I have never felt more keenly the contrast between my ability to articulate grand conceptual schemata and my utter powerlessness to change the world in any but the smallest and least important fashion. I sit here safely in my chair, confined by my Parkinson’s, and watch on television as Israel responds to a brutal and sadistic attack by killing more than 8000 Palestinians as it seeks to find and kill those who perpetrated the original attack.
I know next to nothing about the Mideast. From this
distance, it appears that Hamas has deliberately and soullessly provoked Israel
in order to frustrate a prospective rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and
Israel.
Every time I returned to my meditations on Marx, the world
interrupts me with another horror. And I do not even have the consolations of religion.
84 comments:
Even if you’re right, “that Hamas has deliberately and soullessly provoked Israel in order to frustrate a prospective rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel,” doesn’t it also follow that Hamas read Israel aright—they got it, that the Israeli response would be so disproportionally grotesque, including not just the massive bombing but the looming starvation and thirst it is imposing on a basically helpless population, that it would strike horror in a very great many people, including a great many Jews, and is spreading political disturbances in many places. And not just in the Middle East. (I’m thinking here of reports in the Guardian that the sizeable Arab population in Michigan, a swing state, is seemingly rejecting Biden. Similarly, in the UK, there is increasing disarray within the Labour Party which a few weeks ago imagined it was waltzing to a victory in the next General Election.) In other words, what did they know about the state of Israel that so many others seem to have been blissfully unaware of?
some references:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/27/michigan-arab-american-voters-biden-israel
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/us/michigan-democrats-biden-palestinian.html
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-islamophobia-muslim-voters-israel-palestine-starmer/
https://labourlist.org/2023/10/israel-palestine-hamas-conflict-keir-starmer-stance-backlash/
Netanyahu just addressed Israel, Gaza dalenda est, and the Chief of Staff is addressing the nation.
Let the invasion and the 'idealistic' antisemites have their day
It's incredible how thanks to Netanyahu, Israel has gone from victim to perpetrator in just three short weeks.
It's incredible how Biden, a politician for whom I and most people whom I know had some vague sympathies, due to the fact that he's "the alternative" to Trump has lost all my sympathies and that of most everyone whom I know due to his more or less unconditional support for Israel's slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the U.S. voting against or vetoing all UN resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire.
The folks in my online Chilean group speak of Israeli genocide in Gaza and while I would not call it "genocide", I hear where they're coming from.
I'm sure that within 10 minutes I'll receive an abusive email from Marc Susselman calling me an "anti-semite" or a "self-hating Jew,", but I don't give a fuck and anyway, the Jews I identify with are people like Noam Chomsky and Gideon Levy, not the monsters who
are massacring women and children in Gaza.
Sure, I've always known that Hamas were monsters, but it's taken me 77 years to realize that the IDF is one too.
Anon, I believe it's "delenda est." I see a settler in the West Bank just murdered a local who was only picking olives. I also see that Hamas and folks from Iran just took a meeting in Moscow so there's that. Saw the Bibi, et al presser - corrupt and stupid people rode a tiger and got played.
But Israel does have nuclear weapons.
The journalist Jonathan Cook has a new speculative piece on why the most recent bombing lacks any sense of proportionality and seems 'designed' to render Gaza uninhabitable. I'd be interested in reading what people who are considerably more knowledgeable than I am about the situation (at the very least that would be 10s of millions) think about this: https://www.declassifieduk.org/israels-long-held-plan-to-drive-gazas-people-into-sinai-is-now-within-reach/?fbclid=IwAR240cJp7gijLcvGb8w6PkXQsYyYDFwvvQO3oCDDwyaoNcCAzG3QzXO85wY
John Rapko,
I've heard the same theory from other sources.
Whatever the validity of Jonathan Cook’s account—and by the way, I generally find him an interesting commentator—my guess would be that there is now so much uncontained, and perhaps uncontainable, rage and hatred on so many sides that any plans and policies, no matter where they originate or what they are intended to produce, will all be dead in the water for quite some time to come. At this point, given all that rage and hatred—let’s not talk about whether or not it is warranted on anyone’s part—I am tending towards thinking that a wider conflict is more likely than not. And it too will be horrific.
[Confession: I’m the Anonymous who contributed the first and second responses on this thread, but not the third. I was even lazier than usual, or perhaps distressed.]
s.w., my sense is that Biden, etc, tried to talk Bibi off the cliff and failed. UN resolutions are performative posturing while this is real.
"In public, President Biden and his top officials have indicated support for a planned ground offensive if Israel concludes that that is its best move, while adding that they are asking “tough questions” about the idea. The private advice is a significant departure from the administration’s public posture, and it is a distinct shift from the administration’s position in the days immediately after the Hamas attack inside Israel."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/27/us-urging-israel-rethinkg-gaza-ground-invasion/
Both Hamas and Bibi's coalition see Palestinians as cannon fodder. A good rule of thumb is that a strong emotional reaction usually means someone is trying to play me.
Hamas offers to free the hostages in exchange for all the Palestinian political prisoners held in Israel. Let's see if Netanyahu really cares about the hostages or just is looking for a pretext to destroy Gaza. From the Guardian
Hamas demands Israel free all Palestinian prisoners in exchange for hostages
Hamas’s armed wing has announced that it is ready to release hostages captured during the October 7 attacks in return for all Palestinian prisoners currently held in Israeli prisons.
“The price to pay for the large number of enemy hostages in our hands is to empty the [Israeli] prisons of all Palestinian prisoners,” Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida said in a statement broadcast by the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa television channel, Agence France-Presse reports.
“If the enemy wants to close this file of detainees in one go, we are ready for it. If it wants to do it step-by-step, we are ready for that too,” he added.
The Israeli reports that some 229 hostages are currently being held in Gaza.
I haven't read all the comments as I've spent too much time already in front of a screen today but I'd like to briefly address Anonymous's first comment.
It was predictable that the Israeli response to an attack of the sort that occurred on Oct. 7 would be a determination to destroy the military wing of Hamas. And it was further predictable that achieving this in the circumstances of Gaza, with a dense population and Hamas not really separating its military infrastructure from civilians, would be a response that would cause a lot of civilian casualties and impose a lot of hardship on the civilian population. (N.b. "predictable" does not mean "justifiable") It would be asking a lot of any govt to exercise far-sightedness at such a moment and reach for a different response, although that would have been the better course, I think.
