"I read the news today, oh boy.
The English army had just won the war."
The Beatles, "A Day in the Life," 1967
The news out of Israel and Gaza makes me heartsick. The situation is both horrific and intractable.
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| The Guardian, June 1, 2025 |
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| Washington Post, June 2, 2025 |
Defenders of Israel's actions cite the justification of necessity. The Palestinians have rejected peace offerings and they are a mortal threat to Israel. They carried out a brutal sneak attack on October 7, 2023. So Israel is doing what it thinks it must. From their view, it isn't aggression; it is defense.
Insofar as Americans see Israel as an occupying force or as a "settler colonial" power administering lands that they control, then we judge Israel harshly. We analogize to apartheid in South Africa, German creation of the Warsaw ghetto, or to other brutal occupations. In that context, they are inhumane. They confiscate property in the West Bank. They starve Gazans. We read about incidents like this [Israelis say it didn't happen, not like this] and condemn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a villain. If only Israel would be less cruel, we think.
Americans like me say they support Israel and agree that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. We are not anti semitic, indeed quite the opposite. But the brutality. The oppression. How terrible!
Possibly the dilemma for Americans looking at Israel is that we make a category error. Given that neither Israelis nor Palestinians seem to want a two-state solution, and given that a significant number of Palestinians demand the land "from the river to the sea" be free of Jews, then it is not surprising that Israel thinks that coexistence with Palestinians is a sentimental dream of squishy Americans who want an impossible compromise where everybody gets along. That train left the station long ago. Instead, the correct category for understanding Israel and Gaza is total war. This is another World War, played by war norms. The October 7 Hamas attack on Israel was the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack or the German declaration of war against the U.S. U.S. strategic bombing obliterated Dresden. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We killed soldiers, civilians, the elderly, the sick, men, women, children, pets -- everyone under those bombs. We considered it a military necessity.
Since this is a war of tribes and religion -- not politics -- the war will not end with a change of government. It will require a change in the population of the country. Israel is involved in ethnic cleansing, a necessity to their mind of the total war taking place. Israel isn't saying it explicitly -- that would be a war crime, and in fact they deny it -- but that is what is happening on the ground. They are squeezing out the Palestinians. There is no place for Palestinians in Israel. Israel will not feel secure until they are gone -- either by emigrating to countries that will accept them -- but none will, because they would be a source of domestic turmoil in those countries -- or by dying. Americans -- certainly I am among them -- are horrified by mass death. But mass death is what happens in total war. Americans doled it out, but we didn't experience it ourselves, so it seems novel to us. Newsreels in WWII and television during Vietnam portrayed the bombing as patriotic and good. Their cities. U.S. television didn't focus on Vietnamese civilian casualties.
Mass death in war isn't new. Not in recent or ancient history. God demanded ethnic cleansing repeatedly in the Bible. (See Deuteronomy 20 and Joshua 6.) Ethnic cleansing is exactly what Hitler had in mind for the fertile soils of Ukraine; he wanted that land for Germans. Stalin also had it in mind for Ukraine; he wanted it for Russians. Andrew Jackson, nicknamed "Indian Killer," had it in mind for Indians; "the only good Indian is a dead Indian."
I personally am sick about it. This is another brutal war. But the world knows how to think about wars. Winners do what they can, and Israel is strong. Palestinians are weak, and they suffer as they must. Losers die. It isn't an accident. It is the goal when a country is at war with an entire people.
Germans were poorly led by Hitler. The Japanese were poorly led by the Japanese government's decision to attack Pearl Harbor. Palestinians were poorly led when Hamas carried out the October 7 attack. Hamas rolled the dice. Americans rolled the dice when we elected Donald Trump. Entire populations suffer the price of decisions made by their leaders.
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17 comments:
My opinion of Israel is far less positive than it used to be. Paranoid people are the most dangerous because they too quickly perceive threat, hence Russia and Israel are aggressive and violent. I wonder if we support Israel too much. We are killing those innocent people by our funding without a say so in the matter.
Religion.
Israel will consider a two-state solution, as it has offered before, so long as that other state is not implacably devoted to Israel's complete elimination--like Hamas.
Meanwhile, the Western legacy news media continues its disgraceful regurgitation of Bad Israel propaganda, typically via so-called "Gaza health officials" run by Hamas.
Remember that infamous reported IDF hospital bombing just a couple of weeks after October 7? Turned out it was a Hamas rocket, and misfired in the hospital parking lot.
Last month legacy sources parroted a lurid U.N. claim that 14,000 Gazan babies will die in 2 days from food shortages. That quietly became a heated projection, over one year.
Misguided, misinformed cries of "genocide" and "Free Palestine" are now instigating deadly acts of violence even in the U.S.. The political Left carries responsibility for this.
"Ethnic cleansing" is fatuous too, IMO. Even the Hamas number, 60,000 deaths since 10/7/23, is a tiny fraction of the over 2 million in Gaza. Israel could wage total war. It hasn't.
Given its military competence and power, if Israel had wanted to commit genocide in Gaza, today there would not be a single living Palestinian left in Gaza. Charges of “genocide“ against Israel are just another way of expressing antisemitism.
Israel is fighting in civilian urban areas because that’s where Hamas purposely built their tunnels. Hamas uses civilians as human shields and hides beneath them. Israel has made great efforts to avoid harming those human shields consistent with fighting Hamas, and has achieved the lowest ratio of civilian to military casualties in the entire recorded history of urban warfare.
