IS JUDAISM A RACE OR A RELIGION?:
Poised to Strike: Israel prepares for a final push into Gaza—but will it be stymied by criticism from abroad and discontent at home? (Benny Morris, 24 May 2025 , Quillette)
This week, the Israel Air Force (IAF) continued to hunt, bomb, and rocket the Hamas terrorist squads hiding among Gaza’s civilians, killing more women and children in the process—so far, according to Hamas figures, some 30,000 Palestinian women and children have died since October 2023. Meanwhile, Israel’s international position dramatically worsened. EU member states and Canada have imposed minor sanctions against the Jewish state and threaten worse. Observers in Jerusalem have warned that Israel faces an international relations “tsunami.” In Washington, Israel’s staunchest ally, President Donald Trump’s aides, speaking anonymously, told The Washington Post that a break with Israel is likely if it does not end its war-making in the Gaza Strip. But Trump himself has remained mum—though he previously voiced his agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu that the war must end with Hamas’s destruction. According to recent reports, Trump’s new Arabian Gulf allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—are pressing Washington to end the Gaza War.
Palestinian suffering—and Muslim pressures within Western societies and from the Arab capitals—are now beginning to have an impact beyond America’s Ivy League campuses. Western public opinion and European governments are driven by daily TV clips from Gaza showing dead and dying women and children—though never dead and dying combat-age males. They are also influenced by worsening humanitarian conditions on the ground—Trump has even spoken hyperbolically of “a lot of people starving.” And finally they are alarmed at the prospect of a massive new push against Hamas by Israeli ground forces, designed, Netanyahu announced on 21 May, to end in open-ended Israeli rule over the whole Strip, together with the “voluntary” transfer of at least some of its population out of Gaza, as Trump proposed a few weeks ago.