So the answer to your question: "what did they [i.e., Hamas] know about the state of Israel that so many others seem to have been blissfully unaware of?" is: nothing. Hamas had no special insight here. Hamas staged an attack that it knew would elicit this kind of response, because 80 to 90 percent of the world's governments, when faced w this kind of attack, would respond in the same way. Some govts might have been more open to a humanitarian pause than the Israeli govt, but the broad outline of the response would be the same. Which is unfortunate, because in the long run a different kind of response, one more measured, wd be in the best interests of everyone in the region. But it wd take a truly exceptional set of political leaders, which Israel does not have right now and has not had for quite a while (if ever), to take that path.
P.s.
Obvs in the above I'm using the verb "staged" to mean "carried out" or "executed".
I’m sorry, LFC, but I just don’t accept that every government would respond with the level of unconstrained brutality that the Israelis have responded. To be sure, it doesn’t stand alone in that regard. In fact, I have to say that I take it to be the usual American response to injury: think Iraq and Afghanistan as responses to 9/11. Sociocide in Iraq; genocide in Gaza. I imagine others will come up with other examples.
That aside, as I recall what I wrote, I thought I was quite clear that Hamas likely foresaw the israeli response and that it would be so repugnantly outrageous as to quickly revise a widespread perception of the Israelis as victims to the Palestinians being (as they have been for so long) the victims, and that it would disrupt in a great many ways the political status quo ante, both internationally and in some places domestically. A Rubicon moment, one might say.
In short, I see you adding nothing new to what I wrote. Though maybe I should see you as rather soft soaping the points I was trying to make.
I've heard that the IDF wants to encircle the City of Gaza so they can renegotiate a release of hostages. To me it doesn't sound like an expedient plan but one more of necessity.
This plan raises some questions like:
(1) How do you stop Hamas from using the underground tunnel network system to escape from the City of Gaza with the said hostages?
(2) If the IDF doesn't know exactly who are the hostages how do you stop Hamas from lying and saying they have handed over all of the hostages?
& (3) How can Israel's government save face before its constituents after allowing Hamas rapists and baby-killers go free in an exchange for hostages?
[Especially since Hamas will most likely have the better end of the deal since they are responsible to no one & Israel is responsible not only to Israeli's but also the United States & a great deal of the International Community?]
"Let's see if Netanyahu really cares about the hostages or just is looking for a pretext to destroy Gaza."
I doubt he wants to destroy Gaza qua Gaza as opposed to needing to destroy Hamas and too bad if Hamas has situated itself in Gaza in a way that makes a lot of destruction and carnage necessary. Better leadership would do the hostages first and then do clean up but being rash and stupid kind of goes with being on the Right. BTW, tunnels like the ones we see on the news need mechanical ventilation - that sort of writes itself. After all the above ground destruction perhaps it would be best to bring in some impact crushers and use the resulting product to make some flowable fill and pour it in the tunnels.
My basic point was that if Israel had more far-sighted political leadership it would have adopted a different response, but it doesn't have that leadership. And the fact that it doesn't was obvious before Oct. 7. So it is unsurprising that Israel has responded to Hamas' brutality with its own brutal response.
As to whether this will upset or reverse alignments elsewhere, that remains to be seen. Trump was very close to Netanyahu in terms of policy etc., so voters in Michigan upset w Biden's approach to this conflict and the Mideast generally will not do any better to vote for Trump.
I don't think I was soft- soaping anything.
Two things, LFC.
First, has it been on the cards for Israel to have any other sort of government than the one it has? I.e., one that could never seem to "be soft" on the Palestinian question? So I don't think it's entirely fair to see the nature of Israel's government as only a right-wing Israeli problem.
Second, wrt Michigan, from the statements of Arab Michigan voters I've read, it seems to me you're not taking into account the rage factor. It may well be so that Trump would offer them nothing better vis-a-vis Israel/Palestine and he would surely offer them a whole lot worse on their own domestic concerns, but as I think I claimed, we're in emotional territory that will occasion problematical outcomes. Still, Biden and his minions have all but wrapped themselves in the Israeli flag and some people are going to hold them responsible for what happens in Gaza (and beyond). Were Biden otherwise very popular, it might not matter that much?
I have good news for you Professor- you can still get religion if you want to. Never too late to embrace God I guess. Being marginally to hardly religious myself, I doubt you will find much consolation. But it might be worth a try. You could always just hope. And hope is perhaps some type of consolation. It works for me somewhat, sometimes.
I don't think the attack by Hamas was so instrumental. I think of it as born of relentless indignity, decades of abuse and suffering...of bearing the brunt of ethic cleansing.
Norman Finkelstein, in an effort to better judge the attack, sought to find the reaction among abolitionists to the Nate Turner rebellion of 1831, a rebellion that ended in the murder of about 60 whites, women and children included.
This from William Loyd Garrison in The Liberator:
Two years later in July 1838, Garrison took up this same point. In a printed speech he delivered on the Fourth of July for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, he posed the question, “Was he [Nat Turner] a patriot or a monster?” He argues that had Turner been successful, he would be remembered as we remember Washington, Lafayette, Hancock, and Warren. During the American Revolution, “‘Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,’ was our revolutionary motto. We acted upon that motto—what more did Nat Turner?” (Liberator, July 13, 1838)
Finkelstein, who is probably the foremost expert on the actual conditions in Gaza, asks (from my memory of his statement) "Western media regularly point out that Israel has a right to defend itself. But the media never ask, do the people of Gaza, living in an open air concentration camp, have the right to break out?"
I think the question regarding Nat Turner's uprising is, don't enslaved people have the right to resist violently? What about people illegally and brutally occupied and blockaded, and regularly bombed? The UN says they do.
The issue in 1831 was not the merit of Nat Turner's rebellion. The issue was slavery. Today, the issue is not the merit of the Hamas resistance, the issue is apartheid.
Finally, I disagree that what Israel is doing is focused on killing those who perpetrated the attack. As members of the Israeli government have declared, they do not distinguish between Gazans and Hamas. This has been made horribly clear.
Also, for those seeking a broader, more balanced, vew of the crisis, go to youtube and type in. al jazeera live tv news english
Jerry,
I admire Norman Finkelstein and follow his work, but this time he goes too far.
First of all, the people in Gaza are not slaves. They live in miserable conditions, but it's worse to be a slave.
Shortly after this situation began, I spoke of the two groups which carried out armed resistance against the Pinochet dictatorship. Neither of them ever killed or harmed civilians. There are certain elite clubs in Santiago where if a resistance group had begun to kill people there at random (sparing the service workers which Hamas, by the way, did not do since they killed workers from the Phillippines), they would have killed only
Pinochet supporters. Still, they only targeted those in uniform.
Hamas did not do that and in fact, they killed some Israeli pacifists and peace activists in the kibbutzim.
