Israel: Hit by riots and rockets
The Israeli government has been “caught completely off guard,” said Ron Ben-Yishai in Ynetnews.com. After weeks of rising tension over attempts to evict Palestinian families from East Jerusalem homes and clashes between police and Arab protesters around Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque—the third-holiest shrine in Islam—it was inevitable that Hamas would join the fray in the supposed name of Palestinian solidarity. The Islamist group did just that last week, firing thousands of rockets from across Gaza toward Tel Aviv and central Israel. Those missiles were “accurate to a degree Israel had never imagined.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have been prepared for this assault. But our leaders have spent “more than two years solely focused on themselves and their power”—we’ve had four inconclusive elections since 2019—and have neglected the Palestinian issue and rising anger among Israeli Arabs. Now “everything is blowing up in their faces.”
The fighting is “coming to resemble an actual civil war,” said Ruthie Blum in The Jerusalem Post. Arab mobs in Israeli cities have set fire to synagogues and Jewish stores, while Jewish mobs have pulled Arabs from their cars and beaten them. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who controls the West Bank, helped fuel this violence. He spread the lie that Israel intended to take over the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Abbas’ aim was to spark an uprising, giving him an excuse to cancel the upcoming Palestinian elections that his Fatah party was sure to lose to Hamas. He succeeded in postponing the vote, but Hamas stole his thunder.
There’s something suspicious about the timing of this conflict, said Adam Raz in Haaretz. Having failed to muster a governing coalition after the March election, Netanyahu was just a few days from being ousted from office. Did he instruct police to crack down hard on Palestinian protesters knowing that Hamas would obligingly start lobbing missiles, allowing Netanyahu to play the role of a strong wartime leader? Hamas and Netanyahu have certainly had a long symbiotic relationship. The prime minister needs the jihadist group to undercut Abbas’ authority, “because with Hamas there’s no talk about a negotiated solution to the conflict.” Hamas, meanwhile, likes that Netanyahu has turned a blind eye to the “cashfilled suitcases” that keep arriving in Gaza from Qatar.
It’s absurd that much of the world views Israel as the bad guy in this showdown, said Ronn Torossian in Arutz Sheva. Hamas hurls rockets indiscriminately at our cities, while Israel strikes judiciously, always warning first. Yet because we have the Iron Dome anti-missile system, we incur far fewer casualties. Hamas, meanwhile, hides its munitions in civilian buildings, so when Israel targets them, there are sometimes civilian casualties. The result is that photographs of bleeding Palestinian children are beamed around the globe, and the world sides with Hamas— effectively “attacking a democracy for protecting herself from a terrorist organization.” Evidently, the world would rather have more Jews die, because that would even the score. Too bad. Israel will not apologize for defending itself.