What can Biden do right now, today, to avoid even more deaths of innocent people in Gaza? I am not asking what he can do if he gets Congress to approve a bill in two weeks when they return from their break; I am not asking what the United Nations can do in a week; I am not asking what America’s negotiators can attempt to achieve in the next several days. I am asking what Biden can do today about the starvation now afflicting 2 million people in Gaza?
Here is what I think he can do. First, he can take all of
the food on the aircraft carriers in the Middle East, put it on airplanes, and
airlift it to an Egyptian airport, telling the Egyptians to get out of the
way. He can commandeer trucks, cars,
whatever in Egypt and announced that the aid is being taken into Gaza,
regardless of whether they have permission to do so. He can tell the Egyptians
to get out of the way and my guess is that they will. At the same time, he can
ship more food by air to the carriers to replace the food sent to Gaza.
Meanwhile, he can underwrite the efforts of anybody, any organization,
attempting to help the Gazans and announce to the world that American troops are
going to take the food into Gaza. Meanwhile, he can cancel all military aid to
Israel until they stop the creation of illegal settlements in the Palestine
Authority. He can tell Israel that if its
troops fire on American troops bringing food to the Gazans, he will cancel all
further military aid to Israel for as long as he is president.
Will he do any of these things? No. Could he do them? Yes.
189 comments:
He could also tell the State Department immediately to lift the ban on sending funds to UNRWA.
"He can tell Israel that if its troops fire on American troops bringing food to the Gazans, he will cancel all further military aid to Israel for as long as he is president."
I read at least two acts of war in the post (it is good to hear from you). Unlike with the Liberty, actually firing on American troops on the ground would demand a response. Also, another ground war in the Middle East? Besides there isn't enough food on a carrier to make a difference.
We should keep in mind that leaving a group of thugs and religious nuts with only a nuclear option might lead to undesirable consequences. And, of course. the world is full of conventional weapons available to anyone with the price and Israel has the price.
DZ, the ban is law thanks to the Republicans being willing to shut down the government over the issue. There may be a work around but we don't need another lawless president.
Instead of telling the Egyptians to get out of way, why not simply offer to double aid to Egypt if they cooperate in food relief for Gazans?
There are 5000 troops on a carrier. Two carriers, 10,000 troops. 10 days of food probably at a minimum – three meals a day – 300,000 meals. Not enough but not nothing.
I have the impression that a large amount of the food on a carrier requires refrigeration/freezing.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/lifestyle/food/aboard-the-uss-george-hw-bush-how-to-cook-dinner-for-5-000-1.376769
The other thing is that someone who has not eaten for a while cannot eat just anything without causing stomach problems. Probably the food eaten by sailors on an aircraft carrier is not the most appropriate to be given to a starving person.
When people have been reduced to eating animal feed and grasses, as a significant number of Gazans now have been, I think anything edible, if ingested slowly and not scarfed down which would be a starving person's natural impulse, would be an improvement. From this standpoint the meals on the aircraft carriers, even if they require thawing, seem like a good idea.
Btw I don't understand why aaall, given his overall view of the conflict, is reluctant to put conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. His reluctance makes no sense to me. The idea that Netanyahu would use nuclear weapons strains credulity from a number of standpoints.
LFC,
There's something called "refeeding syndrome". A sizeable number of concentration camp inmates died after well-intentioned Soviet soldiers shared their rations with them.
https://westcorkpeople.ie/columnists/the-history-corner-columnists/when-food-can-kill-a-lesson-from-wwii/
P.s. the problem is not so much where the food would come from as getting it into Gaza and distributed properly. The Israelis claim not to be hampering this but everyone else on the ground says they are. AOC in a recent speech on the House floor used the term "genocide" for the first time, referring to an "unfolding genocide." Biden needs to act more decisively. It's morally necessary and it's not going to hurt him politically, imo.
s.w.
What were the relative levels of starvation? Some or many concentration camp inmates were literally at death's door. Except for infants and very young children, I don't think that's the case yet in Gaza. There's still time to avert that scenario, albeit probably not much.
He could carry a big stick and fly into Israel, supplying food appropriate for starving people and he could send American troops to bring back to fully functioning hospitals stocked with adequate supplies of necessary medicine,he could get advice from doctors in Gaza to handle the operations and end the barbarity of the slaughtering of innocent children, women and men. He can do all that if he makes the hard choice of doing what is morally, spiritually, ethically, and justly the right thing to do immediately.
Mostly depressingly he will not do this.
LFC,
I'm not a doctor, you're not a doctor, Professor Wolff isn't a doctor.
The point is that it is wise to be careful when you're giving food to someone who is starving, whether they're at death's door or just close to it. There are NGO's with a lot of experience in famine and they should be asked to participate, which I imagine they would do willingly.
these calls for a ceasefire that I hear from the so-called West all seem like a dog's wish to be washed without getting wet.
The first ever sensible step for Joe Beiden today on 24.04.2024 would be an ultimatum to Netanyahu threatening withdrawal of any support for Israel. One of the conditions should be free and unhindered access to Gaza for any coordinated aid.
"...even if they require thawing..."
Which isn't the point. These are very perishable items not MREs. I imagine flour, oil, rice, beans, lentils, canned veggies, powdered milk would be way better. BTW, "animal feed" while not optimal is still food. If I ground up my scratch I'd have the makings of bread or porridge and my chicken feed is 18% protein. Wheat, corn, rye, etc. are grasses and buckwheat, while a dicot, is still a seed. Remember Johnson's comment about oats (also a grass) and the Scotch. s.w.'s point about carrots instead of sticks for Egypt makes sense.
Israel's military budget is ~$24B/yr. U.S. aid is ~$3B and that includes purely defensive weapons. Israel's economy and debt level plus other factors could allow it to go it alone if needed. The whole "ultimatum" thing is way over-rated.
We've been kicking the can down the road on Israeli policy for several administrations. The notion that Biden can set everything right with a few words is incredibly naive. Senior Israeli folks are coming to the U.S. this week so we shall see.
LFC, what is the point of having nukes (lots of ILS invested, after all) if they won't ever be used? Who are they deterring? When far-right nationalists and religious nut-cases are the ones defining existential, I wouldn't be so sanguine.
We shouldn't forget that Trump and Jared's Abraham Accords involved the U.S., Israel, the Saudis, and various other Arab states kicking the Palestinians to the curb. The inherent caution and conservatism of Biden's foreign policy approach just went with the flow. As with the ridiculous caution over arming Ukraine with appropriate weapons that was a big mistake.
aaall
I don't have time right now for a real reply, but wd pt out that Israel's nuclear arsenal was prob orig designed as a last-resort thing. I'll leave that to others who know more about its history than I do.
Your own arguments, imo, tend to contradict each other. On one hand, you say it doesn't matter if US reduces mil aid bc it's only a small part of Israel's defense budget; on the other hand, US shdnt cut aid bc Israel may turn to nukes. Something's not meshing here.
My impression is that not only Netanyahu and the Israeli extreme rightwing, but many Israelis and a lot of U.S. Jews, especially older ones, see October 7 as equivalent to another Holocaust and are genuinely freaked out by it as a threat to Israel, which they associate with their most dear inner sense of identity, being Jewish.
Of course there's a bit of cynical manipulation of their target group, mixed in, as there always is in politics, but for many, not just for Netanyahu, Hamas is the Gestapo, the SS, the eternal murderer of Jews dating back to the Pharoah in Egypt.
Given that pathology, I could imagine them using nuclear weapons if things get out of their control.
Analyzing people as freaked out as many Israelis and many U.S. Jews in terms of normal political rationality does not take into account how psychologically fragile and how on edge they are.
As someone said (it was in a book of famous quotations that I had years ago and I don't recall who said it), no one scares me more than scared people.
Also not that I want to be anti-intellectual but all the wisdom and practical suggestions, and advice from this blog will have no efficacy or effect in solving this horrible dreadful barbarous reality.
And yes, I understand people on this blog, do want a resolution to this hellish painful, agonizing nightmare. People of the world who are concerned about bringing an end to this "war" are doing what they can. It is the people all over the world who are putting pressure on the most powerful to end this and start the process of recovery for all involved. Morality has to ultimately trump Politics. As impotent as that is, pressure from the people of the world at this time is in the process of trying to bring about a major change.
I think there is implicit in charles’s statement, “Morality has to ultimately trump Politics.” a, too me, too institutionalised a notion of politics. His following sentence respecting “pressure from the people of the world” surely identifies another region of politics.
Leads me to think we might borrow after a fashion from physics and differentiate between ‘strong force politics’ (i.e., politics of the institutionalised sort) and ‘weak force politics.’ It might then be that the pessimism in charles’s first sentence is on the mark should we be taking a strong force view of things, but off the mark should we be taking a weak force view of things. [Note gravity is a weak force, but it is surely not without effect.] I.e., while trivial in themselves, the comments in this blog and others are part of the process of generating a possibly considerable popular force in favour of getting the US, Israel, and others to do the right thing.
But on to another matter. I must confess to being stunned that Prof. Wolff’s post focusses so much on “telling the Egyptians to get out of the way,” and on “commandeering [their] trucks, cars, whatever.” Perhaps the concluding sentence is intended to put the focus where it properly belongs? But still it’s a bit peculiar to begin by advocating as a first step what would in fact be a military invasion of Egypt. That didn’t go too well when the British, the French, and the Israelis tried it in 1956—-and in 1956 there was at least an excuse, albeit a fraudulent one, for invading. Still, since politics is often multi-purposed, and since Egypt is a military dictatorship to all intents and purposes, . . .
But wait! What sort of regime does Israel now harbour? So why not “airlift [food] to an [Israeli] airport, telling the [Israelis] to get out of the way. . . commandeer trucks, cars, whatever in [Israel] and announce that the aid is being taken into Gaza, regardless of whether they have permission to do so. He can tell the [Israelis] to get out of the way . . .”?????
Professor Wolff --
I agree with LFC that the key logistic problem is distributing food to those who need it most. When you just drop off food, those who clamor to get it are the ones capable of doing it. Those who can't get out of bed miss out. I would advocate that the US military arrive by sea and set up safe zones on the coast where food can be distributed in a more equitable manner. Then health professionals and others can accompany locals back to homes to determine where others need aid. Any attack on the US safe zones would be deemed a hostile act. I can't fathom Israeli forces attacking US military zones in Gaza. If it was set up like a Marshall Plan for the Gazans it would be beautiful. However, it would take a high degree of political will to be exercised on the part of the Biden Administration and an acknowledgement that US support of Israel has limits. For those critical of Biden, a simple reminder is that if Trump were president, he would say go ahead and kill them all while approving more aid to do it. So take your pick.
People working on the art of the possible: gaza aid
The idea of national self-determination is neither wacky nor failed, imo. I don't have time or inclination to comment further. (If I have anything else to say on the matters in this thread, I'll say it in due course elsewhere, i.e., on my own blog.)
The U.S. government doesn't care enough to clothe, feed, & house all of the hungry homeless people in America. Why the heck would men & women of the Federal Government's policy-core care about non-nationals starving in a foreign country? Especially if it's dangerous? The only reason anyone over here cares about the Palestinians is that we have many U.S. Palestinian registered voters who have family in Gaza now.
Of course, that was just my cynical take on U.S. policy.
aaall --
Great point about the USS Liberty attack by Israeli forces. I was unaware of this. My point is that there would be no room whatsoever to imply a confusion about US military safe zones set up in Gaza -- no possibility of confusing them with an Egyptian presence whatsoever. It is a safe and doable move for the US -- they just need to exert the political will (and human decency) to do so.
