Bullshitting about Gaza

The same Wm Saletan who drew from Rushton? http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_dilettante/2007/12/dissecting_the_iq_debate.html
Not that I am going to re-read this by interrupting my listening to Oistrakh and Menuhin’s Double Violin Concerto, recommended by my older daughter’s orchestra teacher.

Anybody who is not parti pris can see that the Netanyahu government has partially contrived and partially been trapped by a domestic political climate that requires them to kill numbers of Palestinians in order to satisfy the Israeli electorate.

…

Um, as a member of the Israeli electorate, who lives and works and frequently converses with many other members of the Israeli electorate, I’m not sure that I can see this. What the Israeli electorate wants is peace and quiet, which is to say a cessation (or, more realistically, a meaningful diminution) of rocket fire toward the south. I’m sure there are such people, because there are bloodthirsty people everywhere, but I’ve never met an Israeli who thought of killing Palestinians as an end in itself, nor do I think it’s fair to describe this as a consensus attitude. I’m in the minority in thinking that my government is going about this the right way, but most people I know, or have spoken to, or have seen interviewed on the news, view the operation as a means of stopping the missile fire.

Vladimir:

An important part of the Israeli communications strategy is the much heralded missile defence system “Iron Dome”. One could argue that its primary utility is propaganda

On Thursday morning I was caught by an air raid siren on my way to work. Looking out of the window of my car, I could see the contrails of the Iron Dome interceptor missiles arcing in the sky, finally stopping right over my head to detonate the Hamas missile. It really didn’t feel like propaganda.

One side uses an Iron Dome defense, the other side uses an Innocent Shield defense. You’ve got to expect some disproportion.

However, shouldn’t you be counting all the deaths as victims of the Palestinians? You don’t get return fire if you don’t launch missiles into Israel in the first place. Would any nation on Earth be expected to just sit there and absorb missile fire, without response? If Mexico started launching missiles across the border, we’d obliterate them. Israel is showing tremendous restraint, IMO: Gaza still exists.

“Would any nation on Earth be expected to just sit there and absorb missile fire, without response? ”

Well sure, if you want to end rocket fire then you deal with it in a way that has been proven to work (ie not military action) For example the Egyptian led ceasefire *did work* (largely) , as has strenghtening the more moderate factions within Hamas by allowing some form of economic normality to return to Gaza (which lessens domestic pressures and incentivises them to crack down on rocket firing) Of course I doubt you *actually* want to stop rocket fire rather than bluster.

I wouldn’t personally agree with all of this

http://mideasti.blogspot.ie/2014/07/guest-post-william-r-polk-offers-grim.html

but I think there’s a lot of truth to it, and it’s a pretty grim outlook for an insider with longstanding expertise and experience to hold. It’s a shame really, as Israelis (rather than their supporters in the West) deserve better. (As obviously do the Palestinians)

Um, as a member of the Israeli electorate, who lives and works and frequently converses with many other members of the Israeli electorate, I’m not sure that I can see this

There are more and more Americans like me who seriously object to $3 billion per year of our tax money going to Israel. It is going to take time to cut you off, but it is just a matter of time. Beginning of the end.

Israel’s behaviour is so repellent that all the hasbara in the world won’t make a difference in the end. Get ready.

jonnybutter:

Not sure how your comment is a response to anything I said. Maybe you just enjoy finding random Israelis on the internet and wagging your finger at them? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

Abigail @ 4

What the Israeli electorate wants is peace and quiet…

If that is so, there are, as far as this *outsider can see, only three ways to get it:

1. End the blockade of Gaza. Withdraw the settlements and the military bases supporting them from the West Bank and Jerusalem. Allow free travel and commerce between all areas settled by Arab Palestinians. Negotiate the creation of a real Palestinian state with representatives the Palestinians themselves have chosen. Do so in good faith, without attempting to assassinate the leaders of the parties they have chosen as those representatives.

2. Stop defining Israel as a Jewish State. As we have seen, such an entity can’t govern all of Palestine without institutionalizing injustice.

3. Kill a lot more Palestinian Arabs — maybe as many as all of them.

If Israelis believe, as many seem to, that none of these solutions, except perhaps the last, can ever be practical, then it seems to me that peace and quiet is not in their future no matter what else they do.

*An outsider, yes, but as a citizen of the U.S., an outsider with certain rights to meddle in the business of Israelis, at least so long as they continue to meddle so significantly in mine.

And the reason there’s a next round of missile fire, is that the Palestinians won’t stop attacking Israel. If at any time they just stopped attacking, there would be no more return volleys.

Did you not read Abigail’s comments?

Whoever is in power in Israel at the moment, can gain political support whenever they need it by beating up on Palestinians.

Do you seriously imagine they couldn’t manufacture an incident to retaliate against if every Palestinian tried not to give them one?

Sheesh.

“Do you seriously imagine they couldn’t manufacture an incident to retaliate against if every Palestinian tried not to give them one?”

Do you seriously think that the bare possibility that they could manufacture incidents has any relevance at all, so long as the supply of real incidents appears unending? It’s just a hypothetical you’re inventing to ‘prove’ it would be futile for the Palestinians to stop attacking.

Let them stop, and if the Israelis start manufacturing pretexts to ‘respond’, you’ll have a case. Until that, you’ve got nothing but an imagination.

Not sure how your comment is a response to anything I said. Maybe you just enjoy finding random Israelis on the internet and wagging your finger at them?

Yes, increasingly Americans are disgusted by the whole thing, and lack outlets to express their feelings.

Israel is an unsinkable aircraft carrier that the USA is utterly unable to steer. It is less than worthless to us. And yet….

Israelis are in deadly danger. At any time Israelis could be killed, they are in almost as much danger as Palestinians. Israel is the only nuclear power in the middle east, but that is not enough. While they do not have large stocks of chemical weapons, they have factories which could be converted to produce large stocks of SOTA chemical weapons in a few months. It is not enough. They have great expertise at biological weapons, but it is not enough. They have by far the strongest military in the middle east — not enough. Mossad assassination teams are widely considered the best in the world — but Israel is still in danger. They will need US support forever.

The middle east is an insanely dangerous place for Israelis to live, but they want to live there so we must give our unconditional support. Except we’re getting increasingly tired of it.

I’m with johnnybutter.

The missing, ugly reality is that over the last 13 years, on average, one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days.

These are the images from Gaza that are too graphic for many US news outlets to publish

Enough of this, on our dime.
~

Abigail, I believe jonnybutter’s response was to your little jab at “outsiders”.

Like jb, many U.S. citizens are considerably less “outside” this situation than we would wish to be, thanks to the massive support from our government (military, economic, and political) that makes possible Israel’s land theft, periodic mass murder sprees, and intransigence.

There’s a minority but growing segment of the U.S. public who support ending this unconditional support, but (as the recent unanimous vote in the House shows) there is a huge gulf between our views and current official policy.

William @ 13:

Your option 1 is somewhat tautological. Yes, if there were peace in the region, there would be peace and quiet for Israelis as well. Not that I disagree that this is the only real way forward, but that’s obviously not how my government feels. Which is to say that a prerequisite to even beginning the process you describe is getting rid of the Netanyahu government, which makes the stability that it’s gained from this operation doubly unfortunate.

Nell @ 14:

You’re very fortunate not to know any personally, but you must live quite a sheltered life. (Outside Israel, perhaps?)

Yes, that’s right. I got caught in an air raid and watched Iron Dome explode Hamas missiles over my head outside of Israel.

I’m perfectly well aware of the growing power of the hard right in Israeli discourse and politics, but as someone who actually lives here, I can tell you that they don’t represent the consensus. To suggest otherwise is not unlike arguing that the Tea Party represents the consensus of American public opinion. In both cases you have an extremist group grabbing hold of political power and using it to wield a disproportionate effect on public policy. I don’t discount the seriousness and danger of this phenomenon in my country, but to suggest that Israelis are uniformly bloodthirsty is untrue, unhelpful, and insulting.

J Thomas @ 15:

Do you seriously imagine they couldn’t manufacture an incident to retaliate against if every Palestinian tried not to give them one?

I wish you wouldn’t use my words as a prop for this sort of conspiracy theory. It really isn’t necessary to manufacture incidents one of the most tense and volatile borders in the world.

Abigail, if you would, what do you make of the comments of Yuval Diskin, translated in English here:
http://blogs.forward.com/jj-goldberg/201468/ex-shin-bet-chief-israeli-illusions-fueled-blowup/?#ixzz36mnD0XtP

an extremist group grabbing hold of political power and using it to wield a disproportionate effect on public policy. I don’t discount the seriousness and danger of this phenomenon in my country, but to suggest that Israelis are uniformly bloodthirsty is untrue, unhelpful, and insulting.

Your first comment very much discounted the seriousness and danger of the rightist phenomenon in your country, and your latest simply lies about what I said, which was very far from suggesting that Israelis are uniformly bloodthirsty:

there is no doubt a substantial segment of the Israeli public who just want quiet and don’t actively wish Palestinians dead, but the numbers of Jewish citizens of Israel who do is larger and growing. … anyone who tries to pretend this isn’t the dominant political tendency in Israel now is in denial.

Netanyahu and his government “grabbed political power” by way of elections. You acknowledge that the latest (still continuing) assault on Gaza, which has killed 166 people, among them 54 women and children, has gained political stability for this government. Since the rockets haven’t stopped, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s the killing that has satisfied the public (a large enough segment of it to reduce the chances of new elections).

On his blog, Goldberg disavows his accusation that the purpose of the suppression of the knowledge of the deaths was “politics and public relations:”

“Second, the Israeli government suppressed the fact that the boys were dead, as it knew on Day 2, with the apparent motive of dismantling the Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank. The prolonged, fabricated uncertainty had the collateral effect of inflaming Jewish emotions in Israel and the Diaspora, and the tension may well have intensified the resulting anger after the bodies were found. On the other hand, it also provided cover for Israel to round up and dismantle, with barely a shot fired, a network operating in territory it controls that openly preaches destroying Israel and murdering its citizens. I don’t know that such a roundup is a bad thing.”

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/jj-goldberg/#ixzz37MNeqjE8

“I’m perfectly well aware of the growing power of the hard right in Israeli discourse and politics, but as someone who actually lives here, I can tell you that they don’t represent the consensus.”

