While I have been watching the world go to hell, I have also been preparing to teach by zoom a study group next semester at Harvard on volume 1 of Capital. This will be a noncredit study group meeting two hours a week for 12 weeks, and it gives me the opportunity to pull together everything I have ever done on Marx in one integrated narrative. At the moment, with a sign-up sheet still open, 18 people have said they want to participate. Of those 18, seven are members of the faculty, several are graduate students, and the rest are undergraduates, almost all of whom – faculty and students – are associated with the Social Studies program of which I was the first head tutor 63 years ago. I am very excited about this opportunity and plan to pour into it such energies as I can mobilize.
All I can really do about the world is give money to organizations supporting Democratic candidates in the next election. I have given $4000 or $5000 so far, and I imagine I will give another $5000 before I am done with donations.
I read the many interesting comments on this blog about the Israeli situation and although I have strong feelings, I have not weighed in because I do not have any kind of specialized knowledge. There have been times in my life when the world was in worse shape than it is now, but I was young then and had hopes for the future. Now, as I am two weeks from my 90th birthday, it is difficult to feel that same hope.
78 comments:
That's great that your course on Marx is working out well.
I applaud your generosity in political donations. Have you ever thought of donating money to groups which are working for a just peace in the Middle East? The first one that comes to mind is Jewish Voices for Peace, but I'm sure that other readers may know other equally worthy groups with the same goals.
I likely would prefer the organization J Street if I were in a position to give donations of a meaningful size in this arena (which I'm not).
LFC,
What is the official name of J Street? I google J Street and don't find any peace organizations. Thanks.
LFC,
I found it. I had to google "peace organization J Street".
https://jstreet.org/
Good idea. It seems that AIPAC is planning on spending $100M to take out a few Representatives whose positions on Palestine they find wanting.
My google went straight to J Street just using that. Is google country specific on some things?
BTW, I see IDF is pumping sea water into the tunnels. This will probably screw up the aquifers and compromise structures.
Is google country specific on some things?
My guess is: yes it is, but that's just a guess. (Ditto, perhaps, for DuckDuckGo and other search engines.)
aaall,
Thanks.
I looked at the websites of J Street and Jewish Voices for Peace.
Jewish Voices for Peace is maybe a little Berkeley for the current crisis. I have nothing against Berkeley, great place to live, but it's a micro-climate, very out of touch with the rest of the world.
J Street seems more mainstream and there's an election in less than a year and it's vital to re-elect the Representatives whose positions on Palestine AIPAC finds wanting. So for the moment I go with J Street.
Any chance the study group will be taped & loaded to YouTube? Since it will be on Zoom, if a large part of the content will involve you lecturing, the other participants could be hidden/muted.
One of the lectures I watched on the recent observance of the National Day of Mourning was this recording that Prof Paul Kelton shared of his discussing the conflict between the Dakota & other Native Americans and white settlers, and Lincoln's policies on the latters' westward expansion. (Kelton shows his interactions with the students.)
https://www.c-span.org/video/?458906-1/abraham-lincoln-native-americans
RPW: although I have strong feelings, I have not weighed in because I do not have any kind of specialized knowledge
When I read that, I instantly wondered what specialized knowledge RPW had when he demanded Harvard divest from apartheid South Africa, or when he agreed to become a professor of Afro-American studies.
Of course, it's easy for me to say this, writing pseudonymously.
From the memoir:
Into the gap opened up by this unique situation stepped a horde of civilians who claimed to know better than the generals how to plan for nuclear war. Leading the pack were economists, who argued that their techniques for analyzing the competition between two firms in the marketplace was just what the Defense Department needed. They were followed by mathematicians, sociologists, physicists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists. Among the most prominent of these new Defense Intellectuals, as they came to be called, were a brilliant economist in the Harvard Economics Department, Thomas Schelling, and a pretentious gasbag of a pseudo-physicist named Herman Kahn, located at the Rand Corporation....