-- Jim
@s. wallerstein (March 24, 2024 at 4:52PM)
According to Al Jazeera and as of March 24th, over 32 thousand Gazans are estimated to have been killed since October 7th, with another 4 hundred plus Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank.
By comparison, the Israeli casualties number over one thousand, although I suspect this figure underestimates the real toll, as it appears military casualties after October 7th are excluded.
I don't need to remark the disproportion between the figures.
So, I suppose it is possible that some Jews, against all evidence, may feel the Israeli casualties amount to a Holocaust v2.0. It is within the realm of what is possible. They may be genuinely freaking out, as you put it. But, frankly, I have a very hard time believing it. It may be possible, but I find it extremely unlikely.
So, let me ask you, what makes you believe that? Persuade me.
BL Zebub,
Most Israeli Jews feel that October 7 constitutes an existential threat for their way of life.
I'm Jewish and I can tell you that a Jewish education teaches you that Jews have been the eternal victim of non-Jewish hatred and persecution from the Pharaoah in Egypt (book of Exodus) through the Babylonians, the Romans, the Medieval blood libels, the Inquisition, the pogroms in Russia and Poland, the Dreyfuss affair up to Hitler, one permanent vibration of hatred of which the Jews are always victims.
Add Hamas to that cocktail, a fundamentalistic group which does not recognize Israel's right to exist.
I'm not a Zionist, but I have many Jewish friends all of them, doves, with relatives in Israel, who are not doves and my Jewish friends communicate how freaked out their families in Israel are and how they want Hamas EXTERMINATED and do not care what happens to Gaza in the process.
Finally, try this dialogue of British journalist Owen Jones with Gideon Levy, one of the few Israelis who has not fallen victim of the collective hysteria.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuSPFuHSopo
As for the difference between Israel casualties and Gazan victims of the IDF, if you believe that Gazan lives matter to the IDF, then you need to reflect a little.
@BL Zebub
Re impact of Oct 7 on Israeli society: remember it's a small country, so a toll of 1100 or 1200 means something different than wd be the case in a country the size (in population) of, say, France or (even more) the U.S.
BL Zebub,
One more point.
For the Jews the Holocaust produced a trauma, which is probably comparable to the trauma of slavery among African-Americans. Psychologists study something called "transgenerational trauma" and it certainly exists among Jews post Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma#:~:text=Transgenerational%20trauma%20is%20a%20collective,or%20individual%20parent%E2%80%93child%20dyads.
So when Hamas slaughters Israeli civilians, including women and children, that sensitive trauma is re-activated in its full potency.
I'm not justifying by any means the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and I realize that Palestinians have their own traumas.
I'm just trying to communicate how and why the Israelis and many U.S.Jews are so freaked out.
Disbelief--how could that possibly happen here?--followed very quickly by great, if unrealistic, fear.
Reminds me of the response to 9/11 in the US. I heard people talking about how Oshkosh, Wisconsin, could--which quickly became would--become a target
I don't want to dismiss the idea that transgenerational trauma is a "thing". But invoking the holocaust 75 years after it occurred, and pogroms, and fall of the first and second temples, and the exile to Babylon and Egypt, etc., as justification for the most technologically advanced military (with nukes) in the region to ethnically cleanse Gaza is weird and scary. Past evil does not entitle the beneficiaries of present evil to exceptionalism. Not that you were doing that, s.w.
I shd. have added, after noting irrational fear, that there are those in power who exploit that in pursuit of their own ends.
Ridicilousicculus, yes to your comment too.
@LFC
Yes, if one speaks of population size, one can say that Israel is a small country. Or, more precisely, if one is an American, one can say Israel is a small country. Last January its population was estimated as 9.24 million people, while 341.3 million live in the US.
The population of Gaza is estimated in 2.3 million ... roughly a quarter of Israel's population.
Israel looms as a giant compared to Gaza, whether one has in mind population, area, GDP, military spending, technology. I suggest a Israel versus Gaza is the relevant comparison.
PS,
Thanks, S. Wallerstein, for your reply. I'm giving it due consideration.
Jim, absent invitations from Israel and Egypt this would seem to constitute an invasion and seizure of another nation's sovereign territory during a war between that nation and a fundamentalist entity given to terrorism which is supported by a nation (Iran) whose fundie leaders hate both the U.S. and Israel (part of whose territory the U.S. would now occupy). Whatever could go wrong?
Since this would involve a ceasefire, what changes Bibi's mind? What's the exit strategy? It would be nice if Israel and its potential Arab partners in the Abraham Accords (you know, the agreements that yet again kicked the Palestinians to the curb) got their acts together but...
Also I don't buy the official versions on the Liberty.
I agree with SW. Both Jew & non-Jew know this. Also I agree with Steven Spielberg here:
"https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/26/steven-spielberg-denounces-antisemitism-and-makes-first-comments-on-gaza"
This was what I agree with SW about:
"I'm Jewish and I can tell you that a Jewish education teaches you that Jews have been the eternal victim of non-Jewish hatred and persecution from the Pharaoah in Egypt (book of Exodus) through the Babylonians, the Romans, the Medieval blood libels, the Inquisition, the pogroms in Russia and Poland, the Dreyfuss affair up to Hitler, one permanent vibration of hatred of which the Jews are always victims."
For the record, there is imo no uniform "Jewish education" -- depends on when and where you grew up, what sort of synagogue(s) your family went to etc. etc. etc. Accordingly different aspects of Jewish history are likely to receive different emphasis depending on what sort of Jewish education one got. And in some cases prob not much emphasis on history, period.
I'm trying to keep my comments short bc I said I wasn't going to comment on this thread anymore but... and in fact I'm taking my disagreements w/ aaall as read, so not taking the time to note them.
Of course, I agree that the Jewish people are taught such things but I view it not in the same context as others. Jewish children & adults have, I believe, every right to feel unjustly oppressed & picked on. Evil people have felt superior to them as a race & religion for over 3,000 years. And such evil men have acted on it. Plus let's not forget nefarious Jezebel.
Like Oscar Wilde breaking up stones in some English heavenly forsaken rock-mine. He's having an existential crisis. Saying: What am I doing here? And, I can't believe I deserve this!
@s. wallerstein
Let us consider a scenario.
Four armed police officers, all of them non-Black, stop and detain an unarmed Black civilian. Although the civilian does not resist, the officers decide to physically restrain him. In the process, the civilian dies, after an officer kneeled on his neck, while two of his colleagues assisted him while the fourth officer kept onlookers from intervening.
Under questioning, the officers say they did not apply unnecessary force against that Black man. They had to physically overwhelm him because they were genuinely terrified of him. They all grew hearing, from parents, neighbors and friends, that Black people in general, but particularly Black men, even if apparently unarmed and cooperative, posed an immediate threat to their lives. Their apparent cooperation is just a ruse. The only way to deal with them is forcing them into a level of submission one establishes arbitrarily.
I trust we all noticed this is not a fictitious scenario. Remember the death of George Floyd. Do you remember the videos? Would you believe Derek Chauvin if he told you he was shitting himself, while Floyd was calling his mother and telling him he couldn't breath?
BL. Zebub,
I don't understand your point. I believe that it would be important to understand what was going on in Derek Chauvin's mind when he murdered George Floyd because police need to be trained to deal with African-Americans without racist violence. That can only be achieved if we understand their mentality.
So too it's important to understand why Israelis act as they do just as it is important to understand why Hamas acts as it does.
Labeling someone or some group of people or some society as "evil" achieves nothing.
Obviously, I do not have the power to change Israel's mentality, but if world statesmen
understand it, maybe they channel things into a more peaceful course. That is not always possible (you will bring up Hitler here, I'm sure), but it often is so.
I don't think "understanding Israel's mentality" will do much for anyone, statesperson or not, to channel things into a more peaceful course. To the extent that a polity can be thought of having a "mentality", Israel's is one of exceptionalism, paranoia, and violence. This is by design and is intended to foreclose the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty in the land controlled by the Israeli state.
If you want a genuine path forward in Gaza and Palestine, Ireland may be instructive. The Troubles in Ireland didn't end because Republicans in Northern Ireland gave up and accepted their lot as a subjugated people. The Troubles in Northern Ireland ended as a result of open borders between Ireland and Northern Ireland/Uk, economic integration via the European Union and various free-trade agreements, the offer of UK and Irish citizenship to Northern Irish nationals, and amnesties for belligerents on both sides. This economic integration and recognition of political and civil rights reduced the utility of armed struggle for both sides, thereby establishing peace.
Any serious solution to the Israel/Palestine problem will require either a single-state with full recognition of civil and political rights for all Israelis and Palestinians, or a two-state solution with open borders and economic integration between Israel and a Palestinian state. This is the only way to reduce the utility of armed struggle for both sides such that peace is imaginable. But either of these solutions would compromise Israel's ability to ensure a Jewish majority in Israel, which is the exceptionalist foundation of the state itself.
Ridi,
You're probably right that understanding Israel's mentality or that of Hamas will not channel things into a more peaceful course.
However, if I can get closer to understanding it and play a role in getting one IDF soldier and/or one Hamas militant into being a little less homicidal and towards recognizing a bit more the humanity of the other, I'll have done something worthwhile in making a world a bit less stupid and a bit less murderous and that's more than enough for me.
Re: realism and understanding mentalities in the service of peace: It seems to me that Ridi's analogy with Ireland is more to the point than the more common (?) attempt to analogize Israel/Palestine with South Africa. Is it unthinkable? I'm always struck how in the U.S. (in my experience) folks refuse to so much as consider Orlando Patterson's suggestion that, instead of, say, promoting 'diversity' propaganda and captive audience celebrations, high schools should encourage interracial dating.--I was just now reading Lévi-Strauss's essay on Vladimir Propp, and it induced the thought that all of us, including the IDF soldier and the Hamas militant, might benefit from applying to the 'other' Borges's remark that there are only two stories: the story about the person who was crucified, and the story about the person trying to find their way home.
@Rapko re: interacial dating. In the neglected but brilliant movie Bulworth the main character (who has gone from truthful to untruthful to telling the real truth over the course of the movie) says: "everybody should fuck everybody" until everyone is "all the same color,"
Bulworth neglected? Not if you care about 90's hip-hop!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP3zuuGav-Y&ab_channel=VideoMusicaHD
one could cry over the humanitarian situation in gaza. the feeling that it should just stop is natural. And, it might be the right thing. But, realistically the only way the situation could make progress would have to include some group of leaders with authority and power themselves, perhaps a coalition of middle eastern states--- the saudis, egyptians, jordanians, gulf states, maybe even turkey...--- stepping in to both guarantee israeli security and creating institutions to govern gaza. This would require recognizing israel's right to exist, the renunciation of jihad and antisemitism as policy, and the disarmament of hamas. This would itself likely require an internal war in gaza even if israel stepped away. Its hard to see another way forward. Hamas could of course immediately release the hostages and surrender to protect their own people, but noone believes this would happen. The immediate problem is of course the humanitarian situation right now, but the problem isnt just israel's war strategy, its also the balancing acts throughout the islamic world that prevent a solution
@ s. wallerstein
I see that you didn't understand my scenario, which puzzles me, for I consider you an intelligent guy and my scenario, if not matching the Gaza genocide perfectly, gets quite close to it. I suppose I am mistaken, for the point, I would have thought, was evident.
I am not explaining Chauvin's behavior any more than I am explaining the Israelis's behavior, much less calling them evil. Check again my previous message. The word evil is not found anywhere, is it?
I am not offering an explanation of my own, my friend, I'm challenging your explanation. That's what I am doing, that's my point.
Sure, it is important to explain why people act as they do. But is that enough?
Let me offer an explanation off the top of my head: The Devil made them do it. It's an explanation, isn't it? It explains the savagery, brutality and cruelty we see. These people are victims of demonic possession.
