Israel Defense Force Archives - standing by the gate

Day 17 of Operation Protective Edge

sTARS OF dAVID aT KOTEL pLAZA

Speaking ahead of special cabinet meeting, prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] says IDF has made substantial gains against Hamas terror infrastructure in Gaza and will continue the operation in full strength. (from the Jerusalem Post)

It’s been twelve days since the last Hamas rocket attack on Jerusalem. According to the Jerusalem Post the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has lost thirty-two soldiers since beginning a ground incursion into Gaza. Less than an hour before I began this entry sirens sounded in the south as another barrage of Hamas rockets were launched at Ashdod, Israel’s fifth largest city 32 kilometers south of Tel Aviv. Although the Israeli Iron Dome antimissile system has performed spectacularly well against Hamas rockets, Hamas gained a temporary victory yesterday when the US FAA and several European airlines halted all flights into Tel Aviv after a rocket landed to no effect within a mile of Ben Gurion Airport .

Hamas continues to eagerly report Palestinian civilian casualties to the waiting world press, as it seems that the human shield business is a hazardous one. There was a time, not too long ago, when international opinion would have sized up Hamas’s behavior as murderous and insane but this is a brave new world.

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An Unfortunate Moment for IDF Officer Shalom Eisner and His Victim

“The truth is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes.” (H.L. Mencken) In the case of Senior IDF officer Shalom Eisner, who recently got caught on video smacking an “innocent bike rider” with his M-16, the reasons are not so mysterious. Eisner is a Jew. He is also an Israeli soldier. Israel, with one tenth of one percent of the world’s population and no broad national ambition beyond hoping to exist, is a threat to world peace…

That’s mankind’s story and we’re sticking to it.

Though Eisner has been reprimanded, suspended and may face criminal charges, this is clearly not enough. Given, the gesture was brutal and, from the 2-minute video below, it seems unjustified, but the YouTube caption that accompanies the video has transformed the encounter into a Middle Eastern version of The Killing Fields:

Palestinian and international cyclists were brutally attacked by the Israeli occupation forces on Saturday as they attempted to bike up Route 90…The cyclists were demonstrating against Israeli apartheid policies in the Jordan Valley, which limit Palestinian access to roadways as part of an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Bedouin communities of the Valley.

In just two sentences three myths are amplified, occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, and the reader envisions a bloody military onslaught against Sunday cyclists. Maybe the author hoped you wouldn’t watch?