Why Israel Isn’t Getting Credit for Protecting Civilians in Gaza
John Spencer isn’t an Israeli apologist. Spencer chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point. In a recent Newsweek article, Spencer expresses his belief that Israel has created a new standard for urban warfare that does more to prevent civilian harm during urban military operations than any other army in human history.
The title of Spencer’s article, Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. Why Will No One Admit It? asks a question that is not answered in his article, Why doesn’t anyone know about this? This article is an attempt to answer that question.
The failure of mass media to pick up the story of how Israel is attempting to protect civilian populations is probably an example of how the media is prejudiced against Israel. It also reflects advertisers’ observations that the Jews are a tiny little market segment, but the Muslim community (which is half the size of the Jewish community in the US) is a huge market segment worldwide and that, since media is now global, they are more concerned with reaching Muslim communities than having the truth about Israel’s magnanimous military gestures publicized.
Many people are not aware of how the globalization of communications has changed the priorities for news organizations, which need to appease the prejudices of Muslim audiences in order to attract advertisers who are reaching out to Muslim markets.
Then we also have to factor in the social media problem. Because Jews are such a small segment of social media user population, their contributions to social media will be overwhelmed by the autonomous contributions from individual Muslim contributors on social media and the organized disinformation campaigns by foreign actors opposed to Israel’s existence.
As far as the Israeli strategy is concerned, however, I think it is an ill-considered attempt to sway public opinion because the Israelis – like the Democratic party – are incompetent at public relations (which is amusing because the “father’ of public relations and propaganda, Edward Bernays was himself Sigmund Freud’s nephew and therefore a Jew.) As a result of that incompetence, they are getting no credit for their humanitarian efforts.
The tactical impact of the policy is adversely affecting the efficiency of Israeli operations, which means that, instead of bringing this conflict to a swift conclusion, the strategy results in tactics that are prolonging the conflict.
The mistake the Israelis are making – and I am sure this is Netanyahu’s own stupid idea – is that they are trying to wipe out Hamas so that they don’t have to go through more reiterations of the same attack and response scenario. The reason this is a mistake is that there is an inexhaustible supply of recruits for Hamas. This is because joining Hamas gives individual Gazans status….and employment. It’s how young Gazans can make money.
Of course, the kicker is that Israel can’t stop until they have retrieved all of the hostages….and that is really what this war is all about
03/26/2024 @ 3:31 pm
Let me say off the top, I support Israel’s continued existence. That said, people don’t live forever, and nations don’t live forever. The war can’t be only about the return of the hostages. There are too many other considerations. War doesn’t make things right. It grinds down to inevitable conclusions. The hostages will not live forever. The current status of Gaza is not a good bargaining position for Israel if you take into account the existence of Israel. Hamas may be entirely willing to kill every hostage. What then? Israel can’t wipe out the Palestinians, practically or morally. If they could wipe them out practically, they would be wiped out by their neighbors, and possibly other nations joining. It’s just not a workable give and take if you play it out. Something has to give.
I dont know how many hostages remain, but at some point a choice will have to be made between them, and the apparent treatment of Palestinians by Israel. I say “apparent” because arguments can be made until the end of time about how they are actually treated. That won’t be solved. It will come down to how the world perceives it. It won’t come down to how Israel perceives it because that will ultimately pit Israel against the entire world. That won’t work. Someone forcing a compromise will say, you sacrifice here, and you sacrifice there. The only option other than sacrifice is ultimate war. That may be put off for sometime, or it may be immediate, but it won’t be avoided. Sacrifice is the only road to a solution. (This is not my recommendation. This is merely my guess as to how it will play out).
03/26/2024 @ 7:24 pm
I started to say that it is dangerous to attempt to assess the motivations of Muslim nations who oppose Israel, but that would understate it. It is beyond dangerous. By dangerous, I mean metaphorically. The words on the page won’t explode, but dangerous in that you’re immediately far from the truth. And given that the issue is so important, a solid understanding is better than poo-poo’ing it with run of the mill tribalism.