I think that’s fair, and I don’t believe the Israeli electorate is particularly ‘bloodthirsty.’ (which is also, of course, true of the majority of Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank) I also think you’re right @10 (fwiw) that it makes more sense to think of the Netanyahu government responding to political coalitions and pressure from domestic interest groups/voting blocks. But (afaict) these military actions *do* have relatively solid support in Israel (I’m not sure about this time, but in the past) thereby not making them politically harmful, perhaps even useful – and a lot of that is because of the rhetoric and propaganda that has built up around the rocket attacks. (which cause very little actual damage relative to the response from Israel, whether in times of direct military conflict or just ‘the usual occupation’)
So there’s a problem around how disproportionate the response *always* is, and how disingenuous the conversation about the rocket attacks is. (Not on your part, though in general)

“On his blog, Goldberg disavows his accusation that the purpose of the suppression of the knowledge of the deaths was “politics and public relations:” ”

How does he disavow it was political ? Your quoted part contradicts as much:

“Second, the Israeli government suppressed the fact that the boys were dead, as it knew on Day 2, with the apparent motive of dismantling the Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank.”

Yes, I thought J.J. Goldberg would “clarify” his article soon. Hamas members were rounded up “with barely a shot fired”? As I noted above in #14, during its fake “search for the missing teens” the IDF and police killed five Palestinians in the West Bank directly, and ransacked hundreds of households. They destroyed enormous amounts of property in the process. The thousand or so men taken are still in Israeli prisons; their crime is political support of Hamas.

Meanwhile, the suspects in the lynching of Mohamed AbuKhdeir are in their own (non-demolished) homes under house arrest; their network of rightist agitators is not being sought out and locked up. Far from it: their demands are being carried out by the government, which is dealing death to the Arabs.

Brett @5:

“However, shouldn’t you be counting all the deaths as victims of the Palestinians? You don’t get return fire if you don’t launch missiles into Israel in the first place. ”

And you wouldn’t get these missiles if Israel weren’t engaging in an illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank for nearly half a century.

Both sides in this conflict can point fingers at the other side; everyone is convinced that they are the victim and are only retaliating. But one side is a heavily armed state that enjoys the protection and lavish funding of the world’s only superpower, while the other is an impoverished, occupied population with virtually no political power and access to much less effective weaponry. Not surprisingly, when both sides attack each other, this vast disparity in power expresses itself, among other ways, in a similarly vast disproportion of casualties.

I understand that the Israeli public only wants “peace and quiet.” But Israel’s methods of achieving peace and quiet over that forty-plus years of occupation are illegal, immoral, and unsustainable.

Resolving the conflict (and thus achieving actually just and stable peace and quiet) is clearly far from easy (and the possible solutions are not limited to those noted by William Timberman above: a two-state solution is also possible). But any solution needs to begin with all parties recognizing their mutual human and civil rights. And that entails, among other things, an end to the occupation.

Ben Alpers @ 39

(and the possible solutions are not limited to those noted by William Timberman above: a two-state solution is also possible).

Although stated in terms of what I see as as its essential constituent elements, the two-state solution was my solution number 1. Frankly, I think the expansion of Israeli settlements, and the effective bantu-ization of the West Bank since the Seventies has put the two-state solution effectively out of reach. The facts on the ground which Israeli intransigence has created seem to me to mean the effective end of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state. Time will tell….

“That two-state solution is as dead as the parrot in the parrot sketch. It is an ex-solution.”

I fear you may be right. If so, Israelis will eventually learn the demographic lesson white South Africans had to learn; but there will be tremendous suffering all around while they learn it.

From the Palestinian point of view, the Israelis are simply thieves and whatever bad consequences occur in the gradual process of occupying the West Bank are their responsibility. In law, after all, the original perpetrator is guilty of the deaths that occur in the commission of a felony. Obviously the Israelis believe (or claim to believe) that they have the right as well as the power to continue to take land from the Palestinians, but the fact that the two sides don’t agree about that isn’t the most infuriating thing from the Arab point of view. It’s the presumption of the Israelis that they alone get to decide the issue. Hence the bit about how the Palestinians could end the troubles at any time by simply giving up, though perhaps they would also be required to tell the thieves where they keep their silverware.

But any solution needs to begin with all parties recognizing their mutual human and civil rights. And that entails, among other things, an end to the occupation.

We all occupy, at least in the geometrical sense. The verb is much less easily misinterpreted when used transitively.

If the conflict admits of no solution while Israelis occupy (1949) Israel, then there is no real question of “all parties” recognizing anything; when it is time to “begin,” the story will be over.

If the conflict admits of no solution while Israelis literally occupy Gaza, then the starting condition was met when the last Israeli occupier (Gilad Shalit) left Gaza in October 2011, or possibly when the last voluntary Israeli occupier left in September 2005.

If the conflict admits of no solution while Israelis occupy Gaza in absentia, then someone else has to stop the missiles, and undertake to do so more successfully yet less bloodily than Israel has done. Israelis have no human or civil rights that are recognized at present by Hamas, so unsupervised home rule by Hamas in Gaza is incompatible with the starting condition.

If the conflict admits of no solution while Israelis occupy, e.g., Gilo and East Talpiot across the 1949 line but inside the borders proposed at the end of Clinton’s multiyear negotiating push, then very difficult decisions must be reached before we “begin,” and so perhaps the formulation of a minimum starting condition is unhelpful.

#35 – Goldberg’s original article implied, perhaps unintentionally, that Netanyahu suppressed the knowledge that the three boys were dead in order to inflame Israeli public opinion. He now says that the knowledge was suppressed in order to provide cover for an operation rolling up Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank, and the incitement of passions in Israel was a “collateral” and unintended effect. He supports (as “not a bad thing”) the suppression of Hamas in the West Bank, which he describes as “a network that … openly preaches the destruction of Israel and the murder of its citizens,” while deploring the effect on Israeli public opinion.

J.J. is a pretty good marker of the leftward edge of informed opinion that can be called Zionist.

Sharks versus minnows. And the sharks are whining that the minnows are picking on them.

Er, but the minnows are, in fact, picking on them. More to the point, individual Israelis are about the same size as individual Palestinians — this metonymy of sharks and minnows is blandly obscuring some human realities.

I sometimes wonder, admittedly from a distance and w/o following the issues w minute daily attention, why relatively few people in the Israeli policymaking elite seem to have realized that one way to deal w Hamas might be to reach an agreement to let the PA have something at least resembling a minimally functional state, with a security force (no need to call it an “army” if that’s a stumbling block). Find some way to postpone the most intractable, contentious issues (e.g. the status of particular settlements) if necessary, but let the PA have a state that can be recognized by all major powers and seated w/o controversy in the UN. Israel to withdraw from the bulk of the W Bank and the only non-negotiable condition wd be that the PA formally recognize Israel’s right to exist (which, iirc, it has already done). Then Hamas, if it or factions w/in it continue in rejectionist vein, wd become not only Israel’s problem but also the new Palestinian state’s problem. Surely that wd be better than the situation now. (I know there is (supposedly) a unity govt betw Hamas and the PA/Fatah now. I suspect however it is prob just papering over continuing real differences.)

Re postponing the intractable issues: there are quite a few creative lawyers out there and I’m sure some of them cd gin up some way of doing this. Set up a special ad hoc intl arbitration tribunal, w reps from both sides. Anything. Basically just kick the can down the road so it’s no longer a roadblock to a “final status” agreement. Of course it wdn’t be technically *final* w issues outstanding but that’s not the pt. The pt is to create the new state. That wd change the equation.

Layman,

I think we should have done that long ago. And we would have, if not for the massive power of AIPAC in the US, and because sending taxpayer dollars to Israel so it can buy American military hardware makes more than a few corporations here very happy.

It’s similar to the NRA for having outsized influence, and no rationale for us to follow their company lines. Both organizations go against America’s best interests, often in profound and deadly ways. IMO, there are no exceptions when it comes to the NRA, as to its odious influence and agenda. It is easily one of the most despicable pressure groups in DC. . . .

I’m struggling to find anything that isn’t incredibly negative about AIPAC, as well, but suspect it’s not quite as clear cut as the NRA.

Bottom line for me: I think the decisions leading up to and including the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948 were tragically wrong, ill-considered to the nth degree, and a world-historical mistake. It never should have happened. Subsequent history proves that to be the case. The world should have taken in Jewish refugees with open arms, but there was no additional sense in establishing a homeland beyond that, especially not on land already claimed by others for two thousand years.

#54

Basically just kick the can down the road so it’s no longer a roadblock to a “final status” agreement. Of course it wdn’t be technically *final* w issues outstanding but that’s not the pt. The pt is to create the new state. That wd change the equation.

It seems to me we have tried that more than once.

The most successful attempt, Israel abandoned 3% of the west bank and accepted dual control of another 23%. Palestinians started building an economy. But Rabin was killed by a lone gunman who had no help from anybody, and Perez didn’t particularly stand for anything and promptly lost the next election to Netanyahu. Netanyahu did not allow resolution of any unresolved issues, and in 2002 he staged an invasion taking back everything Israel had shared. The goals of the invasion are disputable but judging by results a primary goal was to confiscate every hard disk and put a bullet through every computer monitor in the west bank.

And that was that.

I see no reason to hope that the next success at a two-state solution would turn out better.

If there’s going to be a Palestinian state it will have to be defended by some foreign military that’s strong enough to deter invasion by Israel.

the current death score is 159-0
Personally I’m stewing over why I’m more consciously outraged by the violence being visited on Palestinians than what’s accumulated in the larger area around Israel.
Syria especially, with a “death score” of nearly 30K human lives lost, and Iraq especially, with an ungodly number at or near a million equally human, equally lost lives. All those numbers rising.
It’s pretty obvious Egypt’s burgeoning freedom movement was hammered into grisly pulp in the interests of something operating through the nexus of US/Israel.
Palestine has an immediacy, somehow – it’s emotional more than pragmatic, but then I’m an emotional guy.

Some parts of the progressive view that are pretty weak and I believe ultimately dysfunctional are the befuddlement at the way the financing of Israel’s bloody doings are just unquestioned at the top of American political life. Just completely unquestioned. Mysterious. The way the big-box media parrots Israeli/Zionist dishonesty and propaganda, even when it’s surreal and absurdly easy to disprove.
Mysterious.
Like it’s an oversight, an incompetence, a condition of irrationality. Probably it isn’t. There’s power there, and it isn’t reaching out of the Mediterranean and crossing the Atlantic. It’s here, in the US, and it’s literally unspeakable.

All hail the awakened margins who find repugnant the fact that 3 billion dollars of their tax money that could be resurrecting Detroit or something instead going to arm people whose idea of honor and integrity is calling people up, on the phone, and telling them they have one literal minute to get outside their houses before the missiles of God’s chosen land, and explode, and destroy.
That elides the psychological terrorism of calling people and warning them and then not firing missiles on their houses. Ha ha, gotcha!
And it elides as well the fact that Gaza is the most crowded human place on earth surrounded by impassable barriers with every outlet in the hands of the killers, and where would you go if you did get out?
Egypt? Jordan? Iraq? Syria? The Mediterranean Sea?

