Times of Israel editor is providing the best ongoing commentary I can find online regarding Hamas’s war on Israel. His column today is “Whle Hamas celebrates, Israel focuses on its security.” Here are a couple of excerpts worth pausing over:
Entirely unsurprisingly, Hamas is managing to further blacken Israel’s name wherever this conflict is depicted in terms that are the opposite of reality, which is most everywhere. Israel is under attack by the terrorist government of the state next door, which is openly committed to destroying it, in accordance with a perverted Islamist ideology, in partnership with Iran, Qatar, Hezbollah and the rest of this region’s most pernicious governments and terrorist organizations. Year after year, Hamas improves its capacity to do Israel harm, while Israel does its best to minimize that capacity. No attacks on Israel or preparation for attacks on Israel? No suffering in Gaza. It really is as simple as that. To Hamas’s delight, this simple truth is eluding much of the watching world.
Doubtless, it has often been said, Israel would gain more sympathy internationally if only more Israelis were dying. Well, more Israelis are dying now — except that since they’re the soldiers of the side widely misrepresented as the aggressor, even that works to Hamas’s advantage. Gaza’s terrorist government does its best to kill Israeli civilians. It’s managing to kill Israeli soldiers, drawing them into the residential areas where it’s thus also getting Gaza civilians killed. Israel’s even treating in its hospitals injured terrorists it captures emerging from the Hamas tunnels. And still, through every twist and turn of this conflict, the international presumption of blame is on Israel. The dangers to Israel are minimalized. The rocket attacks are dismissed as inconsequential (except, as mentioned, when they necessitate the abandonment of Ben-Gurion Airport) and the cross-border attack tunnels often aren’t even being reported at all. Through the manipulation of the willingly manipulated, it’s all Israel’s fault. Wonderful news for the Islamists.
This is where we come in:
Hamas is also widening the frictions between Israel and its most important ally, the United States. President Barack Obama expressed concern about Gaza civilian casualties, urged a ceasefire and dispatched his secretary of state even as Israel clearly needed time to tackle the horrifying network of terror tunnels Hamas dug under the Israeli border. That secretary showed his cynical dismissal of Israel’s efforts at “pinpoint” targeting of terrorist sites in Gaza in a risible hot mic fiasco, and has engaged Qatar — advocate for and financier of Hamas — in ceasefire contacts, undermining the Egyptian-led effort. It’s a rare and dismal moment when Israel’s leadership finds itself forced to reject a US-offered ceasefire; it showcases a profound disconnect between Jerusalem and Washington; it raises the question of why the US would want to constrain Israel’s capacity to demolish the tunnels through which Hamas sends killers into Israel. And the Hamas leadership must be absolutely delighted.
Whole thing — all of it worth reading — here.
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