Solidarity with Suffering Palestinians? Only If It Involves Blaming Israel

The beleaguered residents of Yarmouk, a Palestinian suburb of Damascus, have been brutally attacked by the forces of both Bashar al-Assad and Islamic State (IS). Yet there has been no outcry even from most pro-Palestinian organizations (including the PLO), and no protests, calls for boycotts, or UN resolutions. Ben Cohen comments:

Both Assad and IS are culpable for Yarmouk’s wretched situation, with Assad taking the lion’s share of the blame. In response to the appearance of Free Syrian Army fighters in Yarmouk, often backed by local Palestinian factions, Assad began a brutal campaign of air strikes in December 2012. By the early summer of 2013, Yarmouk was under a full-blown siege, with water, electricity, and food supplies cut off from its residents. According to current estimates, around 18,000 of an original population of 160,000 remain in Yarmouk, exposed to the full horrors of Syria’s civil war—malnutrition, displacement, and deadly, systemic abuse. . . .

[D]espite the fact that Yarmouk is by some measure the worst blow taken by the Palestinians in nearly seven decades, the legions of Palestine solidarity activists in the West have remained unmoved. Their silence is, in many ways, confirmation of the suspicion that the Palestine solidarity movement is motivated primarily by detestation of Israel’s existence, rather than [concern] for Palestinians wherever they may be. . . .

At the heart of anti-Zionist ideology is a theory of original sin that haunts its Jewish bearers for eternity. The “Nakba” [the Palestinian term for the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation] . . . .didn’t end in 1948 [according to this theory]. It is still going on, and the sin lies with its originators, the men and woman who created the state of Israel, and only them.

Read more at Tower

More about: Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, Israel & Zionism, Palestinians, Syrian civil war

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF