I hate it when my post title and subtitle are both questions.  However, when it comes to the situation in Israel, while it's obvious what's happening there, it's a little harder to divine the bigger mean.  What's happening is that Hamas has fired over 1,000 rockets into Israel's populous Western seaboard, while Arabs are on a rampage in the Tel Aviv suburb of Lod.  The Israeli military has responded with hundreds of targeted strikes.

As matters stand, this seems to have gone from terrorism to open war, but that depends on who's defining things.  Also, if this is a war, will it last for a while or be resolved quickly with a clear outcome?

As to why it started, aside from the Ramadan angle, a good case is that the Arabs have been emboldened by Biden's hostility to Israel and his pro-Palestinian tilt, along with his manifestly weak leadership.  I can only hope that my Zionist friends who voted for Biden have the decency to feel guilty. 

The latest report from the Times of Israel describes escalating military action from both Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF):

Hamas launched a massive barrage of rocket fire on southern and central Israel in the early hours of Wednesday morning, killing a man and his daughter and sending hundreds of thousands of people, from Tel Aviv to Beersheba, fleeing to bomb shelters.

The large-scale fusillade of rockets was apparently launched in response to the Israel Defense Forces destroying a building in Gaza and killing two senior Hamas operatives in a targeted strike.

According to the IDF, over 1,050 rockets and mortar shells have been fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israel since the outbreak of fighting on Monday evening, with 200 failing to clear the border and landing inside the enclave. IDF Spokesperson Hidai Zilberman said the Iron Dome air defense system had an interception rate between 85 and 90 percent of rockets heading toward populated areas.

In response, the IDF launched strikes on upwards of 500 targets in the Gaza Strip, aimed at Hamas personnel, weaponry and infrastructure, Zilberman said.

Because Facebook won't let me quit (and I've tried), I still follow several Israeli and Israel-supporting accounts on Facebook.  These are some of the images from Israel as the indiscriminate rocket barrage rains down on civilians:

As you look at the following post, keep in mind that aiming random rocket fire into Tel Aviv is the same as firing rockets into New York or Los Angeles.  It's an attack on civilians in a major metropolitan area:

Even though Israelis have lived under the threat of genocide since 1948, making them an extraordinarily tough people, when your babies are at risk, fear is inescapable:

This map gives you a sense of the vast scope of the rocket attack.  Again, to put it in context, imagine China raining rockets on the entire Eastern seaboard in America:

Meanwhile, on the ground, the Arabs have gone on a rampage, and armed Jewish defenders are taking a stand, although they appear not to have fired.  As I noted above, Lod is a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel's largest city, and it's home to the international airport.  Again, for an equivalent sense, it's as if the illegal aliens in Los Angeles suddenly started an uprising around Los Angeles International Airport, which is on the Western edge of Los Angeles.  Or it's Kenosha, except BLM is truly genocidally inclined:

Lod Mayor Yair Revivo says he's asked the prime minister to declare a state of emergency in the Jewish-Arab city in central Israel. He calls for the military to be deployed in the city, saying "this is too big for police."

"This is Kristallnacht in Lod," he says, in reference to the Nazi pogrom against German Jews in 1938.

[snip]

"All of Israel should know, this is a complete loss of control… This is unthinkable. Synagogues are being burned. Hundreds of cars set alight. Hundreds of Arab thugs are roaming the streets… Civil war has erupted in Lod… The Orthodox-nationalist community here has guns. I'm imploring them to go back home but they understandably want to protect their homes. Petrol bombs are being thrown into [Jewish] homes. The situation is incendiary."

My question was, do I think this is an open war?  My answer is currently "yes."  So that means the real question is whether Israel will be able to gain control quickly enough to stop it or whether we are about to witness a long war fought between a nation that is loath to kill its enemy and a Mafia territory that is desperate to slaughter its enemies.  And as to that, I have no answer.

I'll close with this post from Elisha Wiesel, son of Elie Wiesel.  It explains what the Israelis defend in the land they have occupied continuously for over three thousand years, making them the true indigenous people.  In contrast, the Arabs in the region mostly arrived within the last 150 years.  They are the genocidal colonizers.

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