The Opposite of Iraq

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning's presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:  

To the media outlets and political left screaming, "Endless wars." Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the "exact opposite" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it's not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not "endless" because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself. 

That's what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they're hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela's new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

 Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more "pragmatic" faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you're urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he's expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he's trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that's really who's giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he's publicly against the war), doesn't think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work. 

Moving Mountains

Mountain moving, via.

I'd been struggling for a couple of days with the need to write a post commemorating the second anniversary of the Gaza war on October 7 when the news came that the negotiators in Sharm el Sheikh, including the Israeli and Palestinian delegations who had arrived on Monday, had brought the war to an end, sort of, or were about to do so, or that the beginning of its ending had been at any rate announced, on Donald Trump's social media platform under his account:

"Well, I'm blessed!" said the president. 

Not by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, though, which pointedly announced that they had already made their final decision (as it turned out this morning for the Venezuelan democracy advocate María Corina Machado) on Monday, that is days before Israel and Hamas assented to the 20-point Trump peace plan—Norwegian politicians are warning that Trump might express his rage in tariffs. The White House has issued its official complaint:

"President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will," White House spokesman Steven Cheung said in a post on X. "The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace."

I have to say I very much welcome the plan as far as I understand it, in spite of its seemingly being the old mountain-mover's accomplishment. It obviously can't make up for the suffering of the last two years, of those Israelis especially living in the desert kibbutzim near the Gaza border who endured the October 7 attack and of all the Gazans who bore the constant bombing and deprivation thereafter, victims on both sides of unspeakable collective punishments—it's so much better if that stops than if it doesn't. And there seems to be a great deal of hope that it really is stopping, for some kind of long term, though the initial declaration that the war was over has been giving way to more cautious reference to a ceasefire.

Total Victory

Satellite image by Planet Labs, food aid convoy in southern Gaza, via The New York Times.

This paragraph has been hanging out in the tabs for a few days already, but it's getting more bothersome as time goes by. From Tom Friedman:

This is the first Israeli-Palestinian war where the worst leaders on both sides are calling all the shots. The moderate Israeli opposition parties and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have no influence. And that is why I cannot tell you how or when it will end. Because Netanyahu still insists on “total victory” over Hamas, which he will never achieve, and the Hamas leadership still insists on surviving this war in order to still control Gaza the morning after, which it does not deserve.

Well, wait a minute, Tom. Not disagreeing with the basic premise that the Netanyahu coalition and the Hamas thing are the worst, as bad as political leadership gets, but "insisting on surviving this war" is not a good illustration of how bad the latter are. It's not crazy if they don't like a deal where they let go of the hostages and then IDF kills them all, which is why they keep insisting that the release of the hostages must  be accompanied by the end of the war. You may well feel that death is what they deserve, but it's not surprising that they feel different. This is actually normal. Good people and bad people alike object to being killed. You can bothsiderize the parties on some parameters but rejecting peace is not one of them.

I Know Everything

 

Drawing by Patrick Chappatte/Globecartoon.com, Switzerland/CagleCartoons.com 2018, via Washington Post.

David Rothkopf may be the most respectable person coming out to say this, and he says it well:

as much as we may condemn the actions of the regime in the Islamic Republic and feel its government is a threat to the stability of the region, Israel started this war. Furthermore, Israel started it not for the reason it gave—the imminent threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program. That threat has existed for many years and U.S. intelligence did not feel Iran had made any notable new strides recently. Rather, Netanyahu decided to strike for three reasons. 1.) He remains in political jeopardy and war has proven an effective means of helping him to stay in power. 2.) Rather than fearing an Iranian breakthrough on nukes, he feared one on a potential nuclear deal. He opposed the one negotiated under Obama. He goaded Trump into abandoning it. And he was deeply troubled that Trump was now advocating re-entering just such an agreement. 3.) He has made the conflict between Israel and Iran a centerpiece of his politics throughout his career. He is Ahab. It is his Great White Whale.

