Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Thursday that the unfolding Gaza electricity crisis could be resolved and that the Palestinian enclave’s Hamas rulers were using the situation to distract Gazans from the failures of its leadership.
He also said that if terror groups in the Strip would disarm, Israel would help rehabilitate Gaza following a decade of Hamas rule and three wars since 2008.
In an interview with the Arabic-language website, Al-Monsk, run by the Israeli Defense Ministry’s civil administration, the defense minister said Israel was not a party in the escalating power spat between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority under president Mahmoud Abbas, which recently requested that Israel reduce its electricity supply to Gaza, ostensibly over unpaid bills.
Abbas is also seeking to ramp up pressure on Hamas, his Fatah party’s bitter rival which seized Gaza in a bloody coup from Abbas loyalists in a dispute over parliamentary elections swept by the Islamist movement the previous year.
The Israeli security cabinet decided Sunday night that it would heed the request and cut the daily amount of power it supplies to the Gaza Strip by between 45 and 60 minutes at the behest of Abbas. Gazans currently receive only three to four hours of electricity a day, delivered from the territory’s own power station and others in Israel and Egypt.
Liberman said Thursday that Israel was a mere “supplier of electricity and was prepared to supply electricity” if the Palestinians paid for it. “This is an [internal] Palestinian crisis; those who need to pay for electricity are the leaders of Hamas, of the Palestinian Authority — we are not a party in this,” he said.
He also sharply criticized Hamas’s rule in the Palestinian enclave, calling it a “decade of suffering” and accusing the terror group of collecting some NIS 100 million in taxes from Gazans monhly and using it for “building its terror infrastructure, tunnels and rockets” instead of investing in education and medical care.
He urged Gazans to look at the situation in the PA-ruled West Bank and compare the living conditions.
Liberman also accused Hamas of using the electricity crisis to redirect the “rage” of Gazans toward another target.
Hamas is “trying to distract from its failures and redirect them toward Israel,” he said, adding that “Israel would be prapared to “build industrial zones, create jobs, and be a partner in building power plants but the most basic condition is disarmamnent.”
The Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and, to a lesser extent, the Egyptian government are locked in a game of chicken with Hamas, which has brought along the two million unfortunate residents of the Gaza Strip for the ride. This death race is being fueled by a combination of internal Palestinian spats, various Israeli policies, military changes on the ground, and a diplomatic siege in the Gulf. A catastrophic collision seems increasingly likely.
Yet, speaking to the Knesset on Monday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman indicated that he was unperturbed, noting that the past year was the quietest on the Gaza border since 1967 and that while there have been protests recently along the security fence, they have not been made up of huge, organic crowds but of “Hamas operatives that were bused there.”
He also called for a strategy toward Hamas and Gaza in which Israel “does not blink and does not deviate.”
In light of developments in recent months, the terrorist group is, in many ways, in dire straits.
The people it controls in the Gaza Strip are growing sick — some of them literally — of the conditions in the coastal enclave, where electricity is intermittent and raw sewage pollutes the surrounding sea because there’s no power for its water treatment facility.
Meanwhile, work is poised to begin in the coming weeks on an Israeli subterranean border barrier that is meant to cripple Hamas’s ability to send gunmen into the country through underground tunnels, one of the terror group’s main weapons.
And one of Hamas’s main benefactors, Qatar, is in the midst of its own crisis, and thus unlikely to step in and help in the near future. Its neighbor Saudi Arabia and many former allies cut ties with the small, oil-rich nation last week for a number of reasons, including its support for terrorist groups, among them Hamas.
But while all seems to be falling apart for Hamas, the group is in top military shape, having completely rebuilt its arsenal and infrastructure in the three years since its 2014 war with Israel, according to Israeli estimates.
Its ranks are said to have swelled to 27,000 fighters, nearly a tenth of them commandos. And the group is also believed to have invested heavily in both naval and aerial capabilities since the last Gaza conflict.