Sadistic horror lacquered with self-pitying tears of victimhood and layers of saccharine delusion.
Bending that horror into an easier to deal with set of political incompetencies is understandable but it isn’t going to help.
Tiresome as it is, we’re still confronting the reality-makers with criticisms of what they’re already doing.
There is no way that the ponderously slow move toward cutting off the money will not be outflanked. If it could even be gotten to the active attention of a fully-compromised and complicit Congress.
And let’s not even mention the massive support for Israeli bloodshed from the millions of fundamentalist American Christians, who see Armegeddon as their only ticket to heaven. Even though that’s probably the single greatest obstacle to a unified American people’s humane response to this nightmare.

Perhaps, then, the minimum starting position is the end of all US assistance to Israel of any kind, and the imposition of international sanctions along the anti-apartheid model?

As a starting point, there were four votes to let the missiles fall: John Conyers (D-MI), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Pete Stark (D-CA) and Ron Paul (D-TX). But Stark and Paul have since retired.

J W Burton @57
More specifically, if the PA rump state likes the ongoing rejectionism-by-proxy, what credible pressure (that is not right now being used on the PA rump less-than-state) will avail? And, should the government of this state hold elections and survive and continue to “own” the problem in good faith, what’s their move?

One source of credible pressure wd be to hold out the prospect of throwing the new state out of, or downgrading its status in, all the myriad intl institutions and orgs — World Bank, IMF, ICC, ICAO, FAO, etc etc etc — it wd have just joined. But the new state will not like the rejectionism-by-proxy, I think, so the question’s premise is wrong. (Their “move” wd be to use their security force vs the rejectionists.)

Another example: India and Bangladesh have a pending Land Boundary Agreement, which the new Modi govt in India is promising to get ratified by the parliament, that resolves a number of outstanding disputes and open questions involving enclaves and so on. As I said, countries don’t have to agree on every square inch of their boundaries before recognizing each other. Of course the issues in Israel-Palestine are more difficult. But that doesn’t nec. mean impossible.

LFC:
Agh, yes. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights it’s 160,000+.
–
In a further attempt to get my facts straight:
Mr. Joshua Burton, I’m under the impression that Dennis Kucinich is no longer serving in the US House of Representatives, either. Sadly.
Also I’m thinking that he never once voted “to let the missiles fall”. Being a serious and committed humanitarian.
Though the circuitous and duplicitous bending of language that is seemingly your forte makes it very difficult to get to that with anything like a clear construction of refutation.
Lies and deceit inside a fog of artificial confusion.
Desperate amoral rationalizing as a way of life.
They hate us, so we’re killing them.
Which is true, if you’re traveling backward through time.
Then it makes perfect sense.
For the rest of us it’s just more snarling horseshit, from a seemingly endless supply.

though the IRA fired plenty of mortar rounds across the border

When?

@69 – your comment is very cryptic, but it seems to imply that because Lebanon has a specific sectarian structure, and so problems with constraining militant groups that have de facto control over certain regions, that the same is true of Palestine ? But the PA security services do collaborate extensively with Israel and reign in militant groups on the West Bank (as do Hamas in Gaza when it’s in their interests)

LFC your plan makes a lot of sense.

I think a useful shorthand for the disparity in suffering of Palestinians and Israelis, and the threat each poses to the other, is that the explosive weight of bombs alone dropped by Israel in the last few days was equivalent to the payload of more than 10000 Qassam rockets, of which around 300 had been fired at Israel in the same period.

This excludes shelling by the Israeli navy and the use of guided missiles and multiple rocket launchers and also ignores the comparatively poor quality of the Palestinians home made explosive versus that in modern Israeli munitions. This is not an “exchange of fire” between Hamas and Israel, it is a pitifully ill equipped and desperate population being punished mercilessly for what are almost cosmetic acts of resistance.

However even before the current police action it was absurd to compare the relative hardships of those living in Israel and those living in Gaza. If you visit the comparatively “comfortable” West Bank you’ll hear that the daily humiliations and suffering inflicted on Palestinians include random multi-hour long waits at checkpoints to get between villages, regular brutal raids by plain clothes Israeli special forces, beatings and punishment shootings by border guards and settlers, land confiscation, the destruction of crops, random arrests and indefinite detention and of course the summary execution of children and adults.

There is a constant fear among adults that demoralized, hopeless, unarmed and bored teenagers will get shot for minor acts of civil disobedience (and acting up for cameras).

The Gaza strip lives under a different kind of occupation with a different set of miseries but is quite certainly a worse place to live than the West Bank with higher levels of unemployment and physical and mental suffering.

This is not a debate that we should be having. It is a settled argument,

@18 Ronan
brett bellmore, don’t be foolish.
Oh, come on! It wouldn’t be the same without the villain twisting his mustache. The show must go on.

In the meantime, the political realignment in the United States continues apace. Unless brett got his last name the way Jon Stewart did, he represents the shifting demographic nature of the blank check support of Israel. Before long Jeffrey Goldberg, Bill Kristol, and the Kraut Hammer will be leading an exclusively goyim army. The thing about American Jews, they are all related to someone who has first hand knowledge that war is a nightmare. But they are also American, which means they have a rock solid faith that every nightmare must end. From AIPACs perspective, that’s ok, because one American demographic is pretty much always in favor of killing brown people. Conveniently, this means donating to only one party.

Increasingly, Israel itself seems to be playing a run out the clock strategy, which is odd, because the shrinking supply of oil combined with the growing supply of Palestinians means that they are losing 2 to zero. Time is not on their side. But are you going to reason with a religious zealot?

Hopefully we will continue and enlarge the Obama doctrine, “Don’t do stupid shit.” That means it won’t be our dead kids. I feel for the Palestinians, but it seems like instead of “You broke it, you bought it,” it might be a matter of just getting all the bulls out of the china shop and hoping for the best.

If that’s not enough mixed metaphors, a got a few more here in my bag.

@MPAV
LFC your plan makes a lot of sense.
More just thinking aloud than a full-fledged plan, but thanks for the kind words.

#65

I am talking about an agreement that wd create a Palestinian state recognized by the major powers and Israel; it wd be seated in the UN and other intl orgs, wd get infusions of intl aid (more than the PA is now), and consequently wd have a stake, I wd think, in opposing those groups that continue to reject Israel’s existence.

In 1995 we were heading toward just that. We were getting the Israelis to allow a Palestinian state to be created without working out all the details first.

The Israelis said they were taking a giant risk and they wanted some compensation. They wanted favorable trade deals with europe. They wanted better weapons from the USA. (We said if they got peace they wouldn’t need the weapons. They pointed out in that case it would do no harm.) Etc. Meanwhile there were efforts to bribe the palestinians too. They got something like a billion dollars in investments. Computers for schools, Lensgrinders and optometrists, a chance to get into the 20th century.

But then in 2000 Barak said he was throwing away the agreement. He offered Arafat a brand new agreement that was going to settle everything in one go. He told Arafat to agree to the new agreement, and then Barak would tell him what would be in it. Arafat refused. He said they had a perfectly good agreement already. Barak said that agreement was null and void because Barak said it was, but if Arafat would just sign the new agreement then Barak would work out the details and Israel would never break that one. Arafat refused, but for a year or so afterward Israelis and Palestinians worked out a lot of details of what the agreement would have said if they had made it.

Meanwhile Israelis said that Palestinians had broken the old agreement. They said Palestinians had tried to smuggle in weapons. Those weapons would make it harder for Israel to invade Palestine, and they said that was strictly forbidden. So Israel did invade Palestine and took away or destroyed all the goodies the Palestinians had been given for peace, but they kept all the bribes they had themselves been given for peace.

Is there some reason you would expect it might work out different next time?

Essentially the sticking point is that the israeli-jewish population doesn’t realise that the essence of a peaceful solution is that military force doesn’t come into it, so their military strength has given them a vastly unrealistic expectation of the strength of their negotiating position.

[I’m kinda reminded here of pre-WWII japan, where the tactical successes blinded the lower-middle-class officer corps to the essential fuckedness of their strategic situation.]

J Thomas
So Israel did invade Palestine and took away or destroyed all the goodies the Palestinians had been given for peace

As I recall, there was something called the 2nd intifada, precipitated partly by Sharon’s provocative stroll along some sensitive pc of ground or other, and that was at least part of the reason or pretext for what you refer to as the Israeli “invasion.”

The Oslo process was supposed to end with an agreement resolving all outstanding issues, was it not? And it didn’t. I don’t know/remember all the details of who said what to whom in 2000/2001.

But the point is that there was never a signed agreement creating a Palestinian state. There was a signed agreement, the Oslo accords, creating a process that was intended eventually to lead to a signed agreement creating a state, but that never did. So we are talking about two different things. And now I really am out of here.

“Hamas hadn’t fired any rockets since November 2012 and had been actively trying to stop other jihadi groups from doing so”

This argument is a double edged sword. What J.J. Goldberg makes explicit but Bertram doesn’t, is that November 2012 was when Israel attacked Gaza before, in Operation Pillar of Cloud/Defense.

So, if we accept that Hamas has kept the missile rains down for the last year-and-a-half since Israels latest incursion in Gaza (to use it as an argument that the missiles from a Hamas are simply a pretext for Israel to go on a punitive raid), then we also accept that such punitive raids apparantly work. Hey, they did the last time….

It is in fact alarming that Hamas has rockets that can reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, although they have not hurt anyone AFAIK. There may be a genuine self-defense war in future in which these rockets are used.

#69: Lebanon has a legitimate military deterrent in the form of Hezbollah which is powerful enough to deter outright invasion by Israel. Hamas is a boogeyman which poses absolutely no threat to Israel and statistically hardly any to individual Israelis today. Both situations are bad, but I’d much rather live close to the Israel-Lebanon border on either side than the Israel-Gaza border on either side. You undermine your own point.

LFC and Ronan(rf), well spotted. The elements of my “modest proposal” for Lebanon are, of course, precisely the pre-existing facts of 2006, and Hizb’allah nonetheless initiated hostilities, doing more damage to life, limb and property in 34 days than Hamas has managed in aggregate down south in the eight years since. As Hizb’allah’s declared aims remain maximalist and unchanged, there is nothing about the northern border situation that would represent “progress” if duplicated in Gaza. (No, not even blue helmets, if they behave as badly as up north. If we could get MFO instead of UNIFIL, that would be great, but while we’re dreaming let’s ask for UNHCR to replace UNRWA, and resolve the refugee problem.)

