Israel – Hamas
Updated in comments, Nov 4th. First published Oct 10.
The whole setup looks beyond dubious.
1. Hamas are a bunch of terrorists who will commit any atrocity to gain any advantage, no matter how small. Their definition of “advantage” comes from their own weird terrorist dictionary.
2. Iran’s Shia co-religionists are Hezbollah, but recently they’ve become closer allies with Hamas. Iran’s mortal enemies in the Middle East are the Saudis. Recently, agreements were being brokered between Israel and the Saudis. Guaranteed, two extremely well-armed enemies becoming allies was giving Iranians the vapours. Blinken says the US has seen no evidence yet that Iran pushed Hamas into starting this war. The idea being to make normal relations with Israel impossible for the Saudis. Iranian involvement is not generally accepted. But the effect of the attack and the timing is terribly convenient.
3. And then there’s Bibi. The guy who responds to pathetic pipe rockets by flattening whole city blocks. The guy whose strategy with the Palestinians seems to be to bomb them back into the Stone Age every few years so that they can never get far enough up on their feet to be a factor within Israel.
He was told by his military months ago that his extrajudicial power grabs were going to make an attack against Israel likely. The response from his inner circle was, to say it politely, We Don’t Care. (This was on the BBC? Haaretz? web site, “Fuck you” they supposedly said, and has since disappeared. Was it untrue? Maybe. It does fit with his past behavior of waiting for any provocation — which Hamas was only too glad to provide — to respond with overwhelming force.)
I may not think much of Netanyahu, but I doubt he’s the kind of psychopath who purposely set up death and kidnapping for Israelis so he’d have an excuse to finish off Hamas. But I can very easily see him thinking that if his power grabs do cause an attack, then that’s a feature, not a bug. Bring it on, I can see him thinking, and we’ll flatten you.
So here we are, waiting for Bibi to finish off thousands of people or to start WWIII and start the destruction of millions more.
Not the article I read a couple of days ago, but a recent on by Yuval Noah Harari on Netanyahu ignoring warnings.
quixote on October 11th, 2023 at 18:48
Brendan O’Neill makes a good point: why do people come down on Israel for state atrocities, when there’s hardly a peep to be heard about, for instance, the equivalent asymmetry and repression by the Turks of the Kurds.
Possibly antisemitism, but that doesn’t seem like the answer. There’s a lot of Western bad feelings toward Muslims too, so if it was bigotry, I’d think it would serve against the Turks as well as the Israelis.
I think some part of it may be that Israelis are one of “us.” Plus they have victimhood status because of the atrocities other Westerners committed against them. In the favored narratives, “good” victims are better than the rest of us, so we’re desperate for Israelis to be shining paragons of the best of humanity.
The astonishing thing is how many of them are.
The Bibis, to paraphrase one of the greats, ye will always have with you. The trick would be to keep them out of power.
quixote on October 13th, 2023 at 15:03
Even given your very lucid argument, all I can see is that on one side the human beings who share the body I was born into, my wonderful female human body, are chattel, owned by male humans no better in any respect at all than any of the women and girls they own. That’s Islam, that’s Palestine, that’s Gaza.
For all its faults, in Israel women walk free on the streets, women wear normal clothes in public, unconstricted by any man’s lustful definition of their being. Women hold jobs that earn those women a living and don’t have to make a sexual contract to support themselves and their children, the sexual contracts’ boundaries being determined in Islam exclusively by men.
There is no “other side”. No free woman could support other women’s enslavement.
Earlynerd on October 26th, 2023 at 23:08
Just to clarify, nothing in my previous comment was at all directed at you.
I’m so fed up with all the media coverage that completely skips over the in-your-face images of free man and enslaved women in Gaza, that shows pictures of women in their male enforced restrictive clothes, trapped in their male enforced houses, the media that expect, as a matter of course, the women who read their articles to care what happens to the men that hold that power.
Earlynerd on October 26th, 2023 at 23:33
You and I cross paths in comments on Mastodon every once in a while, so you may have seen my paragraph there saying pretty much the same thing. To summarize…: Hamas? Hamas? Are you people out of your god-forsaken minds?
I think we need a First Law of Intersectionality: unless your whole piece is about discrimination against some other group, when listing harmed disadvantaged people you must always list the largest group first.
(How much do you want to bet that would lead to loads of people starting off with racism?)
Anyway. Yes. Long way of saying I agree.
quixote on October 27th, 2023 at 15:15
If anyone needed proof of how braindead identity politics are, the Left’s response to this war provides it.
(The people capable of listening to the Perpetual Canaries, women, have known that forever.)