Of which point (1) is the most obvious to me, as you might expect, and the most offensive to the respectable, because of the moral implications that that is the kind of person the Israeli prime minister is, OK with killing a substantial number of human beings (something like 600 in Iran as of yesterday, including at least 239 civilians, and 24 in Israel, under Iran's retaliatory strikes, which seem to have been more effective than usual), as the price of office, and escaping prison in his corruption cases. That's exactly how I've seen him, though, for the last 18 months of slaughtering Gazan civilians (something like 50,000 at this point) and abandoning the kidnap victims from Israel still held in Gaza, so I'm not especially shocked.

Point (2), on the possibility of a US deal reviving the 2015 JCPOA or something like it, in which Iran would stop enriching uranium in return for some sanctions relief, hasn't been taken very seriously by the punditry at large, though newspapers loyally reported the five rounds of talks between the two countries in April and May, of which the last, held May 23 in Rome, was described by the Americans as "constructive—we made further progress" and by the Iranians as "one of the most professional rounds of negotiation," though they held out little hope of an agreement any time soon. 

At War With Virtually Everybody

 

Eli Feldstein, former spokesman in the Prime Minister's Office, now under indictment in an elaborate plot to use fabricated intelligence to exculpate Binyamin Netanyahu (who of course knows nothing about it) in the deaths of those six hostages. Photos via The Times of Israel.

I don't pretend to know any better than I did before the election what Joe Biden should have done about the Gaza war beyond what he did do, but I will say that the administration shouldn't send a ferocious letter like the one of October 16 if they're just going to back off from their threats the way they did on November 12 and pretend everything's fine, the way they've generally seemed to do for the whole 13 months. You can't have it both ways.

International Criminal Court has finally issued the arrest warrants the prosecutor requested last May for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, former Defense Minister Gallant, and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif (whom Israel claims to have killed in a missile attack back in July, but they've never offered any kind of evidence). White House and State Department quickly out condemning "moral equivalence", which I don't get. The ICC isn't claiming that Netanyahu and Deif are "morally equivalent", merely that they have something in common—both seem to be guilty of war crimes. And not the same crimes. Deif is held  responsible for the killing of some 1200 Israelis and others in the massacres of October 7, Netanyahu and Gallant for the killing of at least 44,000 Palestinians, a large majority of them noncombatant women and children, and the deliberate starving and displacement of two million more, for one thing, and Deif committed his crime first, so he "started it", so that Israel is entitled to argue that it has merely been exercising its "right to defend itself" (needless to say, Gazans are not allowed to argue that they were driven stir-crazy by their 16 years in a kind of prison camp from which their freedom of movement was under absolute Israeli and Egyptian control, stir-craziness isn't a legitimate defense).

BBC News Hour asked a Prime Minister's Office flunky "what evidence do you have" of some complaint the flunky was making, I didn't quite catch what, but I think it must have been Israel's irrelevant allegations against prosecutor Karim Khan:

Netanyahyu's Other War. III

 

Following the Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, October 28, 2024. Photo by AFP via Times of Israel.

At a certain point Biden reached a conclusion: that the only way to stop the Gaza war and prevent a wider war all around the Middle East was to get rid of Netanyahu. I don't know when that happened, though an incident reported by Franklin Foer looks to me like a likely candidate, in late 2023, when Biden was entreating Netanyahu to turn over to the Palestinian Authority the tax money that Israel collects in the West Bank to finance the PA's work, such as it is (I'm not going to claim it's a very effective government), but Netanyahu doesn't care about the fact that it's the PA's money: on December 23

Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state there.

“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”

As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked into the phone, We’re done.

They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.

That rhymes, in a way, with the story of Biden's worst blowup with Netanyahu, back during his vice presidency. That was about the West Bank too, as remembered by Michael Hirsh in Politico Magazine:

Netanyahu's Other War. II

Dadanite statues dating back to 4th to 1st century B.C.E., found in a funerary temple in Al-‘Ulā, Saudi Arabia, March 2024. Photo by Ali Lajami, via Wikimedia Commons.

The prisoner exchanges of November, five weeks into the war, as I wrote at the time, seemed aimed at a broader purpose than simply freeing the hostages captured by Hamas: permanent peace, on a scale most of the world had stopped imagining, towards which this was a step. Biden had signaled it himself, in a Washington Post op-ed the week before the exchanges began:

for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released....

