How can one determine who is winning or has won the war between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas in Gaza? Is it the number of people killed, the amount of land taken, the number of buildings destroyed? Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyhu has declared the destruction of Hamas is the war’s avowed aim, but that does not seem likely when the Hamas adherents are mixed in with the civilian population of Gaza or in the labyrinth of tunnels they have built.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, wars are won on social media and the regular media, and right now Hamas appears to be winning the war of public opinion. This may seem counter-intuitive since Hamas started the war by massacring 1400 Israelis, the vast majority of them civilians. They literally butchered babies as well as adults, beheading and disemboweling a number of them. Workers from Thailand and Asia were also killed by these invaders. In addition, Hamas grabbed 240 hostages to take back with them to the warrens of Gaza, perhaps to exchange them for Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails. The hostages they grabbed were civilian women and children as well as adult men, babies and elderly persons.
Yet this barbarous behavior was applauded by many progressive organizations on college campuses in the U.S. and around the world, particularly by Muslims. When the Hamas militants retreated to Gaza after their slaughter, the Israelis started bombing Gaza. Given that Hamas has intertwined itself with the civilian populations, there have been considerable civilian casualties, including children. But that is what Hamas wanted. They have always used civilians as their shields, knowing that Israelis would be blamed for all the collateral damage that has occurred. Their underground storerooms, tunnels and meeting rooms have been purposely built under mosques, hospitals and civilian homes, hoping that if the Israelis bombed these structures they would be blamed for civilian deaths which are inevitable.
Hamas is actually a death cult whose leadership does not care how many people die because of their actions, whether they be Israelis or Palestinians. They want to make the Israelis look bad in the court of public opinion. And they have succeeded with the help of Al Jazeera and other Arab media, and social media. It is forgotten that Hamas initiated the war with their overtly brutal attacks on Jewish civilians. It is also forgotten that Israel once occupied Gaza and when they left, Hamas took over from the Palestinian Authority, winning an election in 2007. There have been no elections in Gaza since. Money from Qatar and other Arab states have not been used by Hamas to improve living conditions for the Palestinians or bolster the economy of Gaza, but to build tunnels, buy weapons and train an army. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and wants to kill Jews all over the world. And Hamas is totally misogynistic, treating women as chattel.
The Palestinians claim the Israelis are colonists occupying land that belongs to them. But the Jews were on this land thousands of years ago, dispersed first by the Babylonians and then the Romans. The Arabs actually colonized the land after the Jews were forced out. Israel was formed by a mandate from the United Nations and became a nation in May 1948. On several occasions, the most recent being the Camp David accords in 2000, the Palestinians had the option of having their own state in the West Bank and Gaza before the Jewish settler movement took over some of the land. But Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians turned down an agreement brokered by President Clinton that provided them with 95 percent of what they wanted, except for the right of return of the Palestinians to Israel.
So the Palestinians have had their chances to have their own state and coexist peacefully with the Israelis but rejected the opportunities they were given. As more Palestinians are killed in Gaza as collateral damage from Israeli shelling, Hamas will be happy because they are winning the war of public opinion, especially in the Arab world. Hamas does not care that their people are suffering.
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Posted at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Gaza, Hamas, hostages, IDF, Israelis, Massacre, Palestinians, propaganda, public opinion, war
Political junkie, Vietnam vet, neurologist- three books on aging and dementia. Book on health care reform in 2009- Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System. Book on the need for a centrist third party- Resurrecting Democracy- A Citizen’s Call for a Centrist Third Party published in 2011. Aging Wisely, published in August 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield. Latest book- The Uninformed Voter published May 2020