Corey arrested

Good for him for having the courage of his convictions. Please keep us posted. I’ll be thinking of him. Do you know what his action was?

Well done Corey!

There will be no solution in “Palestine” without equal rights and dignity for ALL people living there.

Good for him.

Good for him. Way more than I’ve ever done.

Lots of respect to Corey’s courage and conviction. I hope he gets out soon.

https://twitter.com/BayoumiMoustafa/status/494177510889111552/photo/1

nice sandals.

Best wishes to Corey–and my admiration for his integrity and commitments.

Best wishes, Corey.

Video from Louis Proyect, if this is it

Like they said.

Best wishes, and proud of ya, Corey.

Good wishes for Corey Robin, and hope the trip to jail is uneventful.

Release Robin!

Relieved they didn’t put him in a chokehold. Respect to Corey, and hope it inspires others to take their convictions offline and out into the real world.

@24 lol

thank you, Mr. Robin.

may you be released quickly.

There’s been a little bit of coverage beyond Breitbart, though less than I expected.

It was a peaceful, direct, and dignified political action. (Even the NYPD, for once, was reasonably well behaved.) Norman suggested the action–marching across 43rd St. to stop traffic–and the crowd voted orally to march. Norman lead the way, marching across Second Ave. like Moses crossing the Red sea!

Michelle Goldberg, The Nation
“. . . Among those who were taken into custody today was Corey Robin, a Jewish professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Robin is a longtime critic of Israel, but he’d never before been arrested over it. “I finally felt like I had to do something,” he said a few moments before lying down in the street. “This is my first time doing this for Palestine. If it’s my first time, it’s going to be somebody else’s first time, if not now, then another time.””

http://www.thenation.com/blog/180808/why-it-matters-norman-finkelstein-just-got-arrested-outside-israeli-consulate

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Tablet
24 Arrested in Protest Against Israel’s Gaza Campaign
Norman Finkelstein, Benjamin Kunkel, Corey Robin among those arrested
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180812/24-arrested-in-protest-against-israels-gaza-campaign

Zachary Roberts, Village Voice
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2014/07/26_people_arrested_outside_israeli_consulate.php

Thank you Professor for your insight and convictions.
Its a good thing you were not dressed as a Marvel Comics character. I understand the NYPD has great animus towards costumed heroes.

Old school! Great show from Corey and co.

Maybe carry guns next time. The tea party has demonstrated that police are a lot more tolerant of protests when the participants are armed.

If I was gonna joke, Sancho, I might joke about something else beside guns.

Is it really a joke, Colin? Maybe not the place for a discussion about arming the Left, though.

Walks it the way he talks it. Respect.

Glad to hear it!

Sometimes conscience is everything. Good for you, better for us all as example.

At first Corey Robin, I though Joshua Burton was offering to pay your bail, and in Latin no less, but I see now that is likely not the case, but more rather one of the oddest uses of Latin quotation I have ever encountered anywhere.
But just so, if this act of conscience brings with it a financial burden – I mean I’d like to think well-known academics earn something like the salaries of well-known sports figures, making a fine purely symbolic, but reason tells me, no. If this is a burden, as I say, then a passing of the hat would be well-received all round, and generously filled, I’m sure. Yours to say.

Cheers, and good on ya, sahr!

Best wishes, Corey..

Thank you Corey

Thank you, Corey!

Good for Corey Robin.

Although I can’t believe that Prof. Robin’s efforts at moral suasion of the Zionist state can lead to its redemption, I am always glad for reminders that Jews may not be Zionists. I am sorry he will pay a price for his efforts to practice a moral Judaism.

To clarify, Ghandi committed civil disobedience by drying a pan of sea water, to protest an asinine law against making your own salt. The law he broke was the law he protested, and it worked because it drew attention to the injustice of the law.

Others protested segregated facilities by using the bathroom or whatever they were barred from. Again, drawing attention to the injustice of the very law they would be arrested for violating.

But, who thinks it is unjust that people aren’t permitted to block a sidewalk? The connection between the law broken, and the cause, is a bit indirect here, no?

Just my immediate response. It is a reasonable point, though.

Very helpful Brett.

Brett’s comment is not about alternatives, since there really isn’t one that fits his criteria. Not paying your taxes (which support the Israeli government) doesn’t work because it isn’t the concept of levying taxes itself that Corey et. al. were protesting. Let’s see…nope, I can’t think of any alternative in Brett’s approved mold. Therefore, no (or ‘much less’) sympathy. Forget about the slaughtered civilians, what about the wasted 90 seconds of pedestrians in Manhattan?! Why should *they* pay?

Brett Bellmore 07.30.14 at 5:07 pm — Like others here, I am really curious as to what alternative modes of protest you envision.

carbon dated 07.30.14 at 5:19 pm — Some may fear physical violence. I just read an account of someone who went to protest the pro-Israel demonstration the day before, and there received death threats, etc. As the political and moral position of Israel continues to deteriorate, its supporters are likely to become more desperate and erratic in their public behavior.

fwiw I saw something the other day about how the Polish resistance used to execute collaborators, which obviously proves that… gosh, this is fun.

Brett’s criterion of taking the same risk being protested

Not that it matters, but that’s clearly not his criterion. He’s saying he has sympathy only with civil disobedience vis a vis a law, and which takes the form of breaking that law. Certainly narrows the field of action for people who want to do civil disobedience, which I believe is the point.

I doubt if anti-war protesters from the US will be permitted to enter Israeli propaganda.

I guess if you want the crime to fit the protest, you might possibly go to Textron, the owner of a manufacturer of cluster bombs and get arrested for asking them to stop selling to Israel.

Textron owns Textron Systems which owns Textron Defense Systems. They make cluster bombs that have special arrangements to try to prevent the bombs from going off years later. Like, they have an arrangement that is supposed to get the bomblets which did not explode when they should have, to all go off at once later.

It would not make sense to ask Textron Defense Systems, headquarter in Wilmington MA to stop selling to Israel. They aren’t the parent company and probably can’t make that decision.

It probably would not make sense to ask Textron Systems to do that, headquarter in Providence, RI. They aren’t the parent company either.

But if you ask Textron (also headquarter in Providence) and they arrest you for trespassing, that would be appropriate. It’s of course inconvenient to get arrested out of state.

If the USA stopped selling (giving away) cluster bombs to Israel it would not actually hurt Israel much since they now make their own and sell them to any non-islamic buyer who will pay their price.

Does anyone remember that clip from the Simpsons when the old bearded fella says (something along the lines of) “get off the pavement son, the sidewalks for walking” ? I can only remember it vaguely, but it’s popped into my head.

“Does anyone remember that clip from the Simpsons when the old bearded fella says (something along the lines of) “get off the pavement son, the sidewalks for walking” ? I can only remember it vaguely, but it’s popped into my head.”

Yes it is in the 2nd part of the Who Shot Mr. Burns double episode.

/Why yes I love the Simpsons. Why do you ask?

p.s. In fact I think Bellmore’s position borders on the absurd.

“In fact I think Bellmore’s position borders on the absurd.”

Strange, isn’t it, that CT hasn’t come up with some shorthand for this proposition.

Strange, isn’t it, that CT hasn’t come up with some shorthand for this proposition.

Word. Definitely. etc.

I’m simply pointing out that Ghandian civil disobedience derives it’s force from compelling the oppressor to publicly oppress you, in an obviously unjustified manner. The link between what you’re protesting and the violent response you prompt is direct.

It works because it draws a society’s attention to instances where it’s government is not embodying that society’s values.

Arresting people for blocking a sidewalk or street? Just doesn’t peg the old “unjustified oppression” meter.

Gandhian.

What Gandhi did was very brave. But so what? This is not that, but it can still be a powerful statement of dissent.

What would you recommend instead?

We cross-posted.

You think it’s absurd? I’m just pointing out that your favorite form of “civil disobedience” doesn’t work, and why. I’m not saying you can’t go on doing it, and getting arrested for it. Just don’t expect it to win to your side any converts.

You didn’t have to be a civil rights marcher to be outraged at Rosa Parks being forced to stand at the back of the bus, or police blocking children from entering a school. That’s civil disobedience that works, because it causes the oppressor to offend the public conscience in public.

It doesn’t offend the public conscience to arrest somebody for blocking a sidewalk.

Possibly there’s more than one way that a given action can have an effect.

For those of us who vaguely remember the mid-1980s, the embassy protests organized by Randall Robinson and Transafrica (which I assume this is modeled on) were widely regarded as successful.

Brett, why do you think your ignorance of the concept and history of civil disobedience is of interest to anyone other than yourself?

Bellmore, Brett-
My favorite form of civil disobedience isn’t on the table here, yet.
What you missed is the rejection of ‘absurd’.

Talking about Ghandi and Rosa Parks while the carnage in Gaza exponentiates isn’t absurd, it’s grotesque.
As if MLK left Montgomery on fire, with bodies hanging from the lampposts, and children’s heads on pikes all along the bridge.
Grotesque, not absurd.

Colin Danby:
For those of us who vaguely remember the mid-1980s, the embassy protests organized by Randall Robinson and Transafrica … were widely regarded as successful.

I remember the mid-1980s, and yes the Transafrica protests were regarded as successful: they got media coverage, they heightened awareness of the issue. Contrary to Brett, there doesn’t have to be a police reaction that “offends the public conscience.” The pt of the protest is to raise awareness of the issue, which can be done in various ways. This is not just some random sidewalk or street: it’s a street in front of the Israeli UN mission. Protests are in part about symbolism. Brett doesn’t seem to have much notion of what political protest or civil disobedience is about. He shd look into the history of the Vietnam-era protests, for ex.– I mean the non-violent ones, which also tended to be the most effective. When that guy set himself on fire outside the Pentagon (well, Brett may be too young to have heard of it), it wasn’t a question of drawing a police action that would “offend the public conscience.” There was nothing for the police to do in that case but clean up the remains. But it was still effective.

A powerful statement by a bona fide member of the academia. It’s actions of this kind which are most needed and which make a CT community a relevant one. And I was just about to give it up.

I think this *is* the only blog I know Brett from

Let me tell you- you are not missing anything. I say that because what you’d get from Brett on the other blogs would be exactly the same.

if I’m not mistaken you’re a law professor and a philosopher
Only in a tenuous and occasional sort of way, but I’ll take it as a compliment, whether meant or not.

Best wishes to Corey.

Wondering whether it’s common or preferable for democratic political theorists to whom the Law of Return is applicable to exhaust democratic means of changing policy by first acquiring Israeli citizenship and voting in Israeli elections before committing civil disobedience?

unhelpful @110:
not preferable, and presumably not common either

“I’m simply pointing out that Ghandian civil disobedience derives it’s force from compelling the oppressor to publicly oppress you, in an obviously unjustified manner”

No, you aren’t ‘pointing it out,’ you’re baldly asserting it.

Let me point something out – your armchair ruminations about from what all varieties of civil disobedience do or don’t derive their force are bullshit.

The speculation that effective civil disobedience has only derived its force from some symmetry between the act and the object of protest is conveniently made up nonsense.

@116

If my comment was in bad form, I apologize, for I certainly didn’t mean to detract from the gravity of the substantive issues or from Mr. Corey’s courageous action.

There was a larger point, however — namely, the rather lukewarm stance of the academia in today’s corporate climate. Compared to the faculty’s involvement and active participation during the sixties in the burning issues of the day, its virtual lack of support for the recent Occupy Movement speaks louder than words. Which is precisely why Corey’s act of civil disobedience stands in such a sharp relief. Again, during the sixties, such acts were a rule; today, they’re unfortunately exceptions.

Gandhi engaged in dozens of acts of civil disobedience – non-cooperation against the Rowlatt act, for instance – which not only broke numerous laws other than the ones he was protesting but also inconvenienced masses of people. I imagine Brett Bellmore used the Salt Satyagraha because it’s the thing he remembers from the movie. I can’t believe no one else has pointed all this out yet.

Has he uttered even a single word about the war crimes committed by HAMAS?

About HAMAS killing hundreds of Palestinian children while they build the terror tunnels? About HAMAS killing scores of Palestinians for the supposed ‘crime’ of ‘collaboration’ with the Israelis? About HAMAS war crimes in launching thousands of missiles against innocent civilians?

Israeli astrocities/i>

“You’re going to need a bigger rocket.”

I mean it’s pretty easy to denounce 70% of Hamas activities; from war crimes (civilian targetted suicide bombings and missiles) deeply engrained institutional anti semitism, religious dogma that should be objected to by anyone with any liberal perspective, it’s authoritarian leanings, the bloody minded insanity of its militant wing. But what the hell is the point of stating the obvious ? And the inability to recognise(and work with) the parts of Hamas that don’t fit this caricature is reckless childishness IN MY OPINION.