If you think in terms of truth or justice or mercy (inclusive ‘or’!), you abhor Hamas. They’re barely a step up from ISIS for God’s sake. They’re standing there, right now, saying they’d like to kill more babies.
“So,” says the person with Deep Feelings, “zomg, you’re on the side of bombing refugee camps?”
No. Duh. It’s not about sides. It’s about sense.
What one second of being sensible tells you is that the main thing all the slaughter proves is that guns can’t cure terrorism.
The thing to have done, starting decades ago, would have been to structure economies so Palestinians shared in Israeli wealth (whether in a two-state, one-state, or any other kind of state arrangement). And the other thing would have been to make sure women shared in the same level of rights. Terrorism depends on massive dick-waving as well as anger. Short circuit it.
So, great. Everyone on some level already knows this. What do we do now?
As the old saying goes, the best time to start was years ago. The second best time is now.
You do the same thing. It’s a lot more difficult now, after so much accumulated damage, but it’s still the only solution.
The other thing one moment of sense makes obvious is that the biggest stumbling block to a solution, besides Hamas, is Bibi. He’s been keeping Hamas going for years to keep Palestinians divided and away from single leadership under the Palestinian Authority (who aren’t geniuses, but are vaguely normal). He’s been happy to respond to any show of frustration with devastating bombs and more land grabs. He sees it all as a cool way to get support and votes. If that doesn’t make him a monster, I’m not sure what would.
quixote on November 4th, 2023 at 11:28
Two actual experts on first steps now:
Gershon Baskin, Is there an alternative to this war?
transcript of interview with Dominic de Villepin, diplomat and former French Prime Minister.
For how life is in Gaza, I’ve been following Ziad in Gaza. He’s clearly in the top 25th percentile of Gazans with resources — else how would he have an internet connection to write daily comments? — and yet… and yet….
quixote on November 4th, 2023 at 11:53
Yep, I have waved a couple of times and hoped you saw some of my more piquant re-posts (boosts is kind of an awkward word). I’ve been keeping up with your posts as best I can – one of my accounts no longer works on my beloved outdated SciLin system, so I have to either put up with the reduced level of posts and accounts that one allows or go through massive annoyance to use a (yuk! SystemD) Debian system that I’ve only been able to get about 3/4 right.
Very good points about Netanyahu, as well as the Hamas apologists. Terri Kanefield’s blog post about democracy and authoritarians makes a similar argument, that keeping people scared and anxious however you can will make people prize safety and certainty over messy democracy, and that both left and right can and are being influenced by that.
Good links too – I realized how hopelessly outdated and superficial my knowledge of the area was and is, so information from sources like these really helps. I still stand by my partisan knee jerk emotional reaction to the situation of Perpetual Canaries (great term!) in a country ruled absolutely by men and whose recent terrorist acts included sexualized torture and murder of women, apparently to punish those women for their ‘immoral’ freedom.
Earlynerd on November 7th, 2023 at 01:07
You and me both, and everyone else too I suppose, watching this whole mess grind on. And that’s when you’re lucky. People there and in Ukraine and and and are being ground and no way out.
Meanwhile men go on thinking they’re great at running things. It occurred to me the other day that if it was women making this big a stuff-up of everything, they’d look around and, red-faced, hand it off to some other group.
(Then again, realistically, I doubt it. But it’s nice to imagine.)
Anyway. Hope things are tolerable for you. Sending you internet cake 😀 .
quixote on November 9th, 2023 at 21:15
Talk about focusing on the invisible half of the human race while everyone everywhere is banging on about male heroics.
This is getting more acute for me with each passing Nov 11. All the Remembrance cartoons, all the remembered and thanked vets, all the soldiers … they are all male.
The women? Nowhere. The front line nurses (not called medics, of course), the “support” staff, even the actual combat soldiers in more recent years, the ones who were just as brave, just as essential, just as selfless as the celebrated heroes? Nowhere.
And that’s not even touching on civilian heroism in war zones. Not even mentioning that women are the largest single category of war dead in any war, not just the one Bibi and Hamas are fighting from behind their walls of civilians.
quixote on November 11th, 2023 at 12:10
Just checking in and saw this..
“Anyway. Hope things are tolerable for you. Sending you internet cake ? .”
Thank you for that kind wish. As they say in #RedHat: Yum install cake. Yum! I’m still kicking – and fighting, which does keep me going.
I agree with you re: women, especially with the ambivalence. Coming as I do from the perspective that there is nothing at all that makes women different from men in anything other than purely physical differences, it seems to me that women initially do work to make things better when they’re first allowed into spaces or occupations or trades or whatever that they were barred from before. I think that’s due to their recent and still very much present knowledge of what it’s like on the unjust side of things. Also, pioneers tend to be a self-selected group (like so many immigrants) of especially motivated and talented people.