One of the many horrible facts of this situation is that neither Hamas nor Netanyahu's gang are the "good guys". I for one cannot justify either.
The Miserable Conditions, according to Finkelstein:
Now, if you...try to come up with a comprehensive picture, it ...hovers between two images: ...UK’s conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's [who] described Gaza as an open-air prison...[and that of] Baruch Kimmerling, the eminent Hebrew University sociologist who described Gaza as the largest concentration camp ever....the other element is the periodic massacres Israel launches on Gaza...there are so many. I’ll limit myself to two of the massacres...First is Operation Cast Lead which [according to] Amnesty: “The 22 days of death and destruction.” ...Israel killed about 1,400 Palestinians, of whom 350 were children. It flattened about 6,000 homes and destroyed all of the vital infrastructure in Gaza: the cement factories, the chicken factories. ...Then, fast-forwarding past several massacres, one was the massacre in the Mavi Marmara, the humanitarian ship that was heading towards Gaza. Then there was the massacre and Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and then there was in July-August, 2014, there was Operation Protective Edge. And in the course of Operation Protective Edge, Israel killed about 2,200 Palestinians, 550 children, and committed such dramatic destruction in the infrastructure of Gaza. It destroyed about 18,000 homes."
So this Israeli attack now didn't begin with the events of Oct. 7. Is it equal to the pain and suffering endured by Nat Turner? Does it matter?
@Jerry Fresia
Hamas's founding charter, circa 1988, calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. They issued some revised documents years later, but the goal as stated in the original charter has never really been abandoned. Hamas is a corrupt, theocratic organization that after winning an election in 2006 in Gaza has never agreed to another one. Hamas is no way comparable to Nat Turner.
Hamas's action on Oct.7 failed the classic test of jus in bello, i.e., it did not use lawful, just or permissible means. And while it's not entirely clear exactly what the aim of the Oct.7 attack was, Hamas's commitment in its founding charter to the destruction of Israel is not a just war aim or goal.
If the Oct.7 attack had ended after overrunning the IDF bases, that, it could be argued, would have been a military action and hence within the laws of armed conflict. But when Hamas went on to deliberately kill unarmed (in many cases) civilians and take civilian hostages, that's terrorism. The conditions in Gaza and the policies of the Israeli govt don't justify that. This is not to defend the Israeli govt's policies at all, but being oppressed does not license or legitimize *any* means of "resistance." If the armed wing of the ANC in S. Africa had carried out an attack in which it killed 1000 white South African civilians, that would not have been justified. And if the armed wing of the ANC killed white S. African farmers (not members of the military), and I don't recall offhand whether it did or not, that wd not have been justified.
Infants and children, and teenagers who were at a "rave," aren't agents of the Israeli govt and aren't responsible for its policies. Killing them was an act of terrorism and murder.
And btw it doesn't matter whether the killing of civilians was done only by members of the Al Qassam brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, or in some cases by Palestinian men who were not members of the Al Qassam brigades but crossed the border at the same time. That doesn't absolve the armed wing of Hamas of responsibility.
As D. Ross wrote recently, the IDF response needs to be targeted more specifically at Hamas and Israel shd agree to the opening of humanitarian corridors incl from the border crossing in the north.
One last thought. Palestinian and Israeli children and teenagers have an equal right to the rest of their lives. They didn't create this situation and they shouldn't be paying the price for it.
Btw in using the ANC example I'm not saying that the S. African situation pre-1994 and the situation at hand are exactly comparable.
Nat Turner's rebellion was almost 200 years ago.
In the last 200 years the left at least has come to expect and to live by more humane standards.
Few of us on the left today would cheer as aristocrats were guillotined as occurred during the French Revolution. We'd prefer to sentence them, say, to hard labor in a socially useful role, say, emptying bed pans.
Few of us on the left would even accept the mass show trials in stadiums after the Cuban Revolution which lead to the summary execution of so-called "gusanos".
In 2023 I expect people to live up to 2023 standards, Hamas doesn't nor does Netanyahu.
This will be my last comment on this; don't want to get too far away from the initial post:
Whether or not Hamas' uprising met various ethical standards or not is not the issue for me; the issue is many decades long repression of Israeli apartheid (a term Jimmy Carter used long ago or whatever you want to label it) begot the uprising- and those decades of repression were essentially accepted by the "west" which includes us. Further, dissenting voices on these issues whether it has to do with Russiagate, the Ukraine, or Israel. are censored by omission.
We are too accepting of and obedient to systems of power.
From today's Huntington Post:
“There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on Oct. 6,” Biden told reporters, referring to the day before Hamas militants attacked Israel and set off the latest war. The White House says Biden conveyed the same message directly to Netanyahu during a telephone call this past week.
“It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next, and in our view it has to be a two-state solution,” Biden said."
The sad lesson: When nothing else moves along a stalemate, terrorism works.
Despite noting that Hamas has in fact taken a number of different policy approaches to Israel to try to get something worked out—see, e.g., https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/10/the-current-israel-palestine-crisis-was-entirely-avoidable — there are those who persist in putting an awful lot of weight on a founding document (which is perhaps rather like trying to argue that the Declaration of Independence defines the history and the current practices of the USA).
But that aside, what I find reprehensible about all the mentions of the Hamas charter is that they’re rarely accompanied by any mention of many statements, including but not restricted to Likud founding documents—statements and documents that have actually been more practically definitive of Israeli actions, all directed towards curbing and driving out the Palestinians from yet more of their lands and homes.
As to all that verbiage about ius in bello, let’s hear how that has governed Israeli acgtions in the West Bank and Gaza forever—at least it must seem like forever for those imprisoned in effect in these places.
As to the Palestinian and Israeli children having an equal right to the rest of their lives, it’s hard to disagree with that. Yet it’s really quite a meaningless thing to wish for when it so pointedly ignores that one set of children will have sunlit futures while the other set are doomed to grow up in the dark, as prisoners despite the fact that they’ve committed no crime.
Get real!
@ DZ
Whether anything good in the way of progress to peace emerges from this will depend partly on whether the Biden admin chooses to exert the pressure that it can. Favoring a two-state solution is not in itself a change in Biden admin policy. Doing something concrete to help bring about such a solution would be.
Dennis Ross's recent NYT piece may be close to what the Biden admin is thinking in certain respects, even though Ross is not currently in the admin. But I'm not sure, of course, just speculating. (He mainly talks about future of Gaza but it's all connected.)
To LFC:
You are quite correct: if there is to be any progress toward a two state solution (if such an option has any life left) depends heavily on whether the Biden admin is willing to take any active steps toward pressing the Israelis to move in that direction, by, for example, removing settlements from the West Bank.