The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources.

In fact, the program was to move toward the outcome US and Saudi negotiators had been envisaging in Doha, before the war began: while the Israelis stubbornly refused to think about what the end of the war might look like, Biden had already imagined it; a plan already existed, in some detail, with the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia providing the political-diplomatic framework within which the Palestinian state could be constructed from the bottom up, from infrastructure to social safety net, as we now understand, though my readers may have thought it was kind of fanciful at the time, and I didn't really have any evidence of the kind Foer has now provided.  

As long as the hostages were being released, the cessation of hostilities could be maintained, the food and water supply in Gaza could be replenished, the health system restored, a ceasefire evolve into a genuine peace; the release of Palestinian detainees from Israeli jails would supply the makings of a political class to replace not only Hamas but also the elderly and corrupt rulers of the old Palestinian Authority, often seen as Israeli puppets. And then there was the political economy, as Biden said:

Netanyahu's Other War. I

  

Abbott ID-NOW™ COVID-19 2.0 detects SARS-CoV-2 in 6‑12 minutes with the option to add on an ID NOW Influenza A & B 2 test without collecting another sample. About six pounds, comes with a kit of 24 tests and 24 nasal swabs. This is the machine of which Donald Trump is said to have sent "a bunch" to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in spring 2020. Or maybe it was one machine and a bunch of test kits. I can imagine Putin needed several, though, including some for his retainers, so that the one he used would be dedicated to his snot and his alone. Via. 

The most exciting for me of the revelations from the teasing of Bob Woodward's new book on the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and US politics (it's titled simply War) wasn't about Trump's and Putin's continuing relationship, anyway, though it was nice to have some confirmation about that. I was more impressed by the stuff reported by CNN on the relationship between Joe Biden and Binyamin Netanyahu: 

“What’s your strategy, man?” Biden asked Netanyahu during an April phone call, Woodward reports.

“We have to go into Rafah,” Netanyahu said.

“Bibi, you’ve got no strategy.” Biden responded....

“I know he’s going to do something but the way I limit it is tell him to ‘Do nothing,’” Biden told his advisers, according to Woodward.

But Biden’s frustration with Netanyahu boiled over as the war continued to escalate.

“He’s a fucking liar,” Biden said privately of Netanyahu, after Israel went into Rafah, Woodward writes.

“Bibi, what the fuck?” Biden yelled at Netanyahu in July after an Israeli airstrike killed a top Hezbollah military commander and three civilians in Beirut, according to Woodward.

“You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor,” Biden said to Netanyahu.

The Gaza News Is Biden News

All of a sudden this morning the Gaza ceasefire seemed to be back in the air. I was determined not to let them sucker me again

but right now an awful lot of things really seem to be happening, starting with yesterday morning's Biden-Netanyahu call, which went on for half an hour, according to NPR, and during which, according to the White House readout,

President Biden and the Prime Minister discussed ongoing efforts to finalize a ceasefire deal together with the release of hostages, as outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council, the G7, and countries around the world.

The leaders discussed the recent response received from Hamas. The President welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to authorize his negotiators to engage with U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian mediators in an effort to close out the deal. 

or going back beyond that to Tuesday's reports in The New York Times and Jerusalem Post that the Israeli military leadership is starting to get seriously fed up with Netanyahu's apparent insistence that they should have to fight two wars simultaneously, against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and demanding that the government start prioritizing getting the hostages back, even if it means accepting Hamas's terms and withdrawing from Gaza entirely, and apparently saying so sort of openly, to The Times:

What's Going On. II

From the Livre d'Or des Voyages of Louis Mainard, 1890, via picryl.com.

