The MidEast Mindset -- Depends Whose Ox Being Gored

"There are no two sides to this conflict."

"If someone is not standing with us today, he is standing with monsters who murder babies and old people."

"If you are not standing against terror, you are part of terror."

Lior Haiat, spokesman, Israeli Foreign Ministry

"It is in Israel's interest to avoid civilian casualties and Palestinian casualties, because Hamas clearly wants to turn this into a wider Arab-Israeli war, or indeed a war between the Muslim world and the wider world."

"And none of us, including Israel, want that."

U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly

"When the Americans went to Fallujah after 9/11, they didn't ask questions about the humanitarian needs of Fallujah."

"The best example is the Second World War in which the whole free world fought against German Nazis, and no one asked about the humanitarian needs of the enemy."

"It's a war against an enemy state."

Yaakov Amidror, former national security adviser

A grab taken from a UGC video posted on the Telegram channel "South First Responders", Oct. 9, 2023, shows the aftermath of an attack on the Supernova music Festival by Palestinian militants, near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel on October 8....

South First Responders/AFP via Getty Images

 

On Monday, over a week after the October 7 invasion of Israel's northern border towns, kibbutzim and villages, taking Israel's defenses by complete surprise when Hamas terrorist operatives slaughtered soldiers, men, women and children, raping women, torturing the helpless before murdering entire families in their homes, and abducting two hundred civilians, the elderly and ailing, infants and women, taking them to Gaza as  sex slaves and exchange hostages, the Israeli military toured a dozen foreign correspondents through scenes of unprecedented violent depravity.

 

Playing a 42-minute agonizing account of attackers stopping cars to shoot drivers and passengers, axing a corpse, burning a house, they were addressed by Rear-Admiral Daniel Hagari, chief spokesman for the IDF: "We see this as a war against humanity, not just Israel". Exposing the outside world to a level of savagery rarely seen even in a theatre of war. Where a hoe was used to repeatedly smash the skull of a foreign worker while he was still alive, eventually decapitating him, all shown in live action on a video, one of many amassed by Hamas.

 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh the day before. While Secretary of State Blinken reported their discussion was about "the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel", the Saudi prince stated that the focus of their conversation was the search for methods "to stop the military operations that have claimed the lives of innocent people"; obviously his focus on Israel's bombing of Gaza.

 

In the entire region comprised substantively of majority Sunni governments, few have taken to denouncing the October 7 Hamas massacre of over 1,400 Israelis. With the notable exception of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, signees to the Abraham Accords. At the same time the focus of most of the rest of the world has shifted its concern to civilian casualties occurring in Gaza, the result of daily Israeli airstrikes. Allies such as the United States and the United Kingdom have spoken publicly as they call on Israel to protect non-combatants.  

Somewhat as they did in the firebombing of Dresden and the Atomic blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

 

In Israel, the dismay at this reaction by the rest of the world is palpable among its officials. Since the surprise attack they have made every effort to bring foreign leaders and journalists to the grim sites of the killings, they have gathered testimony from survivors and spliced together videos depicting gruesome beheadings, eye-gougings perpetrated gleefully by the terrorists who committed scores of atrocities. Many of the videos documenting the atrocities come courtesy of Hamas public relations.

 

Israeli soldiers remove the body of a compatriot, killed during an attack by the Palestinian militants, in Kfar Aza, south of Israel bordering Gaza Strip, on Oct.10, 2023. Israel pounded Hamas targets in Gaza...Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images

"Let me tell  you, Mr. Secretary, this will be a long war, the price will be  high", warned Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. "But we are going to win for Israel and the Jewish people, and for the values that both [our] countries believe in." Despite that U.S. President Joe Biden has supported Israel's view that Hamas must be entirely eliminated, he has called repeatedly on the Israeli government to limit civilian casualties: "The overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas", he cautioned. 

Nor did the overwhelming number of German citizens during World War Two round up and send Jews to the gas chambers, though they -- like the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who pose a threat to life and limb of any Israeli Jew that might happen to wander inadvertently into either area -- had full knowledge of the dehumanizing of Jews and took part in humiliating and isolating them before they were rounded up for death. Not only did Palestinians decades ago when the last vote took place, overwhelmingly vote Hamas into government, current polls demonstrate that the majority population support Hamas's violence aimed at Israel.

 

An Israeli soldier walks by a house destroyed by Hamas militants in Kibbutz Be'eri, Oct. 11, 2023.    Baz Ratner/AP

The Middle East street generally does not view Hamas as a terror force; it is portrayed frequently as a product of decades of 'oppression' by Israel which has been forced by the level of threat posed against its very existence and that of Jews experiencing countless suicide missions and lone wolf attacks leaving Israelis dead both singly and in groups, to take military precautions in preventing ongoing attacks against its citizens. Measures to keep murderers out of Israel from the neighbours are interpreted as 'oppressive occupation'.

In Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan officials explain that their populations are restive, watching Israel strike back at Gaza. They would be; the Arab states have long fed the Arab street with alienating and hostile propaganda against Jews and Israel. So that even if the leaders finally decide to set aside military violence against Israel to forge a regional alliance where all can prosper, the street is slow to catch up, viewing Israel and Jews as mortal enemies; as they've been taught to do.

Everywhere in the region, even in those states where the Muslim Brotherhood is outlawed as a terrorist organization, its offshoots Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are viewed favourably by the population.