My point was simply that for many years before Oct 7 the US had seldom even mentioned the two state solution, focussing instead on links between Israel and certain Arab states.... Oct 7 seems to have brought about a change in tone at least. Sadly, oh so sadly, acts of terror do seem to concentrate the mind.
A propos Dennis Ross, for one (there are many more on Ross’s partisan/ideological inclinations):
"In writing our book, we judged officeholders to be part of the lobby
if their attachment to Israel preceded their entry into public service or if
they devoted a substantial portion of their personal or professional lives
both in-and-out of office to advancing the special relationship. Thus, when
Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA) declares that his concern for Israel is
the reason he wanted to serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, it
seems reasonable to count him as an active member of the broad pro-Israel
interest group. Similarly, when Martin Indyk—formerly deputy director of
research at AIPAC and one of the founders of WINEP—is appointed to a key
position dealing with Middle East policy in the Clinton administration, it
strains credulity not to see this as a case where a member of the Israel lobby is
serving in government. One could say the same for Indyk’s associate Dennis
Ross (who joined WINEP after leaving government service), or neoconservative
hard-liner Elliott Abrams, whose pro-Israel sympathies are well-established
and who has handled Middle East policy on the National Security Council
since 2002.
"The point is not whether individuals like Berman, Indyk, Ross, and
Abrams, or Christian Zionist politicians like James Inhofe (R-OK) and Tom
DeLay (R-TX) were dedicated public servants acting in what they thought to
be the best interests of the United States—they surely were. The issue is sim-
ply whether their strong prior sympathies for Israel shaped their approach to
Middle East affairs, reinforced the special relationship, and made the United
States less likely to use its leverage effectively. If so, then it is reasonable to
count them as part of the “loose coalition” that sustains the present course
of U.S. policy."
John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Awlt, “Is it love or the lobby? Explaining America’s special relationship with Israel,” Security Studies Vol. 18, 58-78 (2009), at p. 65. accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09636410802678031
They are responding to a review of their book by Jerry Slater who has also been referenced in this blog.
It hardly matters whether Dennis Ross is a paid card-carrying member of the Israel lobby.
At this point of horrors, anyone who can convince or rather pressure the Israelis to sit down and converse with the Palestinians, undoubtedly with some horrid repressive Arab state such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Egypt acting as broker, is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
And it seems like Biden, undoubtedly working with people like Dennis Ross, is the only guy who is in a position to stop Israel from completely destroying Gaza and achieve some kind of workable two-state solution. It could just be Biden's finest hour.
Anonymous @1:50 pm
I'm flabbergasted to learn that Dennis Ross had "strong prior sympathies" for Israel. What are you going to tell me next, that Roger Federer was a great tennis player or that Pope Benedict XVI was Catholic?
I was flabbergasted that you didn't think to mention his biasses!
I think Robert Meister’s book, “After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights,” (2011), is relevant to the discussions and conflicts going on both here and more generally. He critiques “Human Rights Discourse” (HRD), noting that following the end of the Cold War there has been a significant shift in the accepted meaning of human rights from those linked to the Rights of Man as, he says, “a slogan of popular resistance” to “one of compassion for bodies in pain.” The general thrust of this newer sort of HRD is that the victims of evil should not struggle against the beneficiaries of that evil to bring about changes in their condition . HRD “generally functions in twenty-first century politics as a strategy for making justice less urgent.”
What makes the book particularly pertinent in the present moment is that in several chapters he explores how the Holocaust and the fate of Israel have been central to that shift to HRD. HRD is in consequence more favorable to Israel than not.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but it seems to me we’re now witnessing—and participating—in an irresolvable confrontation (when we’re not talking past each other) between two notions of human rights, one of which focusses on the victims of systemic injury, one of which focusses on pain being inflicted on beneficiaries of that system, only one of which is buttressed by the power of the USA. That then goes to the question, whether the US/Biden/etc. can be accepted as an honest broker (something s.w. and LFC seem to think is plausible—unless they’re advocating that American power can impose a solution?)
Anyway, Meister’s argument is much more nuanced and complex than that and worth a read.
Who is my true enemy & who is my true friend? Is the IDF my ally? Or is Hamas my ally?
All I know is that if I was dropped in the Middle of Gaza, I would immediately become a captive of Hamas.
If I was dropped in the Middle of the IDF, I would most likely be sent to the IDF headquarters where I would be questioned & then sent to the U.S. Embassy in Israel.
Would I be beaten by them both? It is more likely I would be mistreated by Hamas than by the IDF.
So who is more my friend?
It is more likely that the IDF is my friend than Hamas is.
Anyone can have empathy with anyone.
But we all should avoid a blind empathy that is only created because thousands of miles of sea and land separates us from others.
Yes I have empathy concerning the Palestinian people. But I don't have empathy for Hamas.
LFC: Hamas's founding charter, circa 1988, calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. They issued some revised documents years later, but the goal as stated in the original charter has never really been abandoned.
From a thread week or so ago, mentioning a piece by Helena Cobban (quoted here):
The elections [of 2006] gave the PLO and its U.S. and Israeli allies a great opportunity to work to find a way to draw Hamas into the political process. Hamas was willing, too, initially making inroads to form a “government of national unity” with Fatah. But the reaction from Israel and Washington was harsh. They threatened to kill any of the newly elected legislators who would agree to join such a government—which I know because I was the conduit for conveying one such threat.
(emphasis added)
Also there's, for example,
"Hamas offers truce in return for 1967 borders"
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24235665
A few questions I have had in recent weeks.
(1) Why have Palestinians in Gaza and other territories not had elections in almost 20 years?
How are/have the current political leaders been chosen?
Whose purposes do they serve? (this last is rhetorical)
(2) What is the current nature of the relationship between the "political" leaders and the "military" leaders of Hamas? Do they generally work in consort, or does the military do whatever it wants, with the political leaders left to deal with the outcomes? Has there been a recent change in leadership, or in the balance of power (as Slater suggests)?
(3) Why do Israelis continue to expand settlements in what was Palestinian land? What reasons do the settlers themselves give for doing this? What reasons do Israeli citizens who aren't settlers themselves give for continuing to vote for politicians who tolerate, or encourage, expansion of settlements?
(4) Egyptians have said that they had given Netanyahu plenty of warning that a very large attack was in the works. Has Netanyahu been asked about this by the press?
What reasons do Israel give for permitting such lax security on their military bases in the face of allegations of preparations for an attack?
(5) With regard to the last question, were US intelligence aware of preparations for an attack? What did they communicate to the White House & Pentagon, and what to Israel?
