Giulio Meotti writes at Israel National News:

That the liberal conscience of the West remains indifferent to the images of Israeli Jews freed from the captivity of Islamic terrorists is aberrant and alarming. It seems that not even the crimes that echo the darkest moments of the 20th century are enough to break the cultural frivolity and moral narcissism of our times.

Hamas placed an hourglass on the stage in Gaza with the photos of the hostage Matan Zangauker and his mother Einav, under the caption: “Time is running out.”

The mothers of hostages are also psychologically tortured. “Time is running out” is the slogan of the hostages’ families forum. Islamic fundamentalists are very skilled readers of the Western psyche.

Romi Gonen only started eating three weeks after she was released by Hamas, her mother, Meirav, said. One of the first things she noticed about her daughter when she returned from 471 days in captivity was “her long, sticking out fingers”.

The hostages were held in extremely unsanitary conditions, full of lice, bedbugs, mold and fungi.

“The Jews are starving us,” Hamas shouted, winning over half of the West, when in reality Hamas was starving the Jews. Gaza is a ghetto, the Western idiots said.

The truth is that under Gaza there is a concentration camp.

For over a year, the entire international community danced to the tune of propaganda about the “famine” in Gaza. Then Hamas showed what they wanted the world to see: evidence of their cruelty, worn on the faces and bodies of those they have tormented since October 7.

The Red Cross has never even pretended to care about the fate of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. When the mother of one of the hostages begged the Red Cross to try to deliver the medicine her daughter needed every day, Red Cross officials scolded her: “Think about the Palestinian side.”

Meanwhile, three hostages arrived from Gaza with high jutting cheekbones, sunken eyes, prominent collarbones, muscle wasting: where is the scandal?

Or Levy was kept in tunnels almost all the time, was allowed to shower only every few months, was barefoot for 491 days and wore shoes for the first time on the day of his release.

The hostages were subjected to severe torture during their captivity, both physical and psychological. They were strangled, tied up, gagged with cloth until they suffocated, hung upside down and burned with a hot object. One of the hostages revealed that he had been shackled. “I was handcuffed in a dark tunnel, without air or light. I could not walk or stand, only before my release did my captors remove the shackles, forcing me to learn to walk again.”

Sagui Dekel-Chen, who was kidnapped while fighting terrorist invaders with his kibbutz security team on October 7, 2023, was held in a Gaza hospital for the first few weeks of his captivity. He was “tortured during interrogation” by the terrorists and has scars on his body to prove it.

The captors ate in front of the hostages and denied them food, and sometimes forced the hostages to watch them choosing who would eat and who would not.

Hamas showed kidnapped Israeli soldiers videos of their fellow prisoners being tortured.

Daniella Gilboa’s father says: “Some days, they were fed animal feed: inedible scraps of dirty vegetables and a kind of hard flour.”

I don’t think it’s just Hamas that is a threat to Western civilization. It’s the entire Palestinian Arab cause, as it has been for half a century.

Gadi Mozes, who turned eighty in Hamas hands and was released three weeks ago, was held alone for the entire 482 days he was held by the terrorists.

Keith Siegel recalled being dragged 33 times through tunnels and dark buildings. Among Keith’s hiding places was a family home with a Gazan family and children, but where he was locked in a room.

Israeli News 12 testimony from a recently released female hostage: “She was held captive by a married father with multiple wives. He was a senior commander in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was extremely abusive, beyond words. He turned her into a house slave.”

Hamas not only beat and caged Yarden Bibas, but also tortured him by beating him and giving him false updates on the fate of his family, his wife and two children.

Adam Berger said his daughter, Agam, witnessed physical abuse while in captivity. “Sometimes they tortured other female hostages in front of her eyes.”

Many were given “cloths soaked in cold water” to wash themselves.

Daniella Gilboa returned with a bullet still in her leg.