A bullet-shuttered window of the entrance to a kindergarten is seen in Kibbutz Be'eri, Oct. 11, 2023.   Baz Ratner/AP

Israel, Unprepared and Vulnerable

"This war will take time. It will be difficult."

"All the places that Hamas hides in, operates from, we will turn them into ruins."

"Get out of there now."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"[The U.S.] stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop."

"There's never a justification for terrorist attacks and my administration's support for Israel's security is rock solid and unwavering."

"This is not a moment for any party hostile to Israel to exploit these attacks to seek advantage. The world is watching."

U.S. President Joe Biden

Israeli police officers evacuate a family from a site hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon, southern Israel, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)

 

Hamas terrorists stormed out of Gaza into nearby Israel towns, just over the border, backed by a surprise barrage of rockets. They wantonly killed hundreds of people, abducting many others. This is the second time in Israel's history that an enemy bent on its destruction used the occasion of a major Jewish holiday to launch a deadly attack. Israeli intelligence is aware that the country is always on the brink of an attack, a generalized perception born of experience. Yet it had no advance warning, not a scintilla of a suspicion that a well-coordinated, long-planned attack was immediately imminent.

And the result was butchery on a grand scale, as residents of border towns and soldiers at military posts were surprised and overwhelmed by hordes of terrorists brandishing automatic rifles and shooting to kill. Killing people in the streets, in their homes, in their cars, and ushering others to waiting vehicles to drive them to Gaza as hostages. The elderly were murdered and so were their grandchildren. Women and girls were raped and tortured and many taken hostage as sex slaves.

Children still in their infancy were separated from their parents and in Gaza were harassed and bullied by older Palestinian children. The confused and frightened babies were placed in stacked animal cages. Hamas's media groups videoed all manner of scenes of gross abuse of Israelis, young and old. Filming streets piled with  the dead. Filming girls and women who had been raped shoved into waiting cars. Filming elderly Jews being directed to hold weapons as they were forced to pose. Filming the bloody battering of people to death in ghastly footage.

And filming the beheading of Israeli soldiers. Since an estimated 100 people, both military and civilian were abducted to be used as prisoner-exchange collateral, it seems that some among them were expendable for entertainment purposes to be tortured and mutilated and slaughtered. Women gang-raped and butchered, their bodies mutilated. Reminiscent of the publicity exploits of Islamic State when that Islamo-terrorist group terrified the world in cruel barbarism.

 

Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian, center, from Kibbutz Kfar Azza into the Gaza Strip on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)

 

Some 22 locations just outside the Gaza Strip across the border in Israel; towns and other communities were assaulted by Hamas terrorists up to 24 kilometers from the border. The while, Israel's military desperately scrambled to respond. Well after nightfall on Saturday the gun battles between the IDF and Hamas continued. In two towns the terrorists held hostages in standoffs with the military. In another town a police station was occupied, taking until Sunday morning for the building to be reclaimed.

Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian from Kibbutz Kfar Azza into the Gaza Strip on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)

 

Thousands of Israelis were wounded, and the last count of the dead stood at 700 and rising. Despite return bombing by the IDF in Gaza, fewer Palestinians died in the heat of the conflict. In Gaza, Israeli airstrikes intensified after nightfall with giant explosions taking down buildings including Hamas offices in central Gaza City. As is the IDF's habit, warnings to evacuate buildings went out before their destruction. 

 

A ball of fire and smoke rise from an explosion on a Palestinian apartment tower following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. The Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip carried out an unprecedented, multi-front attack on Israel at daybreak Saturday, firing thousands of rockets as dozens of Hamas terrorists infiltrated the heavily fortified border in several locations by air, land, and sea and catching the country off-guard on a major holiday. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

 

A rocket barrage into Israel hit four cities, including Tel Aviv and a suburb nearby. Hamas fired over 5,000 rockets. Terrorists made use of explosives to break through the border fence separating Gaza from Israel, enabling the terrorists to cross into Israel with motorcycles, pickup trucks, paragliders and coastal speed boats. In some Israeli towns, bodies lay wherever people had encountered the swiftly advancing terrorists. Clusters of dead lay at bus shelters.

A video was released showing hundreds of terrified young men and women fleeing for their lives from a rave where they were listening to music and dancing until Hamas terrorists entered the area and began firing. Dozens of young Israelis were instantly killed. Photos by Associated Press show an elderly woman brought into Gaze on a golf cart by Hamas terrorists; another woman squeezed between two others on a motorcycle. AP journalists watched as four people were abducted from a kibbutz, including two women.

In Gaza, a jeep rear door opened and a young Israeli woman stumbled out bleeding from her head, her hands tied behind her back while a terrorist waving a gun grabbed her by the hair and shoved her into the back seat. Workers from Thailand and the Philippines were among the captives taken by the terrorists. The expectation is that a ground assault will be launched into Gaza. An eventuality that the Hamas terror is anticipating. 

The greater the civilian casualties in Gaza among the civilian population, the more publicity for Hamas claiming brutality and intention to murder innocent Palestinians on the part of Israel. Claims that have never yet failed them in arousing indignation among sympathizers to the Palestinian 'cause' who believe the PA and Hamas's messages of Israeli brutality against simple Palestinians who want nothing better than to live their lives in peace and harmony with their neighbours.

An aerial view shows vehicles on fire as rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip, in Ashkelon. Ilan Rosenberg/Reuters