(For those who are just skimming, the NBC News piece I linked to above, on Hamas offering a 10-yr truce, is from 2008)
Professor Wolff, as you muse and meditate, I had the image of you sitting down with Philosophy in the guise that she appears to Boethius in his The Consolation of Philosophy. The outcome of the 'chat' he has with Philosophy is that in his final consolation he prefers reason to faith. As to thoughts about atrocities present and past, you might find some consolation in the following verse that opens Book Two of Lucretius' On the Nature of the Universe:
A Joy it is, when the strong winds of storm
Stir up the waters of a mighty sea,
To watch from shore the troubles of another.
No pleasure this in any man's distress,
But joy to see the ills from which you are spared,
And to see great armies locked in conflict
Across the plains, yourself free from the danger.
But nothing sweeter is than this: to dwell
In quiet halls and lofty sanctuaries
Well fortified by doctrines of the wise,
And look thence down on others wandering
And seeking all astray the path of life-
The clash of intellects, the fight for honours,
The lust for wealth, the efforts night and day
With toil and sweat to scale the heights of power.
O wretched minds of men! O hearts so blind!
How dark the life, how great the perils are
In which whatever time is given is passed!
Do you not see that Nature cries for this,
And only this, that pain from out the body
Shall be removed away, and mind enjoy
Sweet sense of pleasure, freed from care and fear?
Peter FitzGerald
Yigal Amir and late 20th century immigration from the former Soviet Union probably made Israel's right-wing heel turn inevitable. As long as the settlements exist, not to mention expanding, there is no way this ends well. The proposed continuing bill has aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Palestinian relief in it but how it fares with the Christo-fascist House majority remains to be seen.
Bibi is desperate, stupid, and has nukes so how much Biden or anyone can do except at the margins seems dubious.
One thing I've noticed is how the current IDF incursion into Gaza (as well as the actions of the settlers in the West Bank) are similar to Russian actions against Ukraine.
In the broader context of this blog, which often deals with issues of political philosophy, what would be a fair way to resolve the Palestine question?
Western leaders, including Biden and most of his predecessors in the White House, have argued that a two-state solution would be the ideal solution. I gather many who frequent this blog also see the two-state solution as ideal.
For many Palestinians, however, a two-state solution would still be unjust because one of the states would occupy an area that had been forcibly carved from land in which their families had continuously lived for many generations. No two-state solution I have heard of deals with this basic issue.
Wouldn't a single, secular state based on majority rule, with guaranteed rights of religious expression, and with Palestinian refugees throughout the diaspora welcomed to return, be fairer, if not ideal?
One of the arguments against the possibility of a single state has been that the Arabs and Jews simply can't live in peace together. But throughout history, Arabs and Jews have often lived in harmony, including in Palestine prior to the foundation of Israel.
Another argument is that with all the enmity that has built up between the groups since 1947, there is no way they could now live side by side in a single state. Yet the South Africans have managed to do so, even if their society is less than ideal.
Many Israelis argue that the purpose of having their own Jewish state is to provide security against antisemitic attacks as minorities in states controlled by others. Yet the current Israeli position as an apartheid state under constant threat from hostile neighbors seems only to increase their insecurity.
Many Israelis and their supporters also contend that the Israelis are entitled to the land because their forebears lived there before being expelled millennia ago.
Slater rebuts that in the Current Affairs interview linked above:
If that were a general principle [that people driven out of a place should be able to return as the rightful owners], it would have to apply globally, that all people who at one time or another controlled territory must have it given it back. So, we would have to give back most of the United States to begin with, and so on. It’s hard to be exact about this, but after some reasonable period of time, a new reality—a moral and political reality—emerges. Of course, land and territory in this world, unfortunately, is constantly changing hands by violence. After a while, there’s a new status quo.
The difference here, though, is that the Palestinians base their claim on expulsions that happened within living memory. There are Palestinians who were driven into exile who are still alive today, or who have parents who were driven into exile. Whatever Slater's "reasonable period of time" to lay to rest claims of a right to land, it must surely not include people who were, in themselves or their children, the direct victims of expulsion.
Eric,
There was a lot of bad blood between Hamas and Fatah, and they fought in effect a civil war around the time of the '06 elections in Gaza, iirc. That meant that the prospects for a Palestinian unity govt were slim, I think, regardless of what certain people might have been saying.
Helena Cobban 's recollection of conveying a threat from Israel and the U.S. to newly elected Hamas legislators is vague and anecdotal. I would like a lot more detail than she apparently provides. No party is completely blameless here. The Fatah-run Palestinian Authority on the West Bank is plagued by corruption and it and Abbas have relatively little legitimacy there w the Palestinian population.
On why the Netanyahu govt was caught by surprise on Oct 7, this has been written about fairly extensively in the MSM. WaPo had a piece on this, and on the the way the Hamas attack unfolded, the other day. Can't link easily bc am on phone. If you wd overcome your apparent belief that nothing in the MSM is worth reading, you wd find that a lot of your questions have been addressed there. Which is not to say that there isn't still a good deal yet to come out re Oct 7 etc.
Eric
See Chris Bertram's post at Crooked Timber on the issue of 'solutions' and the attached comment thread. crookedtimber.org
aaall
Your notion that the U.S. can only affect Israeli policy at the margins is wrong, imo. It's a question of the political will and courage to do so, not the ability.
Eric,
Whether it's a one-state or two-state solution, if there is a solution, is for the parties concerned to decide, Palestinians, Israelis, undoubtedly the U.S. and Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. It would be wise to see what Syria and Lebanon have to say, although given the realities of power, the U.S. will probably try to exclude them. As for Iran, why not include them to if it is possible? However, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia will veto Iranian partipation.
That's not ideal, but the goal, as I see it, is to end the mutual slaughter.
The one state solution might work better in the long run after some obvious initial difficulties, who knows?
My view fwiw is that while a one-state solution might be more just in an abstract sense, it is not achievable for various reasons that I can't go into rt now. A 2-state solution is the most realistic and achievable of the "just-ish" (Bertram's term) solutions available.
Vague and anecdotal? Here’s what Cobban actually wrote.
“Over the decades since its founding in late 1987, Hamas has nearly always been portrayed as intrinsically violent and deeply anti-Semitic. They are held to be unalterably opposed to the existence of Israel. And they are described as having a vice-like hold on a captive Gazan people, reigning over them through fear and intimidation.It is not too hard to understand why this is: most of these portrayals are written by people who have never met, interviewed, or interacted with Hamas leaders.
