In 2016, a conference was scheduled to take place in South Africa regarding the looming water shortage in the southern part of the country, but agitation from the boycott, divest, and sanction movement (BDS) over the participation of the Israeli ambassador led to the conference’s cancellation. Since then the South African government has been reluctant to receive advice or aid from the Jewish state, which has shared its expertise in desalination and water conservation with numerous other countries. Now, writes Howard Feldman, residents of Cape Town expect that water in their city will be shut off in May:

Cape Town is set to be the first major [modern] city to run out of water. The city is experiencing the worst drought in its history. Residents are being asked to utilize less than 50 liters (thirteen gallons) per day, but it is unlikely that they will avoid “Day Zero,” the day the taps run dry. It is unimaginable what contingencies can be put in place to deal with the series of events that will follow that day. . . .

[In 2016], Radio Islam in South Africa celebrated the announcement [of the conference’s cancellation] by interviewing one Professor Patrick Bond, [who claimed that] what Israel has achieved [in terms of drought prevention] can be done by any child and all that Israel has done is practice “water apartheid” and steal Palestinian water. . . . He of course made no mention of desalination or the fact that Israeli cities recycle around 85 percent of their water. Nor did he mention any other achievement in Israel that has changed the ecology of the country for the better.

The fact that South Africa is experiencing one of the worst droughts in living memory, and that the situation is critical, is not a concern for those who hate Israel.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.