Still, Amos Gilad, a long-time senior official in the Defense Ministry, said on Wednesday he was convinced that Israel has sufficiently deterred Hamas from seeking a renewed round of conflict.
One gets the idea that Vladimir Putin really enjoys watching Democrats embarrass themselves, and their country, via their asinine witch hunt. Partly, that’s because he’s no friend of the United States, and (like the Dems) he will do - or applaud - pretty much anything that weakens our President. However, you also get the sense that he’s genuinely enjoying the meltdown. The formerly austere Russian President has turned out to be quite the wisecracker lately.
First, he ripped Democrats for being “shameless losers.”
“Outstanding figures in American history from the ranks of the Democratic Party would likely be turning in their graves. Roosevelt certainly would be. They (the Democrats) are losing on all fronts and looking elsewhere for things to blame. In my view this, how shall I say it, degrades their own dignity. You have to know how to lose with dignit
Continuing his barrage against the Democratic Party, Putin said it is “losing on all fronts” and that it is wrongly trying to blame President-elect Donald Trump’s victory on external factors. “You need to learn how to lose gracefully,” he said.
He added that “losers always look for someone to blame, but they should first of all look at themselves.
Putin then said that “the most important thing is what was revealed. It’s not like people invented this information - what they reported is true. It showed how the Democratic Party manipulated the system against Bernie Sanders. Instead of apologizing, they began to look for people to blame.”
More recently, we saw him laughing at the media’s obsession with Jared Kushner and “Russiagate.” As he told Megyn Kelly:
“If it had been important, the minister would have reported it to me. There wasn’t anything to talk about. There wasn’t a discussion about sanctions or anything else. For me, this is just amazing. You create a sensation out of nothing, and out of this sensation, you turn it into a weapon of war against the current president. Well, this is, you know, you’re just, you people are so creative over there. Good job. Your lives must be boring.”
Now, he’s mocking fired FBI director James Comey - by offering him Snowden-esque asylum if he’s persecuted over those infamous leaked memos.
Speaking in his annual question and answer session in Moscow, the Russian President said it was “very strange” that the FBI official had leaked details of conversations with Donald Trump, and likened his actions to those of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“If there is some kind of persecution, we would be ready to offer political asylum to Mr Comey if he is persecuted in the US”, Mr Putin told a live audience.
Comparing Mr Comey to Mr Snowden, he said the former FBI director’s decision to leak details of his conversations with Mr Trump to the media had placed him in a vulnerable position and meant he had behaved more like an activist than an FBI chief.
A day after the attempt to decimate the GOP congressional delegation, we have yet to hear a word about the close resemblance between the behavior of the American left and the tactics of the Islamic jihadis.
When we turn to the American left, what do we find? A group of opinion leaders (Colbert, Griffin, Whedon, Kaine, Lynch), all fanatical adherents of a pseudo-religion, propagandizing and encouraging resistance to a subhuman enemy, the "deplorables," and their political representatives. The means at their disposal consist not only of the internet, but the American media and entertainment spheres as a whole. The network consists of millions of disconnected misfits seething with hatred and frustration. The propaganda includes targets, methods, and repeated suggestions of violence up to and including murder. All that's lacking is The Call of Global Antifa, but that may well be coming.
And lo and behold, now we have terror attacks. How could that possibly have happened?
They have been neither as successful nor as shocking as those of the Islamists, which is somehow not surprising. Both of them so far – Jeremy Joseph Christian in Portland and James T. Hodgkinson in Alexandria – were rooted in the same source: the campaign of the avuncular, golly-gee socialist Bernie Sanders. (The fact that Christians chose to attack Muslims shouldn't detain us – the type who make up the antifa crowd are unbalanced at best, and many of them are bound to strike out at whatever crosses their path.)
The parallels are striking. Could it simply be coincidence? Of course it could. Fanaticism of any kind tends to dictate behavior, so we shouldn't be surprised to find left-wing extremists resembling Islamic extremists. But we also need to keep in mind Goldfinger's dictum: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action.
There have been two antifa terror strikes so far. We await the third with interest.
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