“But I have. I first interviewed some Hamas leaders in Gaza and the West Bank back in 1989 during the height of the First Intifada. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s I conducted interviews with them as parts of reporting and research projects I undertook for this magazine, The Nation, and other outlets. And from 2004 through 2011 I interviewed Hamas leaders several times, both inside the occupied Palestinian areas and in Damascus, where the organization’s leadership was headquartered until around 2012 when the support it gave to Syria’s opposition led the government to expel them.”
What does someone have to do to have themselves taken seriously as a witness to history in the making?"
It’s surely not just Ross that’s biassed.
Anonymous,
Since you've read the Cobban piece: when she refers to threats vs newly elected legislators in '06, does she mean newly elected Fatah legislators or newly elected Hamas legislators? It's not clear from the excerpted sentence.
And btw, there are no people in this discussion without biases. That includes every single journalist and pundit who has published on this matter in the last few weeks, of whatever viewpoint.
And to demonstrate your own broadmindedness and lack of bias, you quoted Mearsheimer & Walt on Dennis Ross w/o bothering actually to read the Ross piece I referred to.
Link to Bertram at Crooked Timber:
https://crookedtimber.org/2023/10/25/israel-and-palestine-simple-choices/
Free link to D. Ross. Note I do not agree w everything he says. I'm linking bc Anonymous lazily quoted an '09 piece in Security Studies by Mearsheimer & Walt w/o reading Ross. Yes, Ross is biased. So is Mearsheimer. So is Walt. So is Anonymous. So am I. So is everyone. There is no perfectly objective observer here. Doesn't exist.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/hamas-war-gaza-israel.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6Uw.kag8.JZJeUftHoTLn&smid=url-share
No, LFC, on that at least you have me wrong. I did read the piece by Ross. I won't take that prejudicial assertion on your part as a measure of your other comments.
As to the passage about threats to kill legislators who would join a government of national unity, presuming that there were any Fatah legislators willing to do that it would seem they would have been threatened too, but I think the (con)text makes it pretty clear that it was the Hamas personnel who were so threatened because they were the ones who, as Cobban tells it, signalled their willingness to join such a government. Note too that Cobban tells of being the conduit for conveying one such threat.
As to there being no people without biasses, I suppose that can be engaged with in several ways. I don't doubt that everyone has a point of view. But there are some points of view--one might, I suppose, call it the scholarly-academic bias--that pretend to offer above the fray interpretations. Then at the other end of the spectrum there's just sheer unadulterated, unreflected-upon prejudice which is impervious to all correction. There is surely a lot more to be said on this matter, but I'll refrain.
Puzzled by your accusation, LFC, I went back and took another look at that Ross piece in the NYT, and I can't for the life of me figure out what I could have said that caused you to make your erroneous assertion.
I will, however, rejoin that Ross explicitly asserts "I MIGHT HAVE ONCE [my emphasis] favored a cease-fire with Hamas, but not now."
Q1. "Might have"--did he actually ever do so?
Q2. "Might have once"--did he do so only once, or did he do so more than once?
Best wishes
First I'm going to paste here a posting from Corey Robin that captures my thoughts pretty well (except for the "ecstatic" sentence). It will have to be in two parts.
"From Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper: "The abuse lasted the whole day. Soldiers and settlers detained and handcuffed three Palestinians from the West Bank village Wadi as-Seeq, and for hours, according to the Palestinians, they were severely beaten, stripped to their underwear, and photographed handcuffed, in their underwear. Their captors urinated on two of them and extinguished burning cigarettes on them."
Almost 30 years ago, Avishai Margalit, the Israeli political theorist, wrote a book called "The Decent Society." In that book, he said:
"A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people....A decent society is one that fights conditions which constitute a justification for its dependents to consider themselves humiliated. A society is decent if its institutions do not act in ways that give the people under their authority sound reason to consider themselves humiliated."
Under no definition of the word can Israel be considered a decent society.
And it won't do to cite the horrifying murder by Hamas of over 1,000 Israeli civilians as an explanation or justification for the kinds of action we see in the Haaretz article mentioned above. This kind of abuse and humiliation and degradation of Palestinians goes back to the founding of the State of Israel. S. Yizhar's novel, Khirbet Khizeh, based on his own experience as an Israeli soldier emptying a Palestinian village of its inhabitants in 1948, gives a pretty good sense of what that was like.
Or simply read the famous Lord Balfour, of the Balfour Declaration, which I was raised to revere as a child, on what the project of Israel meant for the people who already lived on the land. At the time, Palestine was 90% Arab. This is what Balfour said: “Zionism, be it right or wrong, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
Thus it has been. As Arthur Koestler, of all people, managed to recognize, this is what the Balfour Declaration and subsequent creation of the State of Israel actually meant: “One nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.”
Or, we might just say, Europe gave the Jews, whom it had almost annihilated, the land of the Palestinians, who have been paying the price for Europe's crimes ever since.
Thirty years ago, almost to the month, I decided never to have anything to do with the State of Israel. I'd never travel there, I'd never send my child or children there, I'd never apologize or temporize for the state or society. All states are brutal—as anyone born in the United States knows—but to take the extra step of affirmatively aligning myself, as a Jew, with another brutal state, whose humiliation and degradation of another people is not only built into its foundation but is part of its ongoing activity? No.
I'm Jewish, happily Jewish, sometimes even ecstatically Jewish, as anyone who knows me will tell you. But my Jewishness does not encompass the State of Israel or Zionism. No.
part two of Corey Robin:
I know there are many Jews out there who will read this in horror or anger or sorrow or pity. I get it. I really do. I grew up immersed in the world of Zionism. It was part of our liturgy in synagogue. My family traveled to Israel with my grandfather when I was 9 years old, not long after my grandmother had died. We have all sorts of connections to the land. I still have very close friends who live there. I, too, was once steeped in all the arguments and imagery of the place; I wrote papers in school about it, I doodled cartoons about it, it was part of my mental furniture.
But we all grow up with a lot of myths. Some of them we grow out of. The idea of Israel as a decent society, as a good state, as a place for all Jews, as a just project, as a way to be Jewish, is, for me, one of those myths. And from what I can see of the younger generations of Jews, it is for many of them, too.
And finally I'll say this. A ceasefire is the minimum moral position.
And tactically continuing to call for a two-state solution is smart. I’m not sure what anti-zionism means here. It is, of course, too late to unexist Israel. Most people started to move to (just for convenient short-hand let’s call it) the pro-Palestinian position circa the late sixties (1967 and all that). Like me. And mostly when I talk with people about it and think about it there’s a tendency for history to begin (to use a current trope) in 1967. But really, earlier. Was zionism retrievable had things gone a little differently? Beats me; no historical determinist I. But it was a bad idea and many people, many Jews, thought it was a bad idea even back then. And so it proved. But too late now.
