As my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter William Teach has noted, the Editorial Board of The New York Times has unambiguously supported Israel following the sneak attacks by Hamas guerrilla fighters.

The brutal terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas is a tragedy, one that may change the course of the nation and the entire region.

The Editorial Board minced no words in calling the attacks “terrorist,” which they certainly were:

To the world’s horror, they attacked civilians — including older people, women and children — and took them hostage. More than 150 people remain captive in Gaza, in a further atrocity.

As we previously reported, the Times covered the attacks extensively. The 24-hour cable news networks? They are doing the same thing. But, as we also reported, the very #woke^[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Philadelphia Inquirer has been strangely quiet on the whole thing. Columnist Trudy Rubin, who does appear to support the Israelis at least somewhat, criticized Israel’s security policies, which is at least realistic given that the nation was caught completely by surprise.

Far-left columnist Will Bunch? He gave the obligatory statement that yes, Hamas attack was “butcherous,” “immoral and unconscionable”, right before blaming Israel and it’s “long-running, brutal occupation regime”:

When I was 11, I naively hoped the song lyric, “War! What is it good for?” would be a transistor-radio memory and not a question I’d be asking myself again and again for the rest of my life. The butcherous attacks by Hamas on civilians in southern Israel are immoral and unconscionable — as are Israel’s policies that turned the Gaza Strip into an open-air prison for 2 million people. There were plenty of chances for the world to fight for peace in this troubled land, instead of waiting until the bombs are bursting in air, when it is always too late. On that same plastic radio, I heard John Lennon sing, “War is over … if you want it.” He would have turned 83 on Monday. .  .  .  .

This week’s question: Most U.S. politicians have rightly condemned the barbarous attacks on civilians by Hamas, but with little mention of Israel’s long-running, brutal occupation regime. Is that fair under these circumstances? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

American leftists supporting a people who would throw them in jail — or off a tall building — if they were actually queer in ‘Palestine.’

The newspaper’s Editorial Board? Pretty much the same thing, telling readers how horrible Hamas surprise attack was, but then turning right around to blame congressional Republicans, and, for good measure, Donald Trump:

Over the weekend, rather than uniting around a plan for peace, Republican leaders, including Trump, tried to sow division by blaming Biden for releasing $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets in August as part of a prisoner swap.

Never mind that Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the money was earmarked for humanitarian support and had not been spent yet. Or that Trump may share some blame in provoking the Palestinians — and encouraging Netanyahu’s right-wing supporters — when he moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

It would take someone completely uneducated in economics to fail to understand that even if the freed dollars were entirely spent on “humanitarian support,” the fact that they exist frees up other money which can be then used for other things, including weapons. And President Trump was simply obeying a long ago passed law which mandated the embassy move to Israel’s capital.

It’s Wednesday, October 11^th, four whole days after the Hamas attack, and that’s really all the Inky has had to say?

The very woke Lexington Herald-Leader? There was one story about some “Kentuckians stranded in Israel while local Jewish community mourns,” and an OpEd “As Israel is attacked, our next elite leaders at Ivy League schools support terrorists,” but it’s from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, another McClatchy newspaper. Much of the American left, who are oh-so-sympathetic to the Palestinians, recognize that it was Hamas who attacked, and Hamas who committed barbaric atrocities, but are mostly staying quiet about it, because the whole situation threatens their worldview.

But not the idiotic #BlackLivesMatter movement! Those far-left idiots, or at least their Chicago group, not only tweeted that they “stand with Palestine,” but chose a silhouette of a paratrooper, reminding all who saw their tweet — which appears to have been subsequently deleted, but not before a screen capture — that Hamas used hang gliders to send terrorists into Israel, including a music festival.

Perhaps the reports, from credentialed news sources, that Hamas was butchering Jewish babies got to them?

Some of our friends on the left, including the distinguished Jake Tapper may be shocked by the “antisemitism on the left,” but I am not; I’ve seen plenty of it. Most of it springs from their sympathy for the plight of the poor, poor Palestinians, but, as I have said many times in the past, while it is intellectually possible to be opposed to Zionism and not be anti-Semitic, I’ve never seen it actually in practice. Every demonstration I’ve seen online, every screed I’ve ever read, condemning Israel’s control of the lands they conquered, has always devolved into anti-Semitism. Sometimes it was subtle, but mostly it was not.

And I’ve also said, many times before, that the Israelis made a huge mistake by not expelling all of the Arabs from the lands they conquered in 1968. If Israel wanted to keep that territory, they could not afford to allow their bitter enemies to live in it. An expulsion in 1967-68 would have been a humanitarian disaster, along the lines of the expulsion of the Indians from the American southeast in 1830-50, but it would have been over and done with decades ago, leaving Israel with the land for growth, and shortened, more defensible borders. About the only point on which I’d quibble would have been whether Israel should have then destroyed the al Aqsa Mosque; I can see both sides on that question.

Al Aqsa Mosque, on the Temple Mount. Photo by D R Pico. May be reproduced freely, with appropriate credit.

Instead, the Israelis hoped that, with conditions being so rotten in Judea and Samaria, the Arabs would emigrate; in that, they ignored their own history. As terrible as Germany made conditions for the Jews in Germany before the war began, few Jews actually chose to emigrate; most were heavily Germanized in their culture, had their family roots in Deutschland, and seem to have thought that yeah, things were bad, but eventually everything would blow over. After all, the Jewish diaspora had 19 centuries of experience in dealing with rising and ebbing anti-Semitism and the occasional pogrom.

Nazi’ism was something wholly new, something so far outside their paradigm that they could not accept the wholly insane idea that the Nazis simply meant to kill them all!

Perhaps it was the shock of the Shoah that blinded the Israelis to their own history, to the fact that most Jews did not try to escape Germany when they could, see that such would also happen with the Palestinian Arabs, and realize that their program of restrictive treatment of the Arabs wouldn’t push them to leave voluntarily. Perhaps the shock of the Nazis so pervaded their experience that they also forgot, or didn’t consider, that the refugee ship MS St Louis was turned away by several countries, including the United States, because other countries didn’t want the Jews any more than the Nazis did, and didn’t consider that none of the other Arab nations would want the Palestinians, either.

The Israelis’ only choice was to push the Arabs into Jordan, where most of them were already citizens, but that choice didn’t linger much beyond 1968. The notion of forced expulsion revolted them, and they just could not do it, but, in the end, that was their only logical choice. Now, they’re saddled with an occupied population who hate them.

So, what can be done at this point? The expulsion of the Palestinians is the right answer, but the time at which it could have been done has long since passed. But Israel can neither keep the land  it conquered in 1968 under perpetual occupation, nor trust the Palestinian Arabs to actually adhere to any peace agreements signed which gave them Gaza, Judea and Samaria as their independent state. Yassir Arafat had that offer, in hand, in 2000, from then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in what President Bill Clinton said was the best deal for which the Palestinians could ever hope, and Mr Arafat turned it down, in large part because he knew that, if he had accepted it, he would be assassinated by the Arab irredentists.

The brutal truth is that the only solution is war, war so devastating that one side or the other wins, and the other side loses, and loses for good.
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Related articles:

• William Teach: Jake Tapper Shocked By The Jew And Israel Hatred From His Comrades On The Left
• Robert Stacy McCain: ‘Palestinian Resistance’ = Beheading Babies
• Nina Bookout: BLM Chicago Doubles Down On Supporting Hamas Terrorists
• Don Surber: Palestinian attack was suicidal Even AP found it difficult to shield Hamas this time.
• Art Cole: Appeasement Has Always Failed