Matters Of Fact

To the editor: Reading about the allegations that America's cut off of funding to UNRWA, which has been an utter failure for seven decades, will be a disaster for the Palestinian Arabs and exacerbate what "human rights" officials refer to as an impending famine, I can't help but think of highly relevant statistics that don't seem to make it into the Boston Globe and other media. We've been told how terrible it is that barely 100 trucks are bringing aid to Gaza now, as opposed to 500 a day prior to Hamas' barbaric October 7 Massacre. What's not mentioned is that only 70 of those 500 trucks were bringing food, in contrast to more than 125 currently; the rest were bringing building, agriculture and industrial supplies - in other words, materials that were largely coopted by Hamas to prepare for its perpetration of its slaughter on October 7. There is actually 80 percent more food entering Gaza now than there was before October 7! Especially since most Gaz...

Sent March 18, 2024 to the London Review of Books:  Dear Editor: It has long been commonplace for the Shoah to be used by Jew-haters as a weapon against the Jews and the tiny, beleaguered Jewish and democratic state of Israel. This weapon has been used with special viciousness in the wake of the worst, most barbaric attack on Jews since the Shoah, the October 7 Massacre perpetrated by Hamas, with the assistance of the even more radical Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the supposedly moderate Fatah, other Palestinian terror groups and thousands of ordinary Gazans. The use of the Shoah is especially perverse given that Hamas itself makes its genocidal goals clear in its charter, calling not just for the destruction of Israel and the murder of all its Jews, but the murder of Jews around the world. Hamas, of course, is also a proxy of Iran, which openly calls for the destruction of Israel and has itself perpetrated mass terror attacks against Jews far from Israel. For the London Review of Bo...

Sent to the Hartford Courant March 17, 2024: To the Editor: Like many others, Andreas Kluth uses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a convenient whipping boy in his misguided article "Red lines delineate Biden-Bibi split." The Israeli prime minister does not determine war policy, unlike the way President Biden does here as commander-in-chief,  There is a war cabinet which determines that policy, with three members - Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (whom Netanyahu tried to fire a year ago), and Benny Gantz (leader of the center-left National Unity Camp) - who decide by majority vote. In the aftermath of the October 7 Massacre, President Biden correctly said Hamas must be destroyed. The alternative is much worse than what's now happening. It is also beyond reasonable dispute that Hamas cannot be destroyed unless Israel roots it out of Rafah and takes control of the Philadelphi Corridor. Israelis, who will be the first to suffer the consequences if this is...

Submitted March 16, 2024 to the Boston Globe: To the editor: I oppose a "permanent ceasefire" in Gaza because I support a permanent ceasefire there. Any "permanent ceasefire" now would be no more permanent than the one in effect on the morning of October 7 until Hamas broke it, as it broke all previous ceasefires and will break any future ceasefires as long as it has not been effectively destroyed. Calling for a ceasefire now may feel virtuous, but such a feeling is delusional. A ceasefire now would simply be a reward for Hamas and enable it to rearm, strengthen itself and when it feels ready perpetrate another bloody atrocity and start an even more violent war with more death and destruction. If you really want to save lives, then help Israel destroy Hamas, free all the hostages not already murdered by Hamas, completely destroy all the rockets, tunnels and other terror infrastructure created by Hamas - largely using the aid foolishly sent by the international commu...

Submitted to The New York Times March 15, 2024: To the editor: Aaron David Miller's guest essay "Words Over Deeds: Why Biden Isn’t Pressuring Israel" should really be entitled "Why Biden Isn't Pressuring Israel Even More," given that he's been exerting tremendous pressure on Israel and constantly criticizing Israel, while barely doing anything to pressure Hamas, or the Houthis, or Hezbollah, or their overlord, Iran. The key reason is one barely even hinted at by Miller, when he writes "If the president had a compelling alternative to how Israel could wage a war in these circumstances without doing grievous harm to civilians, he might have more leverage." In that sentence, Miller tacitly reveals he's aware that Israel isn't doing "grievous harm to civilians" and that virtually all the criticism directed at Israel, including by President Biden, is unjustified. Indeed, the ratio of non-combatant to combatant deaths in Gaza is bar...

Submitted to the Atlanta Journal Constitution March 15, 2024: To the editor: Reading the criticism, contained in Kathleen Collomb's explaining to her granddaughter why she shouldn't boycott President Biden's reelection, of Israel's efforts to prevent Hamas' promised repetition of its barbaric October 7 Massacre, Collomb demonstrates that Zoomers aren't the only ones falling for the lies being propagated about Israel. Here are some truths about the war Israel has been trying to avoid since terrorists took over control of Gaza in 2007. For probably the first time in history, this is a war in which one side is trying to maximize suffering and death of its own population while the other side is trying to safeguard the enemy population. Generally unreported has been one of the major reasons why five Gazans got killed when parachutes bringing aid didn't open and the aid fell on top of civilians: the planes dropped the aid from a high altitude because Hamas was fir...

Published in the Washington Post, March 16, 2024: America’s complicity in Gaza’s tragedy began long before Oct. 7 and Israel’s response to that barbaric massacre. It didn’t take long after Hamas won the 2006 Palestine Legislative Council elections and violently overthrew Fatah to take control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 before it was obvious that terror group, officially recognized as such since 1997, could not be tolerated.
Yet every time attacks by Hamas — including rockets launched from Gaza and the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers — started another conflict, the United States, joined by many other countries, pressured Israel into a premature cease-fire. 
These same countries then poured even more aid into Gaza, despite warnings that much of that aid was being diverted by Hamas. As long ago as 2016, for example, then-Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold said 95 percent of the cement delivered to Gaza was being taken by Hamas and used for military purpose...