Israel has assiduously painted itself into a corner; a corner with Hamas. With Israel supplying most of the paint and most of the brushwork.
A two-state solution (like the more ideal, but much less tactically smart here in USA , one secular democracy, but who knows about that in Israel) is going to require the IDF killing fellow Israelis in order to end the occupation of the West Bank. Not sure how that can be worked out.
DDA, it's good form to provide a link when extensively quoting someone.
DDA: It is, of course, too late to unexist Israel.
But is it?
The French left Haiti after a presence of more than 300 years, and Indochina after 60+. The French had been in Algeria for 130 years. But eventually more than one million pieds-noirs, many of whom had never visited Europe or lived outside of Africa, left the country to the Arabs.
The nation-state of Israel, on the other hand, is younger than some of the folks commenting on this blog.
If it is objected that those were cases of French colonies, not settler-colonial projects as in Israel—-consider again the case of the Afrikaners, whose ancestors had been in South Africa for a century or more. They eventually gave up power, de jure apartheid was dismantled, and the whites agreed to a one-state, majority-rule arrangement (although they retained economic power, and the country remains very segregated). South Africa was, in a sense, unexisted.
A two-state solution ... is going to require the IDF killing fellow Israelis in order to end the occupation of the West Bank.
That would be very unfortunate. But many people are already suffering and dying, whether as a result of direct violence or from more insidious threats arising from the occupation. I cannot think of any similar situation that has ever ended without violence.
LFC, since the current situation is unsustainable and yet Bibi, et al persist, Ill assume that attempting too tight a squeeze would lead to him mentioning some flavor of a possible Götterdämmerung (nukes/leverage) if other responses didn't work. Not going to count but it may be possible that a veto proof majority exists anyway.
Then there's this:
"A two-state solution...is going to require the IDF killing fellow Israelis in order to end the occupation of the West Bank. Not sure how that can be worked out."
And this:
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-719820
aaall
On your question about the quote from Corey Robin, my guess is that DDA is quoting a Facebook post (I'm not on FB). It's not from Robin's blog -- I checked there.
https://www.facebook.com/corey.robin1/posts/6816643445067985
Just thinking about you this morning, Bob. Still my favorite professor after all these years. Tom Cathcart
Hey, Tom. How are you? Can you believe I am almost 90? It is a good thing you are still 20.
Eric said...
(For those who are just skimming, the NBC News piece I linked to above, on Hamas offering a 10-yr truce, is from 2008)
October 29, 2023 at 3:45 PM
Eric, I was listening to Norm Finklestein and he said how Israel broke the ceasefire on the day that Obama was elected President,2008. That was operation cast lead. I think it may have lasted 10 years,but I didn't verify that.
Have you seen the protest in Grand-central Station last Friday, Oct 27th It was amazing! I doubt the United States is going to tell Israel to begin a ceasefire. But it's clear to me that most of the World wants to see Israel stop the bombing. My question is what are the socioeconomic factors that prevent the United States from Calling for a cease-fire? Then doing the hard work of ending injustices and oppression of Palestinians. I align myself with the Jewish men and women
who are calling for an end to this brutal inhumane treatment of the oppressed of Gaza.
Leiter gets it right, as he so often does, today:
"Why not rebuild the fences and improve the border security, assassinate Hamas leadership and militants when possible, and, most importantly, negotiate to free the hostages? In that scenario, the only mass murder of civilians will have been perpetrated by Hamas ("proportional" mass murder of civilians in "self-defense" still doesn't look too good, but I guess I'm not a subtle enough moral philosopher?) It's not at all clear the invasion will make Israel safer."
s.w., it's likely that a government capable of doing those things would have been competent enough to not facilitate by omission the 10/07 attack.
aaall,
You could be right, but if they're so fucking incompetent, there's even less reason for believing that they can carry out an invasion to destroy Hamas without killing completely unacceptable numbers of innocent Gaza residents, who, Letelier also points out, are not generally Hamas supporters.
"What Palestinians really think of Hamas." From the article: "Arab Barometer, a research network where we serve as co-principal investigators, conducted a survey in Gaza and the West Bank days before the Israel-Hamas war broke out. The findings, published here for the first time, reveal that rather than supporting Hamas, the vast majority of Gazans have been frustrated with the armed group’s ineffective governance as they endure extreme economic hardship. Most Gazans do not align themselves with Hamas’s ideology, either. Unlike Hamas, whose goal is to destroy the Israeli state, the majority of survey respondents favored a two-state solution with an independent Palestine and Israel existing side by side."
I'll second the @anon October 29, 2023 at 3:10 PM's plug for Robert Meister's book. I read it when it came out and actually picked it up again a few days after 10/7, and it's been instrumental to my understanding of the current state of affairs in Human Rights discourse generally, and Israel/Palestine in particular.
He's also a killer lecturer - I owe a great deal to a course he gave at UCSC on 20th Century Political Thought, and if memory serves a later course on the same subject was recorded and posted online and may be locatable if you look hard enough.
This is mainly food for thought pt. 1:
Not to undermine the impossible conditions Gaza's civilians are living under right now, I would be careful writing and take into account those numbers you wrote with a grain of salt. Hamas is the body that reports those numbers; the media merely repeats them, and it is also odd how little time it takes them to say those numbers. If you know anything about Gaza, you also know that bureaucracy is nonexistent there, let alone know the estimated number of people in each building that has been hit. The people pulling out the bodies from the wrecks are neighbors, family members, and friends, not Hamas, so it is almost impossible to know even a rough estimation. Also, think about how much time it took to get to an actual number for 9/11 or for the earthquake in Turkey.
Another thing is that Hamas has no problem lying for its own benefit, which it does in many instances, while there is no one there to hold it accountable. In Israel, on the other hand, many government agencies from all over the world receive actual evidence, and numbers are not thrown in the air recklessly like they are by Hamas.
I also saw this: "Most Gazans do not align themselves with Hamas’s ideology." I just want to state that as tragic as it is, it is no one's responsibility to save Gazans from the hands of Hamas other than themselves. They demanded the Gaza Strip back, they got it, they democratically elected Hamas, and now they suffer the consequences. If most of them wanted help to do that, they would've received it from so many countries, including Israel.
It is not entirely their fault, but it is also not Israel's responsibility to free them from Hamas if they are not doing anything to help themselves. Apart from that, just less than a year ago, Israel operated in Gaza and took down almost all of the important personnel of Hamas, the main commanders in Gaza, and it still didn't change things. It was all over Israel's news and was barely covered by international news.