I had become friendly with Richard Barnet, a young lawyer at the Russian Research Institute who had made himself an expert on the legal aspects of disarmament. In 1960, I think it was, Walt W. Rostow, later Johnson's National Security Advisor, returned from the Pugwash Conference and gave television interviews in which he parroted the standard propaganda line of the American government that Russians did not really want disarmament, could not be trusted, and so forth. Barnet invited me to a closed briefing at the Institute for Harvard's Russian scholars, and I jumped at the chance to find out what experts really thought, what they said to one another behind closed doors. Everyone was there Alex Inkeles, Adam Ulam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, all the hotshots. I listened with dismay as Rostow used the same hackneyed jargon that had characterized his public appearances. Worse still, the responses from the experts were
couched as well in the cold war boilerplate. It dawned on me that this was the way they actually thought. There was no real insider story that they shared only with fellow experts. I think of this experience now as I listen to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condaleeza Rice mouth manifest nonsense about their invasion of Iraq. (my emphasis)
https://people.umass.edu/rwolff/memoirchaptersix.pdf
As someone who lived in Berkeley back when and who again lives there at least part of the year, I have to say that Berkeley ain’t what it used to be—neither the town nor the university. To put it in language former Berkeleyans will get, the hill liberals in conjunction with the private and university real estate developers won. I’d also protest against the way you marginalise the Berkeley that was. I found no matter where I lived in the US, and I’ve lived in quite a number of places, that that Berkeley was everywhere, and some of them may even have retained more of their berkeleyness than Berkeley itself.
*latter's
lol
Anonymous,
Ok. I'll take your word for it since I haven't been to Berkeley for 45 years ago and I lived there in the early and mid 70's.
Still, I was in contact by email with a few friends from those days who remained in Berkeley until in recent years my cynical view of life got too much for their purism.
In contrast two other friends from my Berkeley days, a man and a woman, who ended up in Southern California have managed to tolerate my sins of lack of political correction and still email me from time to time. With the guy who's been in LA for the past 40 years we never run out of topics to explore and there are no tabus. Of course he was always like that and maybe that's why he didn't make it in Berkeley.
And the woman who now lives in San Diego told me that she started to smoke in Berkeley back when, to defy and piss off all the wholesome and politically correct hegemonic atmosphere.
Anonymous @7:59 p.m. wrote:
I found no matter where I lived in the US, and I’ve lived in quite a number of places, that that Berkeley was everywhere, and some of them may even have retained more of their berkeleyness than Berkeley itself.
In the late 1980s, I lived in a small town in West Virginia (s.e. part of the state) for roughly a year (and worked in another small town nearby). I feel confident in saying there was no trace of Berkeley there. Which is not necessarily a criticism, just a statement.
Well, LFC, I encountered berkeleyness in N. Dakota, in rural Wisconsin, and in Missouri, not to mention such more obvious places as New York and Chicago. But perhaps I should apologise for too hasty generalisation?
s. wallerstein---
On the purism of Berkeley: One of my friends here in Berkeley, a carpenter, conceptual artist, and life-long resident, has a bumper sticker on his pickup truck that reads 'Welcome to Berkeley! Now stop doing that.'
J Street are liberal Zionists, committed to a two-state solution.
David Palmeter wrote the following on December 10. (I will set aside for the moment his comments about genocide, which I do not agree with.)
“Genocide” is a legal name for killing a national, racial or religious group with intent to destroy it. Israel is not trying to destroy the Palestinians (although I suspect the Netanyahu and his crew wouldn’t weep if that were to happen.) Israel is engaged in a counter attack against Hamas (which was voted into control of Gaza by the Palestinian voters). The conflict started with Hamas’ unprovoked attack on Israel, killing more than a thousand and taking several hundred hostages, most of whom have not been returned. Palestinian civilians are tragically in the way.
I’m sure that many will disagree with my view. To them I ask: What would have been an appropriate Israeli response to Hamas’ attack? How would that protect Israel from it happening again?
If I am not mistaken, David previously mentioned in the comments that he has hearing loss, so I am going to type out some of the remarks from a YouTube video that are relevant, rather than just link to the video.
Anonymous,
Well, perhaps I'm not exactly sure how you're using "berkeleyness." I suppose one can find pockets of unconventionality in all sorts of places.
Btw, there is a Berkeley Springs, W.V., but it's in the panhandle, as it's called, not very typical of most of the state. I should add that I haven't been back to W.V. in a dog's age.
This is Miko Peled in conversation with Briahna Joy Gray on her podcast, Bad Faith, from about a month ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8M0mYzD8ZY
Miko comes from a family of very prominent members of the founding generation of Israel. His father was one of the top generals who helped Israel defeat Egypt and its allies in the 1967 war.
8:29-9:43
"Israelis and Palestinians can live together in peace. They can. But it is not possible under the apartheid state. In order for that to happen, the apartheid regime has to be dismanteled, one person-one vote, free elections have to take place, ... and a free, democratic Palestine has to replace the apartheid state. THAT is the recipe for success. There is no other recipe which will allow Israelis and Palestinians to end up living in peace within Palestine."