There is only a problem: I don't believe it, as I suppose happens to you. If you prefer, I didn't do it. :-)
Yesterday I saw an interview with Steve Bannon in his office in Washington. He gave this interview to a German journalist directly behind the Supreme Court in the basement of his private home. On his desk a bust of Julius Caesar and on a bookshelf some medieval portraits of saints next to his own publications.
On his desk is a 1000-page concept entitled "Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise, Project 2025, presidential project", a strategy concept by right-wing politicians, academics and media for the restructuring of American democracy after Trump's election.
Here are some quotes from Bannon from the interview: " After his overwhelming victory, Donald Trump will fire thousands of government officials ... the people want that ... then we will destroy the administrative state brick by brick ... "
Trump's Julius Streicher appears to be a busy working drone on the Republican general staff.
Ridi--(Just a bit more, going way off topic while awaiting the professor's next post) On the alleged neglect of Bulworth and 90s hip-hop: Recently I've taken up playing street chess on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. As when I occasionally played in Washington Square Park in NYC in the 80's, most of the hustler-players are Black gentlemen aged (I'd guess) 30-60. Recently as I regaled my friends with tales of my daring attacks and resourceful defenses, I tried to describe one of my opponents as "looking like Method Man from the Wu-Tang Clan". No one knew who or what I was referring to--another sad comment on our times.
John Rapko - alas, Enter the 36 Chambers is as old today as was the Beatles' Please Please Me when the seminal Wu-Tang record dropped. Time flies.
Also, I live in Oakland and my email is ridiculousicculus@gmail.com. Happy to buy you a beer sometime.
Ridi--
I'm mostly out of town until the last week of April. See you when it stops raining.--At the chess spot in front of the old Cody's on Telegraph, it's mostly anonymous (like the professor's commentators), and in any case you can barely make out anybody's appearance through the clouds of marijuana. The guy who seems to run the operation has taken to referring to me as 'Concept Man' (I was there today lugging the Greek text of Aristotle's Metaphysics and the newer translation of Being and Nothingness), which is going to be my new internet tag.
P.S. (Last off-topic): Re: the Wu-Tang Clan: Best thing on the internet #217: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN-zwLbVmLI
@Ridiculousicculus 3/27, 12:45 pm:
Why do you think open borders (in a two-state arrangement) would compromise Israel's ability to maintain a Jewish majority? Open borders does not mean no borders. There wd still be two states, two political systems, two court systems, two sets of citizenship laws. Open borders, as I understand the phrase in this context, refers to ease of movement but does not mean anyone can live wherever they want, and even if it meant that it wouldn't nec. affect citizenship (residence and citizenship being two different things).
Great analysis.
Another question might be, why won't he do these things?
My "structural" leanings suggest that he won't do them, not because he's not predisposed politically, which he isn't, but rather that the entire weight of imperialist imperatives would prevent him. Go ahead Joe, let's see if you or any other person holding that office is actually in charge.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/history-goes-to-war-in-the-holy-land-israel-leading-historian-palestine-hamas-66384695?mod=arts-culture_trendingnow_opn_pos2
He is smarter than the Wolff and his silly pack of sycophants. Makes all the points a sensible Jew like myself would, and he actually has common sense and a Yiddische Kopf
Anonymous
If you want to link to WSJ, a paywall-free link would be nice. Bc I for one do not intend to subscribe.
Ok I now see it is a paywall-free link.
This is a rather weird remark, IMO, from Benny Morris:
"'Palestinians might tactically agree to a two-state solution, but it would never be enough for them. Because they need more territory than the West Bank and Gaza, especially to absorb refugees from Lebanon and Syria. They’re too big.' They would also need Jordan, as he advocated in “One State, Two States” (2009), or the rest of Israel, as they have always demanded."
The only way to find out if this prediction holds is to reach the deal and then see if it sticks. But apparently Morris isn't interested in that.
This is the epitome of "common sense," according to Anonymous (and we all know who this particular Anonymous is): criticize the Palestinians for turning down previous two-state deals, and then turn around and say "oh it wd never be enough for them." Then why criticize them for turning down the previous deals, when acc to him that was predictable? Seems a rather fatalistic outlook, to put it mildly.
Btw guess what the subtitle of Morris's One State, Two States is? "Resolving the Israel-Palestine Conflict."
LFC, it is a paywall free link, at least on a PC. Anyway, you didn't miss much - typical WSJ OP cluelessness (I also read the OP on the mess at Boeing - too many bean-counting MBAs but the Journal would never own up to that).
Anon, the Yiddische Kopfu fails when Morris refuses to deal with the Settlers and doesn't seem to grasp that destroying Hamas (a good thing in itself) in a way that radicalizes the next generation or so of Palestinians and puts paid to Israeli moral claims may not be all that skillful. Also, an initial "right to invade" because sentimentality?
In the 1850s the U.S. realized that it hadn't stolen enough of Mexico and it needed a narrow slice south of the treaty line. Instead of starting another war the U.S. bought the land for way more (per acre basis) then Mexico got in the GH Treaty. Pointless but just saying.
JF, there are about 500 million folks living around the Mediterranean. That they all aren't starving means that the food supply chains already exist.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jose-andres-aid-gaza-world-central-kitchen-who-is-he-food-for-palestinians/
This is doable without engaging in acts of war.
I run into a paywall.
aaall
I was able to read the piece as I said in my comment at 8:16 pm. Apparently the paywall is up for some but not others (idk).
offtopic: Corey Robin says there’s a new translation of Capital arriving soon and says this about it:
"A lot of you have asked what is the advantage of this translation over older translations. One issue that the new translation is alert to is the way the German relies on nouns, which just doesn't quite work the same way in English. If you try to translate noun to noun, you end up with a lot of gerunds and a much more bloated experience of the text. So I think there's more liveliness and lightness in the new translation, which works as English rather than as attempting (and failing) to recreate German in English. Here is one example.
Fowkes translation: "The objective of the development of the productivity of labour within the context of capitalist production is the shortening of that part of the working day in which the worker must work for himself, and the lengthening, thereby, of the other part of the day, in which he is free to work for nothing for the capitalist."
New translation: "Under capitalist production, the purpose of developing labor's productive power is to compress the part of the workday when a worker has to work for himself and thereby enlarge the part when he can work for the capitalist for free."
You'll notice a greater reliance on verbs rather than gerunds, a shorter sentence, and a more ironic play—so Marxist—on the idea of "free."
By the way, Wendy Brown has an excellent introduction in that new translation of Marx's Capital. Just as a standalone statement on Marx and what he's up to, and how to read him, it's excellent and would be extremely helpful to both novice readers of the text and old hands."
PSA:
Some paywall exemptions work only within a region or country. I use a VPN, and can pick an access point almost anywhere in the world (some 3500 points). Thus I can get get access to many newspapers from dozens of countries because they "recognize" me as a local. Many internationally published news outlets restrict limited paywall-free access to only their home country.
Yet another failure of managed escalation:
■ PM Netanyahu said Israel needs "much more independent production capacity" of the weapons it requires, adding that "we need to be immune from external pressures because we need to make our own decisions."
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-31/ty-article/.premium/israel-at-war-day-177-israeli-delegation-lands-in-cairo-for-hostage-release-talks/0000018e-9570-da88-afff-f57db4860000
I GUESS WE'VE JUST WITNESSED, AND NOT, SADLY, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WHAT HAPPENS TO ANYONE WHO SEEKS TO GET FOOD INTO GAZA
I assume JW is referring to this:
"The Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in the Gaza Strip on Monday night was launched because of suspicion that a terrorist was traveling with the convoy."
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-02/ty-article/.premium/idf-bombed-wck-aid-convoy-3-times-targeting-armed-hamas-member-who-wasnt-there/0000018e-9e75-d764-adff-9eff29360000
The IDF "suspected" that one person was a "terrorist" so after he left the clearly marked convoy they killed everyone else. Perhaps anon can explain the commonsense wisdom in that.
"'It's frustrating,' one of the defense sources told Haaretz. 'We're trying our hardest to accurately hit terrorists, and utilizing every thread of intelligence, and in the end the units in the field decide to launch attacks without any preparation, in cases that have nothing to do with protecting our forces.'"
Sure!
And I'll remind everyone of the Liberty.
And the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria?
The comments attached to the haaretz report you posted, aaall, are also most revealing. Thanks.
Israel seems to be going too far for many.
The Guardian editorial today:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/02/the-guardian-view-on-the-idfs-killing-of-aid-workers-a-grim-milestone-in-gaza
s.w., I have no problem with taking out Iranian generals (as well as other Iranian officials) as Iran is allied with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis as well as supplying weapons to Russia (along with North Korea - good company!) that are used to murder Ukrainians. The only issues are practical e.g. can Israel support a war with Hezbollah without using nukes and can Israel decapitate the Iranian leadership while avoiding a situation that would involve killing lots of innocent Iranians.
Given the way the IDF and the present Israeli government has performed so far (both in allowing the initial attack on 10/07 and in the present war), I don't see how that could be.
We shouldn't forget that it was Trump who abandoned the deal with Iran, recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and came up with the Abraham Accords. Meanwhile Bibi and the Israeli Right (along with Russia, the PRC, and other autocracies favor Trump and are interfering in the U.S. election.)
aaall,
People aren't protesting because an Iranian general was assassinated, but because Israel attacked the Iranian consulate. If they had killed the Iranians while they were walking down the street, there wouldn't be much protest.
Someone blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, causing 22 deaths. They say that Iran was behind that and that Mossad assassinated the people involved.
So bombing the Iranian consulate may be an act of revenge, but let's remember that Iran has atomic weapons and things could get very messy.
I don't believe that Israel or humanity needs a three front war (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran)
in the Middle East. Maybe four front because Assad may see an opportunity there too.
I don't think that Iran has atomic weapons.... yet.
s.w.
I doubt it's an act of revenge for '92. More likely (though I haven't read much of the coverage) is that Israel wanted to target these IRGC officers and they happened to be in the consulate.
Cynical realism crops up on this blog on occasion. But the following is merely cynical criminality, I think:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes
Welcome to our brave new high-tech world.
By the way, this may be relevant to the latest from s.w. and LFC.
Perhaps a nod is due?
"I'm truly impressed by the level of insight in this blog. The author's exploration of health psychology models is not only comprehensive but also presented in a clear and accessible manner. Great work!"
https://www.discountdrift.com/
"I applaud the author of this blog for their in-depth analysis of the Social Cognitive Model. The exploration of self-efficacy, observational learning, and outcome expectations is enlightening and adds a new perspective to understanding behavior."
https://couponsstudio.com/
John Rapko,
A while ago I mentioned that I was reading Martin Jay's introduction to Adorno and you suggested that I read another. I don't recall which book you suggested, but I was listening to this guy, Andrew Bowie, and I see that he also has an introductory text.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boGmBGe-22s
Was Andrew Bowie the text you recommended?
I read introductions to Adorno, because I find his thought fascinating, but his own texts except Minima Moralia almost impossible to read, although Bowie does claim in the video that Adorno's lectures are easier to follow.
Thank you.
s. wallerstein--I like Andrew Bowie's work generally (I had the opportunity to meet him and chat with him when he applied for a job at UC Berkeley; he's especially expert on Schelling, and is very knowledgeable about music and (as I recall) a publicly performing musician). But I think the one I recommended (and would still recommend) was probably Brian O'Connor's book, which is state-of-the-art. And if you want something more advanced, I'd recommend Fabian Freyenhagen's book, though which perhaps puts a Procrustean touch into making Adorno a bit Aristotelean. And further, I very much agree with Alasdair MacIntyre's remark that Raymond Geuss's various essays on Adorno amount to the best account in English--see especially the three essays in Outside Ethics (MacIntyre's appreciative review is online in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews).--You've probably noticed that quite a number of Adorno's lecture series have been translated and published in English. I haven't enjoyed them as much as I'd hoped, but I think they're a good (i.e. fairly accessible) way of getting to Adorno's core concerns--I'd recommend the History and Freedom lectures, and especially The Problems of Moral Philosophy (mostly on Kant).