Déjà vu all over again? Biden (the day after the guilty verdict for convicted felon Donald Trump, some people think that's relevant) announces proposals for a ceasefire in Gaza, to be carried out in three phases: six weeks during which all Israeli forces withdraw from the Strip, hostages in Gaza (especially women and elderly, and remains of the dead) will be exchanged for detainees in Israeli prisons, Gazan civilians will return home, supplied with temporary shelters, and delivery of food, water, medicine, and fuel will get back to full strength, and the parties will work out the details of a probably lengthier second phase; a second phase in which the exchange of hostages and prisoners will be completed and the parties will negotiate a final, permanent ceasefire; and a third, which is supposed to last forever, when Gaza is rebuilt and the last remains are transmitted.  

Isn't this approximately where we arrived three weeks ago, when Haaretz reported that Hamas had accepted a deal proposed by Egypt with a very similar shape, and Israel appeared to have turned it down?

Not exactly. The big difference, to my mind, which isn't getting a lot of press attention, is that this one is billed as an Israeli proposal—Biden is very insistent on that:

Moral Equivalence

Larry Thomas and Bret Mendenhall in Uwe Boll's 2008 Postal, via The New York Times.

On the prospect of the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants on Yahya Sinwar (the head of Hamas in Gaza), Ismail Haniyeh (head of the Hamas Political Bureau), Mohammed Deif (commander-in-chief of the Qassam Brigades), and the Israeli prime minister and defense minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, there's been a lot of angry talk about the ICC prosecutor practicing "moral equivalence", including from President Biden—

The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.  We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.  

A truly weird error in this connection from NBC News, which ran an interview with Netanyahu yesterday in which the prime minister complained that he was being given a "bum rap" (Trump's language choices are a bad influence, now Bibi too sounds like a 1950s gangster):

Echoing Biden's comments, Netanyahu said Khan's decision to seek arrest warrants for both Israel's and Hamas' leaders reflected a "false symmetry" that he said was comparable to the arrest warrants that were issued for both President George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Remember when ICC put out a warrant on Bush? I was so startled I looked it up, but of course it didn't happen (the court did open a preliminary investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan after the country ratified the Rome statute in 2003, but after 11 years of that, from 2006 to 2017, it took until 2020 for them to decide to move on to a full investigation, upon which Trump put sanctions on them, which Biden has reversed). And Netanyahu didn't say it did. You can get a more accurate report of what he said on NBC from The Times of Israel:

Right to Defend

 

Village of Atatra, Northern Gaza, October 21, 2023. Satellite image by Maxar Technologies, via AP. 

A "centrist" Israeli parliamentarian on BBC was less uncomfortable to listen to than the rightwingers generally are, soft-spoken with a kind of Central European vocal quality unlike the shouty, hectoring Likudniks or the coldly domineering IDF spox, who all seem to have been trained in BBC announcer school themselves, but the message wasn't really any different: all about Israel's unquestioned "right to defend itself" (as if that were what they've been doing over the last six months, as opposed to creating an unending supply of future Hamas fighters thirsting for revenge from now into perpetuity) and the prosecution of a "just war". I'll get to that, and St. Thomas Aquinas, later. I just want to point out how deeply unimaginative the Israeli "center" is, like everywhere else, while I keep focusing on Netanyahu and his unspeakable fascist partners, and how unwilling the center is to even try to think outside the conservative box, and sometimes worse than that: like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant's proposal to build a shiny new settler city, Ariel, the capital of "Samaria":

“There needs to be a large and significant city developed there, following what is happening in the mountain ridge of Ariel, because this is the most central junction that allows us to shift Israel’s population eastward,” explained the defense minister.

To which I responded

Drang nach Osten. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drang_n... Fulfilling the Likud slogan "from the sea to the river [Jordan]" Honestly Gallant and Gantz have swung so far right themselves they might as well just join Likud.

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) May 11, 2024 at 1:52 PM

I'm running a little late on things because I spent too much time on the wrong State Department report (the 2023 Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Israel, West Bank, and Gaza, which lays out many facts on misconduct by Israeli, Hamas, and Palestinian Authority forces through the end of last year but doesn't offer any opinions on the legal position or what Congress should or shouldn't do about it), before Just Security posted the one I've been waiting for, its Report to Congress under Section 2 of the Natonal Security Memorandum on Safeguards and Accountability with Respect to Transferred Defense Articles and Defense Services (NSM-20), a very valuable, though frustrating, document. 

