An Israeli mother clings on to her children at the side of the road as a siren gives them a few seconds' notice of an incoming Hamas rocket.
It was one of over 4,000 rockets that the Iranian-backed group used to terrorize, kill and injure Israeli Jewish and Arab civilians, during recent days. Other victims of Hamas in Israel this week came from India, Thailand and elsewhere.
At least 600 Hamas rockets fell short and landed in Gaza, killing and injuring Palestinians ? although some media wrongly gave the impression that these Palestinians were killed by Israel.
Israel also says that some of those the western media added to their list of dead Palestinian children were armed combatants aged 16 and 17 who were in the process of attacking Israel at the time they were killed.
Above: Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi on Thursday showed visiting EU foreign ministers from the Czech Republic, Germany and Slovakia a building that was hit by a Hamas rocket in the town of Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv.
"I am speechless after I witnessed the destruction and terror that Israel has experienced," said Czech Foreign Minister Jakub Kulhanek after touring rocket-devastated apartments.
Even though many Arab and European governments have been very supportive of Israel this week, Israel was pressured by the Biden administration into agreeing to a ceasefire which many Israelis fear is essentially on Hamas's terms and will leave Hamas in a stronger position for the next round of attacks on Israelis.
TIMES OF LONDON: THE CANT AND HYPOCRISY OF ISRAEL'S CRITICS NEVER DIMS
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach three articles below. All are worth reading. The first two were written shortly before a ceasefire was declared at 2 am this morning. The other, from Turkey, was published in 2014 in Hurriyet Daily News but still has some relevance for today.
In the first piece Gerard Baker writes in Friday's Times (of London):
"The neighborhood bully just lives to survive
He's criticised and condemned for being alive
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He's the neighborhood bully"
"The words of Bob Dylan are remarkably relevant as Israel finds itself again the object of much of the world's venomous and, you might say, ancient loathing. Or, perhaps, like the endurance of injustice in America, the lyrics' contemporary resonance shows that the cant and hypocrisy of Israel?s critics never dims.
"Hamas, armed and backed by its sponsor, Iran, is once again attempting to kick down Israel's door and, once again, in the eyes of much of the world's media and opinion-shapers, it is Israel's fault. "
In the last piece (for the Gatestone Institute), leading Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh points to all the Arab journalist who have been criticizing Hamas all week for firing rockets at Israel:
"Inexplicably, these Arab voices are generally ignored by the international community and the mainstream media in the West. Those who are demonstrating against Israel and Jews in the US, Canada and some European countries might want to tune in to what Arabs themselves are saying about Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. If they bothered to listen, they would understand that as far as many Arabs are concerned, the real threat to the future of Arab and Muslim children is coming from Iran and Islamic terrorist groups, and not from Israel."
-- Tom Gross
ARTICLES
THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN'?
America is no longer united behind Israel
Left-wing Democrats who equate the Palestinian cause with Black Lives Matter are now piling the pressure on Biden
By Gerard Baker
The Times (of London)
May 20 2021, 5.00pm
Bob Dylan turns 80 on Monday and the airwaves have been rasping all week with retrospectives on the long life and complex works of America?s greatest modern lyricist.
It's a mark of the enduring power of the Nobel laureate that songs he wrote decades ago can be heard again and understood afresh. Or perhaps it's a testimony to the enduring flaws in American society that the sentiments he expressed remain as relevant today as they were when they were written.
In the last year especially, Dylan's protest songs from the early 1960s, with their indictments of social and racial inequality, have been taken up by a newly motivated and empowered progressive left.
One song that probably won't get any attention from the Dylanologists is an especially apt and timely one from a later era, the 1982 album Infidels. Neighborhood Bully was written during an earlier Arab-Israeli conflict, after Israeli forces had invaded Lebanon and the Jewish state had predictably earned the opprobrium of much of the world?s media, public intellectuals and many of its governments.
The song is a sarcastic denunciation of the critics of Israel, the "neighborhood bully" of the title:
"The neighborhood bully just lives to survive
He's criticised and condemned for being alive
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He's the neighborhood bully"
The words are remarkably relevant as Israel finds itself again the object of much of the world's venomous and, you might say, ancient loathing. Or, perhaps, like the endurance of injustice in America, the lyrics' contemporary resonance shows that the cant and hypocrisy of Israel?s critics never dims.