I’d say that it is quite reasonable to assume that Europeans wronged in Europe have a right to land in the Middle East, to the exclusion of people who already lived there is closer to their perspective. I have had that expressed to me by people that I currently know. More importantly, it is not important whether or not that is accurate. The important thing is that that is a very common view. It is not my place, nor am I interested in determining whether or not Jews or Palestinians have a right to certain pieces of land. (Another version of that argument is whether or not Palestinian is a thing). Those will never, ever be resolved in Israel’s favor. Standing on it would be absurd.
Israel made a mistake decades ago when it gave power to Netanyahu. The problem got worse when it sanctioned settlements in the West Bank. Whether Palestine is an abused minority, or they are using an issue to be a thorn in the side of Israel, in the service to the rest of the Muslim world…is ultimately indistinguishable. This requires that the rest of the Muslim world to treat Palestinians worse than Israel in many ways. Done. That’s already happening, and there is no change. They won’t be guilted off of their course. If you tack the West Bank settlements onto one end of an argument, and what appears to be the annihilation of Gaza on the other, you don’t have a case to take to the world. Netanyahu is connected to both ends, and he has made the case for Israel really weak. So, even if Muslims elsewhere see Israel’s standard of living and think why not here…saying it can only help their case.
03/27/2024 @ 1:14 am
Hostages is not where a sacrifice would come. That would be worse than leaving American hostages in Iran in the late 1970’s. Though Iran is not what this is like. This would be as if Osama Bin Laden took American hostages. How many times have you seen POW/MIA flags? It’s been half a century since we left and they’re still up. And this is in a country where degrees of separation from victims tends to be very significant as opposed to Israel, which has a population roughly the equivalent of Metro Chicago. Everything in the entire country is local and personal.
When Gilad Shalit was a prisoner, his picture was displayed on the pulpit of American synagogues, let alone in Israel.
Hamas sacrifices people because martyrdom leads to Heaven. That’s not how Judaism works. It’s extremely humanistic and doesn’t view life as an audition for death. Israel will not give on hostages. Israel would alienate the world first. That’s not what will give.
03/27/2024 @ 5:15 am
You’re kind of making my point, Kosh. I don’t favor leaving a single hostage anywhere. Try to understand me. Hostages get left all the time. The Vietnam war ended April 30, 1975. If we made it a condition of the negotiation that the war went on until every hostage was returned, the war would be going on 49 years old next month. Under these conditions, every person in Gaza would be dead long before then.
03/27/2024 @ 10:48 am
Or the Israelis will complete taking over the tunnels.
The Vietnamese wanted the Americans to go home. Hamas wants the Israelis gone or dead, not from Gaza but from Israel. Palestinians approached Gen, Giap in Vietnam and asked how he did it. He responded that he was able to do it because the Americans had a home to go back to. The Israelis are home.
The POW’s weren’t hostages, they were combatants. Even the hostages in Iran worked for a government. This is more like Entebbe. Speaking of Entebbe, not only does Entebbe indicate what the Israelis are willing to do, it indicates what they’re willing to sacrifice. The guy who led the mission, and the only Israeli to die on that mission, had a brother who is Prime Minister of Israel.
Also, killing everyone in Gaza would take an extremely long time and would involve all of them being in positions of collateral damage. (Using your deliberately hyperbolic example.)
03/27/2024 @ 11:08 am
“Deliberately hyperbolic”?
We haven’t met. My name is Bill. I am not being “deliberately hyperbolic.” If there is any exaggeration, then I am wrong. Feel free to show me where. It is not my intention to exaggerate this situation. My use of the Vietnam example was from your use of it. “How many times have you seen POW/MIA flags? It’s been half a century since we left and they’re still up. ”
And as for “combatants”, POWs had been combatants, but they are not combatants as POWs.
Let’s see here…if Gaza is held under siege and those within are allowed to starve to death under the famine that is rising, they will all be dead in much less time than the time from 1975 to now. Those facts come from reports from NBC news. If they are exaggerated, take that up with NBC news. Don’t you dare accuse me of weighing in with a bias against Israel. And like I said before, part of the challenge for Israel is perception. Gaza can’t be allowed to starve to death as an intended or accidental part of the solution. My guess is that the world won’t stand for that. If a solution is reached without having to compromise before that happens, great. But, if one is not reached until after that happens…that’s not great.
03/27/2024 @ 4:39 pm
That is an astute observation. The Israelis have no place to go home to because they are already there. As long as the Arabs want to cleanse Israel-Palestine of Jews, there will be a death struggle between them, with no winners in the end.
03/29/2024 @ 1:00 am
Deliberately hyperbolic in that all the Palestinians in Gaza will be killed. Nothing like that is happening. They’ve lost 33,000 in half a year out of a population in excess of two million, with most of Hamas’ forces gone. That’s a reducto ad absurdum, not a prediction. It will not continue at that pace for that period of time.
03/29/2024 @ 6:25 am
The context was the absolute return of all the hostages. If Israel laid siege until all were returned, and all were never returned, practically all might die of starvation, at least. I said, that can’t be how it is settled. Anything SHORT of that would be some sort of compromise.
03/29/2024 @ 2:26 pm
If the IDF gets to all the tunnels and there isn’t a functioning armed force any more, there will reach a point where if the hostages aren’t all returned – or are in exchange for the leadership surviving – we won’t be talking about big military actions any more, more like police actions, and at that point we aren’t talking about low food supplies any more.
03/26/2024 @ 4:59 pm
It has been Israel -or the Jewish people – against the world for two thousand years. That’s the longest history of oppression on the planet. We’re used to it. We’re inured to it. Most people don’t realize this, but Hitler struggled to export his Jewish population. He didn’t want to spend the time and effort to exterminate them but every time he conquered another country, the Jews that had fled to that country were right back in his face again. In 1938, almost every country on Earth – including the United States – closed its doors to Jewish immigration, th US hiding behind a years-old quota of 7,000 per year, one of whom was Albert Einstein. Alone in all the world, the DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (of all places) opened its doors to Jews
That’s not ancient history. That was the situation 85 years ago. In 1938, Fortune magazine commissioned a poll. Sixty-five percent of the respondents said that we should keep the Jews out. Only 4.9% answered that we should let the Jews in and raise the quota to do so.
True, the countries that were contiguous with Germany allowed refugees in, but they clearly labeled as pass-through refugees. No attempts were made to re-settle them, nor did that matter, once Germany invaded them as well.
In the final analysis, the whole world – except for the Dominican Republic – was complicit in the Holocaust…which is why the Jews got Israel in the first place – by one vote.
Guilt.
The nation of Israel was founded on guilt.
The Israelis know there will never be peace between radical Islam and Israel, despite the fact that more than two million Palestinian Muslims are full Israeli citizens by choice, and serve in the military by choice. The Arab-Israelis have seen the alternatives and they know that poor people (meaning not the mega rich) are much better off in Israel than they are in Jordan, Saudi Arabia or just about any other Muslim country, where there is no middle-class to speak of.
And that’s the real reason the Muslim extremists want Israel gone….because their people look at life in Israel and ask, “Why not here too?”
03/26/2024 @ 10:13 pm
Having lived in Muslim communities for more than 20 years, I know a bit about their thinking from the inside out, and it is as various as the thinking of any other large collection of people. The rulers have one agenda. The peasantry has a different agenda…but they all want the same thing for different reasons. Land. Arable land.
They may want it for different reasons, but it always comes back to land in one way or another. Some Muslim countries want to partner with Israel. Some want to bomb it. Some want to do both depending on who you ask.
The only exception I must take to your comments is the point where you refer to Jews as Europeans. With the possible exception of the Roma people, and Africans in America, Jews have the distinction of being the most raped people in history. There’s a little DNA from every people who ever conquered Israel, and more DNA from those who hosted Jews in places like Russia, Ukraine, and just about everywhere else Jews have tried to live. I am myself a Sephardic Jew, but my family hailed from Ukraine, not Spain or Portugal. My DNA, however, indicates more than the usual amount of Semitic DNA.
We aren’t visiting Israel. We are coming home.
Unfortunately, until recently, Netanyahu in office reflected the thinking of a majority of Israelis, He didn’t sneak into the job and there may not have been much of a choice.
Israel is a tragedy. It has been a tragedy from day one. It is going to stay that way.
03/26/2024 @ 10:40 pm
Let me clarify. I am not referring to Jews as Europeans. I am telling you what I have been told by Palestinians. Again, it’s not the dueling facts that matter. They won’t matter. It is the dueling perspectives that drive the conflict.