Army spokesman Daniel Hagari climbed into the hole where Hersh Goldberg Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Ori Danino, Almog Sarusi, Alex Lobanov were detained and killed in cold blood. From a children’s room decorated with Mickey Mouse, he descended into a hole where it is impossible to stand: bottles of urine and a bucket for toilets, bottles of water for drinking and washing, women’s clothes on the floor, a Koran, the blood of six young people. Hagari said that the prisoners were reduced to a minimal weight, about thirty kilos – like in Auschwitz.

Many children released after two months had had their legs branded with motorcycle exhaust pipes.

A freed Thai worker says that the Israeli hostages he was held prisoner with were savagely beaten with electric cables.

Two teenagers were forced to perform sexual acts on each other. Women were sexually abused and forced to undress in front of everyone, tied to the bed, threatened, pulled by the hair. Whipped. This is contained in the report of the Israeli Ministry of Health released in December.

But our progressives do not seem very shaken by the disturbing similarities with the events that shook pre-war Europe.

They are hereby warned: the new Hitler Islamonazis have promised all the “infidels” the paradise in the shadow of the sword.

The Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, is to address a joint session of Congress next week. Congress is sympathetic to Israel. President Obama is not. He is to address the Arab world before the world hears what Netanyahu has to say.

Caroline Glick anticipates what will be said and done:

Obama will praise the populist movements that have risen up against Arab tyrannies and embrace them as the model for the future. As for Israel, the report claimed that the Obama administration is still trying to decide whether the time is right to put the screws on Israel once more. …

The Netanyahu government and Congress are calling for a US aid cutoff to the Palestinian Authority. With Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization, now partnering with Fatah in governing the PA, it is illegal for the US government to continue to have anything to do with the PA. Both the Netanyahu government and senior members of the House and Senate are arguing forcefully that there is no way for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians now, and that the US must abandon its efforts to force the sides to sign an agreement.

The Israeli and congressional arguments are certainly compelling. But the signals emanating from the White House and its allied media indicate that Obama is ready to plough forward in spite of them. With the new international security credibility he earned by overseeing the successful assassination of Osama bin Laden, Obama apparently believes that he can withstand congressional pressure and make the case for demanding that Israel surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Hamas and its partners in Fatah.

Obama seems to be still in pursuit of a “two-state solution” negotiated between Israel and — some Palestinian representatives. Up until recently Israel’s negotiating opposite was supposed to be Abu Abbas, powerless head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) which sort of governs the West Bank. Hamas, governing Gaza, was ostensibly not supported by the US or any Western Power because it was designated a terrorist organization. Abu Abbas also represents a terrorist organization – Fatah – but that is politely overlooked. In fact, Hamas’s terrorism is overlooked in practice: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directs lots of lovely lolly its way – to use for “humanitarian” purposes of course, not terrorism! (Did no one ever tell her that money is fungible?)

Now the PA and Hamas – which have a record of killing each other’s personnel – have cozied up together in a partnership to declare a Palestinian state later this year. Will Obama and his people – such as Hillary Clinton, and Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice – pretend that Hamas is suddenly respectable enough to deal with?

Sarah Honig, a Jerusalem Post writer always worth reading, sees as self-deluding those Israelis who still think a negotiated “two-state solution” to the Palestinian-Israel conflict is possible.

Unflaggingly they peddle tattered, intrinsically disorienting delirium. Incredibly they never seem to tire of pulling the wool over their own and our eyes. They present themselves as possessors of singular insight, as harbingers of a greater truth and as wise beyond our plebeian grasp.

They won’t let go of the grand delusion that underlies their self-professed wisdom and purported truth. Their two-state delusion was certainly sweet – simplistically and seductively so. It claimed that all conflicts can be amicably and fairly settled by just dividing up whatever is contested. It touted idealistic goodwill and seemed compellingly rational. But it was from the start delusionary.

