Hamas has announced Tel Aviv airport as an attack target. This continues the effort to directly target civilian non-combatants. After attacking a music concert for peace, and raiding homes and killing some while abducting others for use as human shields, they continue to literally target peace for attack.
Hamas has announced their attempt to Target the International Airport in the City of Tel Aviv right now with over 150 Rockets having been launched from the Gaza Strip; Iron Dome Batteries are trying to Intercept as many Rockets as possible. pic.twitter.com/2FHESGz6jM
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) October 8, 2023
Life in the Palestinian Territory is rough, and the Palestinian people have my sympathy. Their primary oppressor is Hamas.
- They do not represent the Palestinian people. Hamas and Fatah have blocked elections for over 17 years.
- They saw Saudi Arabia about to normalize relations with Israel, and saw progress towards a Palestinian state, and moved to stop it.
- Israel has to respond. The point of the attacks on citizens inside Israel is to force Israel to respond militarily. Palestinian deaths in Gaza are not a byproduct of this attack, they are literally the point.
Hamas is trying to kill Palestinians to keep them from peace and eventual prosperity. And they’re backed by Iran, whose goal is anything but peace with Israel for Palestinians. My sympathies go out to the people of Israel who are living under this terror, to the people that have lost loved ones and who are currently in captivity – and to the Palestinian people who continue to lose out, and have for decades.
Remember that it was militant hardliners who prevented Palestinians from having their own state 23 years ago – who kept Yasser Arafat from agreeing to a deal that would have given more 95% of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip to a Palestinian state, with right of returned there for Palestinian refugees. President Clinton, who nearly achieved Mideast peace, relays in My Life that Arafat once told him “You are a great man” and Clinton replied, “I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you made me one.”
give it a few days
as a former IDF soldier I can tell you the gates of hell will lead to hamas faster than they imagine
Well said remarks, thanks Gary !
Good, balanced post, Gary
As opposed to Israeli air strikes on Gaza which do such a good job of only hitting military targets. Stop. No one’s a good guy in this war.
“ Remember that it was militant hardliners who prevented Palestinians from having their own state 23 years ago –”
And it was Jewish hardliners who assasinated the Israeli PM trying to create the peace deal. Stop. No one’s a good guy here.
If this is the “Pearl Harbor of Israel” as proclaimed in mainstream media, does this mean Israel will nuke the Gaza Strip in the end?
i can’t wait till Isreal opens up a 55 gallon drum of Whoop Ass on Hamas.
Lol Hamas is the primary oppressor of Palestinians…not the Israeli apartheid government who has confined millions of Palestinians in what is essentially an open-air prison and cut them off from freedom and economic liberty; facilitated the further development of Israeli settlements and Israeli settler terrorism and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank; permitted the desecration of Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem; assassinated journalists; targeted civilians in residential buildings with air strikes; and has created the untenable living conditions and political environment that has produced and sustained the relevancy of Hamas. Right.
@Total there are no fully clean hands in the Mideast and this post is not to support all Israeli policy.
But the assasination of Rabin did not stop the peace process. The Israelis agreed to a Palestinian state with 95% of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip. Arafat could not agree.
The point is that the Palestinian people have been getting screwed over by their militant leaders who see destruction of Israel not properity for Palestinians. My point is that the Palestinians get the short end no matter what, oppressed by those who claim to speak for them.
@john
one can only hope
Do we talk about the open-air prison that Gaza is? Do we talk about the violent creation of the state of Israel, which is based on the same ethnic cleansing as is happening now in Nagorno-Karabakh, without any form of compensation or justice towards the millions who are stateless as a secondary result of German serial killers? Do we discuss the imbalance of weapons by the resistance when compared to that of the occupation with US-backing? Do we talk about the apartheid system that is the very essence of the state of Israel? Israel, as is, will never know peace because it refuses to deal with its skeletons. Until a genuine reckoning with a grave crime is dealt with… no amount of brushing things under the rug will change things towards calm.
Then why were Palestineans — not Hamas but citizens — cheering in the street as the naked hostages were paraded in front of them?
Well said Gary. I stand with Israel.
Notice: All airlines are requested to dump their lavatory waste while overflying Gaza. That is all.
I stand with Israel. Any entity that targets civilians is repugnant to most people.
Israel destroyed the Arafat International Airport in Gaza and destroyed its 10,000 ft. runway.