Israel recently killed the latest leader of Hamas, Mohamed Sinwar, who was hiding in a tunnel beneath a hospital in Gaza. Israel did this by dropping a large number of bombs on tunnel entrances simultaneously, creating a shockwave that collapsed the tunnel. There was no harm to the hospital.
When Hamas uses its civilians as human shields and hides like cowards beneath them, harm to those human shields is the responsibility of Hamas, not the people who were attacked by Hamas and who are fighting back in a justified war of self-defense.
I don’t see how you can accuse Israel of “too quickly perceiving threat.”
On October 7 2023, Hamas slaughtered 1200 people and took 251 people hostage. Was Israel “too quick“ to perceive that as a threat?
I would argue instead that Israel was too slow and clueless to perceive the building threat from Hamas, in pretty much the same way that the United States was too slow and clueless to perceive the building threat from Al Qaeda in the years before 9/11.
This was my comment, Mistakenly posted as Anonymous.
Israel’s founding in 1948 resulted in the displacement of about 750,000 Arabs, and they’ve been duking it out ever since. On 11/7/23, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis. In response Israel has slaughtered over 54,000 Gazans and counting. People who consider that disproportionate are accused of 'antisemitism' by those who don’t know the difference between Israel and Judaism. Whether mass murder will make Israelis any safer remains to be seen, but it isn’t likely to endear them to their neighbors.
Rick is right. Religion. More people have been killed in the name of religion than any other cause. That Magic Man in the sky is a killer.
in 1947, the United Nations decided on a partition plan for Palestine: a two state solution in which both Jews and Arabs would have their own states. The Jews accepted; the Arabs did not, and in 1948 five Arab armies invaded with the goal of eradicating the new, tiny state of Israel.
Amazingly, Israel won that war, and as a result around 750,000 Arabs ended up as a refugees. In some cases, they were chased away by Israelis; in other cases, they were told to leave by the Arab armies so that they would be out of danger as the Arab armies eradicated the Jews.
What is almost never mentioned is what happened afterwards. In response to Israel’s victory, a wave of antisemitism swept through the Arab states and their Jewish populations were expelled. (Baghdad for instance, was 25% Jewish before this, 0% afterwards.) There were around 750,000 of these Jewish refugees, most of whom ended up in Israel, where they are known as the Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews.
The Jews took in their refugees and made them full citizens of the new Israel. The Arabs kept their refugees in miserable refugee camps, purposely molding their misery into a weapon that could be directed against Israel.
There were equivalent numbers of refugees on both sides. Those who demand “justice“ for the Arab refugees never seem to mention what should be done for the Jewish refugees. Perhaps the Arabs should take care of their refugees the way that the Jews took care of theirs.
As to the present war, the best estimates are that of the Gazans who have been killed, half of them are Hamas soldiers, and therefore legitimate targets. The other half are collateral damage caused by Hamas’ habit of using Gazan civilians as human shields.
As I said in a previous post here, this 1:1 ratio of civilian to military casualties is the lowest ratio that has ever been achieved in the entire history of urban warfare, which reflects the care Israel is taking to harm as few of Hamas’ human shields as possible.
Anti-Israel ideologues throw around terms like “slaughter”, “mass murder”, and “genocide” to delegitimize Israel‘s well-justified efforts to defend itself from those like Hamas who seek the destruction of Israel and the removal of Jewish presence from the area.
Anti-Israel demonstrators here in the United States often chant a Palestinian slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” in the original Arabic, the slogan is different: “ From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” In other words, no Jews.
There is just one side in this conflict that wants a genocide, and it’s not Israel.
Equating the longstanding-ceasefire breaking sneak attack in Israel on October 7 with the measured Israeli military response in Gaza against the Hamas fighters responsible for the massacre, hiding behind human shields, alike as "mass murders", seems just a bit much. So is dating the wider issues to 1948. Then again, if Israel is primarily to blame for the recent assassinations in Washington D.C., and the mass-casualty fire attack the day before yesterday in Boulder, perhaps it makes good sense after all.
You do realize that Netanyahu & Israel funded Hamas for years prior to Oct. 7 to keep the Palestinians divided between them and the PA to delay the peace process right?
I realize that Israel’s strategy with regard to Hamas was a more complex calculation than WG’s conspiracy-theory-flavored description can encompass. But I don’t expect very much from those who would describe themselves as “woke”.
Hamas is certainly no innocent victim, but hearing people refer to the Israel’s barbarity in Gaza as a “measured Israeli military response” makes me want to puke, and the supposed 1:1 Hamas to civilian casualty rate is a crock:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/gaza-death-toll-evidence/
Far left sources like The Nation are not definitive, and the linked article is full of equivocations such as “likely”, “may well”, etc.
I stand behind what I said, regardless of the partially digested anti-Israel propaganda that left-wingers choose to puke out.
Anybody capable of excusing what Hamas did to 1,200 Israelis on 11/7 is missing part of their humanity. The same is true of anybody capable of excusing what Israel is currently doing to over 2 million Gazans.
The Jewish part of my humanity insists, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, on the survival of the Jewish state. Hamas is determined to destroy Israel, and so I support the destruction of Hamas.
There is only one race, the race of humanity. Those who separate us into categories such as religion, skin color etc. are just trying to divide and conquer. The fact is that all people are equally entitled to the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - even Palestinians.
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