Aha! Brett is actually supporting Corey, by cleverly showing how the argument against this kind of protest disintegrates. Re 116, this was not far from the problem the anti-apartheid movement faced in the early 1980s. With the issue framed as a constitutional government versus communist terrorists, the white republic had considerable popular support in the US and open backing by the Reagan administration and Republican controlled Senate. The embassy protests were about shifting the terms of debate, and they worked.

“But what the hell is the point of stating the obvious ? ”

When people are taking positions that seem to be based on ignoring the obvious, stating the obvious can be helpful. The Israelis are not fighting some alternate universe, victim Hamas, that is reasonable, and would cease fighting if left alone. They’re fighting the real world, aspiring to genocide Hamas, for which any relaxation of sanctions is just an opportunity to prepare for more attempts to kill Jews.

Let’s recall that this present war was sparked by the discovery of invasion tunnels dug by Hamas, (Using humanitarian aid and child slave labor.) and those tunnels did not terminate under Israeli military basis, but instead in civilian areas. The current war was sparked by the discovery that Hamas was preparing for, and scarily close to carrying out, mass murder and kidnappings.

The Israelis are not saints, except in the context of the Middle East, where they come off remarkably well. I think some want them to be saints, because then they’d be conveniently dead, instead of inconveniently alive and defending themselves.

@129
While deliberate attacks on civilians are hard to defend, this about the tunnels seems analogous to complaining that spies and paratroopers aren’t crossing the border at manned and armed checkpoints.

“Well, yes, but the protesters executed in broad daylight yesterday were not killed by that Hamas; they were killed by a wing of the Palestinian unity government (recognized by over 130 nations) that goes by the same name.”

Joshua Burton’s peace plan:

1) Hamas is bad, so
2) Kill Palestinian children, and
3) ??
4) Peace!

The Israelis are not saints, except in the context of the Middle East, where they come off remarkably well.

Well no, they don’t.

I think some want them to be saints, because then they’d be conveniently dead, instead of inconveniently alive and defending themselves.

My interest is first what’s good for the USA, and second what’s good for the rest of the world.

I don’t see that it’s good for the USA or for the rest of the world for Israel to be in a war that will last forever or until Israel is destroyed. So I want to find a way for that to stop.

You believe that Israel can never have peace because any time they victimize Gaza less, the Gazans will use the opportunity to attack them. So you advocate that Israel continue the status quo since there can never be peace while there are live Israelis.

I cannot support continuing the status quo, but I don’t want all the Israelis to be killed either. How about this — let’s invite all the Israelis to come to the USA. In the USA they won’t have Hamas to deal with, they won’t have Hezbollah to deal with, they won’t have Syria and Iran to deal with, etc. They would be better off here in every way except that it wouldn’t be Israel and they wouldn’t have their own government just for them.

But of course, they don’t want that. Israel is the only nation that’s just for Jews, and if they came to the USA they would give that up.

OK, maybe we can do better. Let’s give Alabama to Israel to have their own nation in. We would have to move out about 5 million Americans, but we could move them someplace else in the USA cheaper than what Israel will cost us. Alabama is considerably bigger than Israel, and green. It has a whole lot more rainfall. A decent port, and the Tenn-Tom canal gives access to the Mississippi and the whole US heartland. Coal, some iron ore, a little gold, forested mountains and fertile plains. Better than Israel in every way except it isn’t Israel.

We can do better than that. Hire a whole lot of archeologists to take apart Jerusalem stone by stone, number the stones, and make copies of each one. Send half the original stones and half the copies to Alabama and reconstruct a new Jerusalem there and a new Jerusalem where Jerusalem used to be. I can’t think of a fairer offer.

Maybe the USA would not make this offer. Probably some Alabamians would oppose it. But when I suggest it, a lot of people tell me not to waste my time because the Israelis would never accept. And I have never yet met a zionist who says he would accept.

So it looks to me like Israelis are not facing the prospect of eternal war versus getting genocided. They choose eternal war, because that’s who they are.

I don’t see that it is good for the USA or for the world, for anybody else to support them in this. So I think that in case someday it becomes dangerous to be an Israeli in Israel, we should invite any Israelis who want to, to come live with us where it’s relatively safe.

Israeli astrocities

Odd that Brett never considered this, given his general preference for hi-tech fixes to the world’s problems.

Layman @133: 1) Hamas is bad, so
2) Kill Palestinian children

I sent my (only) son to spend a week this month with Palestinian children, teaching science and talking peace in a village I first visited in 1985. We’re having dinner this Friday with friends whose kids, peace camp voters all, live on a kibbutz with two tunnels (so far discovered) in its fields. If you’d like to take this offline, I’m happy to compare tax returns, passport stamps and old postcards, to see who’s done more for Palestinian children in the last thirty years.

Or, you know, I might just be some anonymous coward striking a pose.

BrettBellm Orbital?

“Or, you know, I might just be some anonymous coward striking a pose.”

I doubt that sincerely. Good for you, and for your son, and I hope you and he are safe. I’d ask, though, that you consider lending some of your effort and your voice to calling out the inequities on the Israeli side of the conflict. If peace is what you’re after, you need a better plan than we’ve seen so far.

You propose that they guarantee peace by running away from a place they have every bit as much right to be, as the people who are attacking them.

If I knew a collection of Dutch people who believed they had every bit as much right to live in New York’s Harlem as the people who are there at the moment, and they collected weapons to move in and push the others out, I would suggest they not do that. Maybe they have the right, but well, better not.

If they chose to do it anyway, because they have the right, I would not go to Harlem to fight them but I also would not support them.

That’s pretty much how I feel about Israel. If they want to live there and fight forever, they can do it on their own dime. I don’t want any US subsidies for them to do that. No US tax-deductible contributions. No most favored nation status. No US military secrets. No encouragement for them to make spare parts for US weapons and sell them to people the USA wants to embargo spare parts for. No special acceptance for them having nukes, nerve gas, or bioweapons particularly smallpox. No US guarantee for their oil supply. No US vetoes for them unless there’s something in it for us.

It isn’t our fight. It’s a fight they choose, a dirty war they choose to dirty themselves in. We don’t have to choose to help them fight that fight.

They’re not going to do that, nor should they, because Hamas would pursue them wherever they go.

If Hamas fights them in the USA I will object to Hamas doing that. I will support the security apparatus of the US and state governments to stop them. Given an opportunity to personally intervene when the official forces are not likely to consider me an illegal combatant, I will fight.

If Israelis in the USA attack arabs they think are Hamas, I will object to that and will support the police etc to stop them, etc.

People who bring their foreign battles into the USA are domestic criminals.

Mixing up ISIS with Hamas or all of Islam is a common mistake with Islamophobes. There is an Orthodox Church in Gaza where Muslim Palestinians have been allowed to take refuge–I think that was in the NYT. Jewish reporters and Jewish pro-Palestinian activists visit Gaza–sometimes I’ve read that people in Israel say “won’t you be killed?” as though any Jew would be killed on sight. The Hamas charter is disgusting and evil, but Hamas, while guilty of numerous war crimes and terrorism and human rights violations, doesn’t seem to abide by it and Meshaal recently said to Charlie Rose that Hamas is willing to coexist with Christians and Jews. No doubt in his ideal the Muslims would be on top.

I don’t trust Hamas and their human rights record is lousy, but lumping all Muslims or even all Islamists into one undifferentiated mass and then justifying Israeli war crimes as a result is a great way to strengthen the hardliners. But then you hardliners are all unconscious allies of each other.

Whatever Hamas is or isn’t, one thing is perfectly clear: Hamas is a reaction to the Zionist colonization of Palestine. That’s the context; without it Hamas wouldn’t exist.

A top Pentagon intelligence official warned on Saturday that the destruction of Hamas would only lead to something more dangerous taking its place, as he offered a grim portrait of a period of enduring regional conflict. […] “A worse threat that would come into the sort of ecosystem there … something like ISIS,” he added

http://news.yahoo.com/destroy-hamas-something-worse-pentagon-intel-chief-023718713.html

Here is the NYT article with a paragraph about the Orthodox Church–

link

The relevant quote–

——————————–

As the war continues, most Gazans are just struggling for a safe place to sleep.

About 400 people, all Muslims, have crowded into the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, where Archbishop Alexios has four rules: “Be quiet, be clean, no problems and no weapons.”

The displaced sleep in offices and meeting halls and string their laundry across the courtyard. When it is too dangerous to walk to the mosque, they lay out rugs and pray in the church.
———————————————

Apparently Hamas doesn’t know it is on a holy jihad to wipe out all traces of Christianity.

Has he uttered even a single word about the war crimes committed by HAMAS?

The abolitionists spend all this time talk about how bad slavery is, but have they ever uttered a word in condemnation of Nat Turner?

#138 Joshua Burton

I sent my (only) son to spend a week this month with Palestinian children, teaching science and talking peace in a village I first visited in 1985.

OK! So, what do you think should be done for peace and who should do it?

Much of what I’ve seen from you looked to me like apologetics for the Israeli government. They can’t do other than they do, because Hamas.

I have trouble seeing governments being involved in a volutary solution. Palestinians have no credible leaders. PA leaders look mostly corrupt and spineless, because those are the ones that Israel tolerates. Anyone who demonstrates real leadership in any direction gets taken out by Israel one way or another. Hamas leaders are unacceptable to Israel and USA, and might not be willing to give up enough concessions for a deal anyway.

Meanwhile the current Israeli government strongly prefers no real negotiation and they certainly have the power to prevent it.

Oh well. The recent peace offer by Hamas looks like the best deal Israel could reasonably get from any palestinian government, but there’s no way to tell whether they’re sincere other than take them up on it. The offer might be just Hamas hasbara.

From my own perspective it looks like the chance for peace is slim, and the best response would be to get out of the area. You told me you are not Israeli but an American living in the USA, have you gotten out? Good job if so.

And I have to respect your friends and relatives for putting themselves into personal danger trying to find a solution for their friends. What approaches do you think have a chance of success, and who should do them?

p.s. And don’t quote Sayyid Qutb, bin Laden, A. al-Zawahiri, or Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, or any Hamas or Hezbollah or ISIS figure, or Ahmadenijad. They are pretty much all on one extreme (though I’m sure Hamas and ISIS have some divergent views within them).

@ 157

This piece is simultaneously full of insight & bias. The analysis of Hamas’ failure to understand the nature of the Israeli state, and their foolish belief that Israelis can be made to ‘go home’, is spot on. But the sugar-coating of the history of Israel’s double-dealing in the ‘peace process’ is pretty hard to stomach. Objective analysis this is not.

Brett @143,

No, it is because, of these three religions, one has decided that the other two have no right to exist, and has set out on a genocidal crusade to erase the other two from the face of the Earth, starting with the Middle East.

Actually, only one of the three has as one of its central tenets an End Times that calls for the annihilation of all human beings who do not accept Jesus as lord. Only one of the three calls for the mass extinction of all human beings who do not embrace one particular faith, Christianity. And it’s not just your garden variety genocide. As if the slaughter of at least 5 billion people isn’t enough, Christianity also calls for their eternal torment in the Christian hell.

Of course, Judaism isn’t any ride in the park, either, as the god of the Old Testament is given to genocide whenever he gets up on the wrong side of the cloud.

Glass houses, etc.

Sure, Bush said that. He didn’t want the warfare between the West and Islam to become open, he preferred, quite properly, a cold war, while one could be had.

Are you saying that Bush was right to go to war against Islam — cold or hot?

Sheeesh. If so, what a monstrous view of things.

OK, the hate is getting a bit more balanced, now, but I feel that this table needs an anti-Buddhist leg.
http://www.thezensite.com/ZenBookReviews/ZenAtWar_Vlad.htm
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22356306

Go!

#157 Joshua Burton

No solutions from me, sorry — not this month and certainly not here. (The 2001 maps are dusty, but still legible.)

Ah. So what I hear from you is justifications for the Israeli government to do what it does, although there is no reason to hope that will have any good result, and also you are for peace in theory.

Maybe I have this wrong, but it sounds like the difference between you and other zionist apologists is that you know people who are impotently doing things to demonstrate that they want peace, though you have no idea what anybody can do to actually help that, and you say you want peace too.

Unfortunate.

@14: I have that impression as well. The scale of the carnage is also making an impression on some of American media types, so the coverage is ever-so-slightly less bigoted against the Palestinians than usual. Baby steps.

All respect to Corey for walking the walk, etc., and glad to know that he is back home.

“I know that all Muslims don’t act this way, all the time, but Israel isn’t dealing with Muslims living in a country where they are a small minority. They’re dealing with the sort of Muslims who end up in control where Muslims are a majority.”

I know that all Jews don’t act this way, all the time, but Gaza isn’t dealing with Jews living in a country where they are a small minority. They’re dealing with the sort of Jews who end up in control where Jews are a majority.

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

roger nowosielski 08.01.14 at 1:13 am @ 170 — My guess is that Johnson was reflecting the general view of the ruling class, North, South, and neither, of the time, which preferred that the U.S. not be Balkanized, as might have happened had the oppressed turned from non-violence to race war. However, this was not sufficient in itself to overcome the tremendous inertia of established segregation and discrimination among the proles of all U.S. regions. That needed to arise among non-elite Whites, and it was effected, as I said, by driving a wedge between Northern and Southern non-elite racists. (In the 1950s, in my experience, many non-Southerners considered Southerners to be a kind of lower race or caste, halfway between Whites and Negroes, so some of the work had already been done.) Had it not been for the Civil Rights movement, things could have drifted along for many years without the r.c. doing much of anything — until something really bad happened. And so today ‘we’ might be incinerating things closer to home than has been ‘our’ most recent habit.

The Dixiecrats were a party of their own basically, and racism was their raison d’etre.
See Strom Thurmond’s run for the presidency in 1948. He won 40 electoral votes.

LBJ was the consummate opportunist who wanted in on a national ticket, which by 1956 was impossible for a Dixiecrat. Hence the long road in which he completely turned on his former comrades.

@Suzanne, 169

For many a year I have used this test to determine whether a statement is hate speech, bigotry or ignorance. Just exchange the ethnicity/religion in a statement with “Jew”, “Jewish” or “Judaism” and see if it sets your teeth on edge. More often that not it does.

Ze Kraggash 172
The Civil Rights reform, I believe, had a seldom mentioned but significant (and relevant in this case) international component, in the context of the Cold War. Segregation had become an embarrassment in the ideological struggle between the “free world” and “communist tyranny”.

Don’t know exactly what you mean by “seldom mentioned,” but this whole subject (the civ rts mvt in Cold War context) has been the subject of quite extensive research and writing by historians — several long bks on it exist.

Joshua W. Burton @ 176

What this thread has been about is the responsibility of those at some distance from the conflict to be thoughtful, and to turn that thoughtfulness into action. We must be helpful where we can, and it seems to me — and not only to me — that the only way to do this, in the case of a U.S. in thrall to Israeli propaganda, is to find some way to respond that refuses to refill Israel’s bomb hopper without comment, or to acquiesce to the kind of obscene portrayal of the conflict that Bob Schieffer recently indulged himself in on national TV.

Corey Robin’s sidewalk civil disobedience may be called — as no doubt it will be called by some — one-sided, ineffective, the act of a self-hating Jew, etc., but such characterizations, in my view, beg the question. If it achieves nothing else, what he and his fellow protestors have done may help convince the smug that it isn’t only the Palestinians who refuse to accept the label that the majority of U.S. opinion has assigned to them.

Joshua W. Burton @ 180

Yes, I got it, snark included — and also the reasoning behind your comments thereafter. If we who aren’t likely to become morituri want to reason intelligently about those who are, we have to imagine more deeply what both parties to the conflict have faced, and are facing — who they believe they are, and what they believe gives them the right to what they’re demanding of others. This isn’t as easy as it seems….

The resident of Kibbutz Sa’ad can still be a little thoughtful — not easily, but it is still possible, maybe even helpful, even with the Gaza fence 2000 meters away, even with the Hamas tunnels under the fields. For the residents of Gaza trapped in the circumstances of the last 20 years, and since 2009 especially, there’s little possibility of being thoughtful, and even less benefit in it. This too is natural.

I am trying to keep myself from using such patronizing language. I invite you to join me in this discipline.

Neither Kibbutz Sa’ad nor Gaza is populated by dogs who are guaranteed to bite strangers if their owners keep beating them. Rather, they are both populated by human beings with rational thought and moral agency. They choose to pursue certain goals and to exercise certain tactics in order to achieve them. If you disagree with some of those goals and tactics—fine, condemn them, or provide incentives (e.g., demonstrations in front of an embassy) for them to change their behavior. But don’t presume that being apart from the fray makes you gifted with some higher mental powers.

@155, 167: OK, so it’s a new month, and possibly some recent replies have lifted my mood. Read, listen. (Gabardine spitting is a free-form sport, but I’ll be all kinds of flattered to be standing near Amos Oz when one lands. Is Roy Belmont still keeping up?)

I’m struggling to reconcile this:

“I am trying to keep myself from using such patronizing language.”

With this:

“But don’t presume that being apart from the fray makes you gifted with some higher mental powers.”

Unless the answer is ‘failed attempt’.

After 9/11 the US government did a lot of stupid and immoral things, but that doesn’t mean it was run by irrational people. It wasn’t run by Vulcans, but no government ever is.

If the belligerents in Israel/Gaza are truly beyond reason, then they are insane. If there is ever an international war-crimes tribunal for this conflict, should combatants or leaders on either side be declared not guilty by reason of insanity? By analogy with insane people being forcibly committed to an asylum, should some third party occupy the area and take responsibility for the inhabitants’ welfare, until they prove themselves capable of self-government? I don’t see anyone rushing to volunteer for that job. (There are those on the Israeli right who want Israel to re-occupy Gaza, but saving Gazans from their own government is not the hawks’ foremost priority.)

True, but the reason we have “laws of civilized warfare”, to the extent that such a thing is possible, is that even when people are at war—even when people believe they are on the losing side of a war—we hold them to certain moral standards. If we just shrug and say regarding certain belligerents, well, they were beat up real bad and now they want to retaliate, it’s understandable that they cross the line into a bit of attempted genocide, then what’s the point of having these standards at all?

Attempted genocide? The Palestinians? I’m not crazy about the use of that word in this context, except to describe things like the Hamas Charter or the ravings of a prominent rabbi in NYC the other day, but it seems a huge stretch to say this about the rockets. Maybe I’m misunderstanding.

And yeah, what is the point? They never seem to be applied to Western war criminals except sometimes low ranking ones, so I think the point is to have a system which can be useful in jailing dictators that are no longer useful to us, or who never were useful.

Anyway, the I/P conflict seems like a classic one where the two sides are pretty indifferent to what they do to the other. I think Israel can justify killing Palestinians to itself and its supporters as long as they claim they’re trying not to do so, and on the Palestinian side and some corners of the left, whatever they do is “resistance”. Though personally I think results factor in here–the suicide bombings were much more shocking than these rockets and so is Israel’s bombing. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some shooting of civilians was going on–there are claims of that in this war. James Fallows has a post up linking back to a 2004 article by James Bennet (a NYT reporter) James Fallows. Anyway, the point was that Palestinian children had taken sniper rounds right through the head back in the second intifada and Bennet saw two bodies for himself with bullet holes, backing up the Palestinian story and refuting the Israeli story that shrapnel from a Palestinian bomb had done it.

http://m.aljazeera.com/story/201481224957305224

Baby steps indeed.

Actually examine the issue more closely, and you may see that the effect of being arrested half a world away is to remind people much closer that, hey, a whole lot of people reckon we’re being misled by our leaders and media when it comes to Israel, and they’re angry enough to risk themselves in highlighting it.

A further step would be to look up the term “false dichotomy”, and consider that it’s possible to hold Hamas in contempt, and simultaneously be contemptuous of people demanding we support Israel’s actions unconditionally, largely on the grounds of arcane Protestant theology.

tl;dr: violence is unacceptable. So is pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.

I don’t support Israel’s actions unconditionally. They could get pretty awful, and still be better than Hamas, but if they revive the Roman practice of “decimation”, I’d find that beyond the pale.

Right now they’re not doing anything which isn’t standard military practice when your neighbor is lobbing missiles into your territory, and is caught preparing for an invasion.

Just think: if Jesus Christ had been born in, say, Tonga, the English-speaking world wouldn’t give a solitary shit about the Middle East beyond its capacity for oil production.

Obscure conflicts between “Arabs” and “Jews” would have as much relevance as feuding cultural groups of China do now.

Divest from Tujia businesses! The Buyei have a moral right to their land! Shut up, anti-Huist!

“Israel is at war with Gaza and they have been at war with Gaza from the day their occupation troops retreated. It isn’t like France and Switzerland.”

Quite right. What you omit is that Israel is at war with Gaza because Gaza is at war with Israel. But, yes, they ARE in a state of war with each other, and have been for the longest time.

I have no beef with Israel treating Gaza like any country normally does an aggressor nation attacking it.

“I see. You support it when it is 0.1%. Probably you would support it at 1%. But when it reaches 10% you will figure they are going too far.”

I think maybe you don’t understand the difference between war casualties at any percentage, and the Roman practice of decimation. The Israelis are not choosing random people to execute. They are waging a war, and that war has casualties. But they’re not random casualties.

If the civilian, and even the ‘civilian’ casualties in Gaza offend you, perhaps you could prevail upon Hamas to put all it’s soldiers in uniform, and stop using civilians as shields. That would certainly cut down on the civilian casualties.

Even without the oil, the world would care about the Middle East. Without the oil, the world would have a lot less motive to make excuses for the barbarity of the Arabs, but without the oil, they’d have a lot less money to be barbaric with.

Probably be better all around if the oil had been someplace more civilized, or less populated. The Middle East is basically going to be a hellhole until the oil runs out, or some other energy source makes it uneconomic to extract.

#204 LFC

“if Jesus Christ had been born in, say, Tonga, the English-speaking world wouldn’t give a solitary shit about the Middle East beyond its capacity for oil production.”

I don’t think so. There are reasons “the English-speaking world” cares about the Middle East beyond oil and the fact that Christ was born there.

It’s the obvious land route between europe and africa. That’s a second reason. And if Christianity had started in Tonga and still spread the way it did, that would make routes to africa more important. On the other hand, if you have a sea route like the Suez, then a land route is not that important.

The trouble with alternate history outside science fiction, though, is that it’s really really hard to tell what would happen and there’s no possible way to verify any claims. Would Judaism have spread without Christianty and Islam to promote it? I don’t know how to tell. Maybe Judaism would be a third reason for the English-speaking part of the world to care about the middle east.

Would Islam have developed the way it did with an african Christianity? If Christianity was not a “religion of the book” that would be a difference, but how important would it be? If we still had Islam that might be a fourth reason to pay attention to the middle east.

But apart from the weird cultural accidents that left english-speaking people focused on middle-east religions, the geography gives us oil, and a land route to africa.

Oh, Brett Brett Brett. Brett Brett Brett Brett Brett.

I think you’re delusional about who is the aggressor here, and polls indicate I’m not alone, the plurality in America agree with me.

Must be painful believing something that “every objective person” knows is true, and then realizing the most people aren’t, by your definition, objective.

Brett,

First of all, a plurality is not “most people.” By definition.

Second, I think our extremely pro-Israel media has a ton to do with the polls. The American people have been washed in AIPAC propaganda for decades now. If our media were even slightly more even-handed, I think you’d see that plurality disappear.

My own trajectory on the issue is the more likely pathway for the majority, in that case. I’m in my late 50s, and once was an ardent supporter of the state of Israel. But the more I opened myself up to alternative views, the more I observed Israeli actions, the more I studied the history, the less I held to earlier beliefs . . . . Until finally, I abandoned my past assumptions entirely. Of course, it also helped my decision-making that Israeli policy has become increasingly militaristic, offensive, aggressive and barbarous, and that it is decades past its underdog status in the region. It is now a nuclear power, with enormous military resources, funding, organizational and logistical advantages . . . fighting against a very weak, rag tag and scattered group, without a fraction of a fraction the firepower or support.

It’s the Israeli school of sharks attacking the Palestinian minnow. IMO, if a person sees what’s actually happening there, and still supports that school of sharks, few words describe them other than sociopath.

I think that is mostly right, Plume, though I also think there are quite a few Americans who are so deeply embedded (like Brett) in the Israeli narrative that at this point there’s nothing you could have them read or watch that would change their mind. There’s a cultural factor here-the Israelis are US and the Palestinians are the Other. That’s going to matter with a lot of people. But things will change somewhat with the next generation, judging from the polls I’ve seen. Not that this is quick enough for the Palestinians.

I think you are probably romanticizing the polytheistic religions, btw. But I’m no expert.

J Thomas:

the geography gives us oil, and a land route to Africa

And the history since 1918 (and before actually — e.g. the British occupied Egypt in the 1880s, Napoleon had an expedition there much earlier in the 19th cent.) gives us the fact that European former-imperial powers, and not just English-speaking ones, have been entangled w the region for some long time. And as we know, these former colonial or quasi-colonial (mandates in the case of the French post-1918) ties, in and of themselves, often make for continuing contemp. interest in the region on the part of the former imperial or mandatory powers. What it all goes back to in terms of geography or oil or hist. of religions is an issue I am neither esp qualified to discuss nor esp interested in discussing, at least not rt now.

#212

If Constantine had not embraced Christianity, it likely would have died out as just another Jewish sect. The massive size of the Roman empire, and its subjugation of most of Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, etc . . . along with its extended trading partners, brought people into contact with the two Levantine monotheisms and spread them. Take Rome out of the picture, and it might just have been Mithraism instead.

You could easily be right. And yet, Christianity had already spread enough for it to be the default choice for Constantine when he needed a replacement for Mithraism. And Mithraism had secret-society elements which might get in its way as a massive thing. I’ve seen speculations that Christianity’s big advantage was their ladies’ auxiliary and that Mithraism lacked that, although I haven’t really seen any solid evidence that Mithraism lacked that.

Alternate history is hard, though it’s fun to speculate about.

Mithraism might have produced great music, art, and literature. We can’t know without running the control group. I’ve read that the violet was sacred to Mithra so maybe Mithraism might have produced great flowerbeds.

Some people claim that all the religion and ideology etc mask economic concerns. That all the big mass movements and wars etc boil down to economics and the rest is just smoke. If they’re right, maybe that’s an artifact of the particular way our society developed, and if it had been different the economics might have been a constraint that deserved some attention, and not the only thing that really mattered. It could be true without being inevitable.

When I was growing up in the Eighties, there was this dominant theory that Israel/Palestine was the pre-eminent issue of the Middle East, and if only it was solved, all the rest of the problems of the region would be lessened.

It’s obviously been proven wrong in recent years. There are now moderate countries which have more in common with Israel than they do with ISIS or Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood.

This is why you see so few demonstrations in the Arab world in support of Hamas in recent weeks. They are obviously isolated, as never before.

J Thomas,

I think it’s fair to say that increasing the accumulation of wealth (and the power that comes from wealth), in one form or another, is the dominant driver for all wars. I don’t think that’s a stretch. It also stands to reason that the financial elite of the day is almost always the exclusive (or near exclusive) beneficiary of offensive warfare, with the non-rich generally being fodder. In past ages, one method of bringing that fodder on board was through religious propaganda. Today’s it’s primarily sham promises of democracy covering up for capitalist expansion. Democracy as a substitute for religion, in a sense.

Exceptions here and there.

The link here is quite good

https://twitter.com/gametheory101/status/494526893354659840

@Plume
When you say silly things like this about the causes of war (i.e., all wars are a result of “capitalist expansion” or “increasing the accumulation of wealth”), you detract from whatever credibility you might have on other subjects (Mondragon, state capitalism, socialism v capitalism etc). I wd suggest you leave the causes of wars alone; it’s not your strong suit.

Oh hey, how about the Six Day War, one of the ur-sources of the current issues being discussed on these threads. What did that have to do w the accumulation of wealth? The question is rhetorical; the answer is “nothing”.

Oh hey, how about the Six Day War, one of the ur-sources of the current issues being discussed on these threads. What did that have to do w the accumulation of wealth?

The Israeli economy was in serious trouble before the war. They had four major exports, one of them was oranges and another was cut diamonds after they imported the uncut diamonds. They were sinking. In 1962 the Israeli economy was under $3 billion for more then 2 million Israelis. Luckily, Israel got funding from abroad — US aid and loan guarantees that didn’t have to be paid back, German reparations, lots of private contributions etc that amounted to 25% more than the Israeli GNP. Israel did a whole lot of protectionism which resulted in various inefficient businesses — which however employed large numbers of immigrants who otherwise would have had no jobs. Meanwhile “defense” cost around 25% of GDP.

Israel had all the classic problems of poorly-managed socialist government — subsidized government-run businesses, subsidized private businesses, makework jobs, etc. But at the same time, they could not afford to do otherwise. They could not hope to grow their economy fast enough without heavy central planning, they could not hope to keep unemployment low, and they could not hope to supply their military needs without central direction.

The war changed everything. Israel looked like big winners and got much more aid. Before the war, US private contributions were charity that US Jews owed to the unfortunate. After the war, it was investment in Israel, a nation of winners. The Sinai supplied all their oil needs, and they invested the new aid money in new industries. The USA replaced France (in 1966, before the war) as weapons supplier, and was a far better supplier — we didn’t have to be paid! We officially lent Israel the money to pay for the weapons, and the increasing loans looked bad on Israel’s balance sheet until in 1973 we cancelled the debt.

While the war resulted in a temporary decline in standard of living in Israel, in the medium run it allowed the Israeli economy to come close to break-even for awhile.

“This is gibberish, Brett. There’s no definitional link between plurality and objectivity.”

He claims his position is objectively true. Only about 20% of the American people accept anything like it. Twice as many accept the opposite viewpoint. This puts the upper limit of “objective” people in the US at 60%, assuming every one of them is objectively ignorant of the subject. But I think we can reasonably assume that the number of “objective” people in the US is closer to the fraction who agree with him, which is to say, about 1 in 5.

The problem here, is that he’s positing a link between objectivity and agreeing with him. Is there ANYTHING we’re allowed to disagree with him about?

p.s. Plume: On the 6 Day War, the ‘first strike’ to which you refer was a strike in anticipation of being attacked — I’m not talking about whether it was justified or not, but the notion that replacing weapons had anything to do w it I think is far-fetched.

To assert that something is “the truth” (in this case, your view about the causes of “offensive wars”) without being aware of the large amt of research that has been done on the subject seems, to put it charitably, less than helpful to me.

This ‘human shields’ trope has really dominated the narrative, both among the media and with Western leaders. It’s amazing to me how uncritically it’s accepted. Gaza has the 6th highest population density in the world, nearly 10 times that of Israel. There’s no part of Gaza that isn’t ‘next to’ a civilian facility. There are no official military bases that I know of, presumably because Israel will not suffer them to exist; and if there were, they would necessarily be adjacent to civilian facilities and/or residences, just as Israeli military facilities are sometimes in the middle of densely populated urban areas.

Israeli officials claim Hamas is firing rockets from locations ‘near’ this hospital or that school or those apartment buildings, and then bombs said buildings as if ‘near’ means ‘from’. The world chastises Hamas. But ‘near’ does not mean ‘from’.

Israeli officials decry the tunnels they’ve found, saying they’re ‘terrorist tunnels’ intended to be used to attack Israeli civilians. Yet they have apparently not been so used – every example I’ve seen reported of their use involves attacks on Israeli soldiers. Israeli officials say they know they’re for terror purposes because they emerge near towns, not near Israeli military facilities. This is sheer nonsense; what sort of military strategy involves emerging from holes in the ground in the midst of an armed enemy force?

Israeli says Hamas hides weapons in these tunnels, and command and control facilities. Yet every military force in the world – even Israel – builds command and control bunkers, and stores weapons under concrete.

Israeli officials say Hamas has stored weapons in UN facilities, and the UN agrees this has happened. It’s wrong of Hamas to do this, of course. But my impression is that those cases involved unused / unoccupied facilities. I’m not aware that any of the Israeli strikes on UN facilities were justified by the existence of actual weapons in those actual facilities. In essence, if Hamas one time stores a weapon in an empty school, all schools are now legitimate targets, whether they’re occupied by refugees or not.

The world says Israel must be allowed to kill Palestinian civilians as necessary in pursuit of destroying these tunnels, because the tunnels are a wrongness which demonstrate the perfidy of the Palestinian resistance – that they would stoop to aggression! Yet Gaza exists in a state of war imposed by Israel, in the form of a blockade. It is not a violation of any international standards to defend oneself against another nation, and Gazans surely have the right to resist, to circumvent the blockade, and even to try to end it.

Israel says Hamas fires rockets at targets indiscriminately, by which they mean with the intention of harming civilians. Of course Hamas should not do that. Yet Israel fires weapons at Gaza which cannot avoid harming civilians. They know the harm will result, yet they do it with that clear knowledge. This is the very definition of intent. They argue that they’re shooting at legitimate targets, but the ratio of civilian to military casualties makes it clear either that they have no idea what they’ll hit, or that they don’t care. They can’t even claim exigency – they’re targeting a threat (Hamas rockets) which are militarily irrelevant, and the destruction of those targets can’t possibly provide sufficient ground for willfully killing thousands of innocents.

LFC,

You’ve mentioned Israel’s six day war. I will happily grant you that as an exception. Though, again, the fact that Israel had/has the weapons it does, due to capitalist promotion, marketing, lobbying and sales, will make or break the decision to strike. If it did not have that technological superiority, made possible through the selective allocation of resources under the capitalist system (and our support), it never would have attempted war. Unless it wanted national suicide, of course.

Economic factors do not go away.

Perhaps we are both guilty of failing to add enough qualifiers. I can admit that for myself. And I usually do when I talk about the reasons for wars. I generally say “most” or “the vast majority” and “with exceptions.” And, of course, there is a difference between defensive and offensive war. And a difference between attacking another country and fighting internal civil wars, etc. Still, economic factors are always present, to one degree or another.

From my research, I find more than enough evidence to say that most offensive wars — or wars of choice, or wars of aggression — are fought to enrich the powers that be in that particular day and time. And because right now, we live with a capitalist mode of production, they are mostly fought to protect, defend or expand capitalist markets. I really don’t see that statement as controversial.

mijnheer,

I watched a clip of Hannity discussing this, after he was skewered by a British actor. It’s baffling how blind a person can be to continue to insist that Israel is the victim here, and fighting a supposedly heroic battle against terrorists. Geraldo Rivera, on that same panel, while making cringe-worthy statements about his desire to die for Israel, at least tried to get Hannity to see the massive difference in casualties. At the time of the show, 1300 civilians slaughtered, with perhaps one or two Israeli citizens killed. So if the rationale behind the slaughter of Palestinians is those rockets, and those rockets have pretty much all be successfully blocked, with the civilian losses in the single digits, who is the real “terrorist” here?

Of course, one death is one too many, regardless of the “side.” But when you have 1400 and counting on the Palestinian side, and single digits on the Israeli side, it takes sheer blindness to continue the “terrorist” meme. Blindness or one is just a sociopath.

Interesting article on the dynamics of the conflict

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/nathan-thrall/hamass-chances

which Bellmore might do well to read, digest(and then undoubtedly ignore.)

What is the comparison of Israeli and Palestinian casualties intended to demonstrate? Given that Hamas military targets are in Gaza, and that IDF is far more capable of hitting those targets than Hamas is of Israeli targets (though not for lack of trying), one would expect such a disparity.

But this tells us nothing about whether IDF, or Hamas, actions are justified.

Would the conflict somehow be more acceptable if casualties were more evenly distributed?

‘What is the comparison of Israeli and Palestinian casualties intended to demonstrate?’

That one side is far more guilty of indiscriminately killing civilians than the other; and the claims that Israel’s slaughter of Gazans is justified – by Hamas rockets – are morally bankrupt. Why ever do you ask, Andrew F?

I read this interview with Amos Oz today. Although Oz’s prescription for peace – ending the blockade of Gaza, abandoning (most) West Bank settlements, a two-state solution with economic aid flowing to Palestine – are hard to fault, his way of framing the status quo is frankly execrable. Continuing the ‘human shields’ meme, helikens Hamas to a man with a baby in his lap firing a machine gun into your nursery from the building across the street, and asks what you would do.

As analogies go, you can’t beat it for demonization, but it really doesn’t paint an accurate picture, so let’s improve on it. The man isn’t in an apartment across the street, he’s in a prison across the street. You put him there without trial, and you’re denying him either any chance of reprieve or the basic needs of subsistence. He doesn’t have a machine gun; instead, he has a pile of rocks, and he’s throwing them across the gap. Only he’s blind, see, so on a good day for him he might hit your building. This doesn’t mean the rocks can’t harm if he gets lucky, but in statistical terms they almost never do. And there is a baby, but it is not in his lap, it’s in the room next door. The baby is there because you locked up the whole family, not just the man, so the baby can’t be anywhere else. Your response to this situation is to bomb the building, killing everyone in it.

There are some other gems here. Oz says Israel’s attacks are ‘excessive’ but ‘justified’. This is a pretty toothless criticism; how can they be both?

http://www.dw.de/oz-lose-lose-situation-for-israel/a-17822511

Yes. After 1700 civilians deaths in the matter of a few weeks, it’s the inescapable conclusion, Andrew.

Unless you think they can keep getting that wrong for the last month.

“Whoops! We killed another dozen civilians by mistake!” all the way up to 1700.

“If that is the argument, is there any way for us to tell at this point whether most Palestinian casualties are in fact civilians.”

The UN says so, and Israel doesn’t deny it. The media on the ground say so. Since the Israelis are bombing hospitals and refugee shelters, reason says so. There’s photographic evidence of dead & injured children in abundance. It’s not all some conspiracy to annoy Andrew F. Sorry.

The UN and the media are relying on sources within Hamas controlled areas. Let me emphasize that the numbers may well be correct. But at this early point, especially given problems in the past concerning this issue, I’m still inclined to view the numbers with uncertainty.

Taking them at face value, OCHA appears to put the civilian:military casualty ratio at about 2:1. See OCHA Situation Report 2 August.

Is that ratio sufficient for us to judge that the IDF is deliberately targeting civilians or using disproportionate force?

Before you answer, consider two additional questions:

1 – what are civilian:combatant casualty ratios in similar operations?

2 – do we need to know whether Hamas exacerbated the number of civilian casualties by their actions in using these numbers to judge the IDF?

Andrew F.

IDF puts the figure at 47% militants as casualties. Which leads us to believe that even they acknowledge that the majority are noncombatants.

It is also not a matter of doubt that ambulances, hospitals and press facilities, as well as the UNRWA facilities have been targeted.

@Robert Schwartz: Thanks for the 47% number. I’m inclined to view it with some uncertainty as well, for similar reasons. A 1:1 civilian casualty ratio would be – very much only in a sense relative to other conflicts of this type – better than I would have expected.

@Layman: It’s not Hamas’s civilian casualty ratio that makes them a terrorist organization.

@J Thomas: So essentially you would advocate a tit for tat strategy?

” A 1:1 civilian casualty ratio would be – very much only in a sense relative to other conflicts of this type – better than I would have expected.”

You think the UN-reported 2:1 ratio overstates civilian casualties, while the IDF-reported rate of 1:1 understates them. At least we’ve determined what you’re prepared to believe.

“It’s not Hamas’s civilian casualty ratio that makes them a terrorist organization.”

Oh, good, so we’ll be spared more self-righteous nonsense about how they target civilians while Israel doesn’t.

Glad we cleared up both those points.

“then Israel is meeting the standard set by the United States.”

No. In order to meet *that* standard, it would have been necessary for Israel to invade Tonga.

Seth Gordon,

Our “standard” is horrifically bad, and not one to emulate. America has a long history of wiping out hundreds or thousands of times more people than it loses.

Korea, for instance. 2-4 million civilian deaths to our roughly 36,000.
Vietnam: 3 million civilians to our roughly 58,000.
Gulf War: Roughly 100,000 to our 294
The Iraq War: Still to be determined, but well over 100,000 — some say as many as a million — to our 4480.

It’s not a good defense for Israel to say they’re like us.

The thing that makes Hamas a terrorist organization is not who they hit, but who they aim at. They weren’t firing missiles at Israeli army bases, missing, and hitting the town next door; they were firing missiles at the nearest civilian population centers. Every one of those missiles is a war crime, even the ones that don’t hit anything.

And they make no secret of their intent. I see a lot of accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” against Palestinians, but Hamas’s intent is clear in its charter and its propaganda. They do not describe themselves as opposed to the Israeli state or even Zionists, but Jews.

J Thomas above spins a model of what Israel could have done; let me provide my own regarding what Hamas could have done. The Mavi Marmara incident proved that nonviolent action could embarrass Israel into loosening its blockade; as a result of that incident, Israel let more “dual-use” materials into Gaza. Among these materials was concrete. Hamas could have used its imports to develop the Gaza civilian economy, and perhaps even staged more nonviolent actions to goad Israel into further concessions. It could have used the concrete to build bomb shelters for Palestinian civilians. Instead it chose to build out its tunnel network for the sake of attacking Israel—i.e., doing the kind of thing that the stricter blockade was intended to prevent.

In response to the “human shields” talking point, a common counterpoint seems to be “well, Gaza is so densely populated that of course any place they attack from is going to have civilians”. But Hamas chooses where to attack from. They could have announced at the start of the conflict “we have no weapon emplacements, combatants, or other military targets in neighborhoods A, B, or C; these are safe havens for Palestinian civilians to flee into”. Had they done so, and had Israel dropped bombs on any of these neighborhoods without evidence that Hamas had broken its word, then Israel would have clearly been in the wrong.

most people aren’t, by your definition, objective

And this is supposed to be the slam-dunk?

#256 Andrew F.

J Thomas: So essentially you would advocate a tit for tat strategy?

No, not really. Tit for Tat is good when you want to maintain flexible stability. You don’t let the other guy think he’s winning, and you leave room for negotiation in case he’s willing to do that, etc.

But the Israeli goal is to get their enemies to give up utterly, to accept that Israel can do anything Israel wants and there is nothing they can do about it, to surrender abjectly.

So when a Palestinian attack fails, laugh at them and sneer at them and make sure they understand that they failed again and they will always fail — but don’t do it so emphaticly that it looks like you really care. They aren’t important enough to pay much attention to.

But if they actually do accomplish something you can’t just pretend nothing happened. So then you want to be utterly ferocious. Hit them a hundred times harder than they hit you. Hit innocent people as well as (if possible) the ones who did the attack. Make sure they know that if they hurt you they are hurting dozens or even hundreds of their own innocents. Make sure they understand that by hurting you they did not actually win anything, that it hurt themselves a whole lot worse than it hurt you.

Recently Israel failed at that. Palestinians captured an Israeli soldier. The right thing to do was to kill a bunch of Palestinians and then treat him as dead. But Israeli politics did not allow that. They actually negotiated and gave up Palestinian prisoners in exchange for him.

That was objectively no big deal. Israel can pick up as many Palestinians as they want from the West Bank or Gaza whenever they want them. They’ve already recaptured some of the ones they had last time. But it looked like a victory to Palestinians. Israelis actually negotiated with them and made a deal and kept it. So they’ve been trying to capture another Israeli soldier ever since. This is the only way they’ve found to get Israelis to negotiate, so they’ll repeat it as much as they can. Israeli strategy should have given them no way at all to get Israelis to negotiate about anything.

Begin had been a terrorist himself. He knew what it was like. It’s hard to stay hopeful when you’re weak and you don’t have much to be hopeful about. He knew to never let a palestinian ever have the smallest victory. Hit them, smash them, humiliate them, but do it in an offhand way, not like they’re important. You’re just mowing the grass, spraying the cockroaches. They don’t matter. Just a few insignificant people who need to die and who will die when they get in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not important to aim at carefully at fighters. Killing a bunch of innocents near them is good enough.

That prisoner exchange was a bad move. It happened because really, *truthfully*, Israel didn’t care what palestinians thought nearly as much as they cared what their own soft voters thought. But it gave palestinians hope and that will cause Israel trouble for months or years.

“They do not describe themselves as opposed to the Israeli state or even Zionists, but Jews.”

In the charter, but that’s not what Khaled Meshaal told Charlie Rose in the recent interview. He said Hamas was willing to live with Christians and Jews and of course Jews do visit Gaza. Meshaal would not say he would live with Israel as a Jewish state, but only that if there was an independent state of Palestine the Palestinians could make that decision.

As for Hamas’s intent with respect to the rockets, they know as well as anyone how ineffective they are. If the rocket bombardment had killed hundreds, Gaza would be a pile of rubble from one end to the other. Hamas is ruthless and hides its weapons in civilian areas much like any guerilla group, including the Zionist militias in the 30’s and 40’s.

And the idea that Israel is simply making mistakes in its killing doesn’t pass the smell test. They blow up homes with families inside and they shot those kids on the beach and they keep hitting schools and hospitals. Has anyone mentioned the Dahiya doctrine?

You might be in the wrong thread, godoggo. The one that turned into an analysis of Roy’s output is the sociopathy one.

The “Angry Arab” had this post up about some fanatical group that hid weapons in houses of worship–

link

Link didn’t work. Try again.

link to Angry Arab post, I hope

They blow up homes with families inside and they shot those kids on the beach and they keep hitting schools and hospitals.

They telephone hospitals to tell them they’re going to be bombed.
+ hard to argue that they didn’t know it was a hospital
+ hard to argue pressing military necessity if you’re giving the terrorists time to evacuate.

Ergo, violation of third and fourth geneva convention. Even if we accept everything the zionists tell us at face value, that there are huge stockpiles of missiles and what-have-you.

The problem for us here — also the problem for the gazans — is that you can drag up marginalised people from any population. Give ’em a gun or a keyboard [or a suicide belt] and tell them they’re heroes and send them off to die.

We have to structure our society to give marginalised people the tools to recognise when they’re being exploited in this way. I don’t know how.

They telephone hospitals to tell them they’re going to be bombed.
+ hard to argue that they didn’t know it was a hospital
+ hard to argue pressing military necessity if you’re giving the terrorists time to evacuate.

Ergo, violation of third and fourth geneva convention. Even if we accept everything the zionists tell us at face value, that there are huge stockpiles of missiles and what-have-you.

Actually, fulfillment of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 19: “The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded.” See also Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Convention, 57(2)(c): “With respect to attacks, the following precautions shall be taken:… effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit.”

“Actually, fulfillment of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 19: “The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. ”

There’s no evidence that this has occurred. If you think it has, produce the evidence.

“Hamas transformed Wafa Hospital, a civilian building in the Shuja’iya neighborhood of Gaza City, into a command center, rocket-launching site, observation point, sniper’s post, weapons storage facility, cover for tunnel infrastructure, and a general base for attacks against Israel and IDF forces. Hamas repeatedly opened fire from hospital windows and used anti-tank missiles from the premises. Hamas deliberately and cynically turned the hospital into a legitimate military target.”

http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2014/07/28/hamas-uses-hospitals-ambulances-military-purposes/

(I might as well post the link to the contrary story regarding Wafa Hospital: http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/israel-used-fabricated-images-justify-bombing-al-wafa-hospital)

link

And here’s an extended quote from that link I just printed above–
———————————————————-
What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on,” said Gadi Eisenkot, head of the army’s northern division.

Dahiya was a Hizbullah stronghold that Israel flattened in sustained air raids during a 34-day war with the Shiite group two years ago.

“We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases,” Eisenkot told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

“This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved,” Eisenkot added.
———————————————-

I’m sure Israel would deny that it is doing this in Gaza, but it sure looks like what it is doing in Gaza.

Well, this is fascinating–

link

So according to that link, one reason Israel is sure that the hospital is being used as a command and control center by Hamas is because the Israelis built the damn bunker under the hospital. Doesn’t excuse Hamas, of course. But why’d they do that, hmm?

And given the fact that the Hamas rocket bombardment death toll is 3 (i.e., fewer than the number of Gazan civilians killed by Israel in the spring of 2014), it does seem a little disproportionate to blow up a hospital.

And as I said earlier, the Israeli guerilla groups in the 30s and 40s did the same things–hid weapons in synagogues and other civilian places. Which is what you’d expect from guerilla groups–if they were powerful armies with military bases able to fight on equal terms with their enemies they wouldn’t be guerilla groups.

I tried to track that to the original source, but for awhile everything I found directly from Helsingin Sanomat was in finnish.

I did find this:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4553643,00.html

Perhaps the Israelis built a bunker under Shifiya Hospital because, back when they controlled Gaza, and were expecting to control it for the forseeable future, they wanted to protect patients and medical staff from being bombed by an enemy that had no compunction about targeting hospitals. What enemy might they have been thinking of, hmm?

As for the Dahiyya Doctrine, if Israel was working by that doctrine in 2006 and an army spokesman was willing to say so in public in 2006, and they’re working by the same doctrine today, why aren’t they making a similar announcement today? Are they using cluster bombs today, as they used them in 2006?

Hamas has targeted civilian populations. It only became more successful at killing Israeli soldiers because those soldiers actually came into Gaza as ground troops.

Yes, Israel is militarily superior to Gaza. So what? That doesn’t automatically make Israel wrong, any more than Israel defeating numerically superior opponents in other wars automatically makes it right. And the doctrine of proportionality does not mean that if your enemy brings five tanks to a battle and you bring ten, you are somehow cheating. A war is not a duel.

Plume, you seem to be arguing that the missiles coming out of Gaza do not cause significant damage to Israel, because hardly anyone is actually being killed by them.

Would you also say that Israel’s blockade of Gaza does not cause significant damage to Gaza, because hardly anyone is killed trying to run the blockade?

you seem to be arguing that the missiles coming out of Gaza do not cause significant damage to Israel, because hardly anyone is actually being killed by them

Yes, let’s not forget about this:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/owl-hurt-by-hamas-fire-recovering/

“So in this scenario, Israel is like an 800 pound gorilla beating the shit out of a little kitten and it’s despicable. ”

So, the 800 lb gorilla is supposed to just let psycho-kitty keep attacking it, until the psycho-kitty gets hold of some cobra venom, or something like that, and actually kills the gorilla?

Because, you know, it’s not like Hamas is actually becoming more sophisticated in it’s efforts to kill Israelis as time goes by. Or Israel is spending a good part of it’s GDP defending itself against the attacks.

No, the gorilla has to wear armor all the time, and sleep with one eye open, instead of stepping on psycho-kitty. Because in addition to being psycho, the kitty is small, and that automatically excuses the psycho part.

this is the closest true story I know about a gorilla and a kitten

http://youtu.be/XqTUG8MPmGg

#300 Seth Gordon

Plume, you seem to be arguing that the missiles coming out of Gaza do not cause significant damage to Israel, because hardly anyone is actually being killed by them.

Would you also say that Israel’s blockade of Gaza does not cause significant damage to Gaza, because hardly anyone is killed trying to run the blockade?

As usual, the discussion has degenerated into an argument about who is justified in doing what they do.

This is a dead end. There is no cheese at the end of this tunnel. There is nothing to be gained by this, unless you want the status quo.

If we decide that Israel is justified and Hamas is not justified, we get the status quo which is disgusting and bad.

If we decide that Israel is justified and Hamas is justified too, we get the status quo again.

If we decide that Hamas is justified and Israel is not justified, then we get to impotently watch while evil prevails, and we can complain about it, and nothing will happen in the short or medium run. We can talk about BDS and begin to get some traction.

If we decide that neither Israel nor Hamas are justified then we again get to watch impotently while evil prevails and the USA supports one bad side against an insignificant other bad side.

It is a dead end. It is an attempt to justify evil. It does not matter who is “right” any more than it matters whether your furnace or your thermostat is right in their endless war to raise and lower your temperature.

It is not right to continue this cycle. If you decide that one side is right to do their part to continue the destructive useless expensive (for the USA) cycle, you are doing evil.

After posting #287, I expected someone to give a long lecture/explanation about jet-fighter technology, which is what would prob have happened at LGM. (On balance it may be just as well that no one did.)

Seth, I don’t much care about either kind of “justified”.

Do you want the status quo, or do you want a better alternative?

Israelis want a better alternative where Palestinians have nothing and stop complaining about that. After all Palestinians are not their problem. They should just go away, and if they need anything other arabs should give it to them. Israelis feel no particular obligation to them but they keep getting attention.

Many Palestinians want Israelis to go away and leave all of Israel/Palestine to them. In the short and medium runs that will not happen either.

So working toward either of those is really supporting the status quo.

If anybody’s going to make changes, it pretty much has to be the USA or Israel. The USA is the only world superpower, and the USA unconditionally backs Israel. So no other foreigners can do much until the USA changes or the USA loses superpower status.

Say that Palestinians try to do something different. It’s hard for them to agree, particularly when Israel keeps degrading their communications and arresting or killing anybody who looks like a real leader even when he works for nonviolence and peace. But say they agree. So, like, 10,000 Palestinians have a peace march or something, and one of them throws a rock. That’s enough for Israel to classify it as a riot. Or the Israelis can say somebody threw a rock….

So change depends on the USA and Israel.

Can Israel make peace? Until fairly recently, they could not. Israel depended on foreign contributions. $3 billion in US military aid, $12 billion/year in loans that eventually are always forgiven instead of repaid, an unknown amount of money from US Jewish sympathizers, etc. If Israel became an ordinary nation that was mostly at peace, most of that money would dry up.

But now the Israeli economy is doing so well that they don’t really need those subsidies, so they can afford peace.

No, maybe they can’t. A lot of their foreign exchange is military stuff, where they take hi-tech US designs and modify them a little and sell them to the world undercutting US prices. Would the USA still give them our military secret designs if they weren’t at war?

A lot of their economy is international corporations that put branches in Israel to express solidarity with Israel. What Israel has to offer is adequate electricity, good internet, the warm glow of being in Israel, and beaches. (Oh, and educated techie Israelis, but a business that needs those can hire them to come live where it wants them.) If Israel was perceived as not needing help, a lot of that would go away. And Israel would start looking like a slum — a place that needed help but that businessmen wouldn’t want to help.

On the other hand, a peaceful Israel could trade with the whole middle east. They could make products that arabs could afford, and…. In the long run as Israel and the USA could allow arab economies to develop, there could be considerable trade there. Not much in the short run.

I don’t know. Israel might have advanced to the point they don’t need to be thought of as embattled little Israel, surrounded by enemies, needs your assistance to survive! Maybe they’ll reach that point soon if they haven’t already.

The USA could do something toward peace, but until Israel agrees we’d have to break with Israel to do it. We aren’t ready yet.

So, status quo. But still people who try to say the status quo is right and proper are doing evil.

“But I am also opposed to the contrary idea, namely, that Israel is responsible for the death of every single civilian that was used as a human shield for a legitimate military target.”

Then, frankly, you’re a fool. If people fire weapons, they are responsible, morally, for what those weapons do. They may feel they have no choice in the matter, but they do. Presented with the chance to kill two bad men on a motorbike, with the risk that you’ll kill refugees in the school yard they’re riding by, you can decide to hold fire, on the moral grounds that two bad men more or less aren’t worth the life of one child. If you do fire, the resulting dead refugees are your fault, and they were not ‘used as human shields.’

Oh, yeah, regarding those refugees allegedly killed at the school: http://www.thomaswictor.com/two-pallywood-duds/

MPAVictoria 08.04.14 at 2:06 pm @ 317 — Nothing was said about the goodness of anyone’s heart.

Ah yes, international corporations are well known for doing things out of the goodness of their hearts….

Zionists in management might do that sometimes. There’s also the tax breaks the Israeli government offers, and then later retracts like every other place does.

But OK, let’s leave out that motive.

“What Israel has to offer is adequate electricity, good internet, the warm glow of being in Israel, and beaches.

Those reasons would remain if Israel was just another peaceful nation. So maybe Israel can afford peace now.

Seth @ 316

Even ignoring the racist bias of your source, I find it damned funny that you’re now arguing that rockets fired from locations next to X were fired ‘from X’, while missiles fired at targets next to X are not fired ‘at X’. Make up your mind, please!

You guys are still arguing about who’s morally right to continue the status quo.

But the status quo is bad. Everybody who can, is responsible for changing it to something better.

Suppose that we reach an international consensus that Israel is right and Hamas is wrong. Then Israel will keep killing Hamas members and innocent civilians until Israelis believe they have taught Palestinians not to hit back.

Do you think they will have taught Palestinians not to hit back? This accomplishes nothing worthwhile.

Suppose we reach an international consensus that Israel is wrong. Then Israel may possibly bow to international opinion and reluctantly stop the attacks. Then after a short interval Israel will start up small-scale attacks on Gaza again, and nothing will have changed. Eventually Gazans will hit back. Rinse and repeat. That doesn’t accomplish much either.

Arguing about whose fault it is is a mug’s game. If you play that game, the people who like the current status quo win. That is, Zionists win, because for them the current status quo is the best outcome, so this is their ESS.

Even ignoring the racist bias of your source, I find it damned funny that you’re now arguing that rockets fired from locations next to X were fired ‘from X’, while missiles fired at targets next to X are not fired ‘at X’. Make up your mind, please!

You’re the one claiming that Hamas is merely operating near hospitals, not me.

The link I posted regarding al-Wafa hospital included the allegation that the hospital itself, not merely a building next to it, was used for military purposes. A British journalist reporting for RT had described it as “the hospital with human shields”.

The link I posted regarding Al-Shifa hospital has someone describing missiles being launched from “right in the back the parking lot” of the hospital—is that in the back of the parking lot, or in the back near the parking lot? Furthermore, the IDF claimed that at least one of the explosions in Al-Shifa was actually caused by a Hamas rocket falling short. A journalist described in Libération about how he was summoned to meet Hamas security personnel in Al-Shifa Hospital, in an office a few meters away from the emergency room.

J Thomas @324
Arguing about whose fault it is is a mug’s game. If you play that game, the people who like the current status quo win.

Obviously the status quo is bad, but I don’t agree that discussion about the laws of armed conflict and whether and how they are being observed or violated reinforces the status quo. “Is Israel/Hamas following international humanitarian law [i.e. the law of war] when it pursues its war aims?”, to quote Seth Gordon above, seems an important question. I don’t see how discussing it supports the status quo. It’s also important to discuss poss. solutions to the conflict, but the two issues are not mutually exclusive and talking about one doesn’t mean one has to ignore the other.

@ Seth Gordon

Really, this is ridiculous. One of your links points to claims that rockets are being launched not from civilian locations, but from near (200 meters) civilian locations. If true, how does this violate the laws of war, and how does it justify bombing the civilian location from which the rockets were not launched?

Your other link claims Israel did not bomb a site, when before you were arguing that Israel was justified in bombing that site. In other words, Israel did not do it, and if they did do it, they should have done it. Hard to make both defenses work together.

To amplify what LFC said above: I wish there were a political settlement leading to a two-state solution, or at least a truce along the PRC/Taiwan model, but the next best thing to that would be a “clean” war in which both parties have an incentive to behave responsibly. Since most of the tactics forbidden by international humanitarian law don’t actually give one a military advantage (that’s why diplomats from so many countries felt safe promising to follow them!), this is a not-inconceivable goal.

In its 2006 Lebanon incursion, Israel used cluster bombs in civilian areas. They were criticized even by the US for doing so, in part because this kind of bombing does not adequately discriminate between combatants and civilians (e.g., the civilian who stumbles across an unexploded bomblet the week after the war is over). I haven’t heard of Israel using cluster bombs in Gaza, so it seems that this pressure had a positive effect.

LFC 08.04.14 at 2:57 pm @ 328:
‘J Thomas @324
“Arguing about whose fault it is is a mug’s game. If you play that game, the people who like the current status quo win.”

Obviously the status quo is bad, but I don’t agree that discussion about the laws of armed conflict and whether and how they are being observed or violated reinforces the status quo. ‘

Once you get inside the framework, you have consented to the framework. If almost everybody is inside the framework, nothing will change.

As for examples of Israeli malfeasance, there is the use of cluster bombs that I mentioned above. I would also agree with the position that putting Jewish civilian settlements in the West Bank—treating an area as under military occupation for the purpose of its Arab residents, but as a civilian territory for Jews moving in—is a Fourth Geneva Convention violation. If you go further back in time, there are things like the Kafr Qasim massacre.

Obviously the status quo is bad, but I don’t agree that discussion about the laws of armed conflict and whether and how they are being observed or violated reinforces the status quo.

Because Zionists like Seth Gordon start out believing that Israel is right, and they interpret any evidence from the point of view that Israel is right, they deny evidence that Israel is wrong, they accuse people who argue with them of antisemitism, they lie, they try to blur the issues. They believe they are right and therefore it’s right for them to do whatever it takes to look right.

Consider for example the Rachel Corrie thing, where what happened was that Israel was (as their common practice) bulldozing Palestinian houses (and incidentally bulldozing any palestinians who refused to leave quickly enough, ensuring compliance), and they killed an American protester — which did a lot to reduce the number of US protesters travelling to Israel. And Joshua Burton argued that maybe it was an accident, accidents happen everywhere, very likely the bulldozer operator didn’t really mean it. He had no evidence one way or another, he only wanted to establish a reasonable doubt.
https://crookedtimber.org/2014/07/13/bullshitting-about-gaza/

And now Seth Gordon is arguing that maybe sometimes it’s OK for Israel to bomb hospitals. He has some sort of evidence that maybe makes it OK. And he will argue with you for as long as you want to argue, unless you say something that doesn’t sound sensible to him and then he will argue about how Roy Belmont you are instead.

There is no light at the end of that tunnel. There is no cheese at the end of that tunnel. I’m not sure that tunnel has any end.

It plain is not useful. Israelis do war crimes because they believe they are surrounded by an implacable enemy that wants to kill them, and there’s nobody in the world they can really trust to help them, and they must do whatever it takes to survive. If you tell them they are wrong, they think you have joined the enemy who wants them dead. If you persuade the EU or whoever that Israel is wrong, then they will think the EU or whoever has allied with their enemies and wants them dead.

That probably does not head toward a solution.

Although it might.

J Thomas,

In a sense, Israel’s insistence on the never-ending nature of its existential threat is actually an argument for them to leave that region. That is really the only logical conclusion to draw from that assertion. If even the rag tag, imprisoned, crushed, impoverished Palestinians, who have no army, no navy, no air force, no military of any kind whatsoever, are an existential threat to the most powerful military force in the middle east, then what is the point? Why stay?

In reality, there is no place safer for Jewish people than in the United States, where roughly 40% of the total world population exists. I wish the dream of Zion would recognize that.

“In its 2006 Lebanon incursion, Israel used cluster bombs in civilian areas. They were criticized … I haven’t heard of Israel using cluster bombs in Gaza”

In Lebanon they dropped cluster bombs at the end of hostilities: their invasion failed, they retreated, and then they dropped millions of those cluster munitions all over southern Lebanon:

Human Rights Watch “found that the IDF’s use of cluster munitions was both indiscriminate and disproportionate, in violation of IHL, and in some locations possibly a war crime” because “the vast majority [were dropped] over the final three days when Israel knew a settlement was imminent.”

In this case, they are still in invasion mode, and so cluster munitions might be dangerous to the most humane army in the world. It’s not over yet.

There are many wars in which life would be easier for everybody if one side did exactly what the other side wanted.

All meaning is myth, Plume — just stories we tell each other and ourselves.

Plume: In a sense, Israel’s insistence on the never-ending nature of its existential threat is actually an argument for them to leave that region.

The Arab-Palestinian strategy of making the existential threat is an argument that the Israelis should leave the region.

Why should Palestinians peacefully negotiate with an Israel whose dominant party has written into its platform that everything from river to sea is Israel and that no so-called Palestinian state will ever be allowed to exist there?

No existential threat to the Palestinian people there: They simply don’t exist, and they will never be permitted to exist, that’s all!

But the answer is that there are obviously very good reasons to negotiate: one is that Israel is not monolithic, and that those words are just words on paper.

Though it’s virtually never mentioned in the press this little problem does, however, seem parallel to another “words on paper” problem that’s in contrast somehow never without mention….

So “both sides” have irrelevant documents which deny the other’s existence, while one side literally erases the other on a continuous basis through “settlement” and on an intermittent basis through conscience-shocking warfare.

What would it take to call this slow-motion genocide by its real name?

… life would be easier for pretty much everybody if Arab countries gave citizenship to Palestinian refugees and integrated them into their societies.

Sure, and let’s look at what is available for us to accomplish.

The USA could guarantee arab nations lots of foreign aid if they accepted Palestinians as citizens and took them away from Palestine. That might be enough for those nations — which generally suffer low standard-of-living and high unemployment already — to do it. But can they trust us to keep our word? Various people we have promised aid to — Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc — did not get it for one reason or another. I’m not at all sure that they would trust us. And I’m not at all sure how much would be enough.

The USA could guarantee Israelis a place here, though. They are our kind of people and would probably do well here. We owe them the chance not to get genocided but I don’t see that we owe them the horror they have now.

But the problem then is that zionists don’t want to come here. They want to stay where they are and be forced to bomb arabs.

The situations are not quite parallel. Palestinians have no place in arab societies that are poor and overpopulated, they can’t go. Israelis could have a place in the USA but they don’t want it.

Regardless, the USA should make the standing offer. It’s a positive contribution we can make that hurts no one and potentially helps the situation.

#349 Earwig

What would it take to call this slow-motion genocide by its real name?

So far is it not genocide at all.

So far Gaza has taken less than 2000 casualties. Say that by the end of the year it comes out to 3000. That is much lower than Gaza’s birthrate.

The way they’re going now, Gaza will *never* be genocided. Israel could kill 5 times as many of them every year and never genocide them.

So far, Israel’s attacks have not come close to genocide. Israelis talk about it sometimes but so far they have not begun to carry it out.

(that blockquote was supposed to cover two paragraphs, not one)

You’re the one claiming that Hamas is merely operating near hospitals, not me.

I mean, seriously, what is the fucking point of debating with people who make basic burden-of-proof fuckups like that? You wouldn’t play soccer with people who thought they scored a every time they kicked the ball over the sidelines, would you?

[they aren’t selected for debate skills, remember. The ideal hasbaracist is placid, even-tempered, and as dumb as a bag of rocks, because the point of hasbara isn’t to make israel look good, it’s to make an example of people who criticise israel. The stupider and more self-righteous you are, the better you can do that: every second we spend explaining basic fucking logic to these poor unfortunates is a second we can’t do anything useful with our lives.]

#358

Here’s wikipedia’s definition:

Genocide is the systematic destruction of all or part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group via the (a) Killing of members of the group; (b) Causing of serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberate inflicting on the group’s conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) Imposing of measures intended to prevent births within the group; or (e) Forcible transferring of children of the group to another group.

They don’t specify percentages, but surely it would have to be a pretty large percent or we’d be having genocide lots of places.

There are about 50million refugees in the world now. They are not being given permanent settlement sufficiently and temporary settlement does not have very good conditions sometimes or provide for education and employment. Poor countries in the Middle East do better in giving temporary shelter and settlement than wealthy countries like US, Australia, or Japan etc

It seems to me to be highly unlikely that the US will take nearly 8million refugees from Israel any time soon unless the general attitude to refugees changes (and I have never heard of a widespread feeling in Israel that they ought leave the land – if it happened that way it would be a bit like the end of The Tempest – but I guess we had better all join in if that is the case and also leave our own lands if we came to be here/there by colonialism -I am not sure how the countries of origin would go getting such an influx of returnees and then we might get the same sort of problem all over again in a different guise).

There is a lot of trouble in the Middle East and I don’t think Middle Eastern countries will resettle 5million Palestinian refugees soon either (also the refugees might prefer to wait until they can go home to their land, they do seem very attached to it). Also generally this segregation of settlement – Israelis here, Palestinians there – doesn’t seem a very profitable idea to me.

362 is at J Thomas, btw. Sorry.

“And we wouldn’t think of Israelis as refugees, this is Israel we’re talking about. They’re special.”

But I think one of the main reasons they go to live in the land of Israel-Palestine is because they do not feel special and welcomed everywhere else and also the history/currency of anti-Jewish sentiments.

And you haven’t noted anywhere where the US recently said they want/are willing to take 5+ million refugees ASAP?

In WW2 when things got ‘actively dangerous ‘ lots of countries turned Jewish refugees back, sometimes if they were lucky not to be turned back they were then unlucky to be imprisoned in camps, and they may not have been able to work afterwards at their level of qualifications/knowledge. This is an example of the latter from a renowned part-Jewish refugee scholar in Australia:

“Leonhard Adam (1891-1960), anthropologist and lawyer, was born on 16 December 1891 in Berlin, son of Meinhardt Michael Adam and his wife Katharina Clare Rosa, née Schmidt. Part Jewish in extraction….

Adam had already studied and published extensively in primitive law; his first field-work was among prisoners of war in Rumanian camps. … In 1931-33 he lectured in ethnological jurisprudence and primitive law at the Institute of Foreign Laws and was a member of the board of experts of the Ethnographical Museum, Berlin.

The Nazis’ anti-Semitic laws stripped Adam of all official positions in 1933. Five years later he sought refuge in England where he taught at the University of London and published Primitive Art (1940). His academic haven was shattered when he was interned on 16 May 1940 as an `enemy alien’ and dispatched to Australia.

Among the most eminent of the gifted collectivity of scholars who arrived aboard the Dunera in September, he became pro-rector of `Collegium Taturense’ in the internment camp at Tatura, Victoria, and gave lessons on primitive religion and ethnology.

Letters from Bronislaw Malinowski alerted Margaret Holmes, of the Australian Student Christian Movement, and Lady Masson to Adam’s fate. On 29 May 1942 he was released on parole to the National Museum of Victoria, given residence at Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, and placed under the supervision of Professor Max Crawford to embark upon a research project on the Aborigines’ use of stone. …

As research scholar (1943-47), lecturer (1947-56) and part-time curator (1958-60) of the ethnological collection, Adam was always on the edge of the university’s establishment. Mystified at the politics of an institution which had refused to introduce anthropology for sixty years, he poured out proposals which never came to pass. Then he made a fait accompli of an ethnological museum by exchange of artefacts on a picayune budget through an Australian and worldwide network. …

Naturalized on 21 February 1956, he travelled to Germany in 1957 to receive a doctorate from the University of Bonn and to have a volume of the journal he had edited dedicated to him….Survived by his wife and daughter, he died suddenly of heart disease on 9 September 1960 in Bonn.”
http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/adam-leonhard-9962

Well, the high up defense-ish people in the US are I think less likely to support a Jewish state in the land of Israel-Palestine because they are especially fond of and warm hearted towards Jewish people and hoping to be able to show even more support and increase their warm hearted feelings if 5+ million Jewish people moved to the United States in the next year, and more likely to support a Jewish state because it accords with their wider Middle Eastern strategy and wanting to secure resources in the area /prevent certain sorts of nationalism etc. The welcome emigration of 5+ million Jewish refugees from the Middle East to the USA does not fit with the US Middle Eastern strategy or ‘border control’ policy in any way I can think of?

The US has less anti-Jewish feeling than some countries according to this survey – but Laos has the lowest anti-Jewish feeling of all, so that would be the best place to move to on that basis, but Laotian might be a difficult language to learn for Jewish people . They are renowned as a very kindly and good mannered people though generally, but I think there are still some effects from the wars, like land mines.
http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Poll-One-quarter-of-adults-worldwide-deeply-infected-with-anti-Semitism-352154

The majority on the Dunera were Jewish people, this is unlikely to be an accidental anomaly
“in July 1940, HMT Dunera set sail from Liverpool to Sydney, carrying 2 542 male ‘enemy aliens.’ Although the group included some 250 German Nazis and 200 Italian Fascists, the vast majority of the deportees were strongly anti-Fascist and two-thirds of them were Jews.”
http://guides.naa.gov.au/safe-haven/chapter5/dunera-affair.aspx

I meant to add that it probably wasn’t a mistake that the Dahiya doctrine was announced publicly. It was meant to deter Hezbollah from launching any rockets from southern Lebanon. But since Israel is actually fighting a war in Gaza and public relations matter, they have to deny what they are doing there.

Collin Street,

This discussion paper gives a good overview of the discussion of the genocide of indigenous peoples in Australia

http://www.kooriweb.org/gst/genocide/tatz.html

“Australians understand only the stereotypical or traditional scenes of historical or present-day slaughter. For them, genocide connotes either the bulldozed corpses at Belsen or the serried rows of Cambodian skulls, the panga-wielding Hutu in pursuit of Tutsi victims or the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. As Australians see it, patently we cannot be connected to, or with, the stereotypes of Swastika-wearing SS psychopaths, or crazed black tribal Africans. Apart from Australia’s physical killing era, there are doubtless differences between what these perpetrators did and what we did in assimilating people and removing their children. But, as we will see, we are connected – by virtue of what Raimond Gaita calls “the inexpungable moral dimension” inherent in genocide, whatever its forms or actions [1].”

“There are two ways of approaching the issue. One is to use the yardstick of the only extant international legal definition of genocide, namely Article II (a) to (e) of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948:…”

“There are many more, and better, definitions of genocide than Arendt’s [5]. Social science definitions assist us in analysis of causes and in conceptualising events. But if we venture into this realm of improved definitions, we will have no universally accepted yardstick – certainly no justiciable basis for trials of genocidal practice or for civil suits of restitution by victims. Some theorists will seek to narrow the definition and others will expand the genocidal universe to the point of meaninglessness. Chalk and Jonassohn take the narrow view that “genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing” by the state or some other authority. Charny’s much broader view sees genocide, in the generic sense, as the “mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action …under conditions of the essential defencelessness and helplessness of the victims. [6]”… The broadest view comes from the reputable scholar Henry Huttenbach: he defines genocide as “any act that puts the very existence of a group in jeopardy””

ZM, I find it plausible that Israelis might train arab terrorists for their own purposes.

I also find it plausible that Iranian intelligence people might try to discredit somebody they don’t like by telling lies about him.

I don’t see quite what this has to do with our previous discussion. Are you suggesting that Israel is useful to the USA because Mossad provides us with secrets we couldn’t find otherwise?

It’s hard to tell what Mossad has done for us because it’s mostly secret. But I think two public examples are by far the most important, big enough to overshadow everything else.

When Israel revealed the details of the plot to do 9/11 so we could prevent it, they were responsible for stopping the single biggest terrorist incident the USA has ever had. They prevented thousands of deaths and many billions of dollars of destruction. We owe them for that.

And second, when we were thinking about invading Iraq and Israeli intelligence showed us that Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, that saved us an invasion that would have cost something like $2 trillion and thousands of US military and contractor lives, that could have dramatically destabilized the whole middle east. That one piece of information was worth a big fraction of all the dollars we’ve spent on Israel over the years.

ZM, the arabists got rooted out of the CIA, right? In general, anybody who says Israel is more of a liability than an asset can expect not to have much of a career in the US government.

So *of course* Israel’s interests are put first in our middle-east foreign policy. It doesn’t have to make sense, but everybody knows it has to be that way and there’s no point in any individual or group in CIA or State Department etc trying to challenge it.

Israel is utterly useless to us militarily, as the Gulf War showed. We couldn’t have Israel in the coalition because that would have alienated important allies. Saddam fired little useless missiles at Israel hoping to break up our coalition because nobody but us likes Israel, and if Israel had hit back as they wanted to, it would have hurt us. We had to bribe them not to.

Israeli intelligence is not very useful to us. They may occasionally have information about arab nations that we don’t care about much. They may not tell us what we need to know because if we knew we wouldn’t do what they wanted. They almost certainly sold our secrets to the USSR, and likely to China.

There is very little that the Israeli economy provides to us, that we wouldn’t have better if the same people were doing the same work in the USA.

If what Israel does for us with respect to arab nations or arab public opinion is good for us, we are living in an utterly insane world. Nobody has ever made anything like a plausible argument for that.

Well , US middle eastern policy and actions are a great tangled mess to be sure

I think that’s about as close as you can come to an argument that Israel is good for the USA.

But of course, we don’t support Israel out of self-interest. We do it because we think it is the right thing to do. We must defend them against the threat of extermination by far larger numbers of arabs who want to destroy Israel. It’s wrong of them to want that, and as long as they want that the USA will go to any expense and do whatever it takes to make sure that Israel is completely safe.

I think the claim that Israel is a ‘strategic liability’ is kind of weak, and even Mearsheimer and Walt (afaicr) accepted that during the Cold War it probably wasn’t. The main problem(imo) is to assume that the US has a choice between Israel or ‘the Arabs’, which has been shown by history not to be the case.
The United States role diplomatically in the Arab/Israeli conflict, and perception of US ‘influence’ over Israeli behaviour, has probably been an asset to the US (peace agreement with Egypt and Jordan, nearly with Syria iirc)That has probably changed since the breakdown of the peace process, and the relative goodwill that brought the US at times, but you can see that change in US policy now, which is becoming more adapatable and less dogmatically attached to specific alliances.
The Israeli counterweight to Iran and Iranian proxies has also been seen positively by the US and its main regional allies, and the biggest mistake the US has made regionally(Iraq) was not due to the Iraeli relationship.(except, arguably, in a very roundabout way) The US role in mediating the Arab/israeli conflict(and US aid) has also *helped* prevent a war post 73 between Israel and its neighbours.
The question then is,what are the alternatives ?An explicit alliance with Iran isn’t only going to viewed poorly in Israel but in the regimes of all the US’ regional Arab allies. A more critical stance towards Israel, or a more forceful role in resolving the Palestinian situation, would probably be a good idea, but that also relies on the US maintaining somewhat good relations with Israel so as to exert that influence.
The mistake, I think, is to see Israel as the biggest threat to the US’ Arab allies(whereas Iran is) or to think that the relationship with Israel creates a significant backlash to US interests(it’s certainly unpopular domestically within Arab societies, but arguably less so within the ruling cliques) So I don’t see where the positives for ending that relationship (whatever that would mean) are.
A US posture less attached to specific alliances, more neutral towards regional politics and so adaptable to changing circumstances might be the right move, but it still doesnt mean ending the relationship with Israel. (which probably wont happen anyway)

Ronan, thank you! That was exceptionally clear.

I agree with you about the dates. You present a compelling picture of the reasoning, but doesn’t that reasoning seem stupid to you?

There’s a simpler reasoning for people who don’t care about the complexities. When the USA gave Israel so much aid after 1967, arab nations we didn’t want had no choice but to accept aid from the USSR along with the strings that came attached. Egypt, Syria, Iraq etc. Then we could justify implacable opposition to them because they were on the Russians’ side, and support for Israel because they were anti-communist and opposed to the russian proxies. That was probably enough for simple-minded anticommunists.

So you figure we needed the Saudi monarchy. (Why didn’t the Saudi monarchy need us more? If they needed a superpower at all, they had to choose us over the USSR which had no sympathy for monarchy.) The monarchy did not want secular nationalist governments in other nations that might spread bad ideas to SA. So they wanted us to get rid of the Egyptian and Syrian governments which were secular-nationalist.

In 1967 Israel won a war against Egypt and Syria which we thought destroyed secular nationalism, so the Saudis were grateful to us. Is that the reasoning? But it did not destroy secular nationalism. It is not at all clear that the Saudis would show any gratitude to us for what the Israelis did. The reasoning is squirrelly.

Maybe in 1970 we rewarded Israel for helping the Saudis, because Palestinians were about to overthrow Jordan and the Saudis didn’t want that. So Israel mobilized, and Syria withdrew its tanks from Jordan after it lost more than half of them. Israel did not do that for us, they wanted a Palestinian nation in Jordan even less than the Saudis did. Maybe we asked them to, though, and promised them big rewards for doing it. And why were there palestinians in Jordan trying to take over the government? Only because of Israel. The idea that Israel was actually useful to us was nutty.

And then in 1973 our good friend the king of arabia and our good friend the Shah of Iran got together and organized OPEC into something that could actually make an oil shock on us. Over Israel.

The whole reasoning falls apart if you give it a second look.

For today, we have the Saudi monarchy our good friends, and what do they do for us? I guess they sell us oil cheap, about 16% of our total imports. That’s good I guess. They sell three times as much to the far east.

So to be nice to the Saudis we have helped get raging Islam in the various nations that would otherwise be doing secular nationalism. This does not look like a win to me. But it is a win for Israel because it makes it look like Israel is our only possible friend in the middle east.

And the national governments we like tend to be monarchies and dictators, the sort of thing that the Arab Spring tried to overthrow. We talked like it was a good thing at first, we like democracies, but then when it turned out to be muslim democracies we were against it after all and we’re trying to set up secular dictators again. But those have had a decreasing halflife recently, even the ones we don’t support.

Something about all this smells to me. It smells like we’re on the wrong side of history.

379 “This does not look like a win to me.”

You might be over-thinking it. Certainly, to sow discord and fish in muddied waters is a win. Or even THE win, if that’s the main strategy, which I think it might be. In this sense, pan-Arabism is a threat, and Islamism is a win, simply because there are many flavors that are easy to pit against each other. Divide and rule.

@J Thomas – I (genuinely) don’t know the details of the history well enough, just the broad outlines, to really judge whether each alliance was neccesary, measure its pros and cons or decide what other options were available. I can understand the logic behind the security guarantees to the Saudis, and the role various US admins saw it as playing in the Gulf(and in guaranteeing access to oil at steady prices)

I can also see the logic behind the Israeli relationship, or at least how it developed. I’m not sure what the region(or peace process) looks like without that relationship, or at least without one as strong. I think US policy was often reactive with very few good choices, but it also(inexusably) helped reinforce authoritarian regimes and militarise the region. I don’t really know how to view it as a whole, or imagine different options or think of better alternatives now.

I know that’s pretty unresponsive, but I that’ all I have!

Perhaps there’s a solution here somewhere that could somewhat resolve the problems in the region; move towards a solution on the Palestinian issue, begin to dampen down the security issues(with security guarantees, and diplomatic engagement or what have you) stop selling arms in such quantities, push for political reform and economic development etc
I don’t see it coming any time soon though, and I dont know how feasible any solution is even in best case scenario.
I don’t think the Israeli relationship (as a whole) is that problematic though, I dont see a counterfactual situation where the US breaks off all engagement with Israel and something better emerges, or even how that could occur given the pro Israeli cottage industry that has emerged in US FP circles (a more even policy would be good though, or one that uses aid and weapons sales, and potentially sanctions, to influence Israeli behaviour. Although also not politically feasible at the minute)
But I think trying to figure out whether a relationship ‘secures vital national interests’ or is ‘strategically sensible’ is difficult, often futile, and leads to a way of percieving foreign policy that can be ‘problematic.’

I think the most likely scenario in the Middle East, assuming none of the Arab nations manage to get nuclear weapons, and suicidally start a nuclear war there, is that a few decades down the road the oil runs out/becomes irrelevant. At which point Israel has the only remaining strong economy in the area, (Because they’ve never been dependent on the oil), and the rest of the world loses its motivation for excusing Arab barbarism.

At that point things settle down, because the Arabs can’t afford to continue using the Palestinians to wage proxy war against Israel.

The best way to achieve this earlier is to push energy independence.

J Thomas 379
So to be nice to the Saudis we have helped get raging Islam in the various nations that would otherwise be doing secular nationalism.

What evidence is there that “secular nationalism” wd be triumphant absent the machinations of the US? This strikes me as overemphasizing the US role in the rise of political and/or militant Islam.

I read that long quote from alternet that ZM put up. It doesn’t show IMO that secular nationalism wd be triumphant if only the US and Britain hadn’t backed S.A. vs Nasser’s Egypt. Secular nationalism failed in part, after all, b/c of Nasser’s own shortcomings. Yes, it’s more complicated, but my impression is that that was certainly one factor. The US role has been bad enough in some ways w/o saddling it w primary responsibility for the rise of political Islam. It contributed in various ways, but primary responsibility — no, I doubt it.

#387 LFC

What evidence is there that “secular nationalism” wd be triumphant absent the machinations of the US? This strikes me as overemphasizing the US role in the rise of political and/or militant Islam.

Somebody else appeared to claim that this was an important US goal. It looks like a stupid goal to me.

I don’t exactly see it. Like, we supported a mostly secular nationalist dictator in Egypt after Sadat was killed, and we didn’t mind him suppressing muslims. When he got overthrown (partly by secular nationalists who wanted democracy), we supported the army clamping down and setting up something that looks like another secular nationalist dictator.

We supported the Shah, who was very much a secular nationalist dictator though not arab. He got overthrown partly by secular nationalists who wanted a democracy. Then when things went bad millions of them left because they could. People with skills that are demand in the west, don’t have to stay and fight fanatical muslims.

Saddam in Iraq was a secular nationalist dictator, and we tried to make friends with him for awhile but then we double-crossed him. After we took over we said we wanted a secular nationalist democracy but in all cases we stressed the sunni/shia/kurd trichotomy, we defined everybody by that and treated them different because of that, and if they might have been able to set that aside at first we firmed it up quite thoroughly over the years.

Assad in Syria was a secular nationalist dictator and we mostly ignored him for decades, until we decided he had to be overthrown but there was nobody to do it but religious fanatics.

Lebanon was a secular nationalist democracy which at one time shared power equally between Christians and Muslims. But the Muslims had a higher birthrate and the Christians wanted to keep half the control. For awhile they papered it over, like for example they agreed not to have a census. Then Israel made a deal with some suicidal Christian private armies, and Lebanon fell apart.

Turkey is a secular nationalist democracy where the army has a lot of say — kind of like Israel that way — and we repeatedly try to use the army to override the democratic government. They get annoyed at us but they want to stay in NATO.

I don’t see much of a pattern. Of course we want to avoid a pan-arab regional government, since we’d have a hard time controlling it. The majority of the middle-east governments we have supported or opposed were secular dictators and not kings. We of course have wanted weak governments that did not have the support of their people. But this has the side effect that the governments we support tend to occasionally be so weak they fall down. And we aren’t that good at hiding the relationship — every arab government we prop up gets stronger when they can show their people they defied us, and weaker when they knuckle under to us. That’s even true for Israel!

What we are doing just does not make sense to me in terms of us wanting fanatical muslims versus secular nationalists.

It looks to me like we could get along with secular nationalist democracies. They might not do what we want in all cases, but we could actually get along. We can coerce secular nationalist dictators, give them carrots and sticks, and that works for awhile but their people tend to hate us afterward. We tend to get very bad relationships with fundamentalist Islamic regimes.

It looks to me short-sighted to prop up dictatorships hoping we can control them. But that’s what we’ve done in latin america and south america too.

Huh. Rudyard Kipling, apparently. I figured it something was from the Bible.

Can someone please put this thread out of its misery?

“What fish do we hope to catch? I see that it’s good for Israel when arabs fight each other. How is it good for the USA?”

I think you are trying to catch the fishes of Resources and Domination with the lures of Violent Might and Money, and those that return from going out to do your fishing tell tall tales of the exploits of the expedition to the folks who stayed home.

Can somebody please shoot these people and put them out of their misery?