By all empirical yardsticks, that delusion has finally and undeniably crumbled into grimy dust. The illusion of a reasonable accommodation with genocidal foes – which without fail anyhow failed the test of coolheaded analysis – ignobly disintegrated when Ramallah’s Fatah and Gaza’s Hamas banded back together, at least pro forma, for the sake of expediency.

Whatever their motives and whatever the long-range plans of the old-new partners, their joint venture should persuade even the most diehard of our peaceniks that the time has come to finally wise up and lose the illusion.

The prevalent illusion thus far was that we face two dissimilar Palestinian entities – negotiation- espousing Ramallah and Gaza, whose unaltered goal is Israel’s annihilation. Now that the pair has retied the knot, their deception has been exposed. That should mean that the illusion has been shattered irrefutably once and for all.

In reality the only distinction between the two always was tactical. Ramallah excels at propaganda warfare, while Gaza fires rockets. Ramallah is funded by the Quartet, while Gaza is underpinned by Damascus and Tehran. Both wish to obliterate Israel, but Ramallah is more cunning and Gaza more candidly confrontational.

Neither Ramallah nor Gaza was ever a reliable or viable peace partner. Only our indomitable wishful thinking and obsessive illusion kept conjuring up interlocutors on whom we could unload slices of homeland, directly atop the soft underbelly of our densest population centers.

Gaza’s Hamas thumbs its nose at us and glorifies the IslamoNazism of infamous Second World War-criminal Haj Amin al-Husseini, who from his Berlin residence avidly abetted Hitler’s Final Solution, recruited Muslims to the SS and actively foiled the rescue even of several thousand Jewish children.

Conversely, in his Moscow Friendship University PhD treatise, Fatah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas attempted to dwarf the Holocaust’s proportions drastically, while simultaneously accusing Zionists of colluding in Holocaust perpetration – i.e., it didn’t happen, but Israel is guilty. This history-warping dissertation is compulsory study material in his fiefdom’s schools.

Abbas’s Fatahland is nothing but a more outwardly decorous version of Hamastan. All the rest is desperate illusion. …

Most members of the dysfunctional family of nations indeed advocate the two-state solution, but we alone are delusional. All the others are stimulated by cynical vested interests, which impair our self-preservation prospects. In other words, other states don’t push us into the two-state abyss for our own good. Quite the contrary.

In our post, Now is the time for Israel to define its borders, March 10, 2011, we did not say where we think the borders should be drawn, only that Israel should define them before the Hamas-Fatah terrorists who dictate Palestinian policy try declaring a Palestinian state as they say they will.

We see plainly enough, however, that no negotiated two-state solution is possible, because Palestinian leaders do not and never have wanted it. They rejected every offer of a Palestinian state in the past because it would mean co-existing with Israel, and the present leaders have no intention of establishing a Palestinian state that would co-exist with Israel in the future.

Their solution is one state: Palestine.

The Israeli solution ought to be one state: Israel – from the Golan to the Red, from the Jordan to the Med.

Israel would continue to have Arab Israeli citizens. The Palestinians who do not want to live in Israel should be welcomed into the Palestinian state that already exists, and has existed longer than Israel: Jordan.

Jordan was given illegally to the Arabs (as the Emirate of Transjordan); cut out of mandated territory reserved, by legally binding instruments, for the Jews. But since it exists, it should be recognized as the Palestinian state that it is. The British foisted Hashemite rulers on to its mostly Palestinian Arab population, to “reward” the Hashemites for feebly supporting Britain in the First World War, having been prodded every inch of the short way by that notorious charlatan – and abiding hero to the British Foreign Office –  T.E. Lawrence. There are Palestinian voices calling for the Palestinian majority in Jordan to overthrow the dictatorial monarchy and establish a democratic republic. A Republic of Palestine in Jordan would be home to all Palestinian refugees. It might have normal diplomatic and trade relations with Israel, and even allow some Jews to live in it.

But we must not delude ourselves that the Western powers are likely to support the idea. Their policy is to propitiate the Arab states and Islam, and the Arabs states and Islam want the obliteration of Israel.