GNITN – Special Edition

Israel At War – Day 73

Support From An Unlikely Source

Northern Israel Situation Getting Worse

According to a report from the United Nations (UN), is getting worse as read from an article from i24news.tv:

The head of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon warned Monday that the situation on the country's southern border with Israel remains perilous amid ongoing exchanges of fire between Hezbollah terrorists and Israeli forces.

"The situation now...it is tense. It is difficult, it is dangerous," said UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) commander Aroldo Lazaro. He spoke ahead of meetings with officials seeking to ease tensions between Israel and the Iran-backed group.

In further comments, the UN official sees the Hezbollah attacks being similar to the attacks from Hamas:

Lazaro highlighted the correlation between events in Gaza and increasing hostilities along the Lebanon border since the October 7th Hamas attack on Israeli civilians that ignited war in the region.

His UN observers are trying to "avoid miscalculations" that could trigger greater devastation, he noted. But clashes have only intensified of late, even as both sides traded blows for months.

According to unofficial reports, over 130 people have died on Lebanon's side from Israeli strikes, mostly Hezbollah terrorists but also some civilians and a soldier. Israel has seen both military and civilian casualties as well, the IDF has reported.

The UN has come under fire from Israel and the IDF in recent days, first because the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or UNRWA is not impartial and allows Hamas to use its positions of schools to attack from, but also attests this:

The IDF has accused Hezbollah of firing rockets from locations just yards away from UN posts and schools.

They Love, They Love Me Not

If you’ve listened to my podcasts for any length of time you know I am wary of the actual support the current American leadership is giving to Israel. They talk about standing behind Israel as they destroy Hamas, but constantly hamper their war efforts by demanding humanitarian aid keep going into Gaza. And they also constantly tell the IDF to not kill civilians, even though they know that Hamas uses soldiers dressed as civilians all the time, making it even harder to eliminate the terrorists. And in a recent visit from the US Secretary of Defense, we heard talk of a two-state solution among other things that Israel’s current government has stated it is not going to do. Here are some quotes from that visit from an article in The Times Of Israel:

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Tel Aviv on Monday, meeting with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He reiterated US backing for Israel’s war against Hamas, while calling to increase humanitarian aid entering the Strip, though he declined to set any timeline on the ongoing Israeli operation.

In public comments, Austin stopped short of making any suggestions about wrapping up the war, and offered little criticism of the Gaza death toll, saying the US will continue to support Israel’s war on Hamas and send it munitions and other defense aid. But he used a press conference to push for movement toward a two-state solution — something the current Israeli government has rejected — and also issued a warning to Israel about growing violence in the West Bank.

But out of the public eyes we here this happened:

Behind closed doors, the US defense chief was expected to have pressed Israeli officials to look toward winding down major combat operations in Gaza, withdrawing most ground troops and moving to more targeted operations aimed at killing Hamas leaders, destroying tunnels and rescuing hostages, as global anger over the rising death toll in Gaza has continued to grow.

Strange Source, But We’ll Take It

In an article from CBN.com we read that support for Hamas is growing:

… as a new analysis from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) found widespread denial of the fact “Hamas has committed atrocities against Israeli civilians,” referring to the terror group’s deadly attack against the Jewish state on Oct. 7. It also revealed an uptick in Hamas’ “popularity.”

The PSR data also found support for Hamas among West Bank residents exploded from a mere 12% in September, just before the attack against Israel, to 44% in this latest survey. Support in Gaza has increased from 38% to 42%.

Additionally, the majority of residents (72%) between Gaza and the West Bank believe Hamas made the “correct decision” when it launched its assault on Israel. Broken down geographically, that number rises to 82% in the West Bank and falls to 57% in Gaza.

In light of this, some of which I reported on in others of my videos, Comedian and Commentator Bill Maher took time on his program to surprisingly support Israel and Christians living in the West Bank:

HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher blasted Palestinians for believing “myths” about Israel and defended Christians in the West Bank who have maintained peace even as Muslims now predominantly preside in one of believers’ most historically significant locations: Jesus’ birthplace of Bethlehem.