03/27/2024 @ 4:34 pm
Palestinians say a lot of things, much of which is simply untrue. One fact: Vitually all of the land in Palestine was owned by Turks from 1518, when they conquered the region, until 1918, when the British took over….but the Turkish deeds remained valid until 1948 when the establishment of the state of Israel cancelled them. Somewhere between 15 and 30% of the land that is now Israel was purchased by Jews from 1888 to 1918 from Turkish landlords. Many of the Palestinians who claim to have owned farms in Palestine before partition were actually tenant farmers, sometimes for generations, so they want back land they never owned.
They could not have owned the land because there was no such thing as the Palestinian people until 1948. Before that, they were Arabs (and Jews) living under the British mandate, and they were all called Palestinians.
Anyone who thinks there is a peaceable solution to the Palestinian problem has never lived in Israel. I haven’t been there since 83 and my experiences are no longer valid. In 83, I could walk around the West Bank by myself, unarmed, as I did when I visited various sheiks and dervish circles. I was to some extent immune because of my association with the Sufis but that didn’t matter to anyone who didn’t know me already. Today, I could not do that.
When Jews say, “Never Again,” they really aren’t kidding and that bodes ill for any attempts at resolution.
03/29/2024 @ 10:54 am
I recently stumbled across the original poll by Fortune Magazine from 1938 and discovered that the poll never mentions Jews specifically. The question asked was whether the people in the sample favored relaxing US immigration quotas so that refugees from Germany and Western Europe could be allowed in. Jews were never mentioned but it was of course obvious who the vast majority of those refugees were.
04/09/2024 @ 8:43 am
Alan,
There’s another reason Israel isn’t getting credit.
On news reports, here’s what’s not visible:
* Hamas holding hostages, to keep Israel attacking
* Hamas launching rockets from densely populated areas so striking launch sites kills civilians
* Hamas operating from schools and hospitals
* Hamas preventing civilians from evacuating areas Israel announces they’re attacking
* Hamas limiting journalist access as much or more than Israel does (historically, much more)
* Hamas refusing to share water with their population
(In spite of the fact that they say in interviews that they don’t view taking care of their own people as their responsibility
* Hamas refusing to share food with their population
* Hamas refusing to share medicine with their population
* Hamas refusing to shelter civilians in a tunnel system longer than the subway systems of most cities
* Hamas stealing supplies from foreign aid
* Hamas refusing a state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza and instead insisting on the elimination of Israel
Here’s what is visible:
The results of all of the above: A whole lot of destruction caused directly by Israeli weapons and involving Palestinian casualties
If you watch the news from Gaza night after night, what do you see? Nothing that directly shows Hamas responsibility for anything.
Watch what just happened with the Israelis striking a legitimate aid convoy with drones. What do you see? The Israelis owning this error at all levels. Half the leadership has apologized in public, including Netanyahu. They’ve opened up new aid routes into Gaza. They’ve changed the communications channels between aid groups and the local IDF command in Gaza. They’ve fired some senior military officials and reprimanded others.
Watch what hasn’t been noticed:
When has Hamas ever taken responsibility for ANYTHING?
Early in the war, Hamas announced that Israel had struck a hospital and killed 500 people. Journalists didn’t even bother noticing that the announcement of the casualty count happened before anyone could have physically counted casualties when they know damned well how long it takes. An Arab leader canceled a personal meeting with Biden over this.
What actually happened?
An errant Hamas missile struck the hospital parking lot, killing fifty civilians.
In other words, the original claim had multiple lies and Hamas was directly responsible for the deaths of fifty civilians.
Did they take responsibility? Of course not. I’ve never seen them take responsibility for anything.
Did anyone notice? Of course not. The ethical standards on the two parties are too radically different.
This, more than anything else, is where I see antisemitism. Jews are expected to do XYZ while no one else is. People freely invent hoops that Jews must jump through, like Proportional Response, or letting a terrorist organization launch thousands of rockets at your civilians, or taking responsibility for the fact that the people you keep offering a state to keep refusing, or refraining from killing civilians surrounding military people when the other side never refrains from killing your civilians under any circumstances, or being egalitarian toward your Arab population while Arabs are not remotely egalitarian toward Jews (which Jews actually do), or living with a completely different definition of genocide applied only to your behavior, or living with a completely different definition of apartheid applied only to your behavior, or living with a completely different definition of ethnic cleansing applied only to your behavior, or God knows what else.
