So much for that strange demand that Israel observe Ramadan during its war against Hamas and other Islamist terror networks. Hezbollah has ‘celebrated’ Ramadan by increasing the pace of its attacks in the north of Israel, ramping up the intensity of both sides. Overnight, Hezbollah launched over 100 rockets at Israel, prompting another round of answering attacks on their positions:
Israel responded with several strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon after alarms sounded in the Galilee and the Golan Heights as two barrages of at least 100 rockets in total were launched at northern Israel on Tuesday morning, the IDF reported. The first round contained 30 rockets, and the second round contained 70.
Crashes were reportedly sighted in open areas near Ein Kuniya, Snir, Sha’ar Yashuv, and Kfar Szold.
Hezbollah said it fired these Katyusha rockets in response to Israeli bombardment of the Bekaa region Monday night, Reuters reported.
The IDF responded by attacking rocket launch posts in Lebanon that had fired towards the North. A military compound in the Khiam area was struck, and terrorist infrastructure in the Bint Jbeil area was also struck on Tuesday, the IDF reported.
Consider Hezbollah’s explanation an example of the Mom He Hit Me Back! genre of spin. Hezbollah has launched rockets at northern Israel since the start of the Gaza operation, clearly wanting to divert some of Israel’s defenses to its north to slow down the offensive against Hamas in the south. It has worked to some degree but not nearly enough, as Hamas’ rapid collapses in Gaza City and Khan Younis proved. The attacks on Bekaa on Monday came as retaliation for attacks by Hezbollah, and so on ad infinitum, or at least ad October 7.
At any rate, this makes hash of Joe Biden’s arguments for a Ramadan pause. Iranian proxy Hezbollah isn’t observing a Ramadan ‘pause’; they’re not bothering to ask for one, either. In the first place, Islamic nations and terror networks don’t observe this holiday with peaceful interludes in conflicts, and even more to the point, they don’t respect anyone else’s religious days of observance in their attacks either. In fact, they like to use Israel’s holy days in particular as propitious dates for attacks, both for reasons of religious supremacy but also for better surprise against a presumably less-prepared foe.
That includes the October 7 attacks by Iran’s other proxy terror network, Hamas. Those took place at the end of Sukkot (September 29 – October 6) and the beginning of Simchat Torah (October 6-8). Furthermore, Hamas attacked despite the existence of a previous cease-fire, did so without provocation, and deliberately chose unarmed men, women, and children as their targets for rape, kidnapping, and murder on this holiday period.
Given all that, why is Biden insisting that Israel accept a Ramadan cease-fire on Hamas’ terms? The most obvious reason is that Biden sees Michigan slipping away from him, thanks to the Arab-American vote in Dearborn and Rashida Tlaib’s rabble-rousing there. Biden can’t win a second term without carrying Michigan, and the same radical-progressive dissent threatens his position in other swing states. It’s clear political cravenness, not any kind of principled position.
And it’s been cravenness on the cheap, too. Biden thought he could bully Benjamin Netanyahu into concessions that would serve Biden’s political crisis at the expense of Israel’s literal survival — or failing that, crack the unity government in Jerusalem and get a different negotiating partner with more malleability. Instead, as WSJ editor Elliot Kaufman wrote yesterday, Biden’s “Operation Ramadan” effort backfired by firming up support for the Rafah offensive to come:
The administration misread Israel. Its pressure tactics have allowed Mr. Netanyahu to rally even his rivals around his positions on Rafah and against unilateral U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state, an idea Israelis find criminally insane right now. The prime minister’s chief opponent, Benny Gantz, has publicly agreed with him on both, and reportedly told U.S. officials that “finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80% of a fire.” As retired Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, head of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, tells me, “All the Hamas leaders are there. All the hostages are there. The fighters, the munitions—they’re in Rafah.”
Micah Goodman, perhaps Israel’s leading public intellectual, says in an interview, “America is speaking about its own traumas in Iraq and Afghanistan when it says that asymmetric wars are unwinnable. We have a different experience.” He cites 2002’s Operation Defensive Shield, which broke the Second Intifada and helped end suicide bombings. That, too, had been deemed impossible.
“We have the determination and capacity to win,” he says. “The only resource we don’t have is time, which depends on continued U.S. support.”
Biden keeps talking about the humanitarian crisis as a way to leverage his cease-fire demands too, as though Israel created that situation. Hamas attacked Israel and started a war, then hid among the Gaza population to use them as human shields. Hamas puts out regular reports of ‘civilian’ casualties that have such regularity that it has become an arithmetic progression, a clear sign of fiction. Yet Biden not only relies on Hamas’ propaganda for ‘civilian’ losses in Gaza, he actually admitted this weekend that he’s pushing a cease-fire on Hamas’ terms that would benefit only Hamas — and lied about the IDF to justify it once he realized his mistake:
Biden makes the blunder of answering whether and why Hamas would want a ceasefire.
He then notices his terrible blunder in saying the truth, and goes off on a tangent. pic.twitter.com/ypqX7H8D6o
— David Shor (@DYShor) March 10, 2024
Q: Who — who actually wants a deal? Do you think Hamas actually wants a cease-fire?
BIDEN: Well, I think Hamas would like a total cease-fire across the board, because they then [garble] have a better chance to survive and maybe rebuild. But that’s not — uh, the vast majority of people think, you have to [pause] Look. [long pause] After what happened in World War II, and the carpet bombing that took place. What happened was we ended up in a situation where we changed the rules of the game, what constitutes legitimate rules of war.
Let’s go backwards through these points. In the first place, we didn’t change the rules of the game after World War II. if anything, we developed more weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent, making it clear that any large-scale attack on the West would result in devastating and indiscriminate destruction of an aggressor. We used carpet bombing techniques at least as late as the Vietnam War. We didn’t change doctrine until weapons advances created “smart bombs” that could accurately hit military targets, starting in the first Gulf War. And those are the same weapons the IDF uses now, and they use those in exactly the same manner we used them in Iraq and Afghanistan and as late as the assault on Raqqa to destroy ISIS’ so-called caliphate less than a decade ago. Calling the IDF’s tactics in Gaza “carpet bombing” even by reference is a grotesque libel.
But the biggest stupidity in this exchange is Biden admitting that a cease-fire will allow Hamas to “rebuild.” Why would the US want an organization it (righteously) lists as an international terror network to rebuild in any fashion? Why would we want it to be in charge of rebuilding Gaza either? Biden seemed to realize that he’d stepped in it and tried to change the subject by accusing Israel of war crimes, tossing an ally under the bus just to deflect attention from his own moral idiocy.
That’s what Biden’s Ramadan focus intends to do as well. He wants to leverage Hamas propaganda against Israel to allow Hamas to “rebuild” by his own admission. No one should blame Israel for not cooperating in their own destruction.
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