John Rapko,
Thank you very much.
Your explanation is very helpful and, as one expects from you, learned.
In the interview I linked to Bowie talked about music a lot and was critical of Adorno's failure to understand and to appreciate jazz.
I'll try Raymond Geuss. As I recall, he appears in an In Our Time podcast about the Frankfurt school, mentions the movie "It's an wonderful life" and how that type of mentality turned Adorno off. Listening to that, I became an Adorno fan.
I did not realize that he is an animatron:
https://twitter.com/TeamTrump/status/1777315152959815883
I can recommend Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”, although this book is to the ordinary reading experience as eating a flan is to excavating the Panama Canal by hand. And with the same plastic take-away spoon. One hour of this and you’ll feel like John Henry, like the Sir Edmond Hillary of readership, like the first white man to see the great Paragraph of China …
BTW, the common perception of Adorno as a jazz-hater is misplaced. One has to consider the “jazz” on offer in 1920’s Germany. Adjusted for current values, he wasn’t hating on Miles Davis or Thelonius Monk or Eric Dolphy, he was hating on Kenny G (just as Pat Metheny did, hilariously: http://www.jazzoasis.com/methenyonkennyg.htm).
WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF TAYLOR SWIFT, Rapko’s challenge to all potential present-despisers to change their ways has sent me on a survey course of (more or less) present-day music, and I've discovered to my astonishment a highly-danceable club track about--of all things--Kantian ethics: “The Kingdom of Ends”. It's on Roisin Murphy’s 2020 release, “Roisin Machine”. (For those of you in the audience who’ve never taken ecstasy, Roisin Murphy is the Irish answer to Grace Jones … who happens to look like Tea Leoni’s twin sister.)
As for Adorno’s (admittedly) mandarin attitudes to mass culture, let’s recall that he was a trained musician and for that reason probably couldn’t not take this sort of thing seriously. And if we allow that Metheny uses a demotic idiom, it’s hard not to see this as a Frankfurt-level critique:
“When Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis's tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture - something that we all should be totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. We ignore this, "let it slide", at our own peril.”
Pillette,
Adorno was in the U.S. until 1949.
No one ever suggested to him that he listen to a Charlie Parker recording?
Well, that’s true, it’s hard to believe that at some point during Adorno's Babylonian Exile he didn’t find himself in Kansas City with an evening to kill …
There's been an enormous amount of published finger-wagging at Adorno for his lack of interest and appreciation for popular arts, especially with regard to jazz. And there've been a fair number of meek responses of the 'after all, by 'jazz', he meant something quasi-Guy Lombardo'. As far as I can tell, he just wasn't interested, although he could approvingly refer to The Magic Flute as the last instance of a great work that fused popular and classical/high art music. Does his (what seems to us bizarrely) narrow range of interest damage his analyses of the works of 'high' music? It seems to me that it does, because it infects the analytic frameworks he constructs and uses. So his (dialectically qualified) praise of Schönberg is of a piece with his uncomprehending (though dialectically qualified) 'critiques' of Stravinsky and Bartok. And his lack of interest was not as it were an obligatory artifact of his social position; contrast Adorno on the popular arts with Benjamin and Kracauer. But on the other hand, some of his writing on music is penetrating and a little wonderful: see the monographs on Mahler and Berg.--Not that it matters to anyone else, but I just ignore Adorno on jazz, and would really recommend as an alternative among others C. L. R. James on Dick Tracy; Robert Warshow on Westerns, Gangster movies, Krazy Kat, and Chaplin; Gilbert Seldes on the 'lively arts'; Paul Oliver and Albert Murray on the blues; Andre Hodeir, Paul Berliner, and many others on jazz, etc.--If one is looking for some contemporary music, you could do a lot worse than checking out the Ukrainians DakhaBrakha, the Argentinians Perota Chingó, or this from the American jazz drummer Makaya McCraven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaWAjmlzFWU
Re: the contrasting approaches of Adorno and his friend Benjamin, consider the danger inherent in having too catholic a taste in aesthetic subjects: you can spend years (YEARS!) figuratively lost in the Arcades of Paris, and still never come up with anything coherent to say about them. Adorno may have been better off for his own sake just not going the route of pop culture and instead sticking to his own high-brow cultural bailiwick. Why, I could bore all of you senseless with hour upon hour of seeming on-the-spectrum talk about comically recondite subjects of interest to no-one apart from me and about three other people, so what do I do instead? I talk to MYSELF … ENDLESSLY. (Walter, I feel your pain!)
As for Benjamin’s most famous essay, it’s hard to see how it could be written today … “mechanical reproduction” stopped being a problem, at least as far as music goes, in about 1963. I may be a philistine, but to my ear the sound that pours out of a good pair of speakers sounds as good (and maybe even better) than a live performance. By contrast the wobbly, wavery, tinny and scratchy sound that came out of a victrola horn barely qualified as music …
Pillette,
I more or less agree with you.
Adorno's virtue is that he's an out of the closet elitist. He doesn't try to be balanced or fair.
In that sense, he's like Nietzsche, who is also an elitist, has his own idiosyncratic tastes and prejudices and gets away with it because he's so fucking brilliant and intellectually courageous.
Adorno also gets away with it and that's his virtue, his charm.
I even admire him for telling the 1968 student protester to shove it and I was a 1968 studen protester myself. Adorno is not politically correct (unlike Marcuse who makes a fool of himself because he tries too hard to be politically correct when he's old enough
and well-educated enough to know better).
More power to Adorno!!! And to Nietzsche!!!
Two thinkers to read to keep myself sane in my old age.
From the FWIW Department:
Last night I watched "The Zone of Interest."
The Evil of Banality.
Remarkable.
Watching it gives the director's powerful acceptance speech at the Oscar's even more resonance. His critics are blind and deaf, but unfortunately not (literally) dumb.
David Z.
I haven't seen the film but just watched (on YouTube) his acceptance speech. Very much to the point. (He said "refute" when he should have said "reject," but that is a nitpick.)
LFC, I recommend that you see that film. As DZ says, it is remarkable. It becomes even more remarkable when one reflects that so many of us, maybe all of us, live in a pleasant house with a pleasant garden going about our everyday lives paying no heed to the horrors we pointedly ignore going on on the other side of the garden wall.
Thanks, too, LFC, for nitpicking wrt "refute." Unfortunately it has become standard usage for people who are really saying they simply reject or deny something. On the other hand, who bothers nowadays to present arguments for rejecting and thereby refuting something.
@aaall
Totally ridiculous statement about Hamas. Hamas's leader Arafat insulted POTUS and Israel and the international community by refusing a chance to have a state in Gaza and the West Bank.
Next you'll blame the Holocaust on the settlers- that's a classic strawman argument- I bet you and your friends high fived after the 10/7 pogrom., after all, all Jews are fair game because of that magic word: "settlers."
Arafat was not the leader of the fundamentalist Hamas, but of the secular Fatah... a very different Palestinian organization.
Sheeeeesh.... Anonymous.
David Zimmerman,
All them colored folks look alike. You can't tell one from another.
So if you kill the wrong one or one of them colored kids, it doesn't matter. It's not like you're killing the wrong white man.
DZ, I don't know that you'll agree, but I think you could have pointed out to that other anonymous that it was israeli hostility towards Arafat and the PLO that caused them to facilitate the rise of Hamas (part of their policy of divide and rule)--and now their creation has come home to bite them.
THEODOR ADORNO MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE
Adorno = Comedy isn’t a formula you see much, but here it is nevertheless. A big fight about (yes) T.W. Adorno portended that my marriage was not destined to last. If I’d listened to him and not her, I would have realized that I was getting engaged not to a partner-for-life but to my future-ex-wife.
Here’s what happened. The prospect of marriage as a pair of middle-class professionals circa 2002 raised—or so I thought it did anyway—a number of important issues that needed to be discussed beforehand. As they had been raised by Adorno, Weber, Durkheim, et al.
My suggested approach, to discussing the “problem” of modern marriage in this way before entering into it, did NOT fall on sympathetic ears: WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT?!?… NOBODY EVEN KNOWS WHO THOSE PEOPLE ARE!!! ... NOBODY TALKS LIKE THIS!!! … YOU’RE BEING SELFISH!!! … and so on.
So what did I do? I married her anyway because I thought that in "resolving" this issue she might thereafter lay off a bit. Adorno was duly tossed out the window. Can you imagine this level of stupidity/delusion/whatever? What could be more ridiculous (and distinctively modern) than being talked, arm-twisted, argued into marriage in the manner of an all-day binding arbitration? Ahhh ... ROMANCE!
I could have (and should have) listed not just to Adorno, but to P. Larkin as well:
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.
He married a woman to stop her getting away
Now she's there all day,
And the money he gets for wasting his life on work
She takes as her perk …
@David Zimmerman: both Hamas and Arafat are rapists and child murderers on a Nazi Jihad against Israel. The difference between the two is merely technical- Hamas's jihad is picking up the bodies so to speak from Arafat's jihad.
There is no difference between Hamas and Arafat- one is secular, the other Islamists, but the barbarity is from the same keffiyeh- you obviously don't pick up on irony or sarcasm, and don't pick up on opposing POVs
Anonymous,
If you're who most of us believe you are, you're an IDF veteran.
So if you're so gung-ho on this genocidal aggression, why not go back to Israel and volunteer for the IDF? They'll send you to Gaza where you can slaughter as many gooks
as you want.
It's not very courageous of you to sit in your comfortable arm chair in the U.S. and urge on the poor kids drafted into the IDF who are risking their lives so that you can get your kicks from a safe distance.
Happy Passover S Wallerstein, reclining in his easy chair, Blessed be the Marxist peacemakers
The ball's in your court, Stalin, float your peace plan and we'll sail away to the perfect place- as a Jew we're always ready for a lasting peace- you're a genius and are all seeing and a know it all- we came in peace to Israel as we did to Ellis Island- draft up a peace plan and I'll sign off on it
Pillette,
Marriage isn't therapy or telling it like it is.
It's negotiation, give and take and above all, diplomacy, knowing what to say to not offend her or cause tensions with her, lying a little when that avoids tensions and conflicts.
In fact, in my experience any successful adult relationship, be it with a partner, a friend or a grown child, is mostly diplomacy, understanding where the other is coming from and hoping that they understand where you're coming from.
If you want to talk about what you're really feeling and thinking without compromising, see a therapist.
I believe there will be a change of heart on this forum if Iran nukes Israel or destroys half of Jerusalem.
If Netanyahu issues the word for Jerusalem to be rebuilt after a Iranian attack, I believe many liberal Jewish men who didn't support Israel initially when it invaded Gaza will support Israel fundamentally & adamantly for a long stretch of time.
"https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/13/iran-israel-hamas-war-news-gaza-palestine/"
M.L. I just don't understand your sort of speculation @ 4:53 AM. What's the point of it?
Iran does not have nuclear weapons yet.
Israel does.
Your point, Mr. Llenos?
DZ
Some say Iran has nukes, and some say they don't. The Washington Post says they could have 3 nuclear bombs.
"https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/10/iran-nuclear-bomb-iaea-fordow/"
Anonymous
I'm trying to point out the fickleness of human nature.
You were predicting fickleness of a particular sort in a particular context. Isn't that different from fickleness in general?
