concerns, rules of war, and attempts to avoid Palestinian civilian deaths, the perception remains that Israel should be the one to make concessions for a ceasefire, not Hamas, which should immediately release the hostages it took. Hamas, like other Islamic groups from a different culture, does not accede to the West’s laws of war – this much is clear from their treatment of hostages. Pictured: A Palestinian man shows a leaflet, with instructions on humanitarian corridors and safe zones, dropped by the Israeli military over Gaza City on November 5, 2023. (Photo by Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images)

• Hamas, designated a terror group by Western nations, is an Islamist fundamentalist group whose 1988 Covenant openly supports a Sharia law-based paradisical Caliphate free of non-believers and a world free of Jews (end of Article 7).

• Despite Israel’s compliance with humanitarian concerns, rules of war, and attempts to avoid Palestinian civilian deaths, the perception remains that Israel should be the one to make concessions for a ceasefire, not Hamas, which should immediately release the hostages it took.
• Hamas, like other Islamic groups from a different culture, does not accede to the West’s laws of war – this much is clear from their treatment of hostages. Freed hostages tell of “cages, beatings and death threats.” Hamas, in violation of the truce agreement, has not permitted the Red Cross to see the hostages. One can imagine how come.
• The conflict therefore becomes one between a Western state, ultimately seeking peaceful coexistence and adhering to the ethics of a just war, assaulted by terrorist groups pursuing total conquest and seeming to be driven by an ideology of unquenchable animosity toward “unbelievers.”
• Most Western leaders apparently desire to divide Israel, even further than it already has been divided, into two sectors: one for the Jews and one for the Palestinians — all in the name of human rights, social justice, and supposed fair play.
• At its core, these proposals are anti-Zionist and in practical effect, anti-Semitic. For a start, more than half the land promised to Jews by the 1917 Balfour Declaration was reallocated by the British authorities to what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordon. Jewish rights to what remains of their historic land is continually denied, along with stupefying proposals that the Jews should be forced to be ruled by the very people desiring their extinction.
• What accommodation, however, can there possibly be between two conflicting core narratives, in which one party seeks the ideal of martyrdom — “We love death as our enemies love life” — while the other desires to live in peace, without constant threats to its existence?
• Israel is not only fighting to prevent long-term future attacks from Gaza, but also to defeat terrorists from overwhelming the Judeo-Christian values that have been achieved over centuries with much sacrifice.
• Israel has actually been singled out for implementing “More measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in history.”
• Israel is the “only country in world,” the British journalist Douglas Murray pointed out, “who are never allowed to win a war, which is a reason why wars keep occurring.”
• US President Joe Biden and his ministers of state try their utmost to impose unacceptable cease-fire agreements upon Israel. Fortunately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “the Churchill of the Middle East,” will have none of it. Israel stands firm against prematurely ceasing military action: their ultimate aim is not only to destroy Hamas’s military capability and to rescue remaining hostages, but to defeat terror for the future of the Free World.
• “It is left to little Israel to make the first stand against radical evil and the new axis of nations dedicated to the demise of the West. With resolve, courage, and dedication, but, alas, with much more sacrifice, Israel will show the way.” — Professor Leon R. Kass, aei.org, November 3, 2023.