When I first started looking closely at Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I expected to be moved closer to the Palestinian side as I learned things. The exact opposite happened. Instead I’ve learned a lot more about how antisemitism works these days and how pervasive it is. I didn’t expect to find so much of it in American reporting. Of course antisemitism is increasing in the US. With news coverage only showing one side, that’s inevitable. I get why a whole lot of Americans are reaching the conclusions they’re reaching – it’s what they’re being shown. In this respect, the Hamas campaign is brilliant. it’s getting their people killed, it’s getting Hamas military capabilities wrecked, and it’s doing to public opinion exactly what it’s designed to do.
04/15/2024 @ 2:28 pm
An excellent summary. Better than my attempts but who is going to read it. That’s the shame of it all.
04/15/2024 @ 8:17 pm
“Did anyone notice? Of course not. The ethical standards on the two parties are too radically different…”
The ethical standards on the two parties are different. That’s a fact. There are reasons for that, but it doesn’t have anything to do with fairness. Also, the fact that there are different standards for each party is an indication that others do notice. Ethical standards are chosen. They are not automatic.
The moral prism will be used when it is analyzed for history. In the fairly near future, morality will have fairly little to do with anything involved.
04/15/2024 @ 11:04 pm
But the accusations against Israel are couched in terms of ostensible morality.
04/16/2024 @ 7:42 am
Your opponent either has contrasting moral principles, or they just reject your principles from an amoral position. If they absorb your principles they become you with little or no distinction. If they insist on being distinctly different, they will reject every principle that you hold in order to maintain separation. The purpose of maintaining their separation is to maintain power within their group. As long as that outweighs the value of peace, the conflict will remain. Once those common values are recognized and acknowledged, the conflict can subside. The road of conflict does not have friendship and unity as a possible destination. That particular line does not have that as a stop. To get to destination, a turn away from that vector pointing toward a moral principle must be made.
04/10/2024 @ 7:05 am
I remember the riots in L.A. after the Rodney King arrest. If you can picture it, the streets were swamped with a river of marauding citizens. Thousands and thousands running, breaking, fighting, looting…chaos. In one particular location, a Korean store owner was standing in front of his store trying to keep rioters from destroying or looting his store. He stood on the street with handgun firing into the crowd. The crowd streamed around and past him looking for easier opportunities. I don’t know how many people the store owner shot, if any. I only know that he was discharging his weapon into the crowd at close range.
The L.A.P.D. had been given orders to basically let the riot blow itself out and not get involved except in the most extreme cases. We were on 12 hours on, and 12 hours off. Half of the department was deployed at one time citywide. In that “tactical alert” mode, an L.A.P.D. unit deployed to the store where gunshots were being fired. The unit drove up in fairly close range of the store owner and engaged the store owner while he was firing at the crowd. One officer popped out of the two person vehicle on the4 passenger side holding a shotgun. The shotgun was loaded with buckshot. As the unit came to a stop, the door popped open, and the officer popped out, leveled the shotgun at the store owner, and shot him dead. I know these details because I knew the officer personally. He was a close friend of mine, and a former academy classmate.
My friend was of the highest character. He had a very gentle nature. He was a kind, friendly person who was always smiling. So, why did he shoot the store owner? The store owner was not only defending property, but also, arguably defending his life. Why was he wrong?
Obviously, this is not perfectly analogous to the situation in Gaza, but it is close enough. The same principles apply. As a practical consideration, protecting the peace requires stopping the greatest threat in the moment. Whoever was on the end of the store owner’s sights was the single most threatened victim in the moment. The store owner had to stop or be stopped, irrespective of what his motivations were. Firing into a crowd indiscriminately is not an acceptable solution. The cause may be righteous. In Israel’s case regarding Gaza, the cause is. That alone does not justify any and all actions. Whether it is reported by one side or another is not relevant.
Consider this, and please, don’t call me antisemitic…or hyperbolic.
https://wapo.st/3TOWpWB
04/10/2024 @ 12:26 pm
Sometimes it helps to boil down an emotional argument to see what is going on.