But the more women become the norm anywhere, and the longer they are that, I think that memory and experience tends to fade and they behave just like everyone else. Conversely, the more women are hopelessly stuck in subordinate and rightless places, the less they’re going to be fair and ethical in comparison to people who have power and agency. That’s just human nature, not some sex-linked characteristic.
I believe women’s equality to men should happen with all possible speed because of justice, compassion, efficiency and the good of the whole human race. But that boost that comes from the first freedom of any group is nice too 🙂
Earlynerd on November 16th, 2023 at 18:59
Just envying your residence in a more sane country:
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2023/11/28/religious-charter-school-lawsuit-Oklahoma/4991701182230/
This was always the outcome of all the political silence of all those those “pro-woman” blogs. The only legally segregated school system in the U.S., going strong 50+ years after Brown v. Board of Education, now legally entitled to taxpayer funding.
My taxes. The taxes of all those “oh I know some Catholics, so you shut up now” bloggers.
Taxes funding the school system that gave us Bret Kavenaugh, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Alito. The Catholic high school system that segregates boys from girls and gives infinitely more resources to the boys’ schools. The Catholic school system that removes male adolescents from the daily society of girls of the same age. The Catholic school system that begins at that critical age to instruct boys that they are made in God’s image and that girls are nothing more than ‘damaged males’ (in the words of an illustrious predecessor) and that girls are guilty of the sin of sex, a priori.
The thousand five hundred year old out loud and proud hatred of women that is the Catholic church is the elephant in the room of American democracy. It just keeps getting worse. It will take the rest of America down with it.
Earlynerd on November 28th, 2023 at 22:19
Welp,Truthout just lost me forever.
https://truthout.org/articles/bill-targeting-anti-zionism-will-usher-in-new-era-of-mccarthyism-critics-warn/
Defending and helping to fund Ukraine and Israel are the only issues keeping me solidly in support of at least national Democrats. I’ve too few years of usable life left for even the scare tactics of Social Security to matter personally, especially given how many of those years Oregon Democrats allowed to be taken from me for no reason.
Oregon Democrats keep selling out women, first of all, but all others without financial or political power hand over fist. They’ve all gone to a “Don’t call us, we’ll call you, but only if you’re very very lucky” fortress of communication. Not one has even a staff member to answer their phone anymore. You’re told to leave a message that may or (usually) may not get a response. Or you can leave a message (also unanswered) on a website form!
From the governor through the two senators, through the rep for my district, every single one follows this now. Not one of them has done anything other than ABORTION! ABORTION! ABORTION! to help women and other financially vulnerable people here.
That’s hardly a concern of elderly women like myself, in a state where housing laws aren’t enforced and where state and federal housing funds are funneled straight into the pockets of state agency employees, ineffective non-profits and the already rich unregulated property owner recipients of federal subsidies.
Earlynerd on December 12th, 2023 at 22:28
Sorry about spamming your blog, again, Q!
Feel free to delete the above regional comment and this one if you like. I’m just so *sick* of Democrats looking everywhere but what’s staring them right in the face for the cause and solution of urgent problems like homelessness.
Earlynerd on December 13th, 2023 at 00:29
No apologies needed! You’re not saying anything that’s not true.
(And what I get from it is that I should be posting a bit more often. But I keep toppling into puddles of oh-what’s-the-pointishness. The answers to just about all our problems are so bloody obvious, it’s not like anybody doesn’t know what they are. So what’s the point of listing them? Again.)
Anyway…………..
A link that’ll probably speak to you as it did to me: Israel’s Campaign Against International Women’s Groups Has an Ulterior Motive by Danna Frank in Haaretz. Just one example from it:
quixote on December 13th, 2023 at 12:07
I’ve very glad you understand. You shouldn’t worry about posting on your blog when not particularly inspired – isn’t that what muskmelon’s site is for?
I’m very glad those courageous women’s acts have finally made the world notice the UN’s horrible attitude towards the victims of Hamas. It’s also good to have another dependable source for news about Israel. AP used to be a decent source for Ukraine until the political wind started to blow a little too hard against that country, but they’ve never been good on Israel.
I still think much of the support for Islam, including Palestine, is nothing more than white-washed sexism. I remember to this day what an Iranian exchange student I knew in Atlanta was going through from redneck locals after the 1979 hostage taking and how wrong that was. I also remember the shock of seeing many of the young ‘liberal’ men I knew and much of the U.S. media approve of Iranian women losing their human, legal and civil rights, using the fig leaf of religion for that approval.
Earlynerd on December 15th, 2023 at 02:07