Hamas, armed and backed by its sponsor, Iran, is once again attempting to kick down Israel's door and, once again, in the eyes of much of the world's media and opinion-shapers, it is Israel's fault.
There is, apparently, some gross disproportionality in the fact that Israel's powerful military has killed more people than Hamas's wildly indiscriminate acts of terrorism. The real disproportionality is, of course, that Hamas aims to kill civilians: Israelis, by firing directly at them, and Palestinans, by using them as human shields for its offensive. While Israel's armed forces target terrorists, innocents get killed because Hamas has placed them in the line of fire.
Or take the supposed unfairness of the advantage Israel gains from its "Iron Dome" missile defence system while Palestinians have no such protection. There is such a protective shield for the Palestinians, in fact, freely available to Hamas: the option not to fire rockets at Israeli cities. If no Iranian-supplied rockets were falling on homes in Haifa and Tel Aviv, no Israeli Defence Forces? missiles would be fired at Hamas targets in Gaza.
Dylan?s satirical disdain captured and skewered this same kind of one-sided analysis decades ago. But one thing that has changed since then are the political forces within the US. For its entire existence, Israel has enjoyed bipartisan American support. There have been critics, obviously, and periods of tension when Israel's actions have at times merited sanction. However the essential understanding on both sides of American politics has been that the Jewish state?s continuous existential peril demanded robust support.
Now the new progressive wing that is ascendant in the Democratic Party's economic, social and cultural programme is overtly hostile, not just to certain Israeli actions but, it seems, to Israel itself. A vocal group of members of Congress have condemned Israel in the past week in unusual terms in American political discourse. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young standard-bearer of the left, denounced Israel as an "apartheid state" in a tweet, a statement as bizarre as it was offensive in alluding to a country in which Arabs have the same rights as Jews and substantially more than in most Arab states.
A number of her colleagues have made similarly caustic criticisms. Rashida Tlaib, another left-wing congresswoman, implored President Biden to take a stand against Israel, urging an end to the long-standing military support that has helped protect Israel. She met the president on the tarmac at an airport in the Midwest this week and, according to media reports, told him: "The US cannot continue to give the right-wing Netanyahu government billions each year to commit crimes against Palestinians. Atrocities like bombing schools cannot be tolerated, much less conducted with US-supplied weapons."
What has led to the new intensity of this anti-Israeli sentiment is the equation of the Palestinian cause with the condition of African-Americans that has become such a powerful mission for the left. "Israel is having its own Black Lives Matter moment" was the headline on an opinion column this week by a professor at the University of California.
So far the Biden administration has been admirably staunch in its backing of Israel's right to defend itself, but it's under pressure. On Wednesday the president told Netanyahu in a phone call that he "expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire".
For now, the US remains Israel's dependable ally. However there are profound shifts under way in American politics that will continue to reverberate widely. As we've seen in all kinds of ways in the past year, the times they are a changin'.
TURKISH OP-ED: SORRY TO REMIND YOU (BUT GOLDA MEIR WAS RIGHT!)
A friend writes:
Watching the latest celebrations from the Gaza strip and the rest of the Palestinian territories about their latest 'victory' reminded me of this article from the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet back in 2014 after one of the previous rounds of fighting between Israel and the Hamas. Little wonder that we are as far away from peace as we have ever been - when the deaths of civilians and especially children are celebrated (because apparently their 'sacrifice' served some sort of purpose in some imaginary international point scoring competition) it doesn't take a genius to understand that fast-forward 5-7 years we will probably be seeing the same pictures and little other change.
***
Sorry to remind you (but Golda Meir was right!)
Hurriyet Daily News (Turkey)
https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/opinion/burak-bekdil/sorry-to-remind-you-but-golda-meir-was-right-35263
The video of a motorcade features about a dozen Palestinian gunmen joyfully riding nine motorcycles, shooting in the air in victory and dragging behind the body of a man they had just killed on suspicion that he was collaborating with Israel. The victim was one of the six Palestinians the Palestinians had killed.
The same video also shows dozens of younger Palestinians, some aged, perhaps, 8 or 9, proudly filming the scene or taking pictures of the historic moment with their cell phones. About a day later, the mood in the Gaza Strip turned more joyful. Another "hudna" ? temporary peace ? had been "won, " and the enemy had been "defeated again."
