It's horrible, of course, horrible for everybody, for the families of the murdered young people at the Negev rave, itself so close to Gaza, and the hostages taken into Gaza and their families, and the Israeli soldiers in the besieged army posts (which I guess are by now liberated, but some of the soldiers are themselves in Gaza, kidnapped), and the civilians of Gaza whose lives are already so terrible and who are now formally under siege, deprived of fuel and water, and about to be massively invaded by one of the most powerful armies in the world—not especially them, except to the extent that they might be ignored or blamed in a way that people in Israel are not, but you know what I mean.
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| The former Palestine Tower in Gaza City, targeted by Israeli warplanes yesterday. Photo by IEFE/EPA/Mohammed Saber. |
There's a vital point in the New Yorker interview by Isaac Chotiner of Nathan Thrall, former director of the International Crisis Group's Arab-Israeli Project, that I don't think I've seen elsewhere: that the shocking Hamas Organization attacks on Israel over the past two days are suicidal;
It is an attack of unprecedented scope, and Israel will retaliate to a greater degree than it has before, potentially leading to outcomes we haven’t seen before: not just a simple razing of Gaza by airplanes but also a ground incursion and potential reoccupation of parts of Gaza. So the decision to wittingly, knowingly, undertake this comes from a sense that there are no other options and that there’s nothing left to lose. And part of the reason that Hamas, and Palestinians in general, feel that they’re in such a desperate situation is that they have been entirely abandoned by those who should be their allies: the Arab states.
I was thinking about that too. as the first reports came out, of the Hamas fighters scaling the Wall (the one Trump has often celebrated as an inspiration for his own imaginary wall), breaking out on bicycles and hang gliders and motor scooters and trying to occupy IDF installations on the other side of the fence—these guys were begging to be killed!—until we all got distracted by the extraordinary failure of the Israeli intelligence, which was even more shocking, at least for the moment.
And now I'm thinking about it again, in the sense of how it would have gone if Israeli intelligence hadn't failed in this unaccountable way (they were all in shul celebrating Simchat Torah, on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war? I thought the deep believers were the ones who stayed out of the military and intelligence services) the Hamas fighters couldn't have gotten away with any of it, they'd all have been killed. I guess I think Thrall is really right, they're basically just as doomed now as the Maccabees, and among other things the punishment that the IDF will be inflicting on the general population will be even worse than it would have been otherwise.
I should say I don't like the fundamentalist, suicidal Maccabees—I don't celebrate Hanukkah except in the hope of subverting it, I'm a Passover guy—and I never liked Hamas for similar reasons, before I even get going on the killing and kidnapping of civilians (including that time Israeli soldiers disguised as Arabs abducted five students from the Bir Zeit University campus last year), which is never acceptable, including if it's for revenge. Not that I'm here to discuss anybody's moral status, especially competitively, though you can occasionally tempt me into a game of "Who Started It?" (in the case of Jerusalem's holy places, it was almost invariably occupying Romans, then Christians, who banished the Jews from the city, again and again, while the Arabs kept inviting them back). What I really want to be thinking about is what any of these people think they are accomplishing with this bloodshed and terror, if anything.
Another little-noticed thing that caught my attention came in a discussion by Nahal Toosi in Politico of the diplomatic context, the US-sponsored negotiations to bring Saudi Arabia and Israel into diplomatic relations, regarded as part of Biden's effort to marginalize Chinese influence in whatever regions it can:
“China is not just showing up. They are showing up with massive, massive offers to these countries,” a senior Biden administration official told POLITICO last week, before the Hamas attack. The official declined to detail the shape of the grand bargain, including what security guarantees the U.S. would offer the Saudis.
One of the things I've thought about this is that from the Israeli point of view, as with the Trump-administration's "Abraham accords" between Israel and some smaller Arab countries, it's also a plan to marginalize not just Iran (working on its own rapprochement with the Saudis) but also the Palestinians—to get Saudis to throw them under the bus; but Toosi had a scoop (or so he called it) on that subject that surprised me:
The official also said Palestinians had been participating.
”They want to be a part of this process, and we would not do it without them,” the official said. “That is a major change from their policy, which has been they will never engage in any process that has to do with an Arab state normalizing relations with Israel absent a Palestinian state.”
The official didn’t specify which Palestinians, but the reference was likely to people affiliated with the Palestinian Authority.
Which really changes my view somewhat on the Biden maneuvers; if the West Bank Palestinians, at least, are bought into this process maybe something good can actually happen.
But nothing good, on the other hand, for the two million Gaza Palestinians in what amounts to a 125-square-mile prison camp, under Israeli blockade and Hamas rule. Hamas wouldn't be invited, and wouldn't participate if it were; would the fact that the Authority is participating, if true, increase their sense of isolation?
And the last thing is the situation of Iran, which is a lot more ambiguous than you might suppose, despite reporting in the Wall Street Journal that the Iranian government is responsible for the planning of the whole outrage—the rest of the press and the US and Israeli governments don't have evidence of it (I've been thinking about this since last night, when NBC's Matt Bradley in Lebanon was on television expressing his surprise that his own sources didn't know).
Iran, too, has been negotiating, and not just (under those Chinese auspices) with Saudi Arabia, but with the US as well, in talks that may have culminated with the prisoner exchange of mid-August, in which $6 billion in frozen Iranian bank accounts in South Korea were transmitted to Qatar to be spent for humanitarian purposes in Iran, rousing rightwing commentary like this
Change the labels a bit and this cartoon could have gone in Der Stürmer in 1938 or so. The Iranian's features come directly from antisemitic caricatures of those days. pic.twitter.com/azUb1YQsJl
— Yas We Can @yastreblyansky.bsky.social (@Yastreblyansky) October 9, 2023
and Republican agitation (by people associated with Trump and Pompeo) for a war with Iran, as LGM's Cheryl Rofer was noting just the day before the new Gaza war began. The story of Iranian involvement in the last is in the rightwing interest to spread, especially if it's not true.
These are things I want to be watching as the situation develops; I don't know if they're related or not, but we'll see.
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