This is mainly food for thought pt. 2:
About the siege. Israel has the technology of water desalination, as it is also a country with scarce sources of drinking water, and it was more than willing to sell to the Gazans. When Israel forced the Jews out of their houses in the Gaza Strip, there were many greenhouses, agricultural fields, and land abandoned behind that all Gazans needed to do was use in order to grow food. They had an airport, but they tried to launch attacks through it, so it was destroyed by the IDF and could relatively easily have been rebuilt, with the promise it wouldn't be destroyed as long as they didn't use it for terror. They get tons of humanitarian aid, money, and cement, and Hamas takes it all to elevate its own terroristic gain (e.g., terror tunnels). The head of Hamas, Ismail Haniya, is estimated to have a net worth of 4-5 BILLION dollars. For context, Taylor Swift is estimated at 1.1 billion dollars. That money didn't come from the prosperity he brought to Gaza but from stealing aid money, including Israeli aid money. If that aid money got to the Palestinian people in Gaza, it could have been heaven. But it is hell. And there is so much a country can/should/need to do for another country that keeps starting wars. Israel has no responsibility to aid Gaza, and yet it does it anyway because some of Israel's politicians would like to keep the situation as it is, which also allows Netanyahu to keep riding that political horse of his that Israel is in an existential threat. Therefore, he must stay in power.
Israel is under no existential threat; no Israeli thinks that way, but it also doesn't mean the current reaction isn't proportionate. Gazans are being notified by flyers dropped by planes to evacuate before an attack. There are phone call recordings that Gazans testify that Hamas doesn't let them leave the area that is about to be attacked. Why, you wonder? Because Hamas benefits from the numbers and couldn't care less about the Palestinian people.
And one last thing about proportionality that the Western world seems to be obsessed with lately. Proportionality is not a scale for anything in war. In World War II, there were 6.8-8.8 million Germans who died in the war, while the United Kingdom and America combined didn't get to one million. Did it entail anything you entail now when talking about proportionality in the Israel-Gaza war?
Some links:
Hamas leader's son Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwvsrybklf8
Israeli tech for water given to Gaza
https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/01/gaza-israel-donations-machines-water-air-crisis.html
The blast in the hospital in Gaza, decide for yourself who’s more likely to be responsible:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67216929
W.r.t. this:
"And one last thing about proportionality that the Western world seems to be obsessed with lately. Proportionality is not a scale for anything in war. In World War II, there were 6.8-8.8 million Germans who died in the war, while the United Kingdom and America combined didn't get to one million. Did it entail anything you entail now when talking about proportionality in the Israel-Gaza war?"
The word proportionality has a distinct meaning in the law of armed conflict (LOAC). It has absolutely nothing to do with how many overall losses a given country suffers in a war. It's late here so I'm not going to go into the definitions of the word by international lawyers and others, nor the difficulties in applying the definitions, but please read something (something reliable) about the law of armed conflict before using the word "proportionality."
The USSR lost some 20 million soldiers and civilians in WW2 if I recall correctly, many more losses than the UK, US, France or for that matter Germany (or, afaik, any other belligerent). These figures, again, have nothing to do with the word proportionality as it is properly used. The word applies to particular military actions and asks whether their (foreseeable or actual) human costs are in some rough alignment w the expected military gain and/or with future harm prevented. Often difficult to gauge/weigh this in particular situations so there is room for controversy and debate, but again, the word has nothing to do w overall losses on each side.
p.s. there is a debate/discussion among philosophers and others at Daily Nous on these matters of proportionality etc. (not easy going, though)
I’m hanging in there, Bob. Sounds like you’re still sharp as ever. Me too, I think. It’s a mitzvah. The Gaza situation is making me ill. Tom
Oops! My ignorance is showing. I thought a mitzvah was a blessing. Tom
Isn't a mitzvah a good deed?
DZ
Did someone use the word here?
Ok I see where it was used now. I'm pretty sure the word can mean, or is used to mean, either a good deed or a blessing. But I haven't taken the time to look it up.
AnonymousNovember 1, 2023 at 10:45 AM
I’m hanging in there, Bob. Sounds like you’re still sharp as ever. Me too, I think. It’s a mitzvah. The Gaza situation is making me ill. Tom
AnonymousNovember 1, 2023 at 12:02 PM
Oops! My ignorance is showing. I thought a mitzvah was a blessing. Tom
From: https://info-and-data.blogspot.com/2023/12/arab-palestinian-attempt-to-massacre.html?m=1
_
Hamas' fake numbers VS its attempt to massacre some 12,000
Noted blogger exposes:
Proof that Gaza Health Ministry just makes casualty statistics up.
https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2023/12/proof-that-gaza-health-ministry-just.html?m=1
While true numbers:
'More than 11,500 rockets launched at Israel since Oct. 7’.
December 4, 2023 / JNS.
https://www.jns.org/more-than-11500-rockets-launched-at-israel-since-oct-7/
Failing in attempting to slaughter some 12,000 (because of Israel's defense systems), does not make the Gaza health ministry's regime less genocidal.
THAT BLOODY ANTI-JEWISH GENOCIDAL 'RED HAND': NAZI-ARAB FAHOUD POGROM 1941 OR 2000 RAMALAH LYNCHING
* Noted Those who wore red pins—which bear an eerie resemblance to the bloody hands of a Palestinian Arab who had participated in the lynching of two Israelis at the start of the Second Intifada in 2000 in an iconic photograph of that awful moment—in support of an immediate ceasefire, was doing at the Oscars this year
* And: Bloody hands, bloody fools.
That symbol the Hollywood glitterati sported is rooted in the horrific lynching of two Israeli men by a Palestinian mob..
* Oct 7 'reliving the 1941 Baghdad massacre' : The Arab marauders went door to door, targeting every Jewish home and business in Baghdad. (The Mufti had prepared for the massacre by ordering a red hamsa symbol painted on all Jewish properties.) For two terror-filled days of Shavuot, Arabs plundered and demolished hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses, while hundreds of Jews – men, women and children – were raped and slaughtered
* Syrian-Lebanese peace activist - video, highlights the dark association of the Red Hand print with the Farhud, as quoted in a BBC piece‘The violence continued through the night. A red hand sign or hamsa had been painted on Jewish homes to mark them out .”
All you needed to know about twisted mind of "author"/propagandist racist Gilbert Achcar.
On Hamas’s October Counter(sic)-Offensive
10/8/2023
Gilbert Achcar
"..Gaza’s latest counter-offensive brings indeed to mind the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising."
Nevermind his phrasing of the atrocities on civilians as "counter", but the sick glorification and belittling the Holocaust by such a terrible comparison is beyond justification.
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