I recommend watching The Gatekeepers, and even more so the five-disk unabridged version (which unfortunately lacks subtitles). All six former heads of Shin Bet say “sure, where do we sign?” to LFC’s proposal; Abu Mazen would probably also accept an interim full statehood without Jerusalem, if he could somehow survive it. The interim map looked like this when Clinton left office, and like this now: no surprises, no drama, very low remaining stakes. I have no idea when, but this is what.

I should add that all the Shin Bet commanders are, broadly, impressed with PA security cooperation: the Ramallah police have come a very long way. To me, the obvious next trust-building step would be turning Muhammad Abu Khdeir’s murderers over to the PA — a traumatic cleansing that I would strongly support, if only to save them from the Hague.

I’m sure I’ll regret asking this, but curiosity is getting the better of me. What specifically do you mean by “I have experience, direct and personal, with Mossad sadists intent on removing a threat to the power of the thing they serve. And their packs of street-level yapping dogs.”

godoggo 07.14.14 at 5:02 am;

It says exactly what it means. If you want specifics you’ll have to do something more than just ask for them nonchalantly on an internet comments thread.
What that something more would be I’m not interested at the moment in figuring out for you.

lol

Check out the comments at the Jerusalem Post blogs. You’ll meet enough there to last you a lifetime.

Comments sections are not real life, people will say anything on the internet and it attracts the nutters like flypaper. I find Abigail’s claim completely plausible, most people just want to go about their business in peace. The insinuation that a large part of the Israeli electorate are bloodthirsty sociopaths is pretty outrageous.

novakant@103

I find Abigail’s claim completely plausible, most people just want to go about their business in peace. The insinuation that a large part of the Israeli electorate are bloodthirsty sociopaths is pretty outrageous.

The first thing to say that a significant proportion of the business that an Israeli goes about is not in itself peaceful (benefiting or participating in occupation, land appropriation and so forth) and that the actions of the democratic Israeli state are definitely not peaceful (expansionist, militarist and explicitly racist). When an Israeli says “we just want to live in peace” it is usually not about the idea of living in a just peace but about the citizens of Israel “as is” not being disturbed by (or even reminded about) the consequences of the country’s decades long campaign of aggression and expansion. (Gosh, aren’t the Hamas rocket attacks like a kind of collective punishment then? How wrong is that!)

The second thing to say is that anyone wondering about just much anger and prejudice animates Israeli society should read Max Blumenthal’s “Goliath” or follow his journalism. (Gideon Levy is good too, if a little despairing). There has naturally always been a vein of manifest destiny and Jewish ethnic pride (very, very, like white pride) in Zionism but in the last twenty years, due to demographic and cultural changes, a significant proportion and perhaps even a plurality of the Israeli body politic has become unapologetically racist and gives regular dog whistles to a kind of eliminationism-lite. People vote for MKs who compare Palestinian children to snakes (Ayelet Shaked) and casually announce that they have of course killed “Arabs” and that this is nothing to be ashamed of (can not recall his name).

My meetings with Jewish Israelis outside of the peace camp have been fleeting only and I am no kind of expert but I found the few I have engaged with charming, confident, articulate, easy to identify with and easy to like (and, my god, very good looking) and it is hard not to want them to flourish. However, rather like white Zimbabweans, if you ask the wrong questions you can find yourself in a conversation from the late nineteenth century in a compound in Africa and a little probing finds that their national historical narrative is white washed and their perception of events and the relationships between them disturbingly skewed.

During my only trip to Israel (really the West bank) I wandered down through an Arab market in Jerusalem. A small gang of ultra-orthodox teenagers strutted down the narrow street carrying submachine guns giving threatening stares to the stall owners, presumably in their own minds showing that they would not be threatened in their own land. There you have it.

One other thing, if you find yourself in doubt about whether Israel’s current assault on Gaza is motivated by a need to defend itself or some other reasons you might find it interesting to keep an eye on the list of targets. Last night they targeted the house of the head of medicine at a Gaza hospital (he got out in time), two days ago they got the Gaza Ark. Remember that these are targets of choice and not collateral damage, each one intended to send a message.

What message do you think that would be?

“The only answer that makes sense to me is about the West Bank on good days, which is to say the security cooperation with the PA that has reduced Israeli “retail” civilian fatalities from hundreds a year in the early 2000s to zero in Obama’s first term and single digits in recent years.”

In order for Israelis to be killed in the West Bank, they must be in the West Bank. Perhaps a solution presents itself.

In order for Israelis to be killed in the West Bank, they must be in the West Bank. Perhaps a solution presents itself.

My TA’s grandmother was killed in 2002 at a bus stop inside the Green Line, but thanks for the advice.

“In order for Israelis to be killed in the West Bank, they must be in the West Bank. Perhaps a solution presents itself.”

“My TA’s grandmother was killed in 2002 at a bus stop inside the Green Line, but thanks for the advice.”

I’m sorry to hear it, but that hardly rebuts my point; and I imagine there’s a direct relationship between that death & the presence of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Maybe you should do something about your elected leaders besides promulgate their propaganda?

Joshua: do you believe that it is wrong to kill people’s grandmothers?

@106 – oh sure, I don’t think there’s a domestic Israeli solution to it. Any solution that allows Israel call the terms is going to lead to the institutionalisation of what there is now. (A tiny, divided up state with no meaningful sovereignty and a Palestinain establishment only commited to Israeli interests)
As I said above, ideally a solution would be pushed(imposed) on Israel, and not with pats on the back and high fives but with the potential for serious consequences for behaving in a consitently recalcitrant and self pitying juvenile manner. The petty problems of small time nationalists and identity politics are personally not my thing, so Ive no problem supporting the imposition of solutions on polities that show themselves unwilling or unable to behave as adults.

“which is to say the security cooperation with the PA that has reduced Israeli “retail” civilian fatalities from hundreds a year in the early 2000s to zero in Obama’s first term”

Well sure, but who argues that a Palestinian state won’t have to work to gaurantee Israeli security ? This is a pretty basic condition of any future solution. Point is that the context Israel is helping create in Gaza doesnt lead to the sorts of institutions and political culture that will lead to security.
A meaningful Palestinian state with international security gaurantees, infusions of foreign investment and a growing economy which Palestinian elites can suckle from would create the incentives to maintain long term security.

Brett Bellmore, Abigail and many other commentators are stuck in baseless and useless “they did it first” reasoning. But in this 100+ year territorial strife there is no intellectually honest way to make claims of causal firsts, to pinpoint some as “the attackers”. Israel reacts to rockets from Gaza. Launchers of rockets from Gaza react to israeli killings, beatings and coercion. Israelis ordering the killings, beating and coercion as a react to… On and on and on. That way of thinking is psychologically very tempting to engage in but it has no argumentative merit here and is also counterproductive.

Lebanon’s sectarian make up is completly differnt than Palestines, so there’s no reason a Palestinian state should be as fragile(and in fairness Lebanon has remained pretty – relative to what it was -stable since the Civil war) Jordan might be a better comparison.

so there’s no reason a Palestinian state should be as fragile

Or two Palestinian states, or one and a half. But I’m actually in broad agreement with you and LRF about most of this (not with the poets and laymen, obviously), so I won’t hoist you on the petard of arguing for the stability of East Pakistan. Peace!

Joshua Burton’s stand is not nearly as insane as it looks.

Consider how the USA reacted after 9/11. We did not accept that terrorist attacks happen against Americans or in the USA.

Now consider US race relations. We get zero publicity about black separatism. I just did Google News on “black separatism” and got four hits. One article printed 3 times in the Star Democrat, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Tand D.com, and a second article printed in ThyBlackMan.com. Both of them were about the 1960’s.

Meanwhile in 2012 there were 431 reported murders of whites by blacks, and 193 reported murders of blacks by whites. On a per capita basis US blacks killing whites is rather higher than palestinians killing israelis, but I think most Americans think that it tends to be about property — wallets, cars, drugs etc — and not about attempts to form a new nation out of part of the USA. So Americans are mostly satisfied that justice is done when the perps are captured and sentenced to prison.

Imagine that the US media and US government started publishing a lot of claims about a black separatist movement, and they classed every reported black-on-white murder as a terrorist act by black separatists. Is it all that unlikely that we might quickly develop a whole lot of discrimination against blacks? Or that the bad treatment might quickly create a functional black separatist movement? How long would it take before it was as bad here as it is there?

It’s an easy trap to fall into, and hard to climb out of. When it happened to the Germans we wanted to say that they were special monsters and it couldn’t happen so easily to anybody else. But we were wrong.

How long would it take before it was as bad here as it is there?

Chicago has had 201 murders in 2014, through the July 4th weekend. Counting all violent crime, terrorism, last month’s police raids and the ongoing Gaza attacks, Israel/Palestine probably pulled briefly ahead sometime last night, but Rahm is a turtle to Bibi’s hare, and I wouldn’t bet against the Windy City for the full calendar year.

The comparison more apt to Israeli thinking is next door in Syria, where this weekend’s Gaza death rate would be considered a lull.

“One of his captors was exchanged in 2011 to bring Gilad Shalit out of Gaza, where he had been brought on 24 June 2006 when no other Israeli, civilian or uniformed, was on Gaza soil.”

And West Bank soil?

And West Bank soil?

Working on it, in Oct 1994 — me, my family, Rabin, King Hussein, the Wachsman parents. Still working on it, those of us who remain.

More seriously, if you’re looking for racist smut implying that some lives are worth more than others, you’d do better to go ask a Hamasnik. They’re the ones who set the exchange rate at many hundreds to one; I defy you to find an Israeli anywhere who wouldn’t have accepted a trade of Gilad Shalit for one enemy prisoner (or even for five, the Bowe Bergdahl rate). I’m on record with my estimation of the relative value of Muhammad Abu Khdeir’s life and those of his Jewish murderers; see @95 above.

Yuval Dishkin, director of Shin Bet 2005-2011:

the rapid deterioration we’re experiencing in the security situation did not come because of the vile murder of Naftali, Eyal and Gil-Ad, may their memories be blessed. The deterioration is first and foremost a result of the illusion that the government’s inaction on every front can actually freeze the situation in place, the illusion that “price tag” is simply a few slogans on the wall and not pure racism, the illusion that everything can be solved with a little more force, the illusion that the Palestinians will accept everything that’s done in the West Bank and won’t respond despite the rage and frustration and the worsening economic situation, the illusion that the international community won’t impose sanctions on us, that the Arab citizens of Israel won’t take to the streets at the end of the day because of the lack of care for their problems, and that the Israeli public will continue submissively to accept the government’s helplessness in dealing with the social gaps that its policies have created and are worsening, while corruption continues to poison everything good, and so on and so on.

