Two sentence post: 1. Ceasefire 2. Proportionality
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Expecting Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas would be like expecting the FBI to stop trying to arrest a terrorist group that murdered over 1400 people and had hostages.
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Expecting a proportional response from Israel would be like expecting a proportional response from the US immediately after Pearl Harbor.
11/02/2023 @ 3:15 pm
This event feels like falling from a jet airliner. There is nothing to break the fall until you hit the Earth. That fall is probably not survivable.
I agree with you about the severity of the issue. I see what I think Israel intends to do. Given that, I expect Hezbollah and Iran, Syria, maybe Egypt, Russia, and Turkey to get involved against Israel and the U.S. This would be a disaster even if only Hezbollah joins. I also see Ukraine and Georgia going down to Russia, and Taiwan going down to China.
What’s your take?
11/06/2023 @ 12:57 pm
There are several recorded instances of pilots falling thousands of feet without a parachute and surviving. One Air Force pilot actually resumed air operations. One was a teenaged girl on a commercial flight that broke up in mid-air. She landed IN HER SEAT and survived.
We’re not going to be that lucky. We have too many warlords, like Putin and Xi, and too many maniacs like Trump to believe that we aren’t going to see the use of tactical nukes at some point in this decade. It is almost inevitable. The problem with tactical nukes is that they are not under the control of central commands. Theoretically, they are, but practically speaking field commanders have actual control over those munitions. Battery commanders, bomber pilots. There are two many people access to these weapons for them to remain unused.
There is a point after which a massive retaliation will be called for. China wants Taiwan intact. China would cheerfully murder Japan. In either case, our treaties would compel us to react to those cases.
That’s how wars happen.
11/02/2023 @ 5:35 pm
I can’t predict yet. One thing Hezbollah and Iran have to watch is that Israel is quite serious about this. I’m not sure either wants to deal. From a military standpoint, Israel can determine the pace of Gaza, and can from a defensive standpoint easily divert air support. I don’t know about what Hezbollah will do, but Iran’s Air Force is not remotely a match for Israel’s. Russia I could see with limited involvement assuming they can spare the resources from Ukraine. I’m afraid of Ukraine because I think the Republicans will cut Ukrainian funding, though not Israeli.
I’m a little surprised, based on an observation from an old OS friend who doesn’t currently blog, that China hasn’t gone after Taiwan already. What may stop them is their observation of Biden. Obama did a lot of damage to the US in the Middle East. His drawing a line in the sand about chemical weapons with Syria, then not backing it up when Syria called his bluff, was not good. Biden has been way, way less ambivalent about Israel than Obama would have been. China has to be noticing that.
I could be full of shit. Hamas definitely derailed a lot, certainly the growing Saudi rapport with Israel, which was probably Iran’s reason for instigating this.
There’s an aspect of this I don’t think people get. They look at aid to Israel and think that that aid is what keeps Israel fighting. Killing Gazan civilians is not expensive. Sparing them is. Hamas basically functions like cancer. It’s easy to kill cancer cells; the problem is sparing the cells around them. The more surgical Israel gets, the more money it takes, the more effort it takes, and the more danger Israel puts the IDF in. Israel, in trying to spare the most civilians, goes the most expensive route. Like Iron Dome, which costs way more to operate than the rockets it defends against cost. Rockets come from a densely populated site. It would be cheaper to destroy the block immediately. In terms of getting rid of Hamas, carpet bombing would be cheaper and easier yet, and the easiest and least expensive of all, entailing no foreign aid, is a nuke. But, as you can see, the progression involves killing more and more civilians, which Israel really doesn’t want to do. However, if the Israelis view their survival as really at stake, they will. And their assessment of their own survival probability in any given situation is both more dire than that of the rest of the world and, unfortunately, more realistic.
This attack Oct. 7, and especially the reaction to it, drove that home. There are three populations when it comes to judging what happened:
1. Israel, Biden, the British Royals (but not the Government), Harvard’s older alumni (thank God for these guys), a lot of the American press, and most of Congress view the attack through the lens of what was done. These were atrocities. No, all civilian deaths are not equal. There is a moral difference between collateral damage in self-defense and deliberate murder.
2. The Arab world, the American and European Left, way too many American college students are less concerned with how anyone was killed and more concerned with which nationality was killed. More Muslims are being killed than Jews are. End of thought. End of any morality in the discussion aside from viewing Israel as the perpetual aggressor and confusing underdog status with the moral high ground. Living near Hamas is like living near a psychotic nine year old with a switchblade. When your cat gets dismembered as a warning, you’re still going to hear all about how he’s just a kid.
3. The institutional figures who are choosing impartiality over objectivity, something I view as a serious sin. The New York Times made a decision to do this a few years ago, calling their turn to impartiality “Sophisticated Objectivity.” That would have made Orwell blush. College Presidents in the US are like that because they’ve got to keep two populations happy and can’t. The BBC uses the term “militants,” refusing to use the term “terrorists.”