I believe this mess yet again shows the stupidity of attempting "management" as opposed to just doing the right thing in the first place. Biden does need a new national security team.
ML, it's thanks to Trump that Iran has the enriched product that has made a nuke possible and thanks to Eisenhower and the U.K. that Iran is run by religious nuts. BTW, I visited your site and see that lawyers got to lawyer. I believe that the environmental and human rights issues raised by forcibly moving a couple million folks out to camps one has built in the desert are obvious. That's all.
Thursday morning I bought some stock and saw it go up 26 points. Friday I bailed at 18 down thanks in part to this ME nonsense so now it's personal.
Also, I see we again have multiple anons.
Anonymous
If I'm pointing out fickleness in a specific sort of way, even if I'm just hinting at it, it stands to suggest that I'm proving fickleness in a general fashion as well. For the sub-category proves the category above it.
aaall
I post Marc's writings because he is my friend and I believe he shouldn't have been cancelled from the Philosopher's Stone. Besides I believe that he is a par excellence lawyer & writer.
To Michael Llenos:
A propos fickleness, you say: "For the sub-category proves the category above it."
Careful.... this is a philosopher's site.
If by "proves" you mean "demonstrates that all the properties it has, so also do members of the category above it have," then all mammals are cats because, after all, cats are a sub-category of mammal.
Your critic has a point: If X is a sub-category of Y, and all Xs are fickle, it [OF COURSE] does not follow that all Ys are fickle.
It's logic.
Make your point a different way.
aaall,
Marc just sent those of us on his mailing list an email attacking what you said in this blog yesterday.
If you wish, I can forward you what he said. My mail is:
vivepablo@gmail.com
Otherwise, Michael Llenos will post it in his blog sooner or later.
I point this out not because I agree with Marc, but because he seems to be part of this conversation, even if he spends much of his time insulting me and others, often for no clear reason except his apparent mood disorders and gut dislike for many of us.
For example, a few days ago I said that I would spend my old age reading Adorno and Nietzsche, neither of which are anti-semites, yet he could not resist insulting me.
delete him from your mailing list; send him directly to trash; forget him
I recently stumbled upon a remarkable document that includes many, many thousands of words of comments about posts on the professor’s blog, and with particular attention to remarks made in the comments. Much of this is highly critical, and includes, with increasing frequency and ferocity, a small lexicon of invective directed towards the alleged political, moral, and intellectual flaws of the beloved professor and the commentators (a.k.a. ‘sycophants'). [And my ‘intellect’ is mocked for having made a short comment and linking a bit of the comic Stewart Lee on the highly context-specific, limited, and historically variable ‘legitimacy’ of claims of collective ownership of land. Oddly, there is no reference to the ‘intellect’ displayed or betrayed in my two published books (in Spanish) and 100,000 or so other words of published writing. Oh the irony!] The topics range widely from the merits of recent movies to legal minutiae, but a very quick read/skim suggests that the central points urged are as follows: 1. The state of Israel is the legitimate political entity governing (very roughly) its current territory. 2. Any and all criticisms of Israel, its policies, its politicians, etc. are permissible, and perhaps even encouraged, so long as (a) they presuppose or acknowledge #1, and (b) are not infected with the (massively documented) anti-Semitism so prominent globally. People agreeing with claims 1 & 2 are non-anti-Semitic friends of Israel and Jews.--My own philosophical interest with regard to these two claims is on the question of legitimacy (hence the appropriateness of the link to Stewart Lee).-- But of course the great bulk of the writing concerns claim 2(b). As far as I can tell, there are three proposed criteria for a criticism counting as anti-Semitic: 1. Explicit use of familiar anti-Semitic characterizations, tropes, and/or doxai. 2. (Culpable) ignorance of massively documented facts relating to the history of Jews, or failure to cite the relevant such facts. 3. ‘Double standards’, which are particularly salient when a certain action undertaken by the state of Israel and/or Jews is criticized in the strongest possible way (especially as ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’), where identical or even manifestly vastly worse actions by non-Israelis and/or non-Jews elicit no similar condemnation, or indeed even praise. Setting aside philosophical qualms about the unqualified and non-context-specific use of the concept of legitimacy, noting the contentiousness of claim #1, and lacking a new post from the professor to ponder, I find myself wondering whether anyone would disagree with the three criteria of anti-Semitism. Or is it (as it seems to me) that the disagreement concerns the completeness of the set of criteria, and especially the application of the criteria?
s.w., Henny Youngman relates a conversation between two men: One relates that he isn't married. The other replies, "you aren't married! What do you do for aggravation?" I currently have to repair my septic system so I have enough aggravation for now.
I did find the attempt to lawyer around the obvious amusing and after Friday and my septic system, I bit on the distraction. Deserts, water, concentration camps, forced migrations, a government composed of far-right religious nuts, and a moron making plans - whatever could go wrong? Jared is a dimwit failson whose ex-con daddy had a few mil to spare so he could get in to Harvard and then marry into another crime family. He did one of the worst real estate deals ever and still failed upwards with those Saudi billions. That he also did pardons and the Middle East in the Trump administration checks all the boxes - stupid, ignorant, and evil. I do get other's blinders but some things are just hopeless if religion and ethnicity are ones only metrics.
Moving on - if U.S. and Jordanian planes can shoot down Iranian drones and missiles that have left Iranian airspace, why can't NATO (including U.S.) assets take out Russian drones and missiles that have left Russian airspace? Also, while Israel should just "take the win," would it be so terrible if Israel took out Iran's ability to manufacture drones and missiles?
Anonymous,
First of all, I'm on his mailing list because I was one of the people who defended Marc when Professor Wolff banned him from this blog. That friendly gesture on my part did not soften his rooted antipathy towards me.
The Argentinian philosopher Dario Sztajnszajber probably isn't a first-rate philosopher, but generally seems to me to be a sensible or even wise fellow when he talks about how he lives his life, his relationship with his partner or with his now deceased parents.
When asked if he is in twitter, Sztajnszajber answers affirmatively, that he posts in twitter, but generally does not answer comments because of the bad vibes so frequent in social media, although he reads all the comments on his posts.
He says that he wants to see what other are opining, in another words, to be in contact with the reality of the polis, which often is not particularly agreeable.
So too I generally read what Marc writes.
I believe that it's noteworthy that someone, expelled from a blog maybe a year ago or more, obsessively follows it, often commenting on comments within minutes. What trauma or psychic wound lies behind that is an intriguing mystery.
It's like someone, who after a failed relationship, cannot stop reading what his or her ex partner posts.
aaall writes:
would it be so terrible if Israel took out Iran's ability to manufacture drones and missiles?
Do you think it's a good idea to prolong the current Israel-Iran exchange, thereby risking a full-scale war between the two? It is not, imo.
Iran announced its missile and drone strike publicly as it got underway (or maybe even before that). It used slow and cheap drones. It appears to have been basically a telegraphed piece of theater that caused little damage and no fatalities. So there is no reason for Israel to strike back, imo. Plus I doubt that Iran's ability to manufacture missiles can be permanently "taken out." Am no mil. expert, but my guess is that the manufacturing sites are dispersed and prob well-hidden, and even if the IDF destroyed them my guess is that Iran cd reconstitute them. Plus it cd trigger an actual full-scale war betw Iran and Israel, which no one shd want and is why the Biden admin is telling Israel not to strike back.
No, but since I won't be asked, I have no option but to observe and reflect so if the Israeli war cabinet chooses to do something stupid, it would preferably be against missile and drone production facilities then other possibilities.
Factories can be rebuilt but that can take months or even years depending on what gets destroyed. Meanwhile Russia loses a source.
LFC, help me out. Iran shoots a bunch of drones and missiles at Israel and the US, UK, Jordan, and the Saudis scramble to shoot them down, presumably after they have left Iranian air space. Perhaps NATO assets should be eliminating Russian drones and missiles that intrude into sovereign Ukrainian airspace.
Better to just give the Ukrainians the necessary technology to do that themselves, I would think. If US House Repubs continue to be a problem here, then maybe NATO assets cd be used but I wd be worried re dangers of escalation. So far Putin's actions have not fully matched his verbal hints and saber rattling, but I do not have the sense that he is the most stable (in any sense) person rt now.
A final comment following up yesterday's: A bit of musing between my morning reading of Melville and Spinoza delivered the following analysis of the procedure indicated in the bizarre on-line document I stumbled upon yesterday: 1. Claim self-evidence of 'principles', especially (unanalyzed) 'moral' principles. 2. Add arbitrary/unmotivated empirical claims (maintain philosophical naivety about self-evidence, and crow about one's penetrating intellect). 3. Assume/Assert seamless continuity between 'principles' and the empirical claims. 4. (a) Google evidence, and (b) select what seems to support the otherwise unmotivated claims, discard all other evidence. 5. Assert one's infallibility and insist that those who disagree are 'X's (where X is an item in a very short lexicon of invective). 6. Repeat 1-5 with ever-increasing frequency and fervor.
I just heard John Kirby, admin spokesman, say that the US (and presumably Israel) had no advance notice from Iran of (exact) timing or targets. So maybe not as "telegraphed" as I suggested above. (Acc to him, there was one casualty, a 10 yr old girl who was wounded.)
W/r/t John Rapko’s query of the 14th, I DISAGREE! (Because of course I do.)
Actually this is only a meta-disagreement. Your analysis is eminently reasonable, but in order to properly understand the pheonomenon in question I submit that we look not to cognitive modes of analysis but rather consider the affective state of the anti-anti-semite (or AAS).
What an AAS enjoys is the feeling of “calling out” (as the kids like to say) “immoral” behavior. Whether or not the behavior actually meets any relevant moral criteria is beside the point. Not only that, if the calling out is (as is the case more often than not) actually libelous, all the better! This only gins up the AAS’s affective experience.
Moreover, insofar as an AAS operates as a kind of moral witchfinder general, there is a strong—nay, overwhelming—incentive to discover antisemitism in as many places as possible. Witchfinding is an art, not a science. I’m reminded of a brief I wrote contra FBI fingerprint policies. I was surprised to learn that the FBI does not consider fingerprinting to be a “science”—rather it is an “art” (I shit you not)!
An AAS also resembles a kind of musician (or cur) who can hear frequencies that the rest of us cannot.
I'd be hard put to come up with anything as sophisticated as your analysis, J.R., but it seems to me that it might well apply, with suitable emendations, to that John Kirby whom LFC just referred to--to watch him performing is to know that he's probably lying or at leas shaving the truth.
After decades of soft, and misleading reporting from NYT providing cover for Israel's atrocities, we find that things haven't changed much:
https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/
I recently came across an article by Michael Hudson, an economist, who lays out the grand strategy of Israel and the US. I consider it a "must read."
https://web.archive.org/web/20240416010122/https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/04/15/the-gaza-genocide-as-explicit-policy-michael-hudson-names-all-names/
@ Jerry Fresia
Hudson says: "The genocide that we are seeing today is the explicit policy of Israel’s founders...."
This is a rather absurd statement. I don't have time for a debate right now so I'll leave it at that.
Can there be any genuine doubt?
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as:
... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
As Chomsky and others have argued, the word Genocide has been so politicized in the last decades and there are different definitions and interpretations. I think if we substitute "genocide" with Ethnic Cleansing in the quote LFC alluded to, then there is no question at all that the statement is true. I have been reading more and more books on the founding of Israel and its background (mostly by Israeli historians) and the disregard for Palestinian lives is genetic in Zionist thinking. Most Americans, including those that think of themselves as educated (sometimes I think even more so), are incredibly ignorant of the history behind the Palestinian conflict.
Anonymous @3:48
The quotation is about the policy of the *founders* of the state.
