The left believes that ending "oppression", "inequality", "exclusion" will bring paradise on earth, the Palestinian wolf will feed with the Jewish sheep and no longer seek to exterminate them. 18 years after the withdrawal, Hamas, which beheaded 40 Jewish babies and massacred more than 200 festival-goers, denied this. Written by Gábor Sebes.
The first and most important question: how did the terrorist rat's nest in Gaza come about?
In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon led the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which was occupied in 1967. (Before 1967, the area was under Egyptian occupation.) During the Israeli occupation, life was incomparably better than it is now. The economy and trade were functioning, tens of thousands of Gazans crossed to Israel to work. A deep-sea port and an airport were built (both were destroyed by Israel during the second intifada in 2001).
In the 2003 election, Sharon won a victory over Amram Micna of the labor party, whose program included a unilateral (ie not negotiated with the Palestinians) withdrawal from Gaza, which Sharon opposed.
In 2004, however, he already announced that there would be no more Jews in Gaza by the end of 2005.
More than 6,000 people were arrested during the protests against the withdrawal, and many of them were held in prison for months without trial. The Gaza settlers - who made up a third of the army's officer training - were portrayed by the press as dangerous fanatics. Since the religious Zionists felt that the land of biblical Israel (of which Gaza is a part) was theirs, the press declared that they are not even Jews, they are not worthy of the army's protection, and numerus clausus should be introduced in the army.
What was the reason for Sharon's conversion? Before the 2003 election, it was leaked to the press that Saron and his sons were being investigated for bribery. With the courts under leftist influence, Sharon sacrificed Israel's security for the immunity of his family by adopting leftist politics.
The chief of staff of the army that carried out the withdrawal and drove the Jewish settlers from their homes was Mose Jaalon, who is now one of the leaders of the anti-government riots.
The left promised that after the withdrawal, Gaza would become a little Singapore. Benjamin Netanyahu, the finance minister of the Sharon government, however, resigned from his post because he was convinced that a small Afghanistan would be created with Iranian influence.
He was right, and now the whole unsolvable problem fell on him.
Renowned Jewish columnist Melanie Phillips aptly describes the creed of the left: “They are part of a Western culture that no longer refuses to recognize evil. Instead, they try to attribute evil to motives such as oppression. They explain to themselves that all aggression can be resolved by compromise. They refuse to accept that sometimes there is no other option but to fight until the forces of evil are defeated militarily.”
The left believes that ending "oppression", "inequality", "exclusion" will bring paradise on earth, the Palestinian wolf will feed with the Jewish sheep and no longer seek to exterminate them.
18 years after the withdrawal, Hamas, which beheaded 40 Jewish babies and massacred more than 200 festival-goers, denied this.
In Israel, the hundreds of thousands of demonstrations against the government's judicial reform took place on Saturday evenings for the 40th week. Here, in a nutshell, the reasons for the reform.
In the 1990s, Supreme Court President Aharon Barak arbitrarily declared some pivotal laws to be constitutional, while Israel does not have a constitution. (The Israeli legal system was modeled on Britain, and Great Britain does not have a constitution.)
By creatively interpreting these laws, he created some legal principles, with the help of which he gained practically unlimited power over the legislative and executive powers.
The method may be familiar to us, since under the presidency of László Sólyom - God rest his soul - the Constitutional Court developed some very general legal principles, - e.g. based on "human dignity" and "rule of law" - the theory of the invisible constitution. From this, he built an entire legal castle in the air, in which only he recognized himself. In its rooms, the Antall government wandered lost, because how can an invisible constitution be respected?! The Hungarian one was one of the most activist constitutional courts in the world, ruling in Hungarian in cases that were not customary elsewhere.
Part of Barak's legal revolution was that anyone could turn to the Supreme Court in any case. NGOs, civilians, and "rights defenders" naturally took advantage of the opportunity.
The Supreme Court reserved the right to strike down any law passed by Parliament by declaring that the law was "unreasonable"; he did not have to prove that he was in violation of another law. The dynastic legal guild educated in left-wing schools also rules in another way: there is a legal adviser in every ministry who can nullify any action taken by the minister. The chief legal adviser (incorrectly translated into Hungarian as chief prosecutor) not only manages the prosecutor's office, but is also the government's legal adviser and its representative before the court. Let's imagine that a national-religious right-wing government has to take the advice of a left-wing atheist lawyer and represent him in court!
So even though right-wing governments were elected, the leftist Supreme Court prevented him from implementing his program. The appointment of one of the ministers of Netanyahu's new government, for example, was simply annulled, overriding the will of the voters.
The court blocked the construction of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem train for years because it went 350 meters beyond the pre-1967 ceasefire line and insisted that the Palestinians be "compensated" with a highway between Hebron and Gaza. He forced religious Zionist settlements to accept Arabs, while Bedouin and Arab villages can decide who they allow to settle. On the other hand, he described the laws against activists of the anti-Semitic BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement as "unreasonable".
A few times he prevented the demolition of terrorists' houses.
According to Jewish custom, men and women pray separately. Tel Aviv's mayor banned "segregated" prayer in public places, and the Supreme Court upheld it. He stated the LGBTQ "community's" "right to family". It prevented the deportation of illegal migrants.
There is no other court in the world with such power. The Netanyahu government wanted to limit this, which led to the rebellion of the left, which could not accept its defeat.
