By Natalia @Adobe Stock
Reversing Logic
After murdering and raping, then taking hostages, Hamas must be perplexed at the moral ineptitude of its enemies. In the WSJ, the editors decry the terrorists’ murder of six Israeli hostages, including one dual-citizen American.
How is it that Israel is suddenly under pressure to make concessions—to Hamas?
On Monday, Israel said it recovered the bodies of six hostages, who were executed in a Gaza tunnel only a day or two before Israel reached them, shot multiple times at close range. The hostages:
- Eden Yerushalmi, age 24
- Ori Danino, 25
- Alex Lobanov, 32
- Carmel Gat, 40
- Almog Sarusi, 27
- Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the U.S. citizen, 23.
Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, parents of Hersh, might be familiar to you. With strength and courage, they were willing to go anywhere, do anything to help their son, continues the WSJ:
The crime here is all on Hamas, which took the innocent hostages on Oct. 7 and has refused to release them through multiple rounds of U.S.-brokered negotiations.
Yet the reaction from the White House, the British government, the Western press and some parts of Israel is to blame the Israeli government. On Monday, in a one-word answer to a press scrum, Mr. Biden accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of not doing enough to secure a hostage deal.
Like Qaid Farhan Al-Qadi, the Muslim hostage Israel rescued last week, the murdered six were found in Rafah, the city the world worked so hard to prevent Israel from entering. President Biden’s opposition kept Israel out of Rafah for three months.
Deep Thoughts from the Shallows
A Rafah invasion, hectored Vice President Kamala Harris, would doom its civilians.
“I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go.”
Israel proved (Harris) wrong, evacuating a million Gazans in two weeks. Israel has dismantled Hamas’s Rafah brigade with notably low civilian casualties.
Aid groups hyped worst-case scenarios for a Rafah invasion. Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris withheld weapons to stop Israel from fighting there. Ms. Harris wouldn’t rule out “consequences” if Israel went ahead. Egypt threatened to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel over it. Israel has since found over a dozen tunnels from Rafah into Egypt, which insists that Israel leave the border to let Hamas’s arms smuggling resume. It should be clear now why Israel couldn’t let Hamas rule Rafah.
In executing hostages, Hamas must have figured it would increase pressure on Mr. Netanyahu. Many Israelis demand he make more concessions toward a deal because Hamas has rejected the past several, including the U.S. proposals, which Mr. Netanyahu accepted. Israel’s largest trade union held a brief strike on Monday to demand a deal. Others call that giving in to terrorism; the right-of-center group of hostage families is now demanding the end of negotiations and more military pressure on Hamas.
Israel’s leaders don’t need U.S. pressure driven by an American election calendar, argues the WSJ:
Americans know right from wrong. When Mr. Polin and Ms. Goldberg spoke at the Democratic convention, the crowd chanted, “bring them home.” That was also the chant at the Republican convention during the speech by the parents of Omer Neutra, a 22-year-old U.S. hostage still in Gaza.
Israel is offering unprecedented strategic concessions and risking its soldiers’ lives to free hostages. U.S. pressure should be on Hamas, which took the hostages and murders them.
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