Israelis May Ask Who the Real Hostage-Takers Are: Hamas or Netanyahu Regime?

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war Cabinet are pushing ahead with a limited ground invasion of Gaza – even though that will mean disaster for thousands of more innocent lives, including over 200 Israeli hostages.

The Biden administration has reportedly been trying to delay the drastic manoeuvre to give more chance for negotiations to secure the release of hostages. But Netanyahu and his cabinet are driven by their ideological fanaticism and need to save face.

Since the attacks on Israel by Hamas Palestinian militants on October 7, the world has been waiting for a much-vaunted ground invasion by the Israeli Defense Forces into the Gaza Strip. Over 1,400 Israelis were killed during the Hamas raids. An estimated 230 hostages were taken by the militants back to Gaza where they are held in secret locations presumably in a network of underground tunnels.

Three weeks of intense aerial bombardment of the Palestinian coastal territory have wrought unprecedented death and destruction in Gaza. Over 8,000 people have been killed with 70 percent of the toll due to women, children and elderly, according to Gaza’s health officials.

The plight of the hostages presents a dilemma for Netanyahu. He is trying to assure Israelis that the “second stage” of the “war on Hamas” – that is the ground invasion – will achieve both objectives of defeating Hamas and rescuing the hostages.

However, the Israeli leader and his war Cabinet are cynically deceiving their people. If the IDF proceed further with its ground operation, the hostages will most likely die.

Already Hamas spokesmen have claimed that 50 hostages have lost their lives during the relentless air strikes over the past three weeks. Hamas released four of the hostages on humanitarian considerations.

The fierce gun battles that are anticipated amid the rubble of Gaza and throughout the maze of tunnels do not bode well for the safe return of the remaining captives.

This is why families of the hostages and many supporters among the Israeli public are calling on Netanyahu to abandon the ground operation and to engage in negotiations for a prisoner exchange.

Hamas officials have offered the release of hostages in exchange for the freedom of all Palestinian political prisoners held by the Israelis. The Israelis detained an estimated 5,000 Palestinians before October 7.  The number has increased dramatically over the past three weeks due to a repressive policy of reprisal by the Israeli state. Hundreds of Palestinians in the other enclave territory of the Occupied West Bank have been taken into custody under emergency powers.

Israeli families are becoming increasingly angry at the way Netanyahu and his ministers are handling the crisis. Protests were held at the weekend outside the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv. One parent demanded: “We want all of them [the hostages] back with us today. We want you, the Cabinet, the government, to imagine that these are your children.”

Many Israelis have pointed out how Netanyahu’s sons, Yair and Avner, have inexplicably avoided military call-ups during the so-called state of war declared by the Cabinet. Netanyahu’s eldest son Yair (32) has been on an extended holiday in Miami since April this year.

Others are indignant at the seemingly callous attitude towards the families. “They feel like they’re left behind and no one is really caring about them,” said Miki Haimovitz, a former lawmaker. “No one is explaining what’s going on,” he added, as quoted by Associated Press.

Another lawmaker, Ofer Cassif, told the Strategic Culture Foundation that the Netanyahu government is ramping up repressive powers against any form of opposition to its military and security policies.

Cassif says public meetings throughout Israel are being banned for any groups who are calling for an end to the violence and for negotiations to prevail. He says the persecution is particularly sharp against Palestinians living in Israeli territory. Still, all citizens including Jews who are speaking out against war are liable to be charged as “terrorists”.

In a statement, Cassif, a Member of Parliament (Knesset) for the Hadash party said: “Netanyahu and his thugs use the smokescreen of the war to impose a martial law on Israeli citizens, predominantly Palestinian ones: protests are prohibited and can now be answered with live ammunition, workers and students are suspended and dissidents are persecuted for posts on the social network. I plead to the world – supporting the Israeli government is not supporting Israeli people – it is supporting fascism, death and dictatorship. If you wish to help Israeli people in this dire time – support the peace movement, not the warmongers who waged a war against their own people.”