The upshot is that two out of these three populations fundamentally view what’s happened to Jews as tolerable.
That’s the biggest lesson in all this. The Holocaust was no fluke.
11/03/2023 @ 12:41 pm
I appreciate this discussion and the clarity it provides.
Although it could go without saying, I am also glad that it isn’t necessary to wade through the cruel and misinformed opinions of a former blogger known as SBA.
11/03/2023 @ 12:55 pm
I answer enough people like that on Quora but at least I don’t have friends protecting them there.
Glad you find this illuminating. That means I’m getting it right.
11/03/2023 @ 3:29 pm
I have definitely seen at least 33 flavors of crazy on this issue in the last week. People are posting videos about the Shah of Iran, and how he was “right about the Jews”, and so on. Oh, yes…they are also praising Adolph Hitler these days.
And, yes, this discussion is better without the you know what from you know who.
11/03/2023 @ 4:19 pm
I’ve learned some things since then. I expected that when I learned more I’d be less of a Zionist. Instead, I’m more of one. The ethnical differences between Israel and the Arab entities are greater than I would have predicted. I used to think that there was a gap between antisemitism and antizionism. There’s none. Absolutely no daylight.
Another thing I’ve learned is that I can’t get to criticizing what I think Israel does wrong when I’m so busy answering phony accusations. I can’t get to a realistic conversation with antizionists. They believe too much weird shit and they throw around words like genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing with no clue what any of them mean. Most Arab states plus the PA and Hamas have been guilty of closer approximations of all three than Israel has.
Another thing I’ve learned is that the Arabs think they’re special, way more than the Jews do. They’ll refer to what Israel has done to Palestinians as worse than the Holocaust. The big thing they’ve suffered is forcible relocation of their recent ancestors – forcible to the extent that they weren’t allowed back into Israel when most left on their own accord. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s true of the vast majority of Israel’s Jewish population, emphatically including Jews from Arab states. The Jews dealt. The Arabs didn’t. Outside of places like Syria, they have no experience with real persecution, so when they hit an obstacle it’s a Catastrophe, a Nakba. No one’s ever tried to kill them for who they are. No one’s ever tried to interfere with their worship, at least if they’re Muslim. No one’s tried to limit what they can do for a living. No one’s ever told them how they have to dress, wearing external ID. I’m not talking about the Holocaust, I’m talking about the rest of the stuff Jews have dealt with for eighteen centuries, and I’m leaving a ton out.
The offer the Palestinians had was:
* You can have a state, this for a people that has never had one.
* You can keep your existing communities.
* The state can be inside what you yourself identify as your homeland.
* You can have self-rule, though for the most part the Palestinians have that already.
* You can bring home the Palestinians getting killed in Syria and still living in refugee camps in Lebanon after 75 years.
* You’ll be surrounded by three states that don’t want your territory: Israel, Egypt, and Jordan.
* In essence, you’ll have the Prophet Mikah’s promise: “Then each shall sit under their vine and fig tree and none shall make them afraid.” The Jews have never had that and don’t have it now.
They have so little experience with persecution that they don’t see the value of the offer. Instead, their leadership is insisting they die by the thousands in Gaza. There are tunnels to shelter them but Hamas doesn’t let their civilians in. There are months’ of supplies in the tunnels but Hamas leaves food, water, and medical issues to the Israelis, Egyptians, Americans, and UN to deal with when it comes to the Gazan population.
Everywhere I turn it’s stark raving nuts. Israel has two million Palestinian citizens, as in can vote in Israeli elections, more than 20% of the population, while the entire Arab world with 450 million people collectively has fewer than four thousand Jews, and it’s the Israelis who are intolerant? Why do Israeli Arabs have more freedoms, rights, and educational opportunities than any other Arab population in the Middle East? Where the Hell does this calculus come from?
I have to stop. I can go on too long.
11/06/2023 @ 1:12 pm
My father served in Iran during WW2 as a covert counter-intelligence agent. In 1943, he was Reza Shah’s bodyguard for awhile. I had a couple of pictures of them standing arm and arm together although they were in poor condition. I will try to find them. Reza was very fair to his Jewish citizens and made a clear distinction between the Jewish people and Zionism. During his reign, Jews in Iran did not suffer any serious repression. That started in 1979 after the Shah was sent packing.
11/06/2023 @ 1:13 pm
I came here today to post a comment about shutting Bindle down. Now, I think I will hold off on that while I try to trim the operating cost down. Has anyone heard anything from Ron?
12/21/2023 @ 11:21 am
2 Words:
*Requisite Reading*
1. Ceasefire 2. Proportionality
Red Cross
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Wilson Center
NEVER AGAIN
Always Afraid