The 67-year-old comedian explained during the “New Rule” segment of the latest episode of his weekly show that Palestinians have unrealistic expectations and should not expect Israel to negotiate with a genocidal group, referring to Hamas, the terrorist organization controlling Gaza.

Maher went on to make a point about where Jesus was born and who controls it:

“I know it’s supposed to be that magical time of year, but maybe what we all really need right now is a good dose of realism,” Maher joked. “I see a lot of Nativity scenes when I’m out as you always do before Christmas, and I can’t help thinking about where that manger really is.”

“It’s in the West Bank, on Palestinian lands controlled by the Palestinian Authority,” he added. “In 1950, the little town of Bethlehem was 86% Christian. Now, it’s overwhelmingly Muslim. And that’s my point tonight — things change. To 2.3 billion Christians, there can be no more sacred site than where their Savior was born, but they don’t have it anymore. And yet, no Crusader army has geared up to take it back. Things change, countries, boundaries, empires. Palestine was under the Ottoman Empire for 400 years. But today, an ottoman is something you put under your feet.”

Disputes Over Land Are Not New

Maher goes on to make a point about disputes all through history and how they compare to the current war:

The city of Byzantium became the city of Constantinople became Istanbul. Not everybody liked it, but you can’t keep arguing the call forever. The Irish had the entire island to themselves, but the British were starting an empire and well, the Irish lost their tip. They blew each other up over it for 30 years. But eventually everybody comes to an accommodation, except the Palestinians.

After World War II, 12 million ethnic Germans got shoved out of Russia and Poland and Czechoslovakia, because being German had become kind of unpopular. A million Greeks were shoved out of Turkey in 1923. A million Ghanaians out of Nigeria in 1983, almost a million French out of Algeria in 1962, nearly a million Syrian refugees moved to Germany eight years ago. Was that a perfect fit? And no one knows more about being pushed off land than the Jews, including being almost wholly kicked out of every Arab country they once lived in.

He continues to make good points by discussing the Arab/Israel conflicts over time:

People get moved and yes, colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century. And they didn’t do it by asking. There’s a reason Saudi Arabia’s flag is a sword. Kosovo was the cradle of Christian Serbia, then it became Muslim. They fought a war about it in the ’90s, but stopped. They didn’t keep it going for 75 years. There were deals on the table to share the land called Palestine in 1947, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2008, and East Jerusalem could have been the capital of a Palestinian state that today might look more like Dubai than Gaza. Arafat was offered 95% of the West Bank and said, ‘No.’ The Palestinian people should know, your leaders and the useful idiots on college campuses who are their allies, are not doing you any favors by keeping alive the ‘river to the sea’ myth. I mean, where do you think Israel is going? Spoiler alert: nowhere.

Israel Has Nowhere To Go

As I titled this video, Maher is an unlikely source for this support as he is as liberal as you can get although some say the current radical left isn’t the liberal left he once knew. Regardless, his commentary is cogent and sound which may surprise us. Here is how he summarized his commentary:

It’s one of the most powerful countries in the world with a $500 billion economy, the world’s second largest tech sector after Silicon Valley, and nuclear weapons. They’re here. And what the media glosses over is, it’s hard to negotiate when the other side’s bargaining position is you all die and disappear. I mean, the chant ‘from the river to the sea.’ Yeah, let’s look at the map. Here’s the river. Here’s the sea. Oh, I see, it means you get all of it. Not just the West Bank, which was basically the original U.N. partition deal you rejected because you wanted all of it and always have, even though it’s indisputably also the Jews’ ancestral homeland, and so you attacked, and lost. And attacked again, and lost. And attacked again, and lost. As my friend Dr. Phil says, “How’s that working for you?”

Indeed, how is this current war working for you Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran? Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, because if things go the way I think, these terrorists will want things to settle down if they want to live.