Israeli Illusions Fueled Blowup

“They’re the ones who set the exchange rate at many hundreds to one”

This is an artifact of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict. Hamas demands many for one because Israel holds many while Hamas holds few.

“I defy you to find an Israeli anywhere who wouldn’t have accepted a trade of Gilad Shalit for one enemy prisoner”

How about finding an Israeli who’ll abandon the illegal and immoral occupation of the West Bank, and the blockade of Gaza? That’s what I’m looking for. I’m sure there must be some, but all I’m getting at the moment is your apologia.

@3 Abigail writes “I’ve never met an Israeli who thought of killing Palestinians as an end in itself, nor do I think it’s fair to describe this as a consensus attitude…” I’ve never personally met a white person who thinks of killing African Americans as “an end in itself,” but I’ve met lots of people who thought their lives were worth less and didn’t give a rat’s ass about injustice perpetrated against them. The insinuation that raving about openly raving about genocide, just because, is the relevant standard is thoroughly dishonest. Trying to play the victim of slander is despicable.

As for existential threats, it is the Zionists who have a large number of nukes and missiles. And I see no reason to disbelieve that like the US they have every intention of using them when they see fit. I don’t believe anyone who accepts that has any humanitarian interests.

I believe Israel is the last imperialist project against the lower orders of humanity. As such, like other decaying empires (Spain, Portugal) or other would-be empires or new states (Italy, Japan, Germany, Croatia, etc.) it musters support for war by a combination of special rewards for the national group with random violence against the target populations. Zionism doesn’t have a leader principle any more than the Rexists or the Dollfuss regime. All Israel lacks to completely fit the classic mold is a significant political threat from proletarian revolution. But I don’t believe in the necessity of reality to fit old definitions. Zionism is a kind of fascism.

I believe anyone who compromises with fascism shares a commit to imperialism and counterrevolution, however much they fake being left.

“Far more Arabs are killed in Syria – why doesn’t anyone get worked up about that? ”

Hard to blame Arabs killing Arabs on Israel. And noticing Arabs killing Arabs is counter-productive, because it suggests that, when Arabs try to kill Israelis, it might be an Arab thing, not an Israeli thing.

Probably something like this, I’m guessing.

“Consider how the USA reacted after 9/11. We did not accept that terrorist attacks happen against Americans or in the USA.”

@125: The Gaza Strip is an occupied territory, and a weak and tiny one to boot. The repeated punitive expeditions into the territory by Israel, a vastly greater power, to inflict collective punishment in response to militant resistance to that occupation is in no way comparable to what happened in the United States on September 11. Which is not to justify everything the United States did in response to that event, only to note that even to raise the comparison is to play on the turf and by the ground rules chosen by Israel.

There is a weird symbiotic relationship between the extremists on both sides. The point of shooting missiles from Gaza into Israel is to provoke Israeli air attacks on Gaza, which increases the political power of the Palestinian hardliners. The attacks serve no military purpose. The point of air attacks on Gaza is to provoke Palestinian missile attacks on Israel, which increases the political power of the Israeli hardliners. The attacks serve no military purpose. And so it goes.

But it’s not as if there’s anything israel can do about that, is there? Politics is an internal matter: only way israel can have pull over palestinian internal politics is if palestine is placed under israeli sovereignty.

Counting syllables
seventeen is not enough
eighteen would be bet

Hasbara

A small endearing thing about the newborn State of Israel was its decision to use this term. What other country calls its propaganda ministry the Department of Explanations?

It was published in 1975, I wonder what those children think and hope for now?

Well, for example, I just checked and this program is still running as scheduled this week.

@153

A small endearing thing about the newborn State of Israel was its decision to use this term. What other country calls its propaganda ministry the Department of Explanations?

If there was a German compound word for “A person who has said something unintentionally funny at a dinner party but is totally unaware of it” it would be appropriate to use it here.

Many of you will awake to news that Hamas is refusing to sign up to a ceasefire deal brokered by the Egyptians. This is again more Bullshit about Gaza.

The ceasefire deal was a result of discussions between a military dictator who despises Hamas (General Sisi), a war criminal who despises Islamicists (Tony Blair), the US Secretary of State (Kerry) and the prime minister of Israel (Netanyahu). It had no, as far as anyone knows, Palestinian involvement though the PA are probably on side. It is not so much as a ceasefire as an offer of terms to surrender until the next military display of Israeli will (Egypt and Israel both reneged on many of the terms of the last ceasefire).

I hope the thread closes soon, it reminds me of why I stopped being involved in efforts to help Palestinians. Their situation is absolutely hopeless, they have no public support from any government (save perhaps Iran) and they can be killed with absolute impunity. Meanwhile Israel is well on the road to being a functionally fascist state with 200 nuclear weapons and a fleet of German provided stealthy submarines with which to launch them.

As Andrew Sullivan (yes, I know) hints, an intentionally targeted mosque with twenty dead Palestinian worshipers is par for the course, a random hit on a synagogue with two dead Israelis would be a war crime. Palestinians are actually existing untermenschen.

Understanding the Permanence of Greater Israel

@157

**Zack Beauchamp:** Why Hamas’ military wing scuttled a ceasefire with Israel: “Just hours after Israel accepted an Egyptian-brokered cease fire agreement on Tuesday morning, the calm collapsed. Hamas continued to fire rockets into Israel, and its militant wing announced ‘We will continue to bombard until out conditions are met’…. After six hours of holding its fire, Israel resumed bombing the Gaza Strip–and it’s not clear, now, when the fighting is going to stop…. No one’s quite sure what Hamas thinks about the cease fire agreement. That may sound bizarre, given that they’ve clearly violated its terms and never accepted it, but the group has not yet issued any official statement on the deal. The New York Times, CNN, and leading Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz all reported that Hamas’ cabinet was still considering the proposal as rockets were falling. What this suggests is that there may be a real division between Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Dim al-Qassam Brigades, and its political leadership. Nominally, the military wing reports to the political wing, but it’s not clear that the political wing has total control over rocket fire. Notably, an al-Qassam statement, not a Hamas political spokesman, claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks that continues after the ceasefire. And just after the proposal was announced, a military wing statement said the ceasefire agreement ‘is not worth the ink that wrote it’…”

Michael–

Do you have any insight into what Hamas’s military wing thinks that it is doing in rejecting the ceasefire? It’s not killing Israeli civilians. It’s using up rockets that might be useful later. It’s pissing off Sisi even more than it has already pissed off Sisi. And it’s losing its own cadres–albeit at what looks to be a price of three dead Gaza civilians for each dead Hamas cadre.

Moreover, it’s strengthening Netanyahu and people to his right. The narrative goes like this: A decade ago Ariel Sharon was saying that Israel could not withdraw from the West Bank because then it would be taken over by nuts who wanted to wage war with Israel and would do so as best and as destructively as they could. the Israeli left said that that would not happen–that Israel could withdraw from the West Bank and there would be peace. So Sharon said: let’s see. And he withdrew from Gaza. And it was taken over by nuts who want to wage war with Israel. Why does Hamas’s military wing want to strengthen that narrative?

Micheal:

Your examples are both members of the “Jewish Home” party which got 10% of the vote and I have no problem acknowledging that there is a similar amount of angry, genocidal fascists in Israel. But then I don’t think you would have much of a problem finding a similar amount of people with similar views in many other countries.

What I do have a problem with is the whole collective guilt rhetoric, especially coming from US/UK citizens, since their governments have much more blood on their hands.

I’m an ethnic Catholic and I recognize little common humanity with the Palestinians and plenty with the Israelis. Get out the marshmallows!

..ie rather than Zack Beauchamp, who is a journalist and generalist.

@163 – an ethical Catholic ?

I’m an ethnic Catholic and I recognize little common humanity with the Palestinians and plenty with the Israelis. Get out the marshmallows!

I hear the Palestinians poisoned the wells.

The thief tests that theory by only returning your empty wallet. What do you do?

And taking money from your other pocket at the same time, considering Israel withheld PA tax revenues after the election of Hamas.

I suppose if you ignore the blockade, control of operations (tax revenue, stamps), settlers taking the land, massively lopsided casualty figures, etc., it’s easy to say that the only problem is Palestinian aggression. It’d also be easier to ignore the fact that in an area with a ravaged economy, ravaged infrastructure, and ravaged political climate, it’s a bit difficult to control every militant. Or perhaps the US should start bombing Iraq until the government is able to put down every extremist militant in the country.

I’m guessing you understood that I was being bitter. Thanks for the depressing link.

I’ve been to the PressTV site before for non-propaganda reasons and, well, yeah.

If Israel were to magically vanish I suspect a lot of governments in the area would lament the loss of a perpetually reliable distraction.

Contemporary source citations for the origin of the “gasoline libel” are easily deconstructed.
And reconstructed.
Then blown to radioactive dust by vengeful cowards with no escape, save the unthinkable path of humility and remorse, from the backwash of their own delusional iniquity.
And who just happen to have a nuclear fallback for when their myopic dreams of empire fall to ruin.
“Revenge is mine,” saith the Lord.

Ruthless cunning is no substitute for honor.

In the 18th Century, people used to talk about the arcana of states, the secret political ambitions of particular princes especially in regards to which pieces of other polities they wanted to seize and keep (Silesia for the Prussians, for example). Some of these arcana weren’t particularly arcane. They were often secrets only to the extent that kings and ministers wouldn’t admit to them in public. It seems to me in the present situation, the basic Israeli arcana is a determination to absorb the West bank once and for all and somehow drive off the Arabs for good. We’re not supposed to notice the total hypocrisy perpetrated by Israelis whenever they pay lip service to two-state solutions or claim that the recognize that the Palestinians have legitimate interests. After all Israel doesn’t have 200 nukes either. Any bullshitting Israel does about Gaza is merely a supplement to their master bullshitting about territory.

@162: “So Sharon tested the theory that withdrawing from the West Bank would lead to peace by NOT withdrawing from the West Bank?”

Correct. Sharon was a slimy SOB. His “let’s withdraw from Gaza and then use what happens next to infer what would happen were we to withdraw from the West Bank” stacked the deck in many ways…

Na, none of the main Palestinian leadership think ‘the destruction of Israel’ is a realistic possibility. (and the Hamas Charter needs to be seen in it’s proper historical context)
The Irish Republic’s constitution laid claim to Northern Ireland until the peace process, it didn’t really mean anything. (Except symbolic,not in the Republic but in the North)

Joshua W Burton

“Well, for example, I just checked and this program is still running as scheduled this week.”