Gaza and the West Bank might have had the potential to be a trading hub like Singapore but those dreams are too far away to achieve. Gaza has no reliable electricity because it’s mostly controlled by Israel. Gaza has no free import/export channels because Israel blocks it. Gaza has no airport because Israel destroyed it. Gaza has no free movement of traders because Israel bans it, even blocking American tourists from going. Gaza cannot even get basic construction materials, like concrete, glass, roof tiles, floor tiles, and lumber. Gaza residents who had jobs in Israel have been banned to cross the border for years. Gaza residents who had homes in Israel lost them with no financial compensation, just like what Cubans suffered from. It’s all part of an aggressive and long standing punishment of Gaza residents in order to retaliate against Hamas, which is a savage organization and even makes Fatah look moderate.
@ddan
hamas does not care about its own people
in the last 24 hrs 78 palestinean children died and 41 palestinean women as well because hamas uses them as human shields
I have no sympathy for their dead, since one of mine is worth 1000 of theirs, and frankly, nobody has any more
neither jordan, egypt, or the saudis care about them, as they keep electing animals to lead them
golden opportunity to wipe hamas off the face of the earth, even at a high civilian cost
@doug the use of human shields is deplorable. However, who is doing the shooting that kills the human shields? Israel.
The standards of behavior in Israel are not the same as in the U.S. and rest of the Western world.
Hamas cannot win. They cannot openly receive weapons unlike Ukraine. Israel’s stockpile of arms is much larger. Israel can fight for much longer than Hamas in terms of an active shooting war.
@doug, as far as Hamas caring for its own people, Hamas is not the legitimate government of Gaza. It is not elected. The place has been lawless for 16 years. Hamas is just the dominant warlord there.
Seems like American tax payer money has been well spent to prevent a surprise attack. Oops.
Remember that the mossad killed a lot of the moderate and secular Palestinian leaders in the 70s and 80s and even had a hand in the rise of Hamas.
As you sow so shall you reap
Hamas is like the prison gang fostered by the crooked prison wardens who find prison gangs a useful tool for a variety of twisted purposes inside the prison and sometimes even outside. But let’s not be fools or try to fool people into thinking that Hamas isn’t playing on the tremendous frustrations of the Palestinian people who have seen nothing but loss of opportunities and dignity ever since Arafat was convinced by others to “go and make a deal”. And it’s not like Israel has been a saint in the years since. Israel l make a habit of attacking residences — even tall apartment buildings — as part of communal punishment and to try to cause permanent displacement and facilitate further demographic change so as to consolidate control over greater areas. But with Gaza, the open air prison is so densely and highly populated that hitherto Israel has had a limited interest there while the West Bank and East Jerusalem were easier and more ripe playgrounds to dominate via demographic change on the ground backed my violent muscle.
If wanting to blame Arafat and the PLO in 2000 for what is happening today, doing so is disingenuous. Arafat was given a half-baked “deal” that really was not a deal, and that is why it turned out to be nothing but talk to talk later. The Clinton Admin at the time was trying to push anything positive during an election year and come off with a PR win following Clinton’s impeachment in the second term and having annoyed a lot of pro-Israel voters during his first term. In 2000 and later, much of the commentary blaming Arafat for the outcome at Camp David was basically self-serving talk from people that weren’t delivering a deal that Arafat could make work, especially given Arafat’s own problems at the time and Ehud Barak’s red lines for Israel.
The glib lines about the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity and various other glib talking points are intended to try to shift blame to Palestinians for the problems the Palestinians face. At heart they are but cover for purposes of self-serving political expediency and to avoid accepting responsibility for what has transpired and instead blaming others. Also, it’s not like Israel has become a more open and tolerant state vis-a-vis the Palestinians in the 20+ years since Arafat was at Camp David with Ehud Barak and Clinton, so what kind of peace deal partner would Netanyahu’s Israel turn out to be? Not one. If anything anti-Arab racism has risen to be a very profound feature of Israel, and that has done several things including that of playing into the hands of Israel’s illegitimate child Hamas that was built to oppose Arafat and the rest of the PLO. Even if Arafat had signed away anything and everything in 2020 just short of leading Palestinians into exile from the Palestinian Territories, the expansionist tendencies and insecurities of the Israeli public and post-9/11 dynamics would eventually negate anything “given” to the Palestinians in 2000. And it wasn’t like the strain of Israeli/Israel-supporting politics represented by Rabin’s assassin has lost ground in Israel since then and would make for respecting any deal likely and sustainable when it’s pretty obvious the US has not been and is not positioned to be a neutral fair-dealer in the matter and has neither intent nor practical ability to be a guarantor and enforcer of any deal or principles when it comes to Israeli violations. Instead it’s a given for the US to stand with an Israel perceived as democratic and western/European more like the US than any country in the region. So a peace deal wouldn’t really last beyond the limits of what Israel found convenient to buy time to change the demographic reality on the ground and call it a fait accompli so as to permanently frustrate and end Palestinian aspirations for an independent homeland of the Palestinians’ own in lands where Palestinians lived as the majority until the Europeans replaced the Ottomans as the de facto power in the region and demographic change was enabled by Europeans. You know what they say about how no constitution can protect the freedom of people when freedom dies in the hearts of the public? Much the same goes for “peace deals”. And such deal would have died given the rise of the Israeli far right and the others catering to it wittingly and otherwise would be associated with a hardening of approach by Palestinians too.