Later during the day, the international press reported celebratory bursts of gunfire, cheering and chanting, minutes after the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas came into effect. Gunmen from all corners of the Gaza City emerged on the streets to celebrate "victory." Some of the "victors" let off fireworks from rooftops. Along Gaza City?s waterfront, a loudspeaker on a mosque repeated over and over: Allahu Akbar. God is great.
A local told the Guardian: "They bombed us, they killed our women and children, but they could not stop the resistance. So, they had to surrender and agree to stop the assassinations. They learned we cannot be defeated by their bombs."
When Adel Mansour spoke these proud words, about 150 Palestinians and five Israelis had lost their lives. In the eight-day war, the Israeli military had targeted more than 1,500 sites in Gaza with air strikes and shelling, more than 1,000 rockets had been fired at Israel and a blast had ripped through a bus in Tel Aviv, injuring 17 people.
Yet another hudna is another victory. So think the Palestinians. And they celebrate. They celebrate their dead women and children. They celebrate the "victory" with bursts of gunfire, cheering, chanting and fireworks. Fireworks for 150 or so coffins. Fireworks to celebrate the 150 martyrs and five enemies.
Fireworks to celebrate because the enemy had failed to kill more than 150. Fireworks to celebrate because five "Jooos and six traitors" had been killed. Victory, that is. Or so think the willing martyrs.
Like the previous ones, the latest hudna is a pause, not peace. It reminds one of Ambrose Bierce's "The Unabridged Devil?s Dictionary," which describes peace as "a period of cheating between two periods of fighting." Peace, that is, victory.
Meanwhile, the victors keep on celebrating their victory. All the same, there is something bizarre in the whole picture. The victors celebrate their dead while the entire world, including this columnist, keeps on mourning the loss of innocent lives.
Is there something wrong with us, the silly mourners? Should we celebrate instead of mourning, like the kin of the dead do so proudly? Should Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have cheered and chanted in Gaza instead of so humanely weeping along with the relatives of the dead and the injured?
No, I personally would prefer a human Mr. Davutoglu instead of a foreign minister who shoots in the air in celebration of "victory." And I would prefer a human Mr. Davutoglu questioning the wisdom behind celebrating 150 martyrs, knowing, all the same, that my wish is sillier than the victory day celebrations in Gaza.
When I wrote in this column "Why Golda Meir was right," (Aug. 23, 2011), I knew exactly why Israel's fourth prime minister, or the "Mother of Israel," was right. I still know why she was right when she said that peace in the Middle East would be possible only "when Arabs love their children more than they hate us.
HAMAS DOES NOT CARE ABOUT PALESTINIAN SUFFERING
Arabs: Hamas Does Not Care About Palestinian Suffering
By Khaled Abu Toameh
Gatestone Institute
May 20, 2021 at 11:30 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17390/hamas-palestinians-suffering
Prominent Arab writers and political analysts hold the Iranian-backed Hamas responsible for the violence and bloodshed in the Gaza Strip over the past week. These Arabs can also see that if one cares about the Palestinians, why would one want them ruled by terrorists who place weapons caches near hospitals and schools, and use children as human shields?
***
While many in the West denounced Israel for its military strikes in the Gaza Strip over the past week, prominent Arab writers and political analysts held the Iranian-backed Hamas responsible for the violence and bloodshed.
These Arabs evidently understand what the anti-Israel activists around the world fail to see -- that Hamas has brought nothing but disaster and despair to the two million Palestinians living under its rule in the Gaza Strip.
These Arabs also seem to understand that Israel is not waging war on the Palestinians, but against an Islamist terrorist group whose charter openly calls for jihad (holy war) and the elimination of Israel.
These Arabs can also see that if one cares about the Palestinians, why would one want them ruled by terrorists who place weapons caches near hospitals and schools, and use children as human shields?
Those who are condemning Israel for defending itself against the rocket and missile attacks need to see what article 15 of the Hamas charter says:
"The day the enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jews' usurpation, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised."
The message that the Arab writers and political analysts are trying to send to those Westerners who consider themselves "pro-Palestinian" is: Hamas serves as a pawn in the hands of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood in the fight against Israel and the West.
There is another message that the Arabs are seeking to send to those in the West who are demonstrating against Israel: Criticism of Hamas does not make you anti-Palestinian; on the contrary, holding Hamas responsible for the violence and bloodletting actually serves the interests of the Palestinians.
