The Attempted Gaza Invasion – Between Dignity and Cruelty
There have been many articulate, rational, explications of what has happened with the attempted Gaza invasion of Israel in the past few weeks. The sermon delivered by Temple Beth Shalom’s Rabbi Neil Amswych on May 18 was clear-eyed for his understanding and articulating the Hamas charade and the world’s absurd response. We hope he’ll post it on the TBS website soon for all to read.
Another, from May 18, was by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch from the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform congregation in the middle of New York City. Take 19 minutes to watch it. As he says:
What is wrong with us in the West? What is wrong with our own people? Progressives and progressive Jews? Even the Palestinian Authority criticized Hamas for putting Palestinian children in harms way […] It is one thing to point out – rightly – human suffering. But you cannot be neutral between liberal democracy and authoritarian coercion, between respect for human life and contempt for life, between dignity and cruelty, between self-defense and terror. To confuse democracies with autocracies, to confuse terrorists with their victims, is a moral disease…
See the full video here.
What Does “Disproportionate” Mean?
To get a sense of how the critical anti-Israel world uses the term “disproportionate” incorrectly from a legal perspective, read Ambassador Alan Baker’s, “Did Israel Use ‘Disproportionate Force’ to Protect the Gaza Fence?” Here’s a summary:
The Gaza border clash was not a situation of armed conflict, nor had it anything to do with the laws of armed conflict and occupation of territory. It was routine border protection by a sovereign state, from within its sovereign territory, facing a blatant threat of border violation by violent elements on the other side of the line.
Accusing Israel of committing war crimes, massacres, and violations of international humanitarian law, as well as invoking criteria and norms – including the customary international law rule of proportionality – characteristic of situations of armed conflict, has no relevance vis-à-vis the situation along the delimiting fence between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
The highly publicized visit by the Palestinian Foreign Minister to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), armed with a new set of complaints of war crimes and violations of the Geneva Conventions along the fence, cannot be considered to be anything other than a flawed and cynical manipulation of the Court.
Yasher Koach to Lance Bell
whose letter to the editor was in the SF Reporter on May 23, 2018:
I was appalled to see the hateful, anti-Semitic [Clay Jones] cartoon in your paper. Would any country stand by and watch armed terrorists that are launched to kill and maim as Hamas has continued to do to innocent Israelis? Who’s at fault here? Hamas! They tell women, children, and the disabled to approach the fence in the first “wave” of human shields. Right behind them are Hamas terrorist operatives with Molotov cocktails, grenades, IEDs, and guns attempting to break through the internationally recognized border fence-which, by the way, is 30-50 meters inside of Israel. Who’s the real bully here? Hamas. It isn’t Netanyahu, or the location of our embassy. The Reporter was duped by Hamas and Clayton’s incoherent diatribe. I feel compassion for the Gazans. Yet any clear-eyed person can recognize that, sadly, Hamas has put its hatred for Israel above the safety and welfare of its own citizens.
Gerald Lance Bell, Santa Fe
Many others also wrote letters to the Reporter’s editor, who hasn’t yet acknowledged her poor judgment in publishing such a grotesque cartoon. (See our prior post on this issue here.) Kudos to those who wrote. Even if your letter wasn’t published it helped reinforce the repugnance of the cartoon and express the tone-deafness of the editor.
“Roadmap Jerusalem”
 |
SFMEW is a beneficiary organization of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.