The pretense of a two state solution arising from Camp David then would be just that in a country where Netanyahu is truly king and he and his child Hamas had long ago neutered the crooked Arafat and PLO by playing on and playing up corruption in Palestinian-majority areas under de facto Israeli control and elsewhere. It was going to turn out to be a time-buying strategy for Israel to change the realities on the ground through demographic change and neuter a Palestinian state aspiration that way and instead tell them to “go home” to Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon or some other Arab-majority state. Just not an independent Palestinian state. And Hamas, like Netanyahu, doesn’t really believe in a two state solution. But, to the dismay of many, Hamas would rather see Palestinians take over Israel and “return the favor” Israel has done the Palestinians. With what Israel has done this year and with what Hamas has done this year, a Hamas has effectively and more substantially invited Israel into Gaza, and together Israel and Hamas are jointly killing off the idea of a two-state solution by making civilians into collateral damage in the process of getting their way of a “Greater Israel” or a “Palestine or nothing”. All sides should be careful, but none will be careful enough for long enough for it to mean an avoidance of mass atrocities under the banner of nationalism.
Somewhere Putin is probably smirking that his Netanyahu buddy is where he is and that his Iranian buddies are where they are. And it’s only now that Netanyahu decides it’s time for him to not be so pro-Putin as he has been while Ukraine has been subject to Putin’s invasion efforts.
There have been some bad Israeli leaders, some decisions taken under the guise of security regulation that are horrible (as the U.S. has done too!), and I am not justifying those in any way.
If you don’t think the Palestinians would have been 1000x better off taking the 2000 deal you’re living on a different planet.
@Gary — at the final Camp David meeting during which Arafat rejected the Barak offer, Clinton reportedly told him “they always told me you’d be someone who’d wait till five seconds before midnight. Well Mr. President, I think your watch is broken”.
Yes not taking the deal was a disastrous decision
I challenge one person to show one law or action by Israel that is apartheid. If Israel was apartheid then there would be no Arabs in the Kenesset. Please review your history as ‘Palestine’ was never a country with a ruler in the last two thousand years (after the Roman’s conquered it). In 1948 , ‘Palestine’ was dived two ways , Jordan for ‘Palestinians’ and Israel. Lastly , when a person just repeats what they hear without fact checking they show how ignorant they are. Killing of any innocent is repugnant , whether they are Israeli or Arab. Please I implore people to learn some history
The 2000 “deal” wasn’t a deal that would change the long game being played by Israel, and both Barak and both Clintons knew that. It was designed to deliver Palestinians a mix of bantustans without any true sovereignty for Palestinians, as evidenced by the opposition to the PTs and East Jerusalem being able to have a “right to return” (for Palestinian refugees and descendants) to come to the Palestinian Territories.
For a long while people would say that Uyghurs were 1000x better off living under the “deal” China offered in Xinjiang? Are they really 1000x better off these many decades later after CCP rule? Many Han Chinese could make the case that Uyghurs and Tibetans are much better off for being subjugated as they are by the CCP and the colonizing Han Chinese. And we both know that China is engaged in a cultural genocide of Uyghurs, and that is even as the level of economical development and other socio-economic indicators have improved for them over what they were before the CCP took over all that has become China.
The crowd inclined to see Israel as the better governed place are naturally inclined to think that it is better to side with the better governed and more powerful than to realize that individuals and communities have aspirations that go beyond being content to be treated like prostitutes hooked to a little money or their next drug fix but having no real autonomy of their own due to their dependence and subjugation by what they deem to be the foreign.