Despite the repression, a groundswell of public opposition is building against Netanyahu and his coalition administration, which comprises extreme Zionists like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Last year, Netanyahu riled mass opposition to what was perceived by the public as a grab for dictatorial powers under the so-called reform of the state’s judiciary. Netanyahu has avoided court prosecution for several corruption cases by extending his time in political office. He has done this by making a pact with extremists who have long wanted to eradicate residual Palestinian territory in Gaza and the West Bank to fulfil a Zionist project of forming “Eretz Israel” (Greater Israel).

When the Hamas killings took place on October 7, many Israelis initially rallied behind Netanyahu and his War Cabinet.

But despite the repressive climate in Israel, many people are now asking questions of Netanyahu and his regime. How was such a security failure possible on October 7? Netanyahu, the wily and slippery character he is, has tried to scapegoat his military team only for them to hit back at him.

In extreme overcompensation for failure, Netanyahu and his fanatical Cabinet are going hard into Gaza to show muscle, regardless of the innocent suffering and mounting war crimes. All too evidently, also of disregard is the fate of Israeli hostages.

The criminal recklessness of Netanyahu and his regime will rebound with a vengeance. Over half of the hostages held by Hamas are foreigners, including American and British citizens.

The death and destruction in Gaza could be stopped immediately if Israel abided by the United Nations’ call for an immediate ceasefire. But, diabolically, the Palestinians, Israelis and indeed the wider region are being held hostage by a psychopathic regime headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Genocidal Onslaught of Gaza, Not Yet Shocking Conscience of the World

By Irwin Jerome

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

Israel’s Zionists in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine at large, continue to indifferently slaughter innocent civilian Palestinian men, women, children and babies as if they are nothing more than hated and despised beasts to be totally eradicated from off of the face of Israel and the Earth.

Yet the mass conscience and consciousness of the world’s humans hasn’t yet become shocked enough to drop everything they’re doing – flocking instead by the hundreds of thousands in America and around the globe to:

–Attend the latest competitive, corporately promoted sports event, while using all their creative human energies to idly argue about who is going to win or loose;

–plan their upcoming fantasy Halloween costumes for yet another anticipated bacchanalian

–Trick-or-Treat night-out-on-the-town; plan for a sumptuous, bountiful Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends, or;

–ready themselves for yet another year’s anticipated imagined fantasy arrival of Santa Claus down the chimney of their gayly-decorated cozy homes .

Meanwhile, in the United States, poor wretched sods, like Robert Card, a U.S. Army Reservist weapons instructor and fired worker at a recycling centre, decided the best action he could take for himself to address the woeful state of the world was to become a mass killer and just recycle 18 innocent Americans, and then recycle himself along with them by committing suicide.

Yet another sad, pathetic, minor punctuation mark to the real 2023 crisis in human affairs underway in Gaza, the West Bank, the whole of Palestine and the world. 

While the only thing the mass total of politicians in its U.S. House of Representatives and United Nations Security Council can think to do to stop the on-going massacre in Gaza is to vote or not vote again, like they repeatedly did in their war against Russia in Ukraine, against any ceasefire or diplomatic negotiations.

Instead, they can only think to do is send thousands more assault weapons so Israel’s radical Zionist Nationalist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, can pass them out to crazed Zionist Jewish settler-colonists to use, willy-nilly, against still more innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians they hate with a passion with no one in authority willing or able to stop them.

While yet another Carrier Battle Group, filled with battle-trained Marines, is sent into the waters around Israel, ready to assist the Zionist Israeli’s in their, once and for all, utter annihilation of their “Palestinian Problem” that has plagued them ever since the Zionist Jews violent mass occupation [in 1948] of the ancient holy lands of Palestine. Isn’t that a nice solution to yet another ugly human disaster in the world?

A Double Human Tragedy: Jews in Warsaw Ghetto 1943 and Palestinians in Gaza Ghetto 2023

With Israel’s clearly blatant. patently genocidal war against the Palestinian peoples arrogantly, grotesquely, unfolding before all of humanity’s eyes, the world clearly is at a critical crossroads in evolution of the homo sapiens species. Either it is fast completely reverting to its earlier very primitive, fascist, might makes right, state of previous centuries, or the human species is now entering into a very difficult birthing process of something that’s screaming to we humans to become more advanced and evolved.