What is going on is this:
What is happening in Gaza is not genocide. The term has been redefined from its original meaning – the complete eradication of a nation-state or ethnic group – to mean killing civilians as collateral damage during military operations. There are millions of Palestinians who are not in the conflict zone and are not being raped or murdered en masse (or affected in any other way.)
The “Palestinian” claim that they owned the land that was taken away from them by Israel is false. The lands were purchased from Turkish landowners, or converted into the Palestinian Mandate in 1918 by the League of Nations. The Arabs who lived and worked those farms were tenant farmers, not landowners. Additional lands were added by Israeli conquests during three wars.
Name another country that has ever voluntarily relinquished lands taken by conquest. Be careful. Mexico is listening. Spain is listening. The native peoples who were here before we arrived are listening.
Israel is being held to a different standard precisely because the Israelis are Jews. Jews are not supposed to fight back. Jews are supposed to bend their knees to their betters and, in the Christian world, everyone was better than the Jews.
A 2000 study found that 70% of Jewish men and 82% of Palestinian Muslim Arab men share a common Y chromosome pool. This suggests that Jews and Arabs are closely related,
This conclusively demonstrates that referring to Jews who emigrated to Palestine at European invaders is false. They were descendants of the original occupants of Palestine, coming home.
What is going on in Gaza isn’t genocide. It’s an ancient family squabble. When cousins are killing one another, it’s a family feud, not genocide and that’s exactly what this is…and it will end the way all family squabbles end: the parties involved will grow tired of fighting and the conflict will gradually wind down, as it is already doing.
The majority of the Muslim world is completely uninterested in this conflict because they recognize that it is a family squabble. The only people supporting Hamas are, like Hamas, non-state actors who are trying to establish themselves in defensible territories.
This is completely unlike what you experienced in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, the rioters were tearing up their own neighborhoods, looting, and attacking one another as well as the storekeepers and the peacekeepers. No one was trying to drive the storekeepers (and landlords), and peacekeepers out, or to claim lands as their own. It was simply anarchy unleashed and then contained.
You were there. I wasn’t. I could be completely wrong…but I don’t think so. The conditions may have been analogous but the situations were completely different.
https://www.science.org/content/article/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry#:~:text=30%20Oct%202000,includes%20Israel%20and%20the%20Sinai.
04/10/2024 @ 8:19 pm
Alan, I am not comparing the war to the riot. I am talking about the store owner and the crowd. The crowd could have been a circus, or cannibals, or he could have been sleepwalking. The point is that the man with the gun had the immediate control over the death that was happening, or potentially happening. The way to stop it was to stop the man with the gun. Causes at that point were irrelevant. Don’t you see that? EVEN IF the shooter could justify his action as defense of life, the method he was taking was not appropriate.
Therefore, it is very, very much like the situation in Gaza today. Stopping the means by which people are being killed is the thing that must happen in the most immediate way…irrespective of causes. Can’t you see that? And, Alan, that is not taking sides with either party in the matter. That is only putting an end to this method being taken by one party. Please tell me that this is not incomprehensible to you. I assure you that most of the world can see it. It is no mystery that my friend Everett was not reprimanded or fired. He did the right thing. The store owner was doing the wrong thing. And the store owners motivations were valid. His actions were not. In that way, it is totally analogous.
(Oh, and just as an aside, that bit about rioters “tearing up their own neighborhoods” is a racist prism that you are accidentally using. There is no legal distinction between one street in their neighborhood and a block away that would not have been. That is a class distinction. They merely rioted where they could reach on foot. This inchoate hypothesis about how ‘those people’ have a tendency to destroy their own area when under stress is completely useless, meaningless, and propagandistic as a deflection from actual causes. ‘Those people’ lived in the city and the state. Any crimes committed and adjudicated listed city or state as plaintiff, not the “neighborhood”).
04/15/2024 @ 11:13 am
Assuming Hala Kreis was hit by an Israeli bullet, that’s a crime, and most Israeli military officials would probably agree with that definition. Chances are if that video reached the IDF, someone is researching it. Assuming we saw an accurate description, there’s no justifiable reason for that. There’s also no obvious reason to take the shot. There’s no tactical reason to take the shot. Going in the other direction, Hamas wants the civilians dead, but the IDF doesn’t, not as an organization.