"Israel does not have a right to resist because apartheid regimes cannot, should not have legitimacy. Israel is the apartheid state. Now, what we are talking about is transforming that into a free, democratic Palestine. That's what this is all about."
16:15
...
There's no question that Israel has been targeting civilians in large numbers on a regular basis, in the Gaza strip particularly because that is a particular problem ... that Israel has no way to deal with.... The sensible thing and the moral thing would be to open the Gaza strip and allow people to go back to their homes and their villages and their towns, from where they were thrown out. But Israel doesn't want to do that.... So they decided to kill them and blame them for it. And they've been doing this since the Gaza strip was established by Israel [by pushing the Arabs of southern Palestine into Gaza] in the early 1950s.
17:35
"...Israel began attacking Gaza pretty much as soon as they established the Gaza strip [by pushing all the Arabs of southern Palestine into Gaza].... Three years after the end of World War II and the end of the Holocaust, Israel was permitted to engage in three crimes against humanity. Immediately. And they've been going at it for 75 years....
Unless you put everything in context--we are dragged into a conversation that they want to have about a possible genocide and possible antisemitism and possible this, that, and the other.... And the reason people are buying into this is because of the racism that already exists against Arabs, and Muslims, and Palestinians. Well, of course Arabs and Palestinians are a mob. And if they see a white woman, they'll rape her. And if they see white babies they'll kill them. Because there's a racism that's already programmed into people.... Israelis believe this. Americans believe this. They believe the worst of people of color anyway. So it's a very easy target."
55:42
"... And Israel is not behaving strategically. Israel is behaving like a gangster who was humiliated and is taking their revenge out on innocent people. That's what this is. Israel was humiliated publicly, and they have to take it out on somebody so they're smashing everybody and killing as many people as they possibly can. Just because. There's no strategy here.... So it's cruelty. It's savagery. There's no strategy here. There's no way that this can be spun as some kind of [strategic] military operation."
59:50
"We've been accustomed to accept so little. The problem is the humanitarian corridor. The problem is the ceasefire. To hell with a ceasefire! Stop sending weapons. Stop sending money. Impose sanctions. Call the ambassador back. Kick the Israeli ambassador out of Washington, DC. Impose sanctions immediately on the state of Israel. And do everything you can to bring down the apartheid regime. This is not going to be solved with a ceasefire! Ceasefire is not what we need right now. We need the complete dismantlement of the apartheid state! We need complete ending to the siege on Gaza. We need to put mechanisms in place for the refugees to return to their homes and their land. And we need to end this violence against Palestinians."
1:01:40
"...There's a problem with recognizing Palestine. Because recognizing Palestine is recognizing the Palestinian Authority as a state. The Palestinian Authority supports normalization with Israel. The Palestinian Authority is complicit with Israel.... They are themselves undermining the Palestinian struggle.... [Recognizing the Palestinian Authority as a state] is legitimizing the contractors who are helping Israel to maintain the apartheid....
What needs to be ... accepted is the Amnesty International report on apartheid.... That is the report that demonstrates clearly how Israel has been engaged in the crime of apartheid since it was established, ... and there are recommendations ... to deal with it. There are recommendations for sanctions, and so forth."
1:05:52
"A two-state solution is a Zionist construct. It's not even worth discussing.
What needs to happen here, in America particularly, is a huge paradigm shift. Stop talking about Israel as if there is a possibility for an Israel to exist and peace to take place. Not a possiblity.... So you have to pick a side. You absolutely have to pick a side. If you believe in justice, and humanity, and democracy, and human rights, then there is one solution: dismantling the apartheid state. And ... we saw it in South Africa, we've seen fascist military dictatorships fall and be replaced by democracies around the world before.... And establish a free, democratic state on all of historic Palestine. That's it....
Palestine. Free, liberated, democratic, one person-one vote is the recipe for anyone who cares about peace and justice, and wants to see Israelis and Palestinians alive and safe and free.... The other option is the supremacist, racist, violent creation of Zionism which is the state of Israel.
These are the two options. It has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with values.
If anybody wants to tell me that even if the Angel of Death lived in Gaza, if that means it's ok to hurt the head of a single child, there's nothing more to talk about. It's a question of values. I don't care if the Devil is in the Gaza strip. That does not justify hurting the hair of a single child. Period."
Eric @10:43 p.m.