@ MAD
Disregard for Palestinian lives is not "genetic in Zionist thinking." Some Zionists have displayed such disregard, but that's a different statement.
@MAD
The UN partition plan of 1947 was, in current terminology, a two-state solution. I'm sure it was not ideal but one wonders how things would have unfolded differently had it been accepted. Do the histories you've been reading discuss this?
P.s. Btw some strands of Zionism come out of a left-wing tradition. For example, the early Zionist Moses Hess is referred to by Hobsbawm as a communist (in The Age of Revolution, 1962, pb, p. 235). Wikipedia has a long article on Labor Zionism. A section toward the end of the entry headed Labor Zionism Today refers to the late Shlomo Avineri's book The Making of Modern Zionism. It came out in 1981 or around then and in a revised ed. in 2017. Might be worth a look (I haven't read it myself).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Zionism
@LFC
The association of communism/socialism with Zionist is nothing new to anybody that has read something on Zionism and the founding Israel. I recommend Bar-Zohar's biography of Ben-Gurion for some insight on that (Ben-Gurion approved the biography). That is totally irrelevant to their attitudes to the Palestinians. Now, surely there were some exceptional Zionists that had some consideration for the Palestinians. I recommend Between Zionism and Judaism by Shalom Ratzabi which discusses that topic in the context of the Brit Shalom organization. ultimately their influence was nil due to their low numbers. Surely there are some women that are stronger than most men and yet we feel comfortable in asserting that men are stronger than women. In the same way, anybody that reads on the subject and is honest must conclude that Zionist thinkers including the most important figures in the founding of Israel had incredibly monstrous disregard for the dignity of the Palestinians. LFC, why don't you at least read Ben Gurion's own Memoirs? what made you so soft on Israel? is there a book I should read on the subject that has key information I am ignoring? or did you just accept what NYT, Washington Post, etc told you over the decades?
I apologize for the bad grammar, as I had to write this in a phone and was rushing.
From what I can see, LFC is making the point that if the Palestinians had accepted the original partition offer in 1947, they and the rest of the world would have spared a lot of grief.
That doesn't imply that the original offer was fair or just.
Still less does it justify current IDF brutality and slaughter in Gaza.
Sometimes in life (and life is unfair) it's wise to accept an offer which seems unfair to you because it's the best deal that you're going to be offered.
@s. wallerstein
We do not know for sure if disaster would have been avoided even if they accepted the original plan. It was difficult enough for the Zionists to accept the plan since they had plans to expand their territory. Accepting the plan was pragmatic since the expansion plan could only happen once a state existed (I am paraphrasing Ben-Gurion). We don't even have to look at what Menachem Begin and his allies were planning.
Of course the deal was unfair and do we know of a native population that would have willfully capitulated to giving up its land to foreigners at that scale? We have to remember that Palestine was largely populated by very poor unlettered peasants who did not know who they were dealing with. You had experienced political agitators from Europe with access to the ears of the most powerful men in the world taking advantage of this very unbalanced situation.
Most of the wars Israel started since 1956 until 2000 were with expansionist aims. According to US media, most specially NYT, Israel against its wishes had to wage war for its existence.
s. wallerstein,
You're sounding more and more pragmatic as you talk of the need for compromise, even in marriage (especially in marriage!). Are you mellowing in your old age? My recollections (admittedly not the best) are that you were pretty much against bargaining and taking half a loaf.
David Palmeter,
I'm in favor of compromising in all situations except when dealing with you.
You bring out the best (or maybe the worst from your point of view) in me.
You ask a gratuitiously unpleasant question and you get an unpleasant answer.
I think there are two somewhat separate issues I was addressing/raising. One is the question of the original ('47) partition, and s.w. has interpreted me correctly on that.
The other is the question of Zionists' (historical) attitudes toward the Palestinians, and that is not something that MAD and I are going to resolve here. (I acknowledge that I would need to read more on this than I have, and I'm sure the picture is not monochrome. I will put B-G's memoirs on my reading list. Also the Avineri bk, which MAD has apparently not read -- see my comment @7:26 p.m.)
I view Israel's operations in Gaza as a clear and blatant violation of the law of armed conflict (a/k/a international humanitarian law). Its occupation of the West Bank has been illegal since its inception. Its right-wing religious parties are horrible. There is a v. good case to be made that its rule in the occupied territories is analogous to apartheid. None of that amts to being "soft" on Israel. I support a two-state arrangement in which a Jewish state (which respects the rights of its non-Jewish citizens) coexists peacefully with a Palestinian state (which respects the rights of its non-Arab, non-Muslim citizens). Such an arrangement, imperfect to be sure, has been on the table before. Unfortunately achieving it now is going to be, if anything, more difficult than before. But I think it is still the most realistic of the available options for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. (Many people, incl. some "mainstream" academics, disagree w that. So be it.)
W.r.t. Palestine being inhabited by poor "unlettered peasants" in '47. I'm pretty sure there was an educated Palestinian elite, albeit perhaps small. And if B-G wanted to expand, would he have been able to do so once the two states had been recognized? Had the '47 partition been accepted, internationally recognized boundaries would have resulted, so was B-G thinking about a war of expansion in violation of the UN Charter? The 67 war started w a pre-emptive Israeli strike in anticipation of an Egyptian attack that it had evidence was about to occur (M. Oren's Six Days of War is prob the definitive account. Started it once, but the level of detail is a little daunting.) The 73 war began w an attack by the Arab states, one that caught Israel off guard. The 48 war was a war designed to eliminate the fledging state from the map. Some of what Israel did during the 48 war and in the aftermath of the 67 war can be justly denounced, but none of these wars was primarily a war of territorial expansion afaict. If, after the 67 war, Israel had given the West Bank back to Jordan and the Gaza Strip back to Egypt, as it shd have, the war wd have gone down as basically a defensive one.
Well, I've realized I don't know that much about B-G. T. Segev's fairly recent biography is readily available at a local library (Eng. title A State at Any Cost). It's 800 pp.!
2 reviews of the book, the second one more critical:
https://www.progressiveisrael.org/a-state-at-any-cost/
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/7207/indispensable-man/
This is what Begin said on 1967: "In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him". After repeated calls for negotiations and compromise from the Egyptians, completely mocked by Israel, the Egyptians went on the attack to recuperate the lost territory from 1967. I am sure that the Egyptians must have also have in mind the unprovoked 1956 attack by Israel. In the US though, we were told that Sadat was insane and that he did not want want compromise and that finally he matured during the Camp David Accords.
With respect to the partition, I think my response to SW addresses that. There was a lot more to gain for the Zionists from accepting the plan than for the Palestinians. Of course accepting the plan would have been the better option for Palestinians in hindsight. They could not look into the future and their leadership was not very competent. But again, it was difficult enough for the Zionists (who had no moral claim on other people's land) to accept the plan, since they wanted a lot more. Why do we blame the Palestinians for not doing something that no other people would have done in the same situation? The partition process was a losing battle since Zionists had connections since the 1910s to the highest positions of foreign policy authority in the UK and later the US.
Lastly on Apartheid I think this quote from Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle is relevant:
Israel surely suffered a deterioration in its image abroad as a result of
the [Lebanon] war. A dramatic example was given by Yoel Marcus of Ha’aretz, who
regards the war “from its beginning to its end (which is not yet on the
horizon [in October]) as the fulfillment of the most terrifying prophecies
that one could imagine.” He reports on a visit to South Africa, where he
had expected to find “the last island of popular sympathy remaining for
us in the world” in our second most important ally after the United States.” The bombings of Beirut were condemned, and also the massacres. “Who would have believed that even in the eyes of the state that is denounced as the most immoral in the world, Israel is regarded as immoral?” “We carry out a policy of Apartheid, we oppress the Blacks, not giving them a decent education, and their wages are
miserable—but we do not murder women and children,” he was told by a South African editor.
On 14 May 1967, Egypt began a buildup of soldiers in the Sinai. On 22 May, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. On 29 May he announced that if war came the Egyptian goal wd be the destruction of Israel. "For all the excitement and fear that their actions generated, it is unlikely that the Egyptians intended to begin the war themselves....Nasser would almost certainly have regarded it as a great victory if he could have closed the Straits and maintained his army on Israel's borders without war. Indeed, it would have been a great victory, not only because of the economic blockade it would have established, but also because of the strain it would have placed on the Israeli defense system." Israel sought a "political resolution of the crisis" before using force. (Walzer, _Just and Unjust Wars_, p. 84)
All that the quote from The Fateful Triangle shows is that the massacres in the two refugee camps in 1982 were condemned by some in S. Africa.
LFC:
Sorry to make you so agitated. What does "a land without people for a people without land" mean to you? Or the concept of "settler colonialism" or the linkage/aspirations of Israeli founders with US founders? The concept "genocide" or even "Nakba" seems to beget emotional responses that simple statements of fact (for example, the US founding rests on the elimination of 10 million indigenous people, according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) do not. I'm trying to understand some pretty ugly realities.
s. wallerstein,
Sorry if I offended you. I didn't mean to.
David Palmeter,
Thank you very much for your apology.
I fully accept it.
Let this be day-one between us.
Jerry Fresia
Would you extrapolate the entire history of the U.S. (or any other country) from the most stupid and false slogans that have been coined in its course? If not, then you shdnt do it in the case of Israel I suggest Samuel Fleischaker's piece on settler colonialism. Will link later.
Sorry, I left out a period in the above comment.
I'll just defer to Chomsky on Walzer and his hypocrisy in that book. See Fateful Triangle. With respect to South Africa, it should have been clear decades ago that what Palestinians have endured goes beyond apartheid. Without even including the numerous military operations targeting civilians for decades and decades, the treatment of those in the occupied territories has been monstrous. I am not sure what to compare it to. Perhaps Jim Crow South comes somewhat close but then again the US government did not explicitly encourage the beatings and tortures of black children by its white citizens.
@ MAD
Michael Oren, _Six Days of War_ (pb ed, 2003), contains at the end a conversation between the author and Fouad Ajami. A glance at it suggests it may be worth reading. It's about 10 pages.
LFC, is there a link besides the book, can't seem to find one? Poking around it seems like the settler-colonist thing is sort of an academic industry. Folks have moved around since before we were human and in the process displaced who or what ever was in the way (there were apex predators in the Americas that no longer exist and who disappeared when humans moved in from Asia - then Europeans showed up). It's good to transcend that part of our nature but the SC thing seems a bit special.his is interesting:
"Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, in July 1853, who was President of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews wrote to Prime Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was "a country without a nation" in need of "a nation without a country... Is there such a thing? To be sure there is, the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!"[7][8] In May of the following year, he wrote in his diary "Syria is 'wasted without an inhabitant'; these vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion. The territory must be assigned to some one or other... There is a country without a nation; and God now, in His wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country".[9] In 1875, Shaftesbury told the annual general meeting of the Palestine Exploration Fund that "We have there a land teeming with fertility and rich in history, but almost without an inhabitant – a country without a people, and look! scattered over the world, a people without a country".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_land_without_a_people_for_a_people_without_a_land
The nineteenth century gave us all sorts of wacky ideas.
aaall,
Marc S. has sent those on his mailing list the Michael Oren essay you expressed interest in.
I don't know how to link to it here, but if you write me at my email address above, I can send it to you.
@aaall
If you are interested in that topic I recommend The Origins of Christian Zionism by Donald Lewis. It is a very academic book and it focuses on the life of Lord Shaftesbury through his diaries.
#23 of Marc Susselman's Correspondences at my website has my download link for Michael Oren's essay, "Clarity with Michael Oren"
It's a docx.