Already before the election, knowing the forecasts, they started to organize the rebellion, so it is quite clear that the judicial reform is just an excuse and an explanation for the outside world. The Netanyahu government is portrayed as the destroyer of the rule of law and democracy. And the reduction of the supreme power of the Supreme Court is criticized as the elimination of judicial independence and the government's evasion of control. This is also familiar from Hungary, isn't it...?
At several points in the Israeli chain of command sits a lawyer, without whose approval no decision is made.
They also have a say in the selection of targets.
Their task is to check whether decisions do not conflict with international or military law.
What did an invasion of Gaza look like in 2014?
"Thousands of leaflets were dropped in the village. These leaflets suggested a safe evacuation route and safe destinations within Gaza City. The IDF sent similar messages daily on local television and radio. But that's not all. The IDF made dozens of phone calls to influential citizens of Shejaya, asking them to pass on the news of the impending IDF incursion.
Thousands and thousands of warnings were given. The Israeli military authorities essentially told the enemy where and when IDF troops would enter the village. And for three days, Hamas fighters, who were no fools, took full advantage of this. They dug into their own forces better. The traps have been activated. They hid improvised explosive devices. Snipers were placed in perfect positions. More fighters were brought in. The weapons were placed forward. They put their terror tunnels on standby.”
What good is this, why do they do it? Because they have a compulsion to conform to a coalition of clowns and scoundrels called the "international community". Those who, of course, look up to Israel's interests and call for "proportionality".
The IDF dances in knots. There is no other army in the world where lawyers have the final decision.
As a result of the protest movement, more than ten thousand (!) reservists refused to serve in an unprecedented way, including 500 pilots, who are the elite of the army.
Dan Haluc, who was chief of staff in 2006, petitioned the Supreme Court to remove the government from office. Former Deputy Chief of Staff Jair Golan compared Israel to Nazi Germany. Tamir Pardo, who was appointed head of the Mossad by Netanyahu in 2011, called Israel an apartheid state. These gentlemen did not express their opinions under left-wing governments.
Joszi Melman, the leading intelligence and military expert of the large-circulation left-wing newspaper Hárec, explained in his book review that the military coup - which he believes is already underway - is a legitimate and justified step to replace the government.
When Hamas attacked, these voices died down, and the reservists moved in. But how much destruction was carried out until then? How could soldiers turn against Israel's security interests?
For example, the left-liberal Wexner Foundation has been sending senior officers to America for further training for years. "Diversity and Inclusion", these woke slogans are the main values of the foundation. Their scholarship recipients included a supreme judge, former Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, the aforementioned former Deputy Chief of Staff Jair Golan, and five generals, along with high-ranking police officers.
In July, the army had to enter the Jenin refugee camp, the daily terrorist attacks from there became so unbearable. In the last year and a half, as a result of the policies of the previous government and the support of the IDF, the area has become a mini-Gaza. In September 2021, together with then Defense Minister Benny Ganc, the head of the Central Command, Major General Jehuda Fuchs, ordered a five-month moratorium on army operations in Jenin, in order to "strengthen the Palestinian Authority".
The Palestinian Authority spends 7% of its US-funded budget to pay salaries to terrorists in Israeli prisons and to pay pensions to the families of dead terrorists.
These salaries increase with the seriousness of the crimes. The basic salary of stone throwers is 1,400 shekels per month. Terrorists get extra money by killing Jews, and the more Jews they kill, the more money they make. The salaries of terrorists are on average three times the average income of the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
Yet Central Command's top officer insisted that the Authority was opposed to terrorism.
A day before the Jenin operation, it was in the news that the IDF, Sin Bet (internal countermeasures) and the police were forming a joint unit to curb "settler violence".
In those days, a nearby cowherd was attacked by hundreds of Palestinians from Umm Cafa. The IDF did not send forces to protect him from the hundreds of Palestinians who attacked him and his cows with fireworks and stones. He then called the residents of the surrounding villages, who broke the Sabbath prohibition to save him.
Instead of thanking the Jewish villagers, the army called them violent bandits for coming up armed to protect the cowherd.
The Bennett-Lapid-Gantz government was as committed to the Biden government as any previous Israeli government. Instead of protecting Israel's cyber defense industry, their government abandoned it to appease Washington. The Department of Defense froze most export licenses at the demand of the Americans, and the Americans simply decided to dismantle and take over the offensive cyber industry. (This American campaign included the "Pegasus scandal", which spread to Hungary as well, which presented the product of the Israeli NSO as being used for illegal and dictatorship-worthy surveillance.)
The heads of Israel's intelligence agencies were outraged. They complained in vain that the downsizing of the industry would cause enormous damage to Israel's ability to defend itself.
Within a short time, Israeli cyber security companies collapsed, sold their shares or closed their offensive cyber divisions.
This may also have contributed to the current intelligence failure.
The leadership of the Israeli National Defense did not consider Hamas capable of such an organized, practically all-arms, ground-water-air attack. They started from the assumption that the usual border flashes and the firing of a few dozen rockets are the most they can do. This is intelligence failure and organizational blindness.
However, it is already ideological blindness that they believed that Hamas was fed up, and that the problems of the government would force it to deal with the well-being of the population.
They believed that Hamas could be motivated to do this if 18,000 Palestinians were given Israeli work permits and the blockade was eased...
Evil exists, Hamas will never stop destroying Israel. Leftist idealism has cost the lives of more than a thousand Israeli civilians and will cost many more.