How ironic that Arab Muslims are lashing out at Hamas while Israel-haters around the world see no evil in its actions, including the indiscriminate firing of thousands of rockets and missiles into Israel.
"Real sympathy with the Palestinian people means searching for solutions for an actual and practical peace that guarantees their safety, security, and development," commented Saudi writer and researcher Abdulah Bin Binjad Al Otaibi. "The solutions should also stop those [Hamas] who are ready to burn Palestine and its people."
The Hamas terrorist group, he said, "was well prepared for this war by building trenches in which its members can take shelter, while innocent Palestinians were being killed. Hamas likes to play the role of victim and kill Palestinians to win Arab, Islamic and international sympathy."
Denouncing Hamas for persecuting the Palestinians, Al Otaibi noted that the terrorist group carried out a bloody coup in 2007 against the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip.
"Some ask, is this the right time to present the crimes of Hamas," he added.
"This is precisely the best time to do so. The reader can conduct a quick search on the Internet to learn about the crimes that Hamas has committed against the Palestinians. Hamas has the right to destroy its homes with its own hands, but it has no right to destroy the homes of Palestinians and underestimate their blood and the blood of their children."
Saudi writer Abdullah Nasser Al Otaibi called on Arab countries to help the Palestinians get new leaders.
"Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons do not care about the suffering or interests of the Palestinians," Al Otaibi wrote. "They only care about demonizing those who stand against them. Hamas is saying: Let the Palestinians die for the sake of a Muslim Brotherhood victory."
Another Saudi writer, Mishary Dhayidi, warned that Hamas was aligned with Iran and the enemies of the Arabs.
Dhayidi pointed out that Hamas has been associated with the Houthi militia in Yemen, Hezbollah, Egyptian terrorists and Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds Force who was killed last year in a US targeted drone attack near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq.
Emirati writer Al-Sheikh Wuldalsalek accused both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas of "trafficking" in the Palestinian issue.
"Abbas wants to cover up for this decision to postpone the Palestinian elections so that he can continue to sit on the presidential chair at the expense of Palestinian blood," Wuldalsalek remarked. "Hamas aspires to increase its popularity and drain the pockets of those who see it as a resistance movement by launching futile missiles that harm it more than doing any good."
He accused Iran and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of "exploiting Palestinian blood without any shame or conscience."
"A few months ago, we were very happy with the signing of the Abraham Peace Accords [with Israel], which the people rely on to create peace that benefits everyone politically, economically and socially," Wuldalsalek wrote. "But the extremists are working to kill this dream. It is sad that some are working hard for peace, while others are working hard for the sake of war and the continuation of the conflict."
Egyptian writer Khaled al-Berry advised that "criticism of Hamas is in the interest of the Palestinians, now and tomorrow."
Criticism of Hamas, he said, "Is a message of awareness, caution, and a warning about the consequences of its organizational and regional ties."
Former Jordanian Minister of Information Saleh Al-Gholab said that Hamas should choose between being a Palestinian group or "a Muslim Brotherhood movement belonging to Iran." Al-Gholab pointed out that in 2007 Hamas launched a bloody coup against the Palestinian Authority and threw members of its rivals in Fatah from rooftops.
Ahdeya Ahmed Al Sayed, President of the Bahrain Journalists Association, wrote on Twitter:
"Those who support the terrorist militias [Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Houthis, and the Iranian regime] are considered terrorists. The Palestinian issue does not need terrorists and traffickers. The Palestinian issue does not need traitors."
In another tweet, Al Sayed commented:
"Hamas did not use the children of Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Mashaal or Ali Khamenei as human shields. Hamas used the Palestinian people [as human shields]. Shame on you to defend Hamas. This is a major betrayal!"
Such critiques of Hamas and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups are relatively new in the Arab world. The criticism shows that a growing number of Arabs are fed up with the continuous efforts of Iran to destabilize the Arab countries with the help of the mullahs' proxies in the Middle East, including Hamas.
Inexplicably, these Arab voices are generally ignored by the international community and the mainstream media in the West. Those who are demonstrating against Israel and Jews in the US, Canada and some European countries might want to tune in to what Arabs themselves are saying about Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. If they bothered to listen, they would understand that as far as many Arabs are concerned, the real threat to the future of Arab and Muslim children is coming from Iran and Islamic terrorist groups, and not from Israel.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you ?like? this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia