I think the military should decide what information to give the media and then the media can release it to the public. I don’t believe they need to be in the front lines with soldiers, I don’t believe they need to, uh, you know, be bothering the military for information or for access to certain areas.

It continually amazes me that in this supposed beacon of freedom, the USA, there are so many people who will state things like this outright. It has been one of the most shocking aspects of the past eight years. People like Wurzlebacher seem totally oblivious to how his statement makes an utter mockery of any concept of free speech. It honestly blows my mind over and over again.

Joe’s not too smart. Doesn’t he realize the military will very soon be under the control of President Obama? Will he still trust the military?

Wait. Is he talking about the U.S. military here? Or is he talking about Israel’s? Is he saying that the world media have no business keeping tabs on what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza? Wouldn’t that mean less information for America and thus weakened American power? But wait. Obama’s about to take office, so maybe Joe wants to weaken the republic. Maybe he’s a huge traitor beginning to foment the destruction of his own homeland because he didn’t understand Obama’s tax plan.

Wait…
So, if you shouldn’t send reporters into war zones because they produce inconsistent and biased journalism - and Joe Sam Wurtzelbacker The Plumber is now Joe Sam Wurtzelbacker The Plumber The Journalist and is himself stationed in a war zone - does that mean we shouldn’t trust Joe Sam’s reporting opinion unless it is corroborated by a military official (preferable a state-sanctioned source within the IDF or the US Military)?

WTF, I thought Idiocracy WASN’T a documentary!

Brought to you by Carls Jr.

Israel has serious problems with al-Jazeera Arabic and a few other stations which tend to transmit targeting information disguised as newscasts, which tends to lead to the arrest and expulsion of reporters.  Other than that, information management in Israel is pretty good, although nothing can really be done about the mainstream European media’s (France’s official channels, CNN’s Gaza doctors, BBC) investment in a wholesale validation of the Palestinian narrative at Israel’s expense.

Eurosabra, journalists can’t help it if, when showing what it looks like when civilian men, women, and children are blown to smithereens by missiles shot from drone airplanes, or by shells shot from tanks, and their houses destroyed, they can accidentally create sympathy for the people who are being exterminated like roaches, or make viewers wonder why entire neighborhoods are being bombed into rubble and dust. This is a side effect of the interaction between video media and human psychology.

The Idiocrats who run PJ Media understand that, in less than a week, America will lose its greatest ambassador of international badwill ever. Don’t you see that, with JoeDuhPlumbah, they’re just trying to help fill in the gap?

Atheist,

There simply is no way for Israel to strike Hamas targets in Gaza without civilian casualties.  A totally indiscriminate response would be apocalyptic, with hundreds of planes available to the IAF.  A significant decision—and in my view a major error—was made to use ground troops, artillery, and airstrikes, which raised the level of destruction by an order of magnitude, however, since you oppose the precision use of drones, you clearly oppose any Israeli military option.  Drones—given Hamas’s control of Gaza—are really the only means of striking Hamas militants and rocket launchers in isolation, and it seems the expansion of long-range rocket strikes to Ashkelon, Be’ersheva, and Gedera was what triggered the decision to “go big”—preventing Hamas from “going big” in Southern Israel became part of the calculus.  Very little analysis has focused on that development, because it disrupts the “helpless Hamas” narrative.

As I said, as a 1st responder with extensive experience in mass-casualty events, I regard Israel’s security problems as insoluble and likely to lead to the dissolution of the state, as Hamas intends.  The government made the decision to strike back on the scale it did, knowing that it might alienate friends abroad—because of the expansion of a strategic threat.  That it does not have the tools or skills to strike Gaza’s militants alone and apparently does not care to or cannot develop them—leads to wanton destruction and making enemies of even more people in Gaza.  As I said, the problem is insoluble.

What’s with the picture accompanying this post? Who is that, and what is all the Photoshopping intended to mean?

“What’s with the picture accompanying this post? “

Log onto netflix and rent Idiocracy by Mike Judge asap.

I thought Joe the “Plumber” was reporting from Israel. I haven’t heard him actually report anything. I’ve heard him give a bunch of speeches that he could just as easily have given here.

I think we need to cycle ol’ Joe through the various occupations that are currently perceived to be easy and not require skills or experience to do well. Now that he’s established that most reporters work for a living, let’s turn him loose in a public school for the day. No need to make him president - W has already proved that we need one who knows what he’s doing.

..let me guess, this information is transmitted by coded eye-blinks they learned from al-Qaeda operatives in Guantanamo?…

Hey, people aren’t stupid.  If I was a super-secret anti-American Islamic Jihadist Murderator, I’d probably try to leverage media broadcasts and information awareness to my advantage.  If I was going to be on TV regularly, maybe I would use coded eye-blinks.

But we’ve got a CIA for a reason.  And an NSA.  And a dozen other intelligence organizations.  And they’ve got to monitor cell phone networks and internet communiques and courier letters and forty other flavors of coded terrorist talky-talk.  That’s why we pay them billions of dollars a year.

Strangely, I don’t see Joe out there demanding we abolish the internet or get rid of all cell phones or shoot all the mailmen.

Actually the eye-blink morse-code T-O-R-T-U-R-E was one of the major high-points of American POWs in Vietnam.  The medium really IS the message.

Paris:

After “public school teacher” should we have him become an investment banker, or is this only the jobs people think are easy?

It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.

@ Gracchus - Idiocrats!  LOL!

The word for the day - I’m am so stealing that!

What good would “targeting information” be to Hamas given the weapons available to them?

The government made the decision to strike back on the scale it did, knowing that it might alienate friends abroad—because of the expansion of a strategic threat.  That it does not have the tools or skills to strike Gaza’s militants alone and apparently does not care to or cannot develop them—leads to wanton destruction and making enemies of even more people in Gaza.  As I said, the problem is insoluble.

Some poorly aimed rockets are a threat to Israel? C’mon. The Israelis could strike the areas where the rockets are fired from. Very few people would complain about that.. I would not anyhow. But that’s not what they decided to do. They decided to indiscriminantly attack a civilian population as a form of collective punishment for a few bad actors.

Also, the idea that the problem is insoluble… why do you say that? I can think of things that Israel could do that, if they would not solve the issue, might at least improve it in the short term. They could stop the 2-year embargo on Gaza, for instance. Don’t you think that might improve matters, as the Gazans would then be able to start rebuilding their lives? Or are you convinced that the Gazans, if they could start eating at a normal level, and could start running their power plants again, and could start building to a more normal level of existance, would throw this opportunity away in order to attack Israel again?

Also, how is Hamas going to “go big” is southern Israel? It is my impression that this “going big” would increase the threat from the level of a gnat to the level of a mosquito. Would you say that this impression is inaccurate?

Atheist,

You really have no idea how effectively the GRAD rockets shut down life in Northern Israel intermittently from 1982 to 2000, and then again in 2006, and how Hamas’s use of those missiles—as opposed to the Kassams—was viewed as a significant expansion of the conflict.  Certainly a repetition of 2006, with 40-odd dead, and 4000 professional-grade rockets arriving, would be a major disaster, but more importantly it would render daily life in a broad swath of the country impossible, as Hezbollah, with its 40,000-rocket stockpile, could undoubtedly do again in the North.  So the leadership decided to gamble big rather than face that kind of threat on two fronts.

I think the Hamas leadership would take the lesson of 2006 to heart and, if still led by radicals, might quietly expand their arsenal to the point where they could conceivably destroy Israel in one go.  Hezbollah learned that tens of thousands of rockets that go 20-odd miles and a few tens that can reach Tel Aviv that you lose right away just embroil you in an embarassing, damaging war.  If they’re serious, that ten-year truce will be used for the final push.  Again, any Israeli response will be billed as an “overreaction”, so you can forget about ethnic cleansing, re-occupation of Gaza, or nukes.  The problem is both a dispersion (geographic) and centralization (in the hands of militants) of means of destruction that can drag both polities along towards an end neither population seriously seeks.

Some poorly aimed rockets are a threat to Israel? C’mon. The Israelis could strike the areas where the rockets are fired from. Very few people would complain about that.. I would not anyhow. But that’s not what they decided to do. They decided to indiscriminantly attack a civilian population as a form of collective punishment for a few bad actors.

Eurosabra got most of it.  Hamas rockets don’t look like much, but imagine living in a city with a thousand buildings and having one building hit with a rocket every day.  Would you feel particularly safe?  Would you want your government to do something about it?

Likewise, you can find where a rocket was fired from and pelt it with artillery and if the militant who fired it is stupid enough to stand around, you might actually get him.  But if the militant fires the rocket from beside a school or a hospital or from the roof of a mosque or an apartment complex, you’ll be shelling civilians too.

This is not to write the Israelis a blank check, but I suspect at this point the Israeli leadership just doesn’t care anymore.  They want the rocket strikes to stop, so they send in the heavy guns and level a city block in order to kill one man.  Israelis have absolutely no regard for Palestinian life and are lashing out in frustration at an enemy that persists no matter Israeli efforts.

Sadly, all this bloodshed on both sides can boil down to a handful of actors - Zionist settlers and squatters more interested in grabbing up Palestinian land than living as neighbors, and Islamic anti-Semites who are so deep in the “death to Israel” mentality that they’ll never negotiate - who have enough backing from various regional powers that they can fight forever without themselves suffering significantly.

It would be nice if we could take the radicals on both sides of the conflict, stick them in a room together, and have them kill each other for a change.  But these actors tend to be the political heavy weights and financial titans of the region as well, so they know how to get their hands bloody without risking their necks.  So you see civilians die in their place.

There simply is no way for Israel to strike Hamas targets in Gaza without civilian casualties.

Would “Hamas targets” include fleeing 13 year old girls?

I’m not sure Eurosabra is saying what people are accusing him of saying. He is justifying/explaining the Israeli military actions here, but I didn’t read anything in his description of the problem as “insoluble” other than resignation. I don’t read him as saying it’s insoluble so let’s solve it by eliminating Palestinians. In fact, he said he thinks it probably will end with the dissolution of the Israeli state.

He is justifying/explaining the Israeli military actions here, but I didn’t read anything in his description of the problem as “insoluble” other than resignation. I don’t read him as saying it’s insoluble so let’s solve it by eliminating Palestinians.

But, these Israeli military actions are eliminating Palestinians, that’s the point.

It seems to me that Eurosabra is stating that Israel has no choice but to take the actions it has been taking. I personally am not convinced that Israel is really in such a position. If I am misreading you, Eurosabra, let me know.

Actually, I’m generally ridiculed for my optimism, since I’ve lived among Palestinians both in Israel and abroad and generally believe that a DE-escalation of the conflict is preferable, and that some marginalization of the fanatics can be engineered.  The problem is that technology makes the larger society’s veto on violence untenable, as the ridiculous discourse around “the rockets that no one wanted to adopt” in a Lebanese comedy sketch demonstrated.  (The Arabic term “take responsibility for” can also be heard/read/scanned as “adopt.”  Root-based languages are cool.  The portrayal of a deadly soon-to-detonate rocket as an abandoned war baby, not so much.)  So you had a major Arab state at relative peace since 2000 with a developed civil society and economy plunged into war by a militia.  Ditto and a fortiori for the “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” Israeli response in 2001, 2006, and now.

Ms. Kate,  what part of “you can FORGET ABOUT ethnic cleansing, re-occupation of Gaza, or nukes” did you not understand?  I remember how completely daily life in Jerusalem came to a halt in 2000-2, and besides the minor advantage that you could now have a 1st date at someone’s apartment, the writing on the wall was fairly clear, as was the ensuing economic recession.  One suicide bomber even walked into a crowd of HOMELESS at an open-air market, which is a hell of a message to send.  All of that a product of militias unstoppable by their own civil society, even when it periodically turned against violence at peaks in the peace process.  Constant underestimation of Palestinian civil society is the bane of Israeli politics, but there are some grounds for it.

Immobile and wounded 10-year-old girl, PiatoR, get it right.  Why no one was willing to stop him is beyond me.  Probably afraid that the system would back Captain R and not them, plus the minority issue.

I’m talking eliminating like genocide. Not eliminating as in killing individuals. Ms. Kate just accused Eurosabra of advocating genocide, and I don’t think he’s doing that AT ALL. Maybe I’m wrong.

Obviously, I wrote my last comment before seeing Eurosabra’s.

I have the feeling I’m explaining a rather horrendous disaster to outsiders who have already made up their minds about criminal culpability for genocide.  Any operation large enough in scope and duration to destroy the stockpiles of long-range rockets in Gaza would also, by its very nature, kill hundreds of Gazan civilians, even assuming that such stockpiles could be reliably located and destroyed.  The initial videos from the first days, showing large secondary explosions, might have shown the actually *effective* military response, and now everything is 2006-style grasping at straws.

I can’t get too deep into this because I’m at work. Eurosabra, it is certainly true that even a weak and intermittent attack (i.e. the best that a group like Hamas could do) can effectively shut down a society. I do not mean to underestimate the importance of security to the Israelis… I consider my own security to be very important.

However, your remarks about Hamas or Hezbollah using truce periods to build stockpiles for a greater attack has given me the impression that you think Israeli military action against these groups should be on-going, lest they bounce back. Is this impression correct?

Chingona, what does it matter whether the extermination of 800 people is “technically” a genocide or not?

Are we committing genocide in Iraq? Maybe you would say we are. I think the Iraq War was unjustified, that our country committed a war crime by invading a sovereign nation without justification, that our actions have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of civilians, and that it is a moral stain on our country that will last for a generation or more. But I don’t think it is genocide - a deliberate attempt to eliminate a people from the face of the earth. To the people who are killed and their families, it probably makes not a bit of difference. But I’m not a pacifist and I think war is justified or necessary in some cases. And having made that decision, I think there is a moral difference between (1) accidentally killing civilians in the pursuit of a military goal (pretty much all war), (2) deliberately inflicting as much pain and suffering and death on a civilian population as possible (firebombing of Dresden) and (3) actively working to eliminate an entire people from existence (genocide).

I oppose the bombing in Gaza, but I think someone can put forward a rationale for it as (1) without advocating (3). And I think to accuse someone putting forward that rationale of advocating genocide based not on the actual argument that person is making but just because you disagree with them, isn’t really any better than accusing any critic of Israel or its policies of anti-Semitism.

Immobile and wounded 10-year-old girl, PiatoR, get it right.  Why no one was willing to stop him is beyond me.  Probably afraid that the system would back Captain R and not them, plus the minority issue.

Okay, I apologise for the snark directed at you.  Obviously, the situation and horrific imagery raises emotion all over the place.

I think atheist’s point is worth noting.  You cannot create peace simply by crushing a people UNLESS you are prepared to commit atrocity after atrocity, leading to genocide.  To seek an actual peace, you have to deal with people fairly, and one of the keys to that is appreciating how THEY see the situation.  You may be justifying the attack on Gaza in your OWN mind; to them (and to others all over the world), it is a murderous and deliberate overreaction.

You cannot make other people accept the justifications that YOU use to justify things to yourself - especially if they’re the ones getting bombed, and you’re identifying with the ones doing the bombing.

Destroying the rocket stockpiles, even if that were feasible (and if it were, it would have been done long ago), will not end the violence.  If that’s the official justification for the “incursion” into Gaza, it was pretty clearly doomed to be a failure even as it was conceived.  Similarly, expecting the “dissolution of the state of Israel” is also a non-starter; you think a state that has weathered 60 years of near-continuous warfare is going to dissolve tomorrow?  If nothing else, the massive support of the United States will prevent that from happening.

Much is made of the justification that Israel had to do something because of the rocket attacks.  The most recent rocket attacks apparently killed 4 Israelis.  Therefore killing 400 Palestinians is jusitified? 

This “incursion” is a mistake, just like the 2006 “incursion” into Lebanon to retrieve kidnapped Israeli soldiers was a mistake, if the goal is a peaceful settlement.  It is setting back any hope for that; if anything, it seems more plausibly designed to produce the opposite, continued violence far into the future.  If the goal was to establish the conditions to justify a future all-out war of extermination, by enraging the Palestinians into committing more effective and more bloody terrorist attacks than just lobbing a few largely-ineffective rockets and therefore demanding ever-increasing Israeli retaliation, then it has a fair probability of success.

Certainly a repetition of 2006, with 40-odd dead, and 4000 professional-grade rockets arriving, would be a major disaster, but more importantly it would render daily life in a broad swath of the country impossible, as Hezbollah, with its 40,000-rocket stockpile, could undoubtedly do again in the North.

So it took 4000 rockets to kill 40 people in 2006; assuming the same ratios (and that your numbers are accurate), if Hezbollah launched every single one of its 40,000-rocket stockpile (and how do you know that number?), the absolute maximum number of Israelis Hezbollah could reasonably expect to kill with their rockets would be about 400.  Then they are out of rockets.  Is the potential of 400 dead enough to justify all-out war?

All of that a product of militias unstoppable by their own civil society, even when it periodically turned against violence at peaks in the peace process.

So since the militias are unstoppable by their own civil society, that civil society should be indifferently killed off in an attempt to get at the militias?  Is that likely to work?  Part of the tragedy of this whole episode is that it’s so obviously not going to do anything except get a bunch of people killed now and guarantee that more will be killed into the future.

Actually, I’m generally ridiculed for my optimism

I find that hard to credit.

Yeah, my math is off; it’s 4000 max, not 400.  Still not really a justification for genocide.  And this “incursion” isn’t against Hezbollah.

I have the feeling I’m explaining a rather horrendous disaster to outsiders who have already made up their minds about criminal culpability for genocide.

I’m sorry if I’m taking your words in a too-suspicious manner, or not allowing you appropriate space to express what you wish to express. Perhaps the dialogue I have experienced about war in the middle east has led me to be overly suspicious.

...and I just fell into your snark trap, didn’t I?…

No, Mike, I asked in good faith. I’d never heard of Idiocracy until now—thanks for the link. Sounds intriguing.

I like snark as much as the next guy, but I don’t set “snark traps” for anyone, except maybe myself by accident once in a while.

Again, any Israeli response will be billed as an “overreaction”, so you can forget about ethnic cleansing, re-occupation of Gaza, or nukes.

I don’t know if *any* level of response would be generally billed as an overreaction, but even just having that idea is a problem (accurate or otherwise). In fact, the first half of the statement suggests that you *can’t* “forget about ethnic cleansing” at all. If Israel believes that they will get the same negative international response no matter what they do, why *not* go all out and kill everyone in Gaza? Sure the US will pout and make Israel sleep on the couch for a few years, but we were going to do that anyways, so why not go nuts and do what they feel like?

That’s part of the reason why it’s important not to call every different level of response from Israel genocide because then what do we call *actual* genocide? “Still-genocide-but-we-really-mean-it-this-time”? (As for whether or not the violence in Gaza is already at this point, I don’t know.)

...and Joe is fail. /re-rail :p

“The plumber should stick to what he does best as a media personality—relating things as a father and skilled tradesman trying to make a living.  When he moves beyond that, he is out of his depth.”

Actually, he wasn’t particularly good at those things, either.

BTW, Bagelsan, I may be reading your comment wrong, so forgive me if I’m misjudging, but it’s important to realise that ethnic cleansing and genocide are not synonyms.  They’re both crimes, but ethnic cleansing is the removal of a population from an area.  Mass killing is an incidental part of the process.

@ Eurosabra:

I have only a basic knowledge of the conflict, so here’s something I don’t understand: isn’t an Israeli embargo on Gaza just the sort of thing that would cause groups like Hamas to flourish? Likewise with these seemingly indiscriminate attacks?

War and economic desperation will both cause a certain amount of societal breakdown. It seems to me that a more stable Palestinian society would have far less tolerance for Hamas.

The argument was that Hamas is not deterrable by ordinary means, and the experience on the West Bank (the faux Intifada of ‘96, and the Second Intifada of ‘00 to the present) was that armed militias would initiate terror that could rapidly become a strategic threat (as society shut down to a great extent in Jerusalem from ‘00 to late ‘02) regardless of the population’s immediate economic circumstances and feelings about peace.  The pump, once primed by Arafat, would function even without him and Barghouti.  Bombings were carried out by Hamas from ‘93-‘96 largely against the background of a newly-prosperous West Bank populace, with Fateh unwilling to wage “civil war” to stop them, and Fateh feeling out the possibilities of its own later revolt in ‘96.

It’s viewed as “fool me once, shame on you, etc.” except now we’re on the third time.  However, de-escalation is the only thing that has NOT been tried consistently.

For the rest, apocalyptic means were relevant to ‘48-‘56, where mass expulsions took place on both sides and throughout the Arab World, and that experience has tainted the rhetoric of both sides, as well as the experiences of about 1.5million people, Jews uprooted from Arab lands and sent to Israel, and Palestinians sent into nearby exile from ‘48-‘50.

You can usually tell a partisan by how he/she denies that awful symmetry.

Leaving aside arguments over 1948, the problem is that Israel has always squandered its opportunities for rapprochement with an Arab and Muslim world that might have been more accepting, given other conditions and time.  The two-state solution was evidently doomed at the building of the first Israeli settlement in the territories seized in 1967.  Now we know the wisdom of considering settlement-building in occupied territories to be a war crime.  Israel had a second opportunity in the early 90s which it (not the PLO) squandered.

There were non-military options to resolving this crisis.  Hamas had negotiable goals.  A goal it had was the lifting of the siege of Gaza.  An end to Qassams could have been negotiated with this in mind.  Lifting of the siege of Gaza was/is going to happen one way or another.  No one seriously believes that Israel could have kept it under siege without a reaction.  That reaction was homemade rocketry.

Israel has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.  I agree with Eurosabra’s point that the long-term end result is not going to be good for Israel in its present ideological structure.  They cannot let go of Gaza, they cannot keep it without occupying it, they cannot occupy it without setting back a two-state solution, they cannot nix a two-state solution without creating the conditions for a one-state solution, they cannot accept a one-state solution without dissolving a Zionist-constituted Israeli state.

Re PiatoR: I was kinda conflating them, I guess. That was sloppy, but I think my general point stands. If *everything* gets called “genocide” then might as well just do some real genocide, right?

In essence, what makes the war in Gaza beyond justification is that, even leaving aside the war crime aspect of it, there is no plausible long-term benefit from it.  You see this in the Israeli media.  It is next to impossible for any of the more right-wing Ha’aretz analysts to explain any long-term benefit even for Israel out of it.  It is sacrificing Palestinian lives to stave something off that Israelis cannot and will not name, but are clearly coming to the conclusion in their heart of hearts is inevitable.

That’s particularly devastating.

Finally, all of this links into the long-term refusal by Western planners and ideologists to accept the interconnectedness of the Arab and Muslim worlds and to respect its aspirations.  It’s unfortunate for Israel that it was founded in 1948, because that was within the period of the ending of direct colonialism.  Israelis often like to talk about being surrounded by hostile states, but what they’re surrounded by is hostile peoples who are not mushrooms and do see Israel as a colonial state of European foreigners, and Israel has done nothing to dispel that image. 

If Ha’aretz links didn’t expire I’d include a couple of articles over the last couple of days by Avraham Burg and Amira Hass that pretty much encapsulate this situation.  According to Hass, Israel has never managed or even tried to be anything other than the country that was constituted in 1948, and has never tried to be anything other than a colonial settler state.  It cannot even remove the “hilltop youth” without provoking civil micro-war.  Does anyone think that this isn’t noticed?  And Burg notes that the failure to engage with Hamas, which despite the word “Islamic” in the Arabic acronym’s expansion is ultimately a nationalist movement like the PLO was, may eventually mean that it will deal with al-Qaida-identifying groups directly within the Palestinian population.

The question in the minds of Israelis is why Palestinian nationalism should be allowed to supplant the State of Israel.  It is particularly interesting to watch Israeli Palestinians cling to the state of which they are citizens when politicos toss about the idea of ceding them to the PA.

Frankly, I think it terrifyingly possible that Hamas/Hezbollah/Jihad will turn it into a contest of raw power and “last man standing”, since they have no concept of Jewish legitimacy in the Holy Land anyway.  They quote the hadith on the trees and rocks crying out for the killing of Jews, not the legacy of Omar ibn al-Khattab or Salah a-Din.  They have no ambitions to rule benevolently over a Jewish minority.  “O Muslim…come and kill!”  At least f*cking Fateh has a department of Jewish Minority Affairs, complete with an absolutely insane rabbi running it.  Even within Islamic jurisprudence there is precedent for more flexible approaches than “You are responsible for both World Wars, the French Revolution, the rotarians and the masons and we’re going to kill all y’all.”  They are too modern, too Nazi, the problem is in essence they aren’t *Islamic* enough.

I really, really think you have no concept of how people on the ground lived together, and still do in quite a number of places.  Israelis and Palestinians are haunted by images of apocalypse, but no serious political player besides Hamas and Israel Beiteinu make reference to wholesale slaughter of the other side in political charters or speeches.  Even the Israel-Lebanon border has produced a somewhat stable framework, even with both sides talking past each other to the UN.  I can’t really believe I’m the optimist here.  In the absence of an apocalyptic nuclear scenario, the State of Israel will not be ensnared in an endgame of genocide.  The fact that the lights and the water are still on in Gaza is proof of that, sorry.

It is particularly interesting to watch Israeli Palestinians cling to the state of which they are citizens when politicos toss about the idea of ceding them to the PA.

Eurosabra, in light of this, and Israel’s near-total economic control over Gaza, do you believe it is possible that an end or an easing of the approximately two-year-old embargo upon Gaza could have forestalled the recent rocket attacks on Israel? And do you believe that an end to this embargo could have a calming effect on the Gazans even now?

I mean, who would want to cede to the PA or Hamas if they have Israel?  Under present conditions, the PA can never be functional.  Israel itself made it so.  Hamas wants what the Israeli Arabs want, ultimately: citizenship in the area currently controlled by the state of Israel, even if it is not called Israel thereafter.  That’s the meaning of the one-state solution that both Israel and Hamas have chosen together, and Israel having worked hard to strengthen the Hamas option.

Now whether Hamas is a genocidal entity is a complex question and not amenable to simple answers.  In one clause of their charter they have what Eurosabra describes: a poetic sort of hadith mentioning a putative future conflict between Muslims and Jews (and in the context of the document casting The Jews as the warmongers and instigators).  Later in their charter they have a more historical Islamic view, with Jews and Christians coexisting in an Islamic state, which does not suggest a bloodthirsty desire to exterminate Jews as such.

But there are worse things for Israel lurking in the Muslim world than Hamas.  Hamas would not exist without Israel, and if you think it was/is impossible to negotiate with them, you implicitly doom Israel and its Jewish population by very fact.  Who is the pessimist in this?

It cannot even remove the “hilltop youth” without provoking civil micro-war.

I would be curious what Eurosabra thinks of this. I know that if I were Palestinian, the continued expansion of the settlements and the tolerance for illegal land grabs would make it very hard to believe the Israelis ever intend to cede any land in the West Bank. In the past, I believed this was tolerated because of the necessity of appeasing the far-right religious parties to form a functioning government. Now, I’m not so sure. Also, the forced removal of settlers from Gaza certainly was wrenching for many Israelis but the violence was pretty minor. What do you think would happen if there was forced removal of settlers in the West Bank?

re the photo

I really liked many aspects of that movie.  Truly though, any country that got that stupid would be overrun by the hungrier third world countries surrounding it.

The State of Israel is a Jacobin, revolutionary state with a top-down settlement model, pre-state institutions (ca. 1923) turned Yemenite kibbutzniks into the founders of Rehovot by trucking them off a site they’d occupied first and urbanized them against their will.  Controlled involuntary population movements have been an art and a science ever since, along with construction/transformation/destruction of the built environment.  Moreover, with the exception of the Altalena incident, the state has managed to enforce its will—removing settlers in Sinai, Gaza, and parts of Northern Samaria—with minimal force and maximum effectiveness, giving them the choice of bitter-enders’ armed violence against the state and expulsion from the national collective, or acquiescence, relocation, and welfare.  (The “Jewish Underground” sits in jail, Kach is banned, and a blind eye has been turned to the Palestinian massacre of Kach’s settlement elite in the West Bank.

The “Hilltop Youth” are playing a game of chicken, hoping that a Likud government that cannot uproot them without undermining its own ideology post-Gaza will come to power.  In all likelihood, Netanyahu may follow in the footsteps of Begin and Sharon and uproot them.  The Israeli Right jokes somewhat bitterly that Levi Yitzhak Eshkol, the Labor PM, “Samson the Nebbish”, brought the Jews back to Hebron and that only the mainstream right wing has ever uprooted settlements.

The rockets came whether there was an embargo or not, during the time the border was open during Fateh rule of Gaza, when the border was closed with the rationale that at least Israel would not be subsidizing—by releasing fungible resources for the resistance—an entity dedicated to its destruction.  So Israelis tend to answer the question by assuming that the rockets will continue.  The proposed year-long truce seems like merely a pause to regroup and re-arm from that point of view.

The truly wacky fringe of Israeli security consultants hold that a nuclear-armed Iran is in the offing, and Hamas’s own statement of the non-negotiability of its goals in its Charter means that Israel will have the opportunity to confront even crazier parties like Fateh al-Islam, al-Qaeda in Gaza, and use methods that will supposedly create a strategic shift akin to the conquest of Ottoman Europe.  The Canaanite option, the resurrection of a supposed Hebrew—as opposed to Jewish—assimilationist empire, still beats in many hearts.

For the rest, I don’t see WHAT Hamas intends to negotiate, given their view of a permanent solution.  It seems that they can bide their time, knowing that Israel will never undertake a final destruction or expulsion of the Palestinians because of its democratic norms, until such time as they can carry out the destruction of Israel with an Iranian nuke.  If they are weak, how can they negotiate, if they are strong, why should they, and who among the Islamists would ever settle for a solution other than ultimate victory over the despised, infidel Jews?

I think we’ve reached the impasse here.  As long as it is a revolutionary movement under siege, Hamas does not have the desire nor the will nor the need to change its charter.  Doing so would be a sign of weakness of which Israel has always taken advantage (see the PA).  But it not full of crazies.  When it is not a revolutionary movement, we’ll see how its tune changes.  But apparently, we’ll never see that future.

There is no solution even favorable to Israel that does not have some years of risk for Israel.  Israel sowed the dragon’s teeth, and does so again, and solution or no solution, there is going to be blowback.  There will be rockets and suicide bombs.  Like I said, Israel sowed the dragon’s teeth, and peace is going to have to come with a risk of continued violence for years and decades.

The rockets came whether there was an embargo or not, during the time the border was open during Fateh rule of Gaza, when the border was closed with the rationale that at least Israel would not be subsidizing—by releasing fungible resources for the resistance—an entity dedicated to its destruction.  So Israelis tend to answer the question by assuming that the rockets will continue.  The proposed year-long truce seems like merely a pause to regroup and re-arm from that point of view.

Fair enough, and the thoughts about truces could even be correct.

It’s just that, if one follows that train of logic to its conclusion, it seem that there is no choice then, but to have an eternal war, or start ethnic cleansing.

The distinction is that Israel feels non-Palestinian Islamist groups are subject to deterrence because of the national concerns of their polity, as long as they do not govern, and possibly even then.  Hezbollah has re-armed to the extent that it presents a theater-level threat, but the rest of Lebanon can always chide them for provoking Israel when their main priority should be, according to Hezbollah’s own rhetoric, reacquiring the Shebaa farms and securing Lebanon.

Hamas risks being forced into the same marginalized position as the Israeli Islamic Movement, where the realities of participation in democratic governance do not allow the violent enactment of fantasies of power and control over all Palestine, with the exception that unlike the Israelis and the Lebanese, it would lose its raison d’être and its base.

I think Israel is hoping for Fateh back, or just keeping the conflict manageable, and hoping that if it DOES come to “last man standing” the cost to Israel is sustainable.