Despite the presence of 700,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank, I believe a 2-state solution is still the path to resolving the conflict that has the best chance of achieving some kind of lasting settlement that, while not re-winding history (which is effectively impossible in this setting), will still satisfy, at least to some extent, the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians for statehood. Israel can't be dis-established, and a one-state solution does not seem feasible to me. Accordingly, I don't find the fact that J Street advocates a 2-state solution to be a drawback. Someone has occasionally forwarded to me what J Street is saying about the current conflict, and I believe they are calling for a drastic change in the IDF's approach to the campaign and a halt to the high number of civilian casualties. They may well be favoring a ceasefire -- I wdn't be surprised if that's the case. They have a much, much better approach to the I/P conflict than AIPAC and similar groups.
I know that you want Israel to disappear in a puff of smoke as it were, but that's not going to happen. I believe one's views on the conflict have to take account of certain realities. The situation is not analogous to others one might cite. I'll leave it at that.
error @10:57 PM
"Israel does not have a right to resist"
that should have been "Israel does not have a right to exist"
Eric,
Miko Peled's view is a tiny minority of Israeli opinion. If there were a constituency in Israel for a one-state formula of the sort he proposes, that would be one thing. But there isn't, afaik. And what has happened now is that Oct 7 and the events following have resulted in making even a 2-state solution prob rather unpopular in Israel right now, unfortunately.
This is not like the South African situation. There was a significant body of white opinion in South Africa that favored ending apartheid (not a majority, I think, but a not insignificant group). There is no analogous sentiment in Israel for a one-state formula of the sort Peled is proposing, afaik.
A two-state solution is not "a Zionist construct." A two-state solution would have been the way to a lasting peaceful settlement 20 or 30 years ago. Now it may be too late. And quoting someone at length calling for the dismantling of "the apartheid state" is not going to change that.
p.s. There might be formulas for power-sharing within a single state that are worth considering, but these are likely to be complicated. But that's different than simply one-person one-vote. It wd involve, say, reserving certain cabinet positions for certain groups. However, that requires a level of political reconciliation that makes it prob more difficult than two separate states.
*dismantled
LFC,
The presence of 700,000 settlers is not an insurmountable obstacle to any of the options. Certainly not if the support they currently receive from the military and the government is withdrawn.
"Miko Peled's view is a tiny minority of Israeli opinion."
A public opinion survey in November 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, asked Americans, "Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?" 71% of respondents said no. (This was despite 94% of respondents expressing disapproval of Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany.)
Israeli opinion produced the Netanyahu governments. Maybe Israeli opinion needs to change.
"There was a significant body of white opinion in South Africa that favored ending apartheid"
Several have noted that after apartheid ended, a great many of the whites in South Africa insisted that they had long been opposed to apartheid. I think it was Ilan Pappé who quipped that if all of them were opposed to apartheid, why was it so hard to end it?
Eric, attempting to dispossess 700,000 people who have heavily bought into late Bronze/early Iron age just so stories is how one gets a civil war.
Recalling Bibi's dis of Obama a few years ago it occurs to me that he likely sees damaging the Democratic coalition in the U.S. as a bonus feature of Israel's current Gaza adventure. It seems folks like Netanyahu, Orban, and Putin would prefer Republican majorities and a Trump in their future.
This just published dissection of American responses to Israel's onslaught on the Palestinians joined to a brief comparison of British responses will surely be of interest here:
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii144/articles/alexander-zevin-gaza-and-new-york
@ aaall
It will not, imo, require a civil war, but will be (or would be) difficult, no question about that.
LFC, I had an interesting experience with folks on that part of the spectrum a few decades ago. Based on that + I'll vote with Corey Robin.
aaall,
Sorry if I missed something, but what is Corey Robin's position?
Yes, I know who he is.
I previously wrote on this blog that when the South Vietnamese forces ran out of ammunition they ran away and Saigon fell. I believe this is the same strategy Putin is banking on. Once the Ukrainians have their foreign aid dry up they'll eventually run out of ammo. And there goes Kiev. Modern warfare is really reliant on supply and demand.
s.w., the only way we get a two state solution is if the IDF would be willing to shoot Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
aaall,
thanks...
s.w.,
Corey Robin favors a "one-state solution," as I understand it.
aaall claims -- implausibly -- that the only way to a 2-state solution is for the IDF to shoot Israeli settlers in the West Bank. But what aaall does not acknowledge is that likely the only way to a one-state solution is to completely transform the entire ideological and political framework of the current Israeli polity.
Michael Llenos,
Is there any reputable historian of the Vietnam War who has argued that the South Vietnamese army crumbled in 1975 because it "ran out of ammunition"? In other words, do you have a citation for this claim?
