(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . No, it won't be the same: Israel's prior assumptions 'shattered' by Hamas's cowardly 'massacres' [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-14 Photo source An Israeli research fellow, in a column published today in an Israeli newspaper under the headline “Hamas's horrific massacres smash Israel's longtime faulty strategy - opinion,” says the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas terrorists on sovereign Israeli soil has “shattered” a number of assumptions that have amassed in the half century since the last surprise act attack, known as the Yom Kippur War, by Egypt and Syria, invading from the south and north, respectively, on a somber 1973 Jewish holiday. In the words of columnist David M. Weinberg, The Simchat Torah Hamas massacres have ... smashed to smithereens decades of false paradigms and erroneous strategic thinking. Regarding Hamas, Guardian columnist Jonathan Friedman, in a piece published on October 13, 2023, wrote: With a founding charter, never revoked, packed with explicit, medieval anti-Jewish hatred, it has become an Isis-style force of bloodcurdling cruelty, one that brings calamity down on its own people – a calamity that threatens now to become even more devastating. Significantly, Friedman referred to Hamas’s cowardly Simchat Torah attack as a “pogrom.” The word pogrom was not meant to exist in Hebrew. In the new Israel, the very idea of Jews being murdered en masse, their children butchered before their eyes, was meant to have been banished to the realm of bitter memory. … But it was a pogrom that came to Israel last weekend, multiple pogroms in fact, as lethal as any that cut down the Yiddish-speaking Jews of the early last century or, in repeating patterns, the centuries before. Hamas’s abhorrant terrorists gunn[ed] down the young at a music festival, slaughter[ed] the old at a string of kibbutzim, kill[ed] children wherever they could be found. The victims were tortured while alive and mutilated once dead. One journalist, familiar with the most graphic evidence, says the right comparisons are with the massacres staged during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. These appalling acts of savagery, according to Weinberg, have changed conventional thinking in Israel. Some highlights of his thinking. Shattered is the mealy-mouthed Western media and diplomatic practice of calling Hamas a “militant” group and its armed forces “militias.” Hamas is ISIS, and its stormtroopers are Nazi-like Einsatzgruppen. ... Shattered is the hope that the world ever will apply “international humanitarian law” and the so-called “laws of war” to Israel’s enemies. Shattered is the notion that these much ballyhooed but tendentious frameworks can any longer be allowed to tie Israel’s hands behind its back when the IDF goes on the offensive. Shattered is the always-apologize disposition of Israelis. … Israel is now fighting for its life against depraved enemies seeking its extermination and who are willing to rape and mutilate their way through every Israeli living room. Israel cannot afford to play nicely in the sandbox to protect its “image” in the liberal salons of Paris and New York…. Shattered for the foreseeable future is the “two-state solution”.... Hamas has convincingly destroyed the always-flimsy but until-now deemed credible supposition .… Shattered is the theory that with responsibility for the two million residents of Gaza, Hamas would become more “responsible,” “moderate,” or “mature.” It didn’t. Shattered is the misconception that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is about “illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories” meaning Israeli towns in Gaza or Judea and Samaria [aka, “West Bank”]. The conflict is about every Jewish “settlement” in the Land of Israel ...[including] Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem…. This last proposition is amplified by the fact that a Gaza-based UN agency, funded by your tax dollars, not only incites hatred and antisemitism and glorifies terrorism and martyrdom in Palestinian schools, but also use maps in Palestinian classrooms and educational materials that omit all reference to Israel and Israelis. Yep, they simply wipe Israel off their maps. For context, columnist Weinberg probably would be considered right-wing in Israel. However, as further context, “right wing” (leaving aside the extreme right) in Israel is not the same as the right wing in the U.S. Even rightists in Israel tend to support Israel’s social policies that U.S progressives can only dream of enjoying in the U.S., such as high-quality, efficiently provided socialized medicine, low-tuition university education, well-subsidized public transit, and generally modern, well-maintained infrastructure. One is “left” or “right” in Israel based on how much leeway one wants the IDF to have in defending Israel and in wars against its attackers. 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