Chacham,
Israel was not born to be a state with apartheid, but it has effectively sort of ended up with being somewhat so due to the nature of occupation of the Palestinian Territories, the West Bank and East Jerusalem — these being areas which are de facto controlled by Israel — and the growth of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia in Israel and what it means for those ethnic and religious minorities in Israel and their historical kith/kin communities in the PT and East Jerusalem.
Check out what Amnesty International thinks about this:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/
The administrative state has ways to gets its ways even without explicitly self-identifying in public with what its true intentions or even actions have been/are That is how authoritarian governments — including democratic ones that behave in parts like occupying powers where trying to subjugate the locals — get things done without alienating public opinion to a more problematic extent for them.
@GUWonder – there would have been a Palestinian state two decades ago. the deal included right of return to the west bank and gaza. Relative to the status quo the Palestinians were offered most of what they’d demanded. What more could Israel have realistically offered if you accept that they have a right to exist too? And remember that the territory they gained in 1967 was in a war that they did not start, they were invaded, by people who did not accept their right to exist.
I have seen the maps used at the Camp David meet and also at the meetings in Europe. They were delivering Palestinians bantustans and designed to do just that and enable more land grabbing by Israelis later, all while targeting transport, communication, power and water control for maximum subjugation ability.. And as with apartheid era South Africa, those bantus weren’t meant to be given true sovereignty and any chance to be truly independent and free from the control of the South African apartheid era leadership. They were designed to make it easier for the Afrikaaners to govern all within the South African domain and to squash the uppity “vermin” indigenous to the lands prior to European colonization.
Israel could have offered what Israel didn’t want to offer: a one state solution with equality for all; or a two state solution that provided for a unitary, contiguous Palestinian state with full control of borders of its own, a real right to return for Palestinian refugees under Palestinian control, and without all the deliberated carve outs designed to control/limit the Palestinians by keeping the transport, communication, power and ground water ultimately under Israeli authority.
Barak was well-intentioned but had his limits. Arafat was useless but he wasn’t going to be given anything that meant a functional, sustainable state from the get go and had nothing to deliver. Clinton was just there hoping to get a Nobel Peace Prize but only looking out for himself and rehabilitate his image after scoring own-goals that left him with Gore and Lieberman trying to run away from him when not bashing him.
@JP – weird how you don’t seem to blame Egypt, which also maintains a blockade of Gaza. Why don’t the Egyptians just open the border and let people and goods flow freely between the two?
Andrew,
It’s part and parcel of Egypt’s security pact with Israel and for the big flow of US aid to keep flowing Egypt’s way.
And unlike Israel, Egypt is a dictatorship, not a democracy, for its citizens.
And Egypt doesn’t want to become the Palestinian homeland and thus has an interest to keeps it borders shut.
None of the powers in the region like the Palestinians.
@GUwonder
If Israel is not Apartheid, why do people keep on saying it is ? Lastly, do you agree that the Israeli general public are legitimate targets ? Is taking Israeli citizens justifiable ? Lets keep our focus on what happened.
I encourage everyone to contact the White House and Congress for the US to vocally and frequently demand the return of hostages taken by Hamas / Iran which include US civilians. The entire world must know we need these people back. Gary, thank you for covering this subject.
Thanks Gary but I’m sure you’re wondering why you started this. My grandson is on a gap year there and decisions will be made today about whether to keep the kids there or try to send them home. It’s not exactly a news flash that TLV would be a target.
Chacham,
Civilians are never legitimate targets for violent military/militant activity and yet each of the violent parties is killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure, including houses and apartment buildings. And now we have the democratic state actor willing to lay siege on the civilian population in Gaza by cutting off water, food, electricity and even deliberately aiming at ambulances for the few medical facilities barely operating where it’s mostly injured women and children due to targeting of residences and casualty distribution as a result of that.
Hamas knows that a lot of Israelis can get away to shelters and move out in a way that Palestinians in Gaza cannot from being on the receiving end of violence and they don’t really seem to care about that as they are willing to sacrifice massive amounts of civilian lives on each side at this point.
Focusing solely on the plight of the Palestinians – their long standing political situation reminds me of ours: a minority hard-right faction that is unwilling to compromise takes down the entire system through misinformation and autocratic dogma.
What’s the point of contacting the White House and US Congress at this point about the hostages taken by Hamas? The Biden Administration has given Netanyahu unconditional support for Israel to defend itself and recover whom what it wants to recover while also rapidly deploying US military assets to act to support Israeli operations, to be in position to warn off and go after any and all neighboring state actors or non-state actors who may dare to try to violate Israeli sovereignty at this time. The White House and Congress already are fully on board with delivering security cover to Israel. Even the EUropeans are too.