The Korean shop owner was not fighting for his life.
04/15/2024 @ 12:28 pm
If you get too close to one of the trees, you will lose the perspective to see that you’re in a forest. Don’t lose the forest for the trees.
No crime exists which can justify any response. A proportional response is commonly valued, especially when one side has a huge power advantage. Ultimately the powerful will have to lean toward not using its advantage, so that all might gain stability. This is a sacrifice, but the only other alternative when one faces a determined opponent is complete annihilation. That is not in everyone’s interest. That sacrifice seems to be taking shape today, pending Israel’s response to Iran’s attack.
04/11/2024 @ 10:09 am
With all due respect to your service as a sworn officer, I was in the Harlem riot after MLK’s death, which was not nearly as bad as what happened in Los Angeles, but the low percentage of uniformed officers to population in LA has always seemed to me to be very strange, although I suspect that may because of the multiple jurisdictions in the county may balance that out. (I just finished re-reading MIchael Connelly’s “Angel Flight.” I’m sure you’ve read him. What do you think of his work?)
But I have to tell you that I think the Israelis are absolutely right in their strategy, if not their tactics, which are rather dubious. Israel must destroy Hamas or Hamas will destroy Israel. Israel may destroy Israel in the process of destroying Hamas, but that’s the risk Israel has to take.
Israel cannot afford to lose, not once, not ever. While most Muslims don’t really give a shit about Israel one way or the other, while many are actually friendly to Israel, the fact remains that Israel’s existence is a cause celebre for non-state actors who have nothing to lose – except the lives of their followers – from attacking Israel. Nation-states know that, individually, none of them is a match for the Israelis, and history indicates that the “confrontation” states cannot get it together to organize a coordinated attack on Israel, (They have tried three times and failed three times.)
The Middle East is a problem without a solution. It is a two-thousand-year-old enigma: What to do with the Jews that no one has ever been able to answer.
04/11/2024 @ 8:05 pm
“But I have to tell you that I think the Israelis are absolutely right in their strategy, if not their tactics,…”
You just said it. I don’t see why you think we disagree. I don’t take issue with Israel’s strategy. It’s the tactics that matter. That is precisely the point.
As for deployment of officers, I can explain that. New York and Los Angeles are different in many ways. To make it brief, New York is dense and small. The way deployment and patrol is done in L.A. is not possible in the congestion of New York. Western departments generally move quickly over vast areas, and Eastern departments in the large cities move slowly over small areas.
You have heard of beat patrol, etc, well, that is the older form of patrol which developed on the blocks on Eastern cities. Police officers are local office holders, and remain in those areas for extensive periods of time. The idea was that knowing individuals in communities would be a tool for the officers, and it was. The downside, however, was that it created influence and influence peddling. The notions that most people have of corrupt policing comes from the beat cop concept who uses leverage against people he knows and sees frequently.
Cities like L.A. sought a department devoid of such structural corruption. Officers comport themselves in a fashion derived from the professionalism of the USMC, which was derived from the Prussian military. Military strictness about appearance and behavior, briefly put, and discipline. This was a departure or rejection of the Eastern fat, slow, corrupt beat cop.
SO…in my time on the department, the LAPD had fewer than 7000 officers on the department. At the same time, the NYPD had something like 35,000 or 40,000. We generally refer to both styles as policing and police officers, but they are profoundly different. A department that size can’t field officers in a mob like New York can. Also, officers in L.A. are more carefully selected for being resistant to corruption. NYC’s officers are often nepo-babies, whose parents were local influence peddlers, etc. The differences in philosophy and style are vast.
04/11/2024 @ 10:26 pm
If I were going to write a police procedural screenplay or novel, I would want you to be my co-author. (Have you ever tried you hand at fiction and if not, why not?)
This was the most succinct explanation I’ve ever read about the differences between these two different styles of policing. When I was 16, I was seriously considering the Marine Corps. Later, I wanted to be a cop for awhile but it turns out that it doesn’t help get you into the NYPD if the draft board rejected you with a 4F rating for a heart condition.
I am struggling with a deep foreboding about the upcoming election. I haven’t written a poem in months, and can’t seem to write more than these stupid posts I put up…but thank you for the explanation of the differences between NY and LA.
04/12/2024 @ 5:03 pm
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