I myself don't see any solution, neither one state nor two state.
I am a philosophy student in Germany and would love to attend your zoom seminars. Would it be possible to post a link to them here?
LFC, one state or two the outcome of attempting to "completely transform the entire ideological and political framework of the current Israeli polity" will be folks shooting each other or at least that's the way to bet. I have an example, e.g. the U.S., have you any?
aaall
well we've reached an impasse here, probably.
btw Leiter linked several days ago to a petition re Gaza calling on the Biden admin to press for an immediate ceasefire -- I'm planning to sign it, though these things are mostly "performative," I suppose.
LFC
The NVA were not supersoldiers like foolish men would have you believe.
In On Strategy (pgs. 134-135) by Harry G. Summers it reads:
"On 29 March 1972 North Vietnam launched what was to become known as the Eastertide Offensive. It began with an armored attack across the DMZ. Leaving two divisions in Laos and one as a strategic reserve, North Vietnam committed some 12 divisions–a total of about 150,000 men–to the attack on South Vietnam. Supported by tanks, heavy artillery and mobile antiaircraft units, they had some initial success. But they had severely miscalculated both the fighting ability of the South Vietnamese Army and the ability of the United States to react. As President Nixon said, “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.” By July 1972, the North Vietnamese had reverted to the tactical defensive. Their attempt to mass had proven disastrous—again over 100,000 battle deaths."
NVA General Dung in his book Great Spring Victory (pgs. 18-19) says this about the 1975 offensive against the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army):
"A comparison with the enemy over the entire area of the campaign showed that our infantry was not much superior to the enemy's."
This time in 1975 they were able to finally defeat the ARVN in a certain area of South Vietnam because of a better operational use of MASS (a Clauwitzian term) that they learned from their battlefield experiences while fighting the ARVN after the U.S. left Vietnam.
The Paris Accords finally ruined the ARVN from being effective on the battlefield as hinted at on p. 237 of Inside the VC and the NVA by Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg:
"[THE DEATH OF THE ARVN] Hanoi planned well for the final conquest of South Vietnam. Although the Paris Peace Accords, signed in January 1973, specifically prohibited the "introduction of troops, military advisers, and military personnel including technical military personnel, armaments, munitions and war material into South Vietnam," these restrictions applied only to the ARVN and the Viet Cong, not to the North Vietnamese. As a result, during 1973 more than 75,000 replacements infiltrated into South Vietnam from the North. While the VC and ARVN were permitted to replace weapons and munitions on a piece-by-piece basis for material "destroyed, damaged, worn out or used up after the cease-fire," no similar restriction applied to resupply of the NVA by the Soviet Union or Red China. In fact, the accords were silent on any presence at all of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam."
--These bad deals could not have happened except for the complete loss of power by the Nixon administration because of Watergate. Hence the rise of the anti-war party in Congress & their aid to North Vietnamese politicians.
-A lack of ammunition was one of the reasons ARVN troops lost to the North Vietnamese. NVA generals would continue to concentrate their forces against the ARVN. In one battle they used human waves and threw five and one half soldiers against every one South Vietnamese soldier. If ammo is rationed it won't take long before you run away from the Frontline because you have nothing left to shoot at the enemy who outnumbers you 5 to 1.
Michael L.
The second and third quotations are interesting, thks. (The first one, on the Easter Offensive, in which there was v heavy use of US airpower btw, is not really relevant to what I asked.)
The anti-war movement, including anti-war sentiment in Congress, pre-dated Watergate, though the latter did weaken the Nixon Admin. My impression is that both sides violated the Paris Peace Accords starting not long after the ink was dry. Our views remain somewhat different, but this thread is not the place to discuss them further. But thanks for digging up the quotes.
at the SDS anti-war march in DC in 1965 and much else besides
I’m struggling to imagine what that ”one half soldier” could possibly have achieved. But you’re so very right, LFC, to remind M.L. that the anti-war movement was in action long before Watergate. It’s actually quite fascinating in a bizarre sort of way to watch the reformulations and misrepresentations of the times one lived through being presented as profound insights into that long gone reality.
I forgot to add that the attempt to analyse the Vietnam war as little more than military encounter is to repeat the error that led the US to its well deserved defeat. Remember, as the Vietnamese always did, that the war's political dimensions, both in Vietnam itself and in the US, were of paramount importance.
Jeremy Scahill's report on the Scorched Earth Policy of Israel and the United States Government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMRIqznX9IM. Where are the human rights policymakers?
