The Future of the West Bank: The Case of the Israelis in the Gaza Strip, or What Has Israel Learned to Do in the Last Three Days?
I am very impressed with how President Biden has utilized his physical presence in Israel to reach out to Israelis who might be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Biden, I know, tried really hard to get the Israeli leadership to pause in their rage and think three steps ahead — not only about how to get into Gaza to take down Hamas but also about how to get out — and how to do it with the least civilian casualties possible.
Netanyahu has an incoherent strategy of building more settlements in the West Bank because he wants to keep the Palestinians out of Gaza.
Because in the first week of this war the Supreme Leader of Iran and the leader of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, appeared to be keeping very tight control on their militiamen both on the border with Israel and in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But as the second week has gone on, U.S. officials have picked up increasing signs that both leaders may be considering letting their forces more aggressively attack Israeli targets, and maybe American targets if the United States intervenes.
Have not doubt: the possibility of a regionwide war that could draw the United States in is much greater today than it was five days ago, senior U.S. officials told me. As I write on Thursday night, The Times is reporting that a U.S. Navy warship in the northern Red Sea on Thursday shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched from Yemen that the Pentagon said might have been headed toward Israel. Pro-Iranian militias are thought to have fired missiles at the U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.
Iran is unlikely to hit Israel with its proxies without eventually firing a missile at Israel. Anything can happen if that happens. There is a belief that Israel has submarines in the Persian Gulf.
What makes the situation triply dangerous is even if Israel acts with herculean restraint to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, it won’t matter. Think of what happened at Gaza City’s Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday.
As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (P.I.J.) achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket “than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.”
That is why I believe that Israel would be much better off framing any Gaza operation as “Operation Save Our Hostages” — rather than “Operation End-Hamas-once-and-for-all” — and carry it out with surgical strikes and special forces that can still get the Hamas leadership, but also draw the brightest possible line between Gazan civilians and the Hamas dictatorship.
Where I have a vote — just one — is in America. In his prime time speech the president vowed to ask Congress for an additional 14 billion dollars in assistance for Israel to get through the war, as well as an immediate injection of $100 million into humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
If Israel needs weapons to protect itself from Hamas and Hezbollah, by all means ship them. If Israel agrees not to build any more settlements in the West Bank, then it should receive broader economic aid. Netanyahu’s coalition agreement pledges to annex the whole of the West Bank.
Since its inception, Hamas has committed to eliminate the Jewish state and not because Israel has begun building settlements in the West Bank. But if Israel has any hope of nurturing a Palestinian leadership that could replace Hamas in Gaza in the long term and be an effective partner for a two-state solution, then the settlement project has to stop and it has to stop now.
Without those two sets of conditions being met, there isn’t a future for moderation in this corner of the world, no chance of a sustainable peace, and no chance of normal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
We are not telling Netanyahu what to do in Gaza. We are a sovereign country so we are just going to tell him what we are not going to do anymore.
I am not just talking about settlements, as America has been indirectly funding Israel’s suicide. Netanyahu did something in June last year. The Netanyahu government increased funding for the ultra-Orthodox and settlers in order to keep himself out of jail, and they did it without teaching English or math. “This budgetary increment alone is more than Israel invests each year in higher education altogether — or 14 years of complete funding for the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T.,” Mr. Ben-David said. “It is completely nuts.”
If this is the season of war, it also has to be a season for answers about what happens the morning after. I’m not the only one who wants to know. In an essay written this week in Haaretz, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari mentioned that Netanyahu’s government dreams of exploiting victory to annex territory, forcefully redrawn borderlines, expel populations, ignore rights, censor speech, realize messianic fantasies or turn Israel.
The Haley Crisis: Her Campaign Against the Exclusion of Refugees from the Middle East, and the Role of the United States
With that upward climb, she has come under more scrutiny. After the second debate last month, the former president attacked her as a “birdbrain” on social media, and Ms. Haley accused his campaign of sending a birdcage and birdseed to her hotel.
The debate stage has drawn attacks from his rivals, including some from Ms. Haley, though he has largely refrained from initiate heated exchanges, keeping his long-running insistence that the primary is between him and Mr. Trump. The campaign and its allies have been forced to re-think after Ms. Haley focused her fire on the Florida governor.
Never Back Down reported spending over a million dollars this week against Ms. Haley after devoting less than one quarter of a million dollars to anti-Haley messaging in the first half of the year.
Now, under fire from Mr. DeSantis, her campaign has underscored her hard-line track record as governor on immigration policies and portrayed her as nothing but staunchly opposed to taking in people from the Middle East. “The truth is, Haley has always opposed settling Middle East refugees in America, believing that Arab countries in the region should absorb them,” read one email to reporters.
The Republicans are unified behind Mr. Trumps hard-line approach to immigration and the nation’s borders, with Ms. Haley largely aligned in their calls to keep
It is widely seen as unlikely that Gazan refugees will be headed for the United States anytime soon. The crowd applauded when the candidate promised that he would not accept people from Gaza as president. He also said that any American aid sent to Gaza would end up in the hands of Hamas.
Rick McConnell, a 70-year-old Air Force veteran who heard Mr. DeSantis speak, said he understood that Gazans needed food, water and medical supplies. Mr. McConnell believed that Iran should give aid to Hamas, because it was responsible for the group’s brutal attacks.
Ms. Haley had events that raised concerns. “If you are living in Gaza, I don’t think you love America or are Christian,” said Corrine Rothchild, 69, a retired elementary school teacher who was still weighing her vote between Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis.
The Florida Republican who served as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Representatives objected to some of the policies he saw as being in favor of the Mexican drug traffickers and encouraged military force against them. In the last week, he also has used state funds to charter flights that have brought home hundreds of Americans stranded in Israel.
Ms. Haley sought to make her stance on China, Israel and foreign policy central to her campaign, as well as her foreign policy credentials. As Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador, Ms. Haley forcefully spoke out in support of his formal recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, as well as his decision to cut American funding to Palestinian refugees.
The two have clashed in the past on foreign policy. She has criticized Mr. DeSantis for supporting a Senator from Alabama who was trying to keep the travel expenses for service members who seek reproductive health care services covered in other states. She attacked him for his stance regarding the war in Ukraine, which he called aterritorial dispute that was not central to U.S. interests.
Both have since distanced themselves from Mr. Trump after his comments after the Hamas attack on Israel in which he said Hezbollah was a very smart group. Mr. Trump has become less critical of his comments. He has pledged to reject refugees from Gaza.