Michael Llenos--
As the administrator of your website, you really, really should remove all those silly playground insults and sneers from the writings that you post; they're of course self-embarrassing and self-indicting for their author, and also taint the blog as a whole. It's not censorship, but rather just modeling good behavior. I won't be looking at your site until you do so. Might I suggest that in place of, say, 'that idiot [and likewise: 'liberal'; 'Marxist'; 'academic' (expanded version: 'armchair academic'); 'xxxhole'; etc.] So-and-so', you put 'the honorable, highly intelligent yet wayward thinking So-and-so'. In my case, you could alternatively replace it with my future nom d'internet, 'Concept Man'.
Here's a link to his substack:
https://claritywithmichaeloren.substack.com/
The essays in question are there.
Naftali Bennett was recently on Zakaria's show. When he was asked if the present IDF actions weren't just creating more terrorists. Bennett insisted that that wasn't the case and that as soon as Hamas was eliminated the rest of the Palestinian population would settle down. Seems delusional to me.
Just curious. Since I've stated multiple times that the U.S. and other Western Hemisphere nations should have taken in the folks on the St.Louis and asked for more and the options for European Jews post WWII should have been limited to stay in Europe or come to the United States, etc. Somehow "more Jews in the U.S." (where I live) makes me antisemitic.
By the 1980s California Condors were almost extinct. They once ranged from Baja to Oregon and the Pacific to the Grand Canyon. The last couple dozen were trapped from their redoubt in Southern California and divided into two breeding populations at the L.A. Zoo and the San Diego Zoo. There have been breeding pairs released in several areas and there are now wild populations in Northern and Southern California and Arizona.
Let's move a bunch of people from one place where they were almost exterminated to another place where almost everyone hates them and wants to exterminate them. Boutique nations, Bronze and Iron Age just so stories - whatever could go wrong?
Amazing how many easterners came out to our deserts and just dried up and blew away - cemeteries are an interest. Folks think they understand logistics and water and then comes the body count.=
"I won't be looking at your site until you do so."
I guess I'm just one John Rapko reader the poorer.
I don't have time to look at Oren's substack right now but just want to say I don't necessarily share the views expressed there -- can't say, bc haven't looked at it. (I think my views wd differ in some respects, though.)
In the interview w Ajami incl at the end of the pb ed of his bk Six Days of War, he says he made a conscious effort to take his own biases (which are with the more "traditional" (i.e., non-revisionist) historiography of the I/P conflict) into account. That doesn't mean he succeeded in writing a perfectly "objective" account -- there is no such thing -- but it does appear to be an impressive work in terms of research etc. I wd have to plow through the bk of course before being able to form a real judgment.
Checked Bloomberg and oil is up, futures down, treasuries up, Vix down :-).
I wonder if Prof. Wolff knew Daniel Dennett (whose death was announced today) in his time at Harvard. Dennett would have been an undergraduate during the time Wolff was an instructor.
LFC, what's the point of you again and again writing that you haven't read something or skimmed only a part of something before pronouncing that you would probably disagree with it if you'd read the whole thing. Is this a nervous intellectual tic, or what?
T.J., I know, nil nisi bonum . . ., but I just recently read Dennett's biography and found it to be rather awful--he just couldn't constrain his animus against those who argued against him and his vanity seems to have been overwhelming.
Anonymous,
My impression of LFC is that he is a very intellectually scrupulous person, probably more scrupulous than one expects in a blog.
He holds himself to intellectual standards than one might expect and usually does not find in a graduate school seminar.
Being so scrupulous is a virtue, although it doesn't get you far in this world.
That LFC is often intellectually scrupulous is something I don't doubt, s.w. But it surely isn't scrupulous to refer to books unread or partly skimmed. I just wish LFC would write about the things he has a well-founded understanding of. That would benefit us all. I'll add that I do understand that he, as do we all, want to engage in some conversation. I'm sorry if I called attention to a minor tic.
Anonymous,
With respect to Michael Oren in particular, I'm pretty sure I don't completely share his view of current Mideast politics (or his politics in general for that matter). I have on my shelf the book by him (Six Days of War) that I referred to.
Explaining why I mentioned that book even though I haven't done more than dip into it requires some rehashing of the thread. Specifically, MAD wrote that all of Israel's wars from 1956 on have been "wars of territorial expansion." I disagreed (I don't think any of them really can be characterized that way). W.r.t. the Six-Day War in particular, it was an anticipatory or pre-emptive use of force, and I don't think its original aim was territorial expansion (though one of its consequences was the occupation of the WB and Gaza). I took a few "cuts" at this, first saying something that wasn't quite right, then looking up Walzer's take on the Six-Day War in Just and Unjust Wars (which I had read before but had forgotten the details of). Then MAD in reply referred briefly to Chomsky's discussion of Walzer's "hypocrisy." Then I decided to cite something on the Six-Day War other than Walzer's few pages, and the Oren book was on the shelf and it got some very favorable reviews to judge by the blurbs (at least in "mainstream" outlets). So I mentioned it. (I could have also mentioned Nadav Safran's From War to War, which I had read part of in college when I took a course with him, but since my memory of it was v. sketchy and I think I no longer have the book, I decided not to.)
I'll try though I can't promise) in the future only to mention books I've read. That applies e.g. to Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, which I've read more than once (once in grad school and once before that). However, despite having read that book more than once, I did not remember the details of his few pages on the Six-Day War (all I firmly remembered is that his take on it, in terms of his normative judgments, is controversial). So I had to pull the book from the shelf and re-read those few pages (I was mainly re-reading them for the factual/historical context as he gives it).
p.s. Perhaps (?), Anonymous, you are a professional (i.e. academic) philosopher, and maybe you remember almost every page of everything you've ever read. I'm not a philosopher, and I don't. This a side point, and admittedly has nothing directly to do with your complaint that I mention things that I haven't read or have only skimmed. I understand, btw, why that could get annoying, and I'll try to be more conscious of it.
Thanks for your response, LFC. And again my apologies for raising the matter in such a testy fashion.
As to memory, I'm of an age where it would be absurd to claim I had a good one. I am, however, inclined to try to refresh what I still have by taking a look at the sources I make use of before saying anything--my inclination is to footnote everything.
That said, at risk of being over-provocative, since Israel's motivations and actions are under consideration here, I've just come across this. Enjoy?
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/samson-and-cassandra/
Every prominent politician who has endorsed him knows this and yet:
https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1779807253849108874
Anonymous, if you wanted to watch and listen to the article you site in Jewishvoiceforlabour.org etc,
You can do so if you have not already here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEfYVUzgxCk i think one could open that without any problem. If there are problems let me know.
@LFC
I said "most", not "all". I did that because throughout the second half of the 20th century there were countless Israeli military operations against civilians (Palestinians and other Arabs)that received no coverage in western media, especially the US. I have not read an academic monograph on the 1967 war but my other readings it is clear that what we were fed about it was largely an illusion. I hope to read Oren's book in the future despite the fact that he was the Israeli ambassador to the US from 2009 to 2013. I went to the website of Cambridge university press to search for books on the topic. Literally the first one I selected (preview linked at the botoom) has this as the abstract:
"The war fought in June 1967 between Israel and Arab states was widely taken to
have been forced upon Israel, to fight to prevent the annihilation of its people by
Arab armies hovering on Israel’s borders. Period documents declassified by key
governments now give reason to question that view of this war. The four major
powers all knew that the Arab states were not in attack mode. The major powers
tried feverishly to dissuade Israel from attacking. In later years, the June 1967 war was seized upon as a precedent for allowing an attack on a state that is expected to attack. The precedent has been used to justify even an attack on a state whose own expected attack is well in the future. In a number of instances, a state using force has contrived facts to make its use of force appear to be defensive. The June 1967 war in fact can serve as no precedent in such circumstances, because evidence is lacking that it was waged on Israel’s side in anticipation of an attack by Arab states. A flawed perception of the June 1967 war holds sway in governmental
and academic circles, despite the declassified documents. Additionally, and also
negatively, Israel-Palestine peace efforts are hampered by the persistence of the
view that Israel acted in lawful self-defense in 1967. This book seeks to provide
a corrective on the character of the June 1967 war."
https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/32064/frontmatter/9781107032064_frontmatter.pdf
I just finished reading "The Myths of Liberal Zionism" by Yitzhak Laor, an Israeli journalist. I just picked it at random from the Library and I could not be more satisfied with it. I heavily recommend it. It contains great insights into the dynamic of the liberal West, the Holocaust, Israel and the consequences upon the Palestinians. It also has deep reflections on the cultural divide between Israelis (Ashkenazim vs Mizrahim) and again the relation to the Palestinians and the Arab world at large. There is a lot more than that but I will save it in case anybody reads it in the near future. It's short book of only 162 pages.
Compare these 2 accounts.
From Chomsky's Fateful Triangle:
The pattern is common. Israeli journalist Tom Segev reports what happened when an Arab lawyer told him that a random walk through Jerusalem would yield ample evidence of intimidation and humiliation of Arabs. Skeptical, Segev walked with him through Jerusalem, where he was stopped repeatedly by Border Guards to check his identification papers. One ordered him: “Come here, jump.” Laughing, he dropped the
papers on the road and ordered the lawyer to pick them up. “These people will do whatever you tell them to do,” the Border Guards explained to Segev: “If I tell him to jump, he will jump. Run, he will run. Take your clothes off, he will take them off. If I tell him to kiss the wall, he will kiss it. If I tell him to crawl on the road, won’t he crawl? Everything. Tell him to curse his mother and he will curse her too.” They are “not human beings.” The Guards then searched the lawyer, slapped him, and ordered him to remove his shoes, warning that they could order him to remove his clothes as well. “My Arab,” Segev continues, “kept silent and sat down on the ground” as the Border Guards laughed, saying again “Really, not humans,” then walked away. “People were passing by and didn’t look at the Arab, as if he were transparent. ‘Here you have your story’, said my Arab.” Others are not so fortunate, and may be beaten and taken away for “interrogation” and detention without charge. Complaints to the police evoke still further brutality, as amply documented.
From "Do not go Gentle" by Charles Gelman, a Polish Jewish resistance fighter in WW2:
Throughout the period of Russian administration there were Jews living in our town, as well as surrounding towns, who had come from the western part of Poland, occupied by the Germans in September 1939. These Jews had managed to come to eastern Poland, even after living several months under the Germans. The stories they told were not pleasant. Jews in German-occupied territory had to wear a yellow star of David on their clothes. At times they were mistreated and demeaned, for example, by being made to wash public latrines and streets. Jews had no right to use sidewalks; they had to walk in the middle of the street. Religious Jews in the street often had their beards cut by force, or grabbed by a handful of hair pulled out. Sometimes a German officer would order an individual Jew, or a group, to dance for him and then proceed to mercilessly beat up those who hadn’t jumped high enough or who had otherwise failed to perform to his liking.
MAD,
I do not doubt that Palestinians are subject to arbitrary brutality and discrimination from Israeli authorities.
For that reason, Israeli treatment of Palestinians is often compared to apartheid in South Africa and that seems apt to me.
As to comparing the Israelis to Nazi Germany, we all know that the Nazis went beyond arbitrary brutality and humiliating treatment of the Jews when they put into practice the
so-called "Final Solution."
I am aware that Israel is accused of genocide in international courts, but so far the courts have not issued a definitive ruling. Until such a ruling is issued, if it is,
why compare Israel with Nazi Germany?
I feel compelled to ask,
SILL HERE?
ALSO....
reading through some old notes, I found the following passage that is delightful in content and form:
"The technical term for extracting more value from a factor input than is contained within it is "exploitation." Where then, Marx asks [ironically, as though he did not already know the answer], can the capitalist find an input into production whose consumption in the production process actually bestows more value on the output than is contained in the input? Well, Marx says, in one of the great passages of classical [or neo-classical for that matter] Political Economy, "Moneybags must be so lucky" as to find such a commodity, and find it he does in labor-power.