LFC
You're welcome.
--------
'I’m struggling to imagine what that ”one half soldier” could possibly have achieved'
Of course, the math only works with larger numerals & one must cancel out the fraction portion:
5 1/2 (5 men) = 11 men= 16.5 (16 men)= 22 men= 27.5 (27 men) etc.
I'm watching the news right now and it says the IDF shot & killed 3 hostages in Northern Gaza.
People may hate or adore Netanyahu. But I believe he is finished. Am I wrong?
M.L. I was making a joking point. Try not to be so serious about trivial things. Best wishes
It looks like this is the event you're referring to:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-palestinians_n_657c9fbbe4b036ecab44ef60
From the article Anonymous linked to:
"U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan also met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the besieged enclave’s postwar future, which, according to a senior U.S. official, could include bringing back Palestinian security forces driven from their jobs in Gaza by Hamas in its 2007 takeover."
This poll was in the news just this week:
https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/961
Almost 90% of surveyed Palestinians want Mahmoud Abbas to resign.
Hamas has an approval rating of 72% (85% in the West Bank, 52% in Gaza), compared to only 14% for the Palestinian Authority (10% and 21%, respectively).
When asked about their satisfaction with the role played by other countries, 0% of Palestinians in the West Bank and 1% in Gaza said they were satisfied with the United States.
(Russia and China each got 20%.)
More on the Palestinian Authority--
From an interview in October of historian Rashid Khalidi of Columbia (who served as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation and Yasir Arafat during the negotiations in the early 1990s).
Q: Is the Palestinian National Authority a viable option in Gaza?
Rashid Khalidi: One of the great problems the Palestinians have is a lack of strategic thinking and young, innovative leadership. We have an old and corrupt leadership in Ramallah that is politically bankrupt — it has no ideas and continues to pursue a strategy that failed decades ago. It failed after the [1993] Oslo Accords. It failed before the Second Intifada. They have empty minds and most Palestinians hate them for being collaborators with Israel. They are not a viable alternative for the Palestinians. Israel wants the Palestinian National Authority, of course, because Israel and the United States created it....
You dismantle a political alternative and turn it into a security subcontractor for Israel, while Israel seizes more land. Following the 2006 elections, Hamas joined a coalition government that was open to negotiations. Why did they join? Why did they propose a 100-year truce? If they wanted to kill Jews, how could they kill them in a 100-year truce?
That was a door that the United States, Europe and Israel slammed shut, and then did everything possible to break up that government. If you can’t go to the International Criminal Court or do a BDS [boycott of Israeli products], and you can’t protest nonviolently because you’re being shot at in the Gaza Strip or in Ramallah, then you pick up a gun. I mean, this doesn’t seem terribly hard to understand, but of course we want to ignore that history.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-10-20/rashid-khalidi-destroying-hamas-as-a-political-institution-as-an-idea-is-impossible.html
Well, here is a little good news. Judge orders Giuliani to pay election worker plaintiffs $148 million for defamation.
(I don't have high hopes for the full award order surviving appeal and Giuliani ever actually paying, but we can enjoy the moment while it lasts.)
re the 'accidental' killing of the Israeli hostages by the Israeli military, the immediately obvious question—a question which can never receive an answer, but which is nevertheless worth asking so that more of what is going on in Gaza will be highlighted—is how many other innocents have the Israeli soldiers slaughtered because they are incapable of recognising actual threats? A more bitter question is, are they perhaps operating according to directives to spread as much death as possible? That is a question that could in principle be answered.
I think the current action of Israel in Gaza most open to valid criticism is the way it's conducted the air campaign, using (as CNN and then WaPo have highlighted) approx 40/45 % non-precision guided munitions according to US intel estimates.
Being a soldier on the ground in an active war zone, esp one of this kind, is prob. enormously difficult even for well-trained soldiers who are doing their best to shoot at or target combatants. In light of that, the suggestion that the IDF soldiers are "incapable of recognizing actual threats" only makes sense, imo, if taken to mean that in a densely populated urban war zone facing an enemy (Hamas) that is of course not wearing uniforms and doing everything it can to blend in w the civilian population (what remains of it in the north), the recognition/identification of actual threats is going to be very challenging.