Thanks, that program looked interesting. I also found an intentional community of Jewish and Palestinian Arabs Wahat al-Salam – Neve Shalom, which organised a peace rally against the violence with the theme “Jews and Arabs Refuse to be Enemies”

http://sfpeace.org/jews-and-arabs-refuse-to-be-enemies-neve-shalom-wahat-al-salam-organizing-for-the-future/

#157

I have to be careful here or my Dunning–Kruger collar will deliver a powerful electric shock to me, so forgive me if this comes over all vox.com. The situation is hellishly complex and I can only give a flavor of the parts I am familiar with from following the region.

President Sisi (along with the Saudis and most of the Western friendly Arab states) are strongly opposed to political Islam because it represents a less authoritarian option to their governments with broad popular appeal and an economic agendas that existing elites in these countries would find troublesome. In the case of Egypt this resulted in the military coup that removed the Muslim Brotherhood for power. Hamas have very strong political and historical links with the Muslim brotherhood and for that reason Sisi would be quite happy to see the entire leadership in Israeli prisons or dead (much like the 182 members of the former Muslim Brotherhood government now imprisoned and sentenced to death in Egypt). Additionally Sisi and the political and judicial elite of Egypt are utterly corrupt and strongly anti-democratic and would much prefer a military strongman in charge of the West Bank and Gaza.

I know its hard to believe that Hamas has democratic chops but this is true. Hamas won freeish and fairish elections in Gaza which upset both the PA and Israel and so a charmer called Muhammad Dahlan tried to stage a coup on their behalf. It is worth reading about the man, he was certainly being groomed as a “strong leader who could bring stability” and “man we could do business with” by the usual suspects and you might hear of him again.)

All this is to say that the only thing that Hamas could do to please Sisi is disappear and the initial “ceasefire” offer and Hamas’s suspicion of it should be seen in that context.

I think other people have covered the rationale for continuing the rocket fire, the situation is Gaza was always verging on the intolerable and now that the shooting has started Hamas has very little choice but to keep it up until the blockade of Gaza is eased or Israel causes so much destruction that the loss of international political capital forces it to stop. It is possible death now or definite death later for Hamas.

One interesting thing about Hamas you might not now, Israel was initially supportive of them as they represented a way to undermine the PLO and fragment resistance to the occupation. Be careful what you wish for.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123275572295011847

My last post was a response to Brad de Long at #159.

#164

There were two recent incidents that made me think the F word (loaded and nebulous as it is) might be appropriate to describe the trajectory Israel is on, if not the place it yet is:

The Nation: After Latest Incident, Israel’s Future in FIFA Is Uncertain

The Guardian: Israeli troops shoot dead a Palestinian-Jordanian judge at border crossing

As a thought experiment why not list the changes that would need to come about in the lived experience of Palestinians or even the Arab citizens of Israel for it to be truly that of an oppressed minority in a fascist state. Alternately ask yourself what about the life of a Palestinian in Hebron could never happen in a fascist state.

One last try.

The Nation: After Latest Incident, Israel’s Future in FIFA Is Uncertain.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/178642/after-latest-incident-israels-future-fifa-uncertain/

Joshua W Burton,

Hand in Hand looks really positive – how have your friends found the experience of being involved?

The Wahat al-Salam – Neve Shalom site has a short publications page with a link to a really interesting article in Peace and Conflict Studies : “Who is More Humane? An Ethnographic Account of Power Struggles in Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue Encounters”

“Adnan (P) talked about the Bereaved Parents Circle, whose Israeli and Palestinian members demonstrate together against the occupation – something Adnan saw as a humane act.
Ronen(J)): Adnan, do you see this as something good, or bad?
Adnan (P): No, of course as something good.
Sigal (J): But it’s hard for you to imagine this. So what does it make you feel? Adnan (P): It was hard for me actually to imagine that someone might get this idea and especially in this period that they initiated this. Those 300 images that they put in Rabin Square, I just see people Palestinians and Jews, who are trying despite everything to live together and to do something, and they’re simply creating a grounded place with ideas like these, which are very original in my opinion, and very moving, and I don’t know what this is doing to me, Sigi [sic].”

http://sfpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/who-is-more-humane.pdf

Micheal Lunny @189: Alternat[iv]ely ask yourself what about the life of a Palestinian in Hebron could never happen in a fascist state.

Well, for starters, pretty much everything on this page, including the bylines.

Thanks to Chris for posting this. The thread is predictably depressing, but cheers to those responding to Brett Bellmore (jesus!), Joshua W. Burton, et al. You’re all made of stronger stuff than me.

Ok, this is hilarious. On the one hand, you’ve got the group with the historical and ideological connection to Nazism, literally goose-stepping around, and on the OTHER hand you’ve got the group they aspire to genocide, being called “facists”, with no irony whatsoever.

Geeze, do you even know what fascism means, beyond being a swear word?

Ronan @200,

Literally.

https://www.google.com/search?q=hezbollah+salute&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=mWXGU6rmOdWpyASohYCYAw&sqi=2&ved=0CBsQsAQ&biw=1440&bih=809#q=hezbollah+goosestep+salute&tbm=isch

One Israeli civilian has been killed during the current Israeli operation. He was a West Bank settler who was giving out candy to soldiers near the Erez crossing between Israel and Gaza when he was hit by a mortar shell.

Last night an entire family was killed in Gaza; a bomb hit their car as they were driving away from their house after receiving a warning from the IDF to evacuate.

If your government is arming Israel, ask it to stop doing so.

Link for the Channel 2 poll:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/182960#.U8Z0bLG2wsx

Even if you believe that the strategy of Hamas’s leadership is “if we kill enough Israeli civilians, God will help us and a miracle will occur”, how are its actions helping it?

There’s an extensive literature and a lot of active research. I think it’s generally understood to be a hard problem.

I think it should also be acknowledged that Hamas were not included in the ceasefire talks

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.605363

So if Hamas are viewed as a political organisation with factional splits, power struggles and domestic constituents (rather than an institution that colectively wants resolution X) it helps explain why a declaration ex cathedra from Egypt couldn’t be easily accepted. (Interestingly, Islamic Jihad, according to the link, *did* call a ceasefire which might be a result of the (afaik) relationship they have developed with the Sisi regime.)

goose-steps

And blood in the Passover matzah, just to distract you further. (3rd to last paragraph; Google translation is pretty feeble, but try your luck.)

I think it should also be acknowledged that Hamas were not included in the ceasefire talks

In other news, the Irgun and the Stern Gang were excluded from the 1949 ceasefire talks that set the Gaza border in the first place. The diplomatically correct approach would be to negotiate this ceasefire with Ramallah, then let the PA call for outside help enforcing it as necessary. But that might take a while, so (in humanitarian urgency) other channels are being offered.

Bellmore is just spouting predictable slogans; Burton obvs knows a lot about the region

Ah, but which is worse, here? Show of hands, please; I’ll abide by the verdict.

One of the things I always find interesting about Haaretz is that you find articles that are much more critical of the Israeli government and military operations than anything you’d find in a mainstream US newspaper. There’s been a lot of talk about how AIPAC influences US foreign policy, but not as much about the effect of vast amounts of money from right-wingers in the US going to Israeli politicians.

Hell, one has to wonder about the impact a right-wing American group like AIPAC has on Israeli politics. What would our foreign policy look like if after the Iraq and Vietnam debacles a much larger country rushed in and tried to help us avoid any of the fallout?

“Bellmore is just spouting predictable slogans; Burton obvs knows a lot about the region”

“Ah, but which is worse, here? Show of hands, please; I’ll abide by the verdict.”

I’d say Burton, since Burton ought to know better…

as in :

“Begin agreed the Irgun soldiers would be fully integrated with the IDF and not kept in separate units.”

@216 – well if you want a ceasefire with group A then it makes sense to put a request in to group A HQ

It’s a delicate dance. The US probably has some direct line of communication with the Juárez cartel, for example, but not through the State Department. (For that matter, William Seward and Judah Benjamin didn’t sign anything at Appomattox.)

On Irgun and Stern Gang – I don’t know enough about Israeli history to say how they were dealt with in 49, but I’d be very surprised if they were just ignored.

Irgun became Herut, merged with other right-wing parties to form Likud, and took over the government.

Joshua W. Barton #226: “because the US cadre not only obeys draft-dodging chickenhawks but seems to enjoy it…”

What is the “US cadre”? The US military? Are you out of your mind?

There is a natural quadrant chart here that I think is worth drawing, with something like “aggressiveness of aims” and “estimation of opponents” on perpendicular axes. The terms “dove” and “hawk” for -/- and +/+ are universally understood, and “chickenhawk” is a lovely coinage for +/-. I don’t know if there is a good English word for -/+, which is the defining philosophy of Dayan, Rabin, Ami Ayalon, Carmi Gillon, Yuval Diskin and most of the Kirya and Shabak. The Hebrew yonot sh’horot, “black doves,” is pretty good, but I don’t think it would be understood in the US/UK (or most anywhere politicians and pundits have safe kids).

Joshua W. Burton #229: “aggressiveness of aims” and “estimation of opponents”

That is ridiculous nonsense. But before we get into that again, what is the “US cadre”? Is that the US military?

“Americans seem to have this persistent idea that, because the US cadre not only obeys draft-dodging chickenhawks but seems to enjoy it, the Israeli cadre must feel the same way. ”

It’s really quite hard to understand what this is supposed to mean. Does it claim that the Israeli military simply ignores its elected leaders, in the patented ‘only democracy in the Middle East’; and does it approve of that? Or does it mean they obey while holding their noses? Is it a criticism of the American military leadership for upholding their oaths to civilian authority, or a suggestion they should do otherwise? Does it mean anything at all, or is it just more of Joshua W. Burton’s sophistry?

Joshua W. Burton #230 — Sorry you’ll have to keep the argument here because I am not interested in pursuing endless links to buttress stupid contentions. Otherwise I will send you the link to the list under the Wikipedia entry “Reprisal operations”, which I now must assume YOU will say were all “rogue”. Did you convince Benny Morris of this, as well?

Ronin @232: yes, yes, yes — my point. Could six US chiefs of staff making a documentary together have slowed the rush to war in Iraq? I don’t know, but I would have very much liked to see it tried.

In the end, you go to war with the voters you have, not the voters you’d like to have. But thought leadership, or perhaps I should say thoughtful leadership, still matters even in a democracy — perhaps nowhere more so, in the long run.