"Technically, therefore, the capitalist exploits labor-power, DESPITE THE FACT THAT HE PAYS FULL VALUE FOR IT AND THEREFORE SATISFIES THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE OF BOURGEOIS MORALITY.
"This exploitation is not a consequence of any moral failing on the part of the capitalist. Indeed, he could not do otherwise and still survive in the cutthroat competitive environment of the capitalist marketplace. He is not reprehensible, by bourgeois moral standards. Quite to the contrary, he is to be praised and honored for his fair dealing, as indeed he is by the universities that award him honorary degrees, the churches that make him a vestryman, the art museums that woo his patronage, and the governments that bestow upon him their Medals of Freedom or even offer him high positions in the halls of power. To say otherwise is to trouble deaf heaven with our bootless cries."
Best to give up on 'exploitation' as a technical term, methinks. The concept that children understand is the concept. It's not a thought it's a feeling.
But I'm posting to wonder if Wolff at 90 years old is incapacitated, not blogging for a month?
Does it now require a judicial ruling to validate that something is genocide? Did it take a judicial ruling to validate that what the Nazis were doing was genocide?
If genocide is a crime under international law, then nvm.
I had been making light of 'exploitation' as a technical term, I can make light of lots of technical terms. This is Wolff: 'There is no duty, prima facie or otherwise, to obey the law simply because it is the law.'
There is a reference in there to the notion that liberal political theory usually assumes that an obligation to obey the law implies nothing more than a prima facie reason to obey. There is such a thing, though, hypothetically, as a practical necessity more stringent than that of a prima facie reason. But fine, even in this ‘modest’ sense there is no obligation to obey the law, even if it is, shall we say, it is of interest, to note that for most people an obligation to obey the law (and most people believe themselves to be under such an obligation) means something far more demanding than a prima facie reason. The prevalence of this ‘strong’ notion of an obligation to obey, even seems to me to reflect a coherent and sober understanding that the law’s claims for obedience are very different from the current philosophical conception of the obligation to obey the law as a prima facie reason to obey. At the very least, we might reflect that the question of the proper attitude to the law is a central preoccupation of political philosophy. Of course, the law claims that its rules and rulings are authoritative. I'm kind of just riffing here, I hope to hint that there are tricky matters, if you stop to consider them. I can promise you that you do not want anybody in your life who doesn't consider it a duty to obey the law. You probably know better than to hire such people, and a student should know that you break the law, you're not going to be tolerated at a university.
All of which is totally irrelevant, I'm still here because I think Wolff is perhaps burdened healthwise..?
MAD, quoting a book's abstract:
"The June 1967 war in fact can serve as no precedent in such circumstances, because evidence is lacking that it was waged on Israel’s side in anticipation of an attack by Arab states."
When Walzer published (the first edition) of Just and Unjust Wars in 1977, he included his discussion of the Six Day War in the chapter called "Anticipations." Yet Walzer does not think the Israeli strike was launched in anticipation of an immediate Egyptian attack. I quoted Walzer upthread to this effect: "...it is unlikely that the Egyptians intended to begin the war themselves" (p. 83) -- i.e., Nasser probably had no "immediate intention" (p. 85) in early June '67 to launch an attack.
So why, in Walzer's view, was the Israeli strike nonetheless justified? His argument basically is that the blockade of Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran announced by Nasser, plus the buildup of Egyptian forces in the Sinai, put Israel in a situation where a very hostile state to it (as Egypt was then) could launch an attack from the Sinai at any time -- it put Israel in a position of danger that was intolerable and put its territorial integrity at serious risk, he argues. Much of the Israeli public apparently feared an imminent invasion and apparently at least part of the mil. establishment did too, otherwise why would "thousands of graves [have been] dug in the military cemeteries" (p. 84)?
One may or may not be convinced by Walzer's conclusion that the Israeli strike was a "case of legitimate anticipation" (p. 85). No two situations are precisely alike, and thus to cite one situation as precedent in another situation is hazardous. Under all the circumstances in this specific case, one can at least make an argument that an "anticipatory" strike was justified. However, it may well have been a very exceptional situation that should not be taken as self-justifying precedent by other governments in somewhat different situations.
Do I agree with Walzer that the Israeli strike was a "legitimate anticipation"? I'm not sure. I would have to do more reading about the details and the surrounding circumstances, and at the moment I have no intention of doing that (b/c of other things on the plate).
So (apparently) unlike you, MAD, I'm willing to live without having a firm answer to certain questions, in this case the normative question of whether the Israeli strike in June '67 was justified or not.
@s. wallerstein
I am not sure if you saw my comments on the comparison with apartheid on April 17 12:22 am and at 9:16 am. In any case Professor Wolff gives a response to your point I agree with to a large extent. Is there a particular reason you keep insisting on this point?
@LFC,
I have not asserted a firm position on the events, decisions or intentions in the 1967 war. I have already mentioned that I have not read an academic monograph on the subject. From my readings of the conflict (30 or so books and papers in the last 5 months) my only "firm" opinion is that what we were fed by the media and so-called intellectuals was an illusion. The world is complex and whatever the right answer to the problem might be, there will be complications and caveats, etc. Invariably though, what seemingly educated individuals think happened in some conflict involving Israel (due to media and other sources of information) is radically different from what scholars and on the ground journalists say happened. I know without a shred of a doubt that whatever may the complicated truth about 1967, that it is drastically different from what most Americans think happened. If I may say so, it seems that you unlike me, are willing to live your daily life without digging through uncomfortable facts because they can make any sane person depressed and question your worldview assumptions. That is not a criticism since most people cannot (and maybe should not) constantly focus on depressing stuff. I feel a deep sense of disgust toward the establishment that I had not felt in many years or maybe ever.
when I say readings of the conflict, I mean Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
@s. wallerstein
Comparing two different catastrophes is too complicated. I just wanted readers to reflect on the two accounts. I have no "firm" answer on the following questions but I am wondering if any you have thought about them: what if Israel had been founded before WW2, before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, before human rights organizations came to exist, or if it did not come to depend on some powerful Western nation, etc? Is it far fetched to imagine the Zionists attempting something even more monstrous than what they have done over the decades ? From my readings, it seems to me many of the necessary ingredients for the tragedy of WW2 are/were present in the ideology of the most important foundational leaders of Israel. Maybe not all of them but certainly a lot of them. It would take to long to justify that statement but a little treat comes from Lawrence Wright's "Thirteen days in September":
Begin's ideology envisioned a vastly expanded Israel; he did not even acknowledge the existence of the Kingdom of Jordan, which he believed should be conquered and folded into an exclusively Jewish nation—a dream he never entirely surrendered. Many Israelis considered him a crank, a fascist, or just an embarrassing reminder of the terrorist underground that stained the legend of the country’s glorious struggle for
independence. “Begin is a distinctly Hitleristic type,” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s revered founder and first prime minister, wrote of his lifelong political antagonist. “He is a racist who is willing to kill all the Arabs in order to gain control of the entire land of Israel.” Prominent American Jews, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, denounced Begin’s career as a terrorist chieftain. “Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them,” they wrote to The New York Times in 1948, when Begin made his first trip to the U.S. “By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and widespread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy
tribute.”
when I say "Maybe not all of them but certainly a lot of them" I mean the necessary conditions
MAD,
I'm going to accept for the moment all your data on the evil intentions of the founders of the state of Israel.
How do we get out of this mess?
I've said this before, but it is vital to realize that the Jews suffered a collective trauma with the Holocaust and that that trauma was reactivated and increased by the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
The Palestinians also suffer from a collective trauma from the Nakba, which has been reactivated and increased by the merciless Israeli invasion of Gaza.
We have two traumatized peoples who hate and fear each other. I've also quoted before the wise saying: nothing scares me so much as scared people.
In the 1990's Rabin and Arafat began to talk to each other with Clinton's mediation. The pro-Palestinian people say that the Clinton deal was insufficient and unjust; the pro-Israeli people say that Israel was overly generous.
At this point the only question that matters to me is: how do we get out of this mess? How do we reach a lasting peace between two parties who hate and fear each other so much?
I have strong opinions on the 1990's negotiations but let's leave to the side for now. I think the only thing we can do is highlight the deep responsibility of the Western world for this mess; mainly Great Britain during the first half of the 20th century and then the United States since Nixon. The greed and immorality of the leaders of these 2 nations knows no bounds. More people need to become aware of the immense set of lies we have been fed. If US leaders had a shred of morality and bravery, then the lives of both Palestinians and Israelites would be better.
It seems to me that closing the Straits of Tiran was an act of war and Israel was justified in its actions. While listing the unwise (stupid) actions of the UK, France and the U.S., Mad fails to note the Arab nations that insisted on starting wars (we might add the Ottomans who entered WWI on the wrong side). Pace you know who but this 19th century bad idea won't fix. The U.S., Canada, etc. was the proper place for European refugees.
There isn't enough land for proper nations. There are several counties in the U.S. that are larger then Israel. I regularly cover more territory (the tract on my north is bigger then Vatican City) then a proposed Palestinian state which at best would wind up more like one of our reservations then an actual nation (assuming Israel would be willing to kill enough Settlers to resolve that problem).
I am concerned that the Prof. hasn't posted anything for quite awhile.
aaall,
Professor Wolff just posted.
@aaall
The first serious "research" I ever conducted was on the causes of the Mexican American War for an advanced history course in high school. From that I still remember being flabbergasted at the deep incompetence of the Mexican elite, the corruption and the general backwardness of the society. This does not change the fact that the US consciously and immorally took advantage of the situation to virtually steal a third of the land of what is now the US. Who suffered the consequences? the Mexicans who lived there and who had no voice in their new leader's decisions. They became second class citizens, and many lost their property. I have little to no respect for the leadership of the Arab nations (even worse now since they are hostage to US interests and won't do anything for the Palestinians). It is clear Palestinian leadership degraded considerably since the 90s hence the rise of the monstrous group of Hamas. This does not in any way contradict the fact that those with the power to bring actual meaningful change decided not to do anything because of our own legalized corruption. While we are in the topic of Hamas, I think Alex Gourevitch's comment (link at the bottom) is relevant:
If anything, Hamas’ willingness to target civilians reflects a degeneration of the freedom struggle in Palestine rather than anything justified by it. Hamas is less an anticolonial struggle than it is the backwash of the defeat of those liberation struggles—as they existed in their leftist and Arab Nationalist forms. Hamas exists and is able to claim to represent Palestinians in light of Israel’s systematic destruction, suppression, and cooptation of the previous liberation movements. It is not just that Netanyahu once found it useful to support Hamas against the PLO/PA and openly announced that support as a way of dividing Palestinians. Once successive Israeli governments succeeded in destroying the political independence of all other Palestinian organizations, successfully incorporating Fatah as a kind of corrupt extension of the Israeli security apparatus, Hamas was all that was left.
https://damagemag.com/2024/03/05/seven-realities-of-israel-palestine/
@aaall
Also, if you are interested, Chomsky amply demonstrates in his "Fateful Triangle" that contrary to what we are told, Palestinian leadership since the 70s had been willing to negotiate and compromise and that this caused enormous panic in Israeli leadership. This led to a decades long campaign of sabotage, infiltration, supporting rival extremist groups and also helps explain some of the reasons for the war in Lebanon in 1982. The point is that, while Palestinian leadership has a long line of mistakes, there is nothing they could have done to bring meaningful change in the 70s,780s, and 90s. The real power lies here in the US.
https://goodtimesweb.org/documentation/2012/Noam-Chomsky-Fateful-Triangle.pdf
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