So far, however, its the old male cretin thugs like Biden, Netanyahu and their ilk, and gross propaganda lies and manipulations by their clever wordsmiths, who still rule the roost, because the people still, basically, are too primitive, stupid and unaware to see beyond their own crude, dumb noses.

At any rate, two excellent examples of an always higher feminine consciousness constantly at work that seeks to combat this old male nemesis, are rightly aghast, as we all should be, at what is happening at present in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, who, like many of us, almost can’t believe the grotesqueness of all is actually happening. At Listen to the conversation of two such evolved feminists with one another.

Abby Martin since her formative days as a radical activist at the University of California, Santa Cruz is a genuine Keeper of the Truth, as the old saying goes, who unabashedly speaks truth to power, as does Rania Khalek of Dispatches From the Underclass.

Another fellow humanist who also questions the madness of what we humans are currently doing in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere in the world at large, is Michael Brenner, Professor Emeritus in International Affairs at the University of Pittsburg and a Fellow of the Center of Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/John Hopkins.

Brenner has authored what he calls the Final Scene: “America – its vassal train in tow”, Brenner contends, “is committing moral suicide in Palestine.” Brenner goes on in the Final Scene to say: 

‘The political consequences will be profound, and as enduring as the complete discrediting of the country’s standing as a positive presence in world affairs. Encouragement of, and participation in the murderous Israel assault on Gazans has been accompanied by a torrent of lies and deceptions which discredit anything we shall do or say. The reference points for this harsh judgment are not the mythic image of “the city on the Hill;” the last, best hope of mankind; the indispensable nation for achieving global peace and stability: the Providential people born in a state of Original Virtue destined to lead the world down the path of Enlightenment. None of those idealistic standards. No, we are debased when measured against the prosaic standards of human decency, of responsible statecraft, of a decent respect for the opinions of humankind.”

Brenner further contends:

“Some might rightly say that America has behaved in similarly atrocious ways in the past – and that it always restored its sense of self-respect and effectiveness abroad. Decimation of the native population; the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the wanton killing and destruction in Vietnam, and – more recently – the horrendous consequences of our interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The last two mentioned being highlighted by the razing of Falluja (twice), Mosul and Raqqa that can be seen as the template for what we and the Israelis are now doing in Gaza. The practical difference – as opposed to the moral one – is the unique attention focused on events there. After all, this is the Holy Land for the three Abrahamic religions, the main protagonist is the Jewish state of Israel founded in the wake of the Holocaust, the conflict’s powerful resonance with large communities of co-religionists in Western capitals. It is a Passion Play with rival scripts. Ours will not be the anointed one.

Moreover, it is occurring at a time when the tectonic plates of the political world are shifting, when the old constellations of power and of influence are being successfully challenged, when America has responded to feelings of self-doubt as the ordained global guide and overseer by compulsive, futile displays of muscle flexing. Anxiety and self-doubt masked by false bravado is the hallmark sentiment among the country’s political elites. That is a poor starting point for a reengagement with reality. Americans are too attached to their exalted self-image, too narcissistic – collectively and individually, too lacking in self-awareness, too leaderless to make that wrenching adaptation. Instead, we are about to see an epic act to prove that reality is only what the United States wills it to be: the girding of loins for war on Iran. It will end badly – very badly. Leaving a diminished, aggrieved but unrepentant America.”

The little bells are tinkling. Bow down

They are bringing the sacrament to a dying God

Meanwhile, the carnagebefalling Palestine, Palestinians & the World, grows worse with every passing minute, hour and day:

“Please, if you can hear us, tell the world that we are isolated now in Gaza” (israelpalestinenews.org)

Finally, in closing, what follows is this writer’s own “kick at the can” entitled, “We Humans Continue To Indifferently Massacre the Earth & One Another.”