Joshua W. Barton #236: “Professional officers, as a class…. what I see them supinely supporting…”

You think there is a significant difference between Israel and the US on the issue of the advisability of military operations? The Gatekeepers are all ex-head of operations, and their demonization by war-mongers even in the US has been notable. You seem to have missed the indication of opposition in the US military both to the neocons and to invading Iraq, but, because serving officers took an oath and follow orders, this did as little good as the Gatekeepers. More recently and quite amazingly, high-ranking officers still serving in the US military objected publicly to the idea of bombing Iran (we saw a few statements by one or two sitting US Admirals). So it happens.

But the original question, which you have so far avoided, is why you think Hamas’ strategy is difficult to understand.

a fortunately small number of seriously violent people (“settlers” primarily)

The numbers don’t work here. The IDF, acting under orders, has killed about 3500 Palestinian noncombatants this century, against 750 Israeli noncombatants killed (480 of them inside the Green Line) and 700 P-on-P collaborator killings by Palestinians in the same 14 years. Leaving aside all question of justification, this is a serious prima facie case that the IDF is an agent of force wielded against Palestinian civil society.

But Israeli civilians, including “seriously violent” settlers, have killed a total of 57 Palestinians in this period: in other words, 12 times as many P civilians have been killed by P forces as by I civilians. If the settlers are a state instrument of force, their low-impact effectiveness should be a case study for uniformed services everywhere.

Barry #240: :Assume that they want war – as much as possible, on their own terms, of course, like everybody else. Their actions make much more sense in that view.”

Then you will also not object to assuming that Hamas and most Arabs want Israel destroyed. Their actions make much more sense in that view. So then we are back to my question, which is about security in the long term.

“Then you will also not object to assuming that Hamas and most Arabs want Israel destroyed. Their actions make much more sense in that view.”

No they don’t Lee, and you keep pushing this nonsense as fact even though it’s *completly* counter to all mainstream opinion ans empirical research.

You think there is a significant difference between Israel and the US on the issue of the advisability of military operations?

I think American career officers vote Republican about 4-1, and I suspect this is true all the way up to flag rank. I think Israeli career officers have voted Mapai, then Labour, then Kadima by similarly lopsided margins, and that, while all mainstream-party Israeli politicians are necessarily veterans, the Likud has time-servers and the occasional commando hero, but seldom or never two generals to rub together. As I think both (US) Dems and (IL) Labour have policies more congenial to intelligent military minds than their respective opponents, I suspect the US officers of unprofessional motivation.

Just read this post from last wk at Duck of Minerva. Relevant and worth reading:
http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2014/07/the-collapse-of-the-status-quo-in-israel.html

“The Warsaw Ghetto”

The Warsaw Ghetto would have gotten better treatment if they surrendered? You can’t really think this.

@213
In 1949, Lehi and Irgun had both been absorbed into the IDF. They weren’t consulted because they didn’t exist.

LFC @249: Yes, this is about right.

@253: In 1949, Lehi and Irgun had both been absorbed into the IDF. They weren’t consulted because they didn’t exist.

Yes, exactly. And their former supporters remained in the political wilderness for 28 more years. Where is Abu Mazen’s Altalena? (Answer: he’d never survive it. Well, then.)

JOshua W. Burton #244: “But I do think it’s good for Hamas leaders”

Please give a short precis of how, in terms of signaling theory, it is good for Hamas leaders.

Ronan(rf) #246: “…unless you’re just adopting an extremely simplisitic position…”

Exactly. What’s sauce for the goose etc.

“self identity” = “self image”. Too late to be posting.

The Warsaw Ghetto would have gotten better treatment if they surrendered? You can’t really think this.

No, not really. I can make the logical argument but I don’t believe it.

The argument goes, that there were maybe 70,000 people left in the ghetto, and with cooperation the germans would have transported about 7000/day to Treblinka. They would have had relatively good treatment — water, some food, some shelter from the elements, etc — before they were euthanized with carbon monoxide which is relatively painless.

Instead they had the dubious privilege of getting shot, blown up, burned alive in their basements etc while surviving on dead rats and whatever they could find for up to two months before the survivors were transported to Treblinka anyway. So far as I know, every single person who survived the uprising did it by crawling through the sewers and escaping the ghetto.

They knew they had no possibility for victory. None whatsoever. Why didn’t they peacefully accept the surrender terms the germans offered them? They killed more jewish collaborators than they did germans, fighting among themselves….

It could be argued that since the fighting did no good for the civilians and no good for the fighters, still it was good for their leaders. A leader who said not to fight would have lost his followers immediately. But what good did it do them to be leaders of the ghetto resistance? Every single one of the leaders was killed.

They tied up 2000 german troops for 2 months, which was a small accomplishment, and they killed maybe 20 and wounded maybe another 100. It didn’t amount to much but it was something, and if they had cooperated they would have hurt the germans even less.

I want to think that if I’d been there I would have fought, and I’d like to imagine that before the end I’d escape to fight on, though there was no food in the forests and the more people that tried to fight there, the more starved.

The situation is not nearly so bleak for Gaza and Hamas. They have quantitatively less to lose if they fight, and quantitatively less to lose if they surrender. So doesn’t it make sense that they should just surrender, and let the Israelis kill all the Hamas members that Israel claims have committed terrorist acts, and then let the civilians of Gaza live entirely by Israel’s mercy? Wouldn’t that be the best thing they could do?

I can understand that they don’t think so.

Dunno why supposed “left” gets all totalitarian in Mid-East–what is so wrong with small countries for minorities, like Israel for Jews and Lebanon for Christians? Not as if Arab Muslim land-claims are strong outside of Arabia (to say nothing of dubious Turkish claims in Anatolia). I guess it’s the Phoenician in me . . .

A post below gives a detailed analysis of previous ceasefires between Israel and Gaza over the last few years.

http://blog.thejerusalemfund.org/2014/07/gaza-cease-fire-dynamics-explained-what.html

It is essential reading for anyone who wonders why Gazans might “provoke” Israeli attacks with rocket fire and why Hamas might be suspicious of any ceasefire offer.

No, the status quo includes various intermittent attempts to change the situation through various kinds of force, such as the recent rocket attacks, which make violent repression by the Israeli government excusable among those who want to excuse it, as even in the present discussion. Force has not done much for the Palestinian Arabs in the last 66 years, so, practically speaking, it would be reasonable to try something else. I realize that human beings are seldom reasonable; it is a last resort, attempted only when all else has failed. In this case all else has failed over a considerable period of time.

Force has not done much for the Palestinian Arabs in the last 66 years, so, practically speaking, it would be reasonable to try something else.

Palestinians tried not-force for decades, and what they got was that Israel said there was no such thing as Palestinians, there were only arab refugees and displaced persons who were entirely the arab communities’ responsibility.

When they did intifada Israel killed a bunch of them and then agreed that there was such a thing as a palestinian.

When palestinians are peaceful they get abused and ignored. When they retaliate they get abused more but not ignored.

The obvious approach for the Israeli government is to abuse palestinians less when they are completely passive, and then hit them very hard whenever they do retaliate — but do not speak of it. Don’t tell the media anything, order the domestic media not to report anything about palestinians, and imprison or kill foreign journalists who report about palestinians. If they got nothing at all except death for any attempt to fight back, they might learn not to try.

But Israeli governments don’t think that way. Each of them — of any ideology — gets a big temporary support boost when they publicly beat up on arabs. Keeping quiet about it defeats the purpose. They get a boost from beating up on arabs and they get another boost if international opinion is against them and they defy it.

And they have learned that it isn’t safe to beat up on Hesbollah, so Hamas is the obvious target. Palestinians aren’t very important in the process, the main thing is the domestic media and voter opinion and the international reaction.

It’s like in school. “Why are you attacking me? You know it never gets you anything.” Thwack. “See, you hit yourself. Why did you do that? Don’t you know better than to hit yourself?” Thwack. “You’re so stupid. You keep hitting yourself for no reason.” Thwack thwack thwack. “You should learn to be more peaceful.” Thwack.

Hence, strictly nonviolent public demands for full legal and political equality in a single state, which might have interesting resonances in the United States and other patrons of the Israeli government.

https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifamericansknew.org%2Fmedia%2Fnonviolent.html

Google “nonviolent resistance in Palestine”. The above is the first hit.

It’s happening, and when it happens the Israeli military treats it as violent resistance, and it goes almost entirely unreported in the Israeli and US media.

We’ll see. Israel has had a long time to plan how to neutralize nonviolent resistance.

But this is what I got: http://electronicintifada.net/content/invisibility-palestinian-nonviolent-resistance-new-york-times/5775

Likewise, this approach re: death tolls of fallen Palestinian victims to weigh morality, is pretty sick and reads as blood thirsty.

If more Israelis died would it sway your support away from Palestinians?
Then why exploit deaths tolls like a sporting event?
Has this blog made mention of the tens of thousands that make up the death tolls in Syrian or was that have no political use for you?

Are we really to believe Israel’s Army wouldn’t be capable of more causing much more deaths during indiscriminate attacks?

And what’s this about “No rockets since November 2012”?
Are you endorsing the effectiveness of the IDF’s “Pillar and Truth operation” of November, 2012 then?
Is there a reason you’re erasing the rockets fired during March 2013 during Obama’s visit, and every month since?

One thing I recall about the 1st Intifada is that it resulted in a lot of of sympathy among Americans for a while. I think I saw a poll indicating that that’s happening again. That can’t be a bad thing.

#271

Anarcissie, the Israeli state is not the most evil one in the world but they have spent a very long time, decades in fact, devising physical, security and media strategies to prevent Palestinians from organizing and mobilizing mass protests and to manage international responses to violent suppression of peaceful protests (most notably in the US). They have studied the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa carefully and have processes in place to stymie its methods (BDS is difficult to manage in this way and it is their major headache).

There has also been a policy of assassination and imprisonment without trial intended to cull any promising leadership figures (see the very long list of assassinations here). Abu Ali Mustafa, killed in 2001, was a clear example of a political assassination of a “potential Mandela” (which I remember well). The Israelis take the danger of a good example very seriously indeed.

Physical barriers are important too. Checkpoints prevent protesters assembling, clever construction means that many East Jerusalem settlements are hidden by large embankments from the eyes and noises of protesters, watch towers and drones mean that any serious acts of civil disobedience can be nipped in the bud. The Apartheid Wall is eight meters high (twice the height of the Berlin wall) and even if there was a mass attempt to climb it naked wearing only lilly underwear the protesters would be beaten and shot before they made it over.

Any large gatherings of Palestinians is a riot, every riot can be met with force and if someone is executed by an army sniper you can be sure that will be out of the news cycle in hours in the US, even in”liberal” media.

It might be useful to think about the killing of Rachel Corrie here. If Israel can, with malice aforethought, crush a peaceful American protester to death underneath an armoured caterpillar digger without any consequences how could anyone imagine that peaceful protest by Palestinians could work?