Whatever the IDF's culpability -- and I do not think the air campaign has complied w the law of armed conflict -- I don't think the suggestion that the IDF soldiers on the ground are under an official directive to shoot "anything that moves" w/o attempting to determine combatant status is v. credible. Some soldiers may in fact be doing that (I don't know), but if so it's not because they're under an official directive to do it. On the hostages: all that seems to have been reported is that three hostages were shot mistakenly by "friendly fire." Without knowing much more, it's impossible to reach any conclusions about this except the bare fact that it happened. So-called friendly fire incidents do happen, of course. (One case that got a lot of press coverage more than 20 years ago in the US is the pro football player Pat Tillman, who enlisted after 9/11 and, if memory serves, was killed in a friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan.)
@ Anon 6:56
In my basic training or tiranoot we shot nuclear warheads at targets plastered with the faces of Palestinian toddlers and philosophy students, which we have and will use on Khan Yunis,
you're right the eleventh commandment is to sacrifice innocents to the volcano of our bottomless war machine- that's why we crucified Jesus and instigated Karl Marx's premature demise by buying him too many beers more than his fat body and head could handle
You're right, we started this war and we started all wars and we invented capitalism and caused the Great Depression and the Holocaust and the death of Elvis and the rise of Trump.
Please anon back up your idiotic comments with more contrived idiotic facts
anon. is right.
Were these three escaped/released hostages armed? No, or the IDF would have made sure every news report mentioned that the soldiers were confused because the hostages were, or appeared to be, armed.
So, the obvious conclusion is that the soldiers thought they were firing on and killing apparently unarmed Palestinians. What's the downside to killing Palestinians? The world won't care, if they even ever hear about it.
How many Palestinians have been killed like this?
Anonymous @ 8:45 PM, you might actually try and read and respond to what I wrote instead of fabricating an anti-semitic monster which says more about how and what you think than it does about me. Be well.
I imagine the IDF soldiers in Gaza as very young, and frightened and freaked out by October 7, convinced by their media that Hamas is Satan incarnated. Anyone in their position is going to shoot anything that moves. I probably would and you probably would too, in spite of our education and political commitments.
The French did it in Algeria, the U.S. did it in Viet Nam. It's inevitable in wars where there's no way to distinguish between enemy combatants and non-combatants.
There are some sociopaths in all armies, but in general, soldiers are just scared young kids in a situation which they neither understand nor control and which is life-threatening.
The only solution is an immediate and permanent ceasefire and real peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
I don't see the good will, openness and willingness to compromise needed for that on either side.
I'm not going to comment specifically on the three hostages bc I'm not sure that any details of the shooting have become available, and if so I haven't seen or read them.
Obviously every time a civilian Palestinian is killed by the IDF, in whatever way, Israel's support abroad diminishes another notch. The Gaza Health Ministry when it releases the casualty figures does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but the consensus seems to be that the large majority of the casualties have been non-combatants. The notion that the world doesn't care about this is obviously wrong, given the mounting pressure on Israel to modify its approach to the campaign.
Btw it's long been known that a significant determinant of how frontline soldiers behave in a war is the quality of their leadership at the small-unit level. If your immediate commander is telling you forcefully to follow the rules of engagement, you are presumably more likely to follow them, or make an effort to do so, than if the immediate boss is looser about it. Hence in this situation it makes sense to assume that particular IDF units may behave somewhat differently depending on the varying quality of their immediate superiors. That said, the overall situation will be difficult even for those on the ground who want to follow the rules of engagement (whatever they may be).
JERUSALEM, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Three Israeli hostages killed mistakenly in Gaza by Israeli forces had been holding up a white flag, a military official said on Saturday, citing an initial inquiry into the incident that has shaken the country.
A soldier saw the hostages emerging tens of metres from Israeli forces on Friday in Shejaiya, an area of intense combat in northern Gaza where Hamas militants operate in civilian attire and use deception tactics, the official said.
"They're all without shirts and they have a stick with a white cloth on it. The soldier feels threatened and opens fire. He declares that they're terrorists. They (the Israeli forces) open fire. Two (hostages) are killed immediately," the official told reporters in a phone briefing.
The third hostage was wounded and retreated into a nearby building where he called for help in Hebrew, the official said.
"Immediately the battalion commander issues a ceasefire order, but again there's another burst of fire towards the third figure and he also dies," the official said. "This was against our rules of engagement," he added.
Gaza, America's Black churches, and the 2024 election:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/16/black-church-leaders-on-the-fence-on-biden-endorsement-amid-israel-gaza-war
It seems two of the hostages were shot by a sniper. In the past snipers have been employed against Palestinian demonstrators in a "shoot to wound" capacity. That is going to attract a certain sort of person to the job. Sort of like who goes into law enforcement in the American South during Jim Crow.