And calls to Israel to be more careful in attacking Gaza would be more fruitful in securing the lives of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza as already there are indications that IDF has hit buildings where hostages had been taken for use as bargaining chips, human shields or perhaps either one or neither of those. The actors best positioned to secure the lives of the hostages in (and possibly some still nearby around) Gaza are Israel, Hamas and Iran. None of them are going to really care to listen to critical messages from the general US public nor even from US officials. The era of Jesse Jackson being able to get hostages freed on the relative cheap is over; and the cost to pay de facto ransom or otherwise surrender money to bad actors to get hostages freed poses a strategic risk and a political risk.for the involved parties in a world where money is fungible.
So Israel has said it will cut off food and water, direct quote, to 2 million civilians.
Will the targeting civilians is bad commenters still be riding their high horse tomorrow?
@ann
Yes, and we will rejoice
I hope CNN shows thousands and thousands of bodies in the streets of gaza
They chose to change the equation, and now they will pay the price
Doug’s comment is reminiscent of a Nazi-like mentality that is at peace with the dehumanization and mass extermination of “the other” and even celebrates death of “the other”. Vulgar mentality that is not conducive to any peace beside that of the grave or crematoriums.
@guwonder
When you”ll have a remotely similar experience to what we have been going through then you can form an opinion
Meanwhile you can ride your moral high horse
@GUWonder
and you remind me of the Nevil Chamberlin appeasement types.
What reminds me of “peace in our time” is the naïveté of the idea that the 2000 negotiations between Israel and the PLO/Arafat had any real chance of delivering a sustainable peace between the Israelis and the non-Israeli Palestinians when those negotiations in Europe and the US really were meant to lead to what we mostly already have today: a “Greater Israel”, Palestinian bantustans, and an Israel with which all the “strong” Arab states have a basically peaceful relationship with no desire to do what it takes to peacefully birth a truly independent, sovereign Palestinian state that could sustain itself. The world is there now nearly 23 years later and yet this month we have the most brutal conflict between Israelis and Palestinians on record that there has been in over 46 years. If anything, my comments are rooted in the opposite of NC’s “peace in our time” reference.
Doug,
Better to be on a high moral horse than to ride in the moral gutter with a Nazi-like mentality. And with or without my experiences, people can form an opinion. Just like I have formed an opinion about the vileness of Nazi Germany, the Nazi and other racist mentalities.
@GUWonder why change the goal post though? I cannot promise a sustainable peace as historical counterfactual. I simply suggested that Palestinians would have been far better off with that deal than what we have today and have had over the past 23 years. A ‘sustainable peace’ is not required for ‘better than status quo’.
What status quo? The status quo is what tragically cost over 900 (?) Israeli lives within the past couple of days and at least several hundred Palestinian civilian lives so far too. And those are deaths, with multiple
times that number injured.[And if the reports are accurate, there are also 1500 Hamas corpses which have been found by Israelis outside Gaza so far since this weekend, and that speaks to what Israel has fostered in all the time since Arafat got neutered and Arafat and the PLO made irrelevant as a partner for peace able to deliver that.]
And all of this violent mess is now under the ground circumstances that would more or less have been delivered sooner under the 2000 sham “peace deal” even if Arafat just gave his useless John Hancock to please Clinton back then. The idea that the PLO/Arafat signing that “peace deal” in 2000 would have prevented or even delayed Hamas from terrorizing Israel like this is something like wishful thinking or naïveté. The only major difference now is that in the first half of the year Israel had shown to Hamas and the Palestinians that even the Muslim’s third holiest site is now more likely to be treated like the Taliban-destroyed giant Buddhist carvings in Afghanistan and the Babri Majid in India: to be destroyed by ultra right-wing fundamentalists under the banner of religious nationalism/fundamentalism. And so their own cultural identity rooted in the land was now deemed as under existential threat from the big, strong boot of an angry majority ultimately in charge of the place. That probably ran up the number of Hamas supporters in Gaza like never before.
Netanyahu is hoping to see most Palestinians in Gaza go into Egypt and make room for Israeli settlers in Gaza. He had actually wanted that in the 1990s but Israelis weren’t as far to the right-wing then and as comfortable with dehumanizing Palestinians, other Arabs and Muslims then as now. Netanyahu plays a very effective long game, but he really should be fired by the Israeli voters for having been such a major security failure that a heavily fortified border got run over by so many thousands of Hamas militants.