#284 Joshua Burton

would need to address why, in the shooting of UK activist Tom Hurndall three weeks later, similarly conflicting accounts did not save the IDF sergeant from a conviction for manslaughter, obstruction of justice, perjury, suborning false testimony, and behavior unbecoming.

Are you perhaps a lawyer? This smells like lawyer-logic to me.

George Zimmerman was declared innocent of murdering Trayvon Martin. Michael Dunn killed Jordan Davis six months later and has been convicted of three counts of attempted murder and now is on trial a second time for actual murder. If the Florida justice system was biased in favor of whites, surely both of them would have gotten off quickly. Therefore George Zimmerman really is innocent of any wrongdoing.

Something about this reasoning leaves me with a lot of doubt. At a minimum we would have to assume that the legal system is consistent.

@285: J Thomas: “George Zimmerman was declared innocent of murdering Trayvon Martin…”

Don’t be a total dork.

George Zimmerman was found not ‘guilty beyond a reasonable doubt’ of murdering Trayvon Martin. “Innocent” is a much stronger claim than “not ‘guilty beyond a reasonable doubt'”. It is a stronger claim than “not ‘guilty by clear and convincing evidence'”. It is even a stronger claim than “not ‘guilty by the preponderance of the evidence'”.

Well, I’ll say it: sieg fucking heil.

@290: Not, yes, intent, and not really.

“Not, yes, intent, and not really.”

Taking these one at a time:

What should be done, by whom, to eject Israeli settlements from the West Bank?

What international law permits Israeli military forces to destroy homes in another country?

How are you judging intent?

If not, then why do you correspond?

ISTM that if Palestinians who perhaps knowingly live beside, above, or below militants are complicit and therefore deserve targeting, litter-collectors like you (can we say water-carriers instead?) are also complicit. Note that the former premise isn’t my contention, but what I take to be yours from the evasive nonsense you post.

> What should be done, by whom, to eject Israeli settlements from the West Bank?

Bluntly, the whole “hasbara” thing is deliberately engineered as a tarpit. You take fucked-in-the-head true-believers and you point them at the people who are asking difficult questions, so that they ask the true-believers the questions rather than anyone who might matter or who might ponder what’s said. Debate by zerg rush.

[only real solution is aggressive moderation of the aggressively-not-getting-it, which runs into other costs.]

[same as the IDF, or any oppression force anywhere: you take ignorant lower-class kids, tell them they’re awesome, and you point them at your enemies. Plausible-deniability crumple-zone. Terrorists do much the same thing, but they have slightly different personnel requirements [they need to be more autonomous and they don’t need as many] so they draw from different sectors of the population]

Comment 13 was the last serious consideration

No.

@297: aggressive moderation

If that were a political party, I’d vote for it.

P.s. Also, I thought Western’s brief analysis of what Fayyad did on the WB, and how it has actually reduced the costs of the occupation for Israel, was interesting. This deserves further elaboration but I have to run just now.

IDF . . . you take ignorant lower-class kids

So, by elimination, the black-hats, Orthodox women, poor kids from the Negev who fail the bagrut, and the Israeli Arabs (ex Druse & Bedouin) make up almost the whole of the Israeli middle and upper class — wow. If, per @298, serious consideration of Israeli domestic politics is of interest, a top issue is the serious and intergenerational class barriers created by army deferral and rejection. Evidence so far released suggests that Muhammad Abu-Khdeir’s torturer/murderers were haredi deferral street bums.

“There has not been a time in the last five-plus years that rocket fire from Gaza hasn’t been a very real possibility, and frequently a fact, of southern Israeli life.”

I didn’t wade through this whole thread–I was out of town for most of it–but I never get used to this moral obtuseness. Israeli troops fire at Gazan civilians inside Gaza on a fairly regular basis. They shoot at fishermen. Sometimes innocent Gazans die. All of Gaza is an open air prison camp. And all this nice Israeli woman and Brett Bellmore deign to notice is the rocket fire.

Sorry, but if the US or Israel were placed in the exact same circumstances as the Gazans, the very same people who are too clueless to notice the suffering of Gazans would be the first ones cheering the firing of rockets at their tormentors.

@305 Now that is interesting! The idea that Americans could intuit how Likud voters think without some consideration of who serves in the Israeli military does seem strange, no? We haven’t really faced similar issues here for 40 years.

“Oh, was I evasive again? ”

Yes, of course, but you’ve satisfied my curiosity.

Sorry, but if the US or Israel were placed in the exact same circumstances as the Gazans, the very same people who are too clueless to notice the suffering of Gazans would be the first ones cheering the firing of rockets at their tormentors.

And equally if the palestinian arabs were in the position the israeli jews were in now you’d get a certain percentage condemning the דְרוֹר missiles[1] and saying all sorts of terrible horrible racist things, too.

There’s nothing special about jews any more than there’s anything special about arabs, after all. People are the same everywhere. Some are decent, some are less so: whether a polity collectively does good or ill is all tied up in messy path-dependency and shit. There’s significant… hysterisis, feedback, I-don’t-know between the policies a polity’s elites support and the policies the elites can get support for: some people just think what they’re told. In any population.

[1] Yay google translate. How do I read that, btw?

How do I read that, btw?

Dror is “freedom” (like in the quote on the Liberty Bell) or “sparrow” — as a missile, it would be the AIM-7, which is air-to-air as far as I know.

This guy is pretty close to the action. Anyone who wants to meet Tommy should take a break from CT and give “Eylo” a few minutes of your time. (Still laughing at “Apples in shakshuka? What sort of monster are you??” — same apples/potatoes problem as in French or Dutch.)

J Thomas 07.18.14 at 1:19 am @ 312:
‘Another part of my suggestion was, instead of carrying on about a state of their own, which can be fiddled by the opposition indefinitely, Palestinians would accept the facts on the ground — that is, a singe state — and demand equal legal and political rights within that state. That is a very simple, very basic, very nonviolent idea which resonates very strongly with a lot of Americans.’
‘Palestinians are seriously discussing this. The immediate problem is that the USA and Israel reject the idea out of hand and insist that negotiation must be for a two-state solution — which can be fiddled indefinitely.’

Well, of course. What do you expect? They are the opposition, the oppressor. They’re not going to hand the Palestinians the game.

If the demand is for full legal and political rights, there is nothing to negotiate anyway.

No doubt the Israelis will continue to shoot Palestinians, but now they will be publicly murdering unarmed, nonviolent people asking no more than equal rights, equal protection of the laws. It will not go down well abroad. In fact, it will not go down well at home.

#317

If the demand is for full legal and political rights, there is nothing to negotiate anyway.

Citizenship is something that most nations don’t give away lightly.

Genesis 34:

8 But Hamor said to them, “My son Shechem has his heart set on your daughter. Please give her to him as his wife. 9 Intermarry with us; give us your daughters and take our daughters for yourselves. 10 You can settle among us; the land is open to you. Live in it, trade[b] in it, and acquire property in it.”

11 Then Shechem said to Dinah’s father and brothers, “Let me find favor in your eyes, and I will give you whatever you ask. 12 Make the price for the bride and the gift I am to bring as great as you like, and I’ll pay whatever you ask me. Only give me the young woman as my wife.”

13 Because their sister Dinah had been defiled, Jacob’s sons replied deceitfully as they spoke to Shechem and his father Hamor. 14 They said to them, “We can’t do such a thing; we can’t give our sister to a man who is not circumcised. That would be a disgrace to us. 15 We will enter into an agreement with you on one condition only: that you become like us by circumcising all your males. 16 Then we will give you our daughters and take your daughters for ourselves. We’ll settle among you and become one people with you. 17 But if you will not agree to be circumcised, we’ll take our sister and go.”

18 Their proposal seemed good to Hamor and his son Shechem. 19 The young man, who was the most honored of all his father’s family, lost no time in doing what they said, because he was delighted with Jacob’s daughter. 20 So Hamor and his son Shechem went to the gate of their city to speak to the men of their city. 21 “These men are friendly toward us,” they said. “Let them live in our land and trade in it; the land has plenty of room for them. We can marry their daughters and they can marry ours. 22 But the men will agree to live with us as one people only on the condition that our males be circumcised, as they themselves are. 23 Won’t their livestock, their property and all their other animals become ours? So let us agree to their terms, and they will settle among us.”

24 All the men who went out of the city gate agreed with Hamor and his son Shechem, and every male in the city was circumcised.

25 Three days later, while all of them were still in pain, two of Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. 26 They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem’s house and left. 27 The sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies and looted the city where[c] their sister had been defiled. 28 They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys and everything else of theirs in the city and out in the fields. 29 They carried off all their wealth and all their women and children, taking as plunder everything in the houses.

30 Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me by making me obnoxious to the Canaanites and Perizzites, the people living in this land. We are few in number, and if they join forces against me and attack me, I and my household will be destroyed.”

No doubt the Israelis will continue to shoot Palestinians, but now they will be publicly murdering unarmed, nonviolent people asking no more than equal rights, equal protection of the laws. It will not go down well abroad. In fact, it will not go down well at home.

It’s hard to get people to be unanimously nonviolent, when they’re getting killed.

Imagine that in the USA Martin Luther King had been assassinated very early, and the media did not report any nonviolence but only reported Stokely Carmichael and Black Panthers and reported every violent crime committed by any black person as a terrorist act.

We might be a lot more like Israel today, if it had gone like that.

Genesis 34:

Rashi, on Simeon, Genesis 42 (“and [Joseph] took Simeon from among them and imprisioned him before their eyes”): Simeon: He [was the one who] had cast him into the pit. It was he who said to Levi,“Behold, that dreamer is coming” (Gen. 37:19). Another explanation: Joseph intended to separate him from Levi, lest the two of them take counsel to assassinate him.

Genesis 49: And Jacob called unto his sons, and said . . . Simeon and Levi are brethren; weapons of violence their kinship. Let my soul not come into their council; unto their assembly let my glory not be united; for in their anger they slew men, and in their self-will they houghed oxen. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was cruel; I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.

True to their father’s word, Simeon and Levi wind up on opposite ends of a spear in Numbers 25; Simeon is the only tribe that diminishes (by half) between the two censuses, while Levi turns his zeal to haShem and is “scattered in Israel” as priests instead of pariahs. Anyway, you’ll have to look pretty hard to find these two in midrash or Talmud without the Dinah story hanging around their necks as a curse and a warning. It’s very human, but it’s also very very not Jewish.

Sorry, The Peace and Violence of Judaism. There’s a preview in Google Books, I believe.