Part of the problem Biden has is a kind of muscle memory. Back in the day I used to hang out at Canter's deli on Fairfax in L.A. After the Six Day War most everyone idealized the IDF and Israeli intelligence. Students from Fairfax High started wearing military style garb. Then came Munich, Entebbe, and the Yom Kippur War. Lots of folks will be marking views formed decades ago to market.
I see that four of the five largest shippers have decided to not use the Red Sea. Egypt gets about nine percent of its budget from folks using the Suez Canal.
aaall
The WaPo account I just read said nothing at all about a sniper. It is possible (?) you may be confusing this w another story (also seen in WaPo) about two women sheltering in a Catholic Church whom the Latin Patriarchiate of Jerusalem says were shot and killed by an IDF sniper.
Re Biden: He has recalled in public several times his meeting as a young Senator w Golda Meir, then p.m., during (iirc) the Yom Kippur War. While he may be influenced by views formed a long time ago, keep in mind he was v.p. in 2014 during the last war (on a lower scale, but still a substantial mil. exchange) in Gaza. Still, decades-old experiences can leave lasting impressions.
p.s. The notion that a sniper would shoot at people holding a white flag is much less credible than what the WaPo said the IDF spokesman said: namely, one soldier "felt threatened" and opened fire. That's considerably more credible as an account of what happened, istm. Then again, when the commenter named FYI posted the Reuters report above, I thought the comment was just sarcasm until I looked at WaPo about 15 minutes ago.
LFC, this sounds like a good order and discipline and training issue. I don't see reasonable fear as an issue.
"The IDF's preliminary investigation found that the three Israeli men walked together without shirts, IDF officials said in Saturday's briefing with reporters. It appeared that the three men were aware they might be recognized by soldiers as Hamas militants and therefore took several steps to indicate they were hostages, including waving the white cloth.
The IDF investigation found that two of the hostages were killed by a sniper who fired at them from a distance.
The third hostage managed to escape into a building. When the soldiers came close to the building, the hostage shouted "help" in Hebrew. A battalion commander told the soldiers to hold their fire but some of them shot at the hostage and killed him.
The IDF officials added that two days before the incident soldiers found the words, "SOS" and "Help three hostages," written on the walls in the area where the three were killed. IDF officials said the assessment was that this was a deception attempt by Hamas."
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/15/hostages-killed-israeli-troops-gaza-hamas
@ aaall
Please show me where I said the fear was "reasonable." You can't. You know why? Because I didn't say that. The IDF chief of staff perhaps seemed to imply it (see below), but I didn't.
Here is the WaPo story, fwiw.
"The three hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were carrying a makeshift white flag when a soldier who felt threatened opened fire, a senior Israeli military official said Saturday, adding that an investigation was underway.
"They were 'all without shirts' and carried 'a stick with a white cloth on it,' emerging 'tens of meters' from an Israeli military position, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with the rules of the briefing.
"The official said a soldier felt threatened and opened fire. [N.b. He didn't say it was "reasonable" fear -- LFC] Two of the hostages were killed immediately while the third was injured and ran back to a building, he said. A cry for help was heard in Hebrew and the battalion commander issued an order for troops to cease firing, but there was 'another burst of fire,' and the third hostage was killed, he said.
"'The shooting at the hostages was against the rules of engagement. It is forbidden to shoot at someone who raises a white flag and seeks to surrender,' the head of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said in a statement Saturday night. 'However, this shooting was carried out during combat and under pressure.'" [He prob shdn't have added that, as it appears to be excusing, or cd be seen that way -- LFC]
"Halevi added in his statement that Hamas fighters have previously [used] 'various deceptive methods,' including wearing civilian clothing. 'I put myself in the shoes of the soldier in Shejaiya, after days of hard fighting,' Halevi said. 'He needs to be alert and prepared for any threat.'
"The preliminary findings alarmed many international law experts.
"'These hostages were clearly either civilians or surrendering fighters,' Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers University who focuses on the law and ethics of armed conflict, wrote on social media. 'Either way they would be protected. There are no free-fire zones in international humanitarian law.'
"The hostages may have been abandoned or escaped when they ran into the IDF soldiers, the official said at the briefing earlier Saturday. There was a building with 'SOS' marked on it a few hundred meters away from the location, and the Israel Defense Forces is checking whether there is a connection between that building and the hostages, the official added."
LFC, I was referencing the ridiculous claim of the Israeli soldier who shot the first two hostages. No innocent commenters involved.
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