The purpose is to examine assurances from seven recipients of US arms aid that are currently engaged in conflicts (Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, and Ukraine) that they will 

Newsletter: Summer of 2024

This looks like the development I've been imagining for the last five months among the Israeli public, as the hostages become more and more salient and the need for revenge less and less so. It's evidently connected to the video released a little over a week ago by Hamas of the American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin (Hersh was my dad's Yiddish name, as it happens), in which he denounced Netanyahu for abandoning the hostages and made the claim that 70 of the hostages have been killed, so far, by Israeli bombs, which may well be true (I've expected from the start that IDF would kill more hostages than Hamas would), even though the video is plainly released for propaganda purposes, and it seems that a lot of Israelis believe it.

The really curious thing is it seems to be where the Hamas leadership is at too, asking for a permanent ceasefire and release of many prisoners in Israel in return for release of hostages held in Gaza. The odd man out is Binyamin Netanyahu, who can't accept the permanent ceasefire, which would prevent IDF from killing everybody in the Hamas leadership.

I know, I know, Hamas is bad (but "you don't make peace with your friends," as a wise man once said, "you make it with very unsavory enemies"). At the same time, if you think about it, you can understand why they might be reluctant to get killed. That's definitely not the most evil thing about them. It's even kind of normal. 

The Chatbot Did It

 

Another Substack post.

Word and Deed

Gaza around the turn of the 20th century, via Palestine Remembered.

Jonathan Capehart was on my radio yesterday morning, talking about his NBC interview last week of President Biden, and they came to this exceptionally fraught moment:

Jonathan Capehart (06:22):

Some have suggested you should go back to Israel and address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Is that something you would do?

President Joe Biden (06:31):

Yes.

Jonathan Capehart (06:35):

Would that have to be at the invitation of the Prime Minister or could that be at the invitation of the President?

President Joe Biden (06:42 [after a pretty substantial pause]):

I’d rather not discuss it more.

Biden didn't mind saying he might address the Knesset, but he didn't want to say who might be inviting him. Or rather, since you wouldn't expect it to happen other than by an invitation from Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is by definition the head of the government in the Knesset, and runs the things that happen there, he didn't want to say that it might be from somebody else, such as President Herzog, the head of state (whose only direct interaction with the Knesset is when he's accepting the resignation of a prime minister, or inviting a politician to try to form a new government). Or he couldn't or at least didn't want to deny that he might have an invitation from President Herzog, let's say, so he preferred to drop the subject and let Capehart make of it what he would.

Brian Lehrer, the host of the radio show, was suitably gobsmacked, and expressed himself, as people so often do, with a "can you imagine" scenario, like "Can you imagine if some foreign leader came to Washington and addressed Congress over the head of President Biden?"

Gaza Update

 

Israeli journalist Noga Tarnopolsky said something that especially struck me on BBC, on the attitudes among the families of the hostages still held in Gaza, in reference to Antony Blinken's latest visit: that they trust President Joe Biden, because they're confident he's doing everything he can to bring the hostages back, and that they don't feel that way about their own prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

I'm glad to hear somebody does. I'm not myself ready to give up on Biden in this context, but it's really not easy and not getting easier. What I've supposed could be his plan, to get a Palestinian state out of this horror, still looks delusional to seasoned observers, who understand that there's less appetite in Israel for such a thing than ever, especially inside the government, now completely dominated by parties that have been absolutely opposed to it since their deadly enemies of the Israeli "center-left" signed the Oslo accords (though I wonder if the inclusion of center-left ministers in the war cabinet makes a difference to that), but also in a general population that gets its information from extraordinarily biased TV coverage; and my own idea of how it might work could be ridiculously baroque.

Starting with the observation that there is no direct action Biden can take that will save a single life in Gaza, because of the situation inside the US as well. Biden cannot threaten to cut off military aid to Israel because Congress is not going to allow it. Lobbying groups like AIPAC make sure it doesn't happen. American Jews, overwhelmingly liberals and Democrats, may not like it, but we can't do much about it; it's not our money that makes the difference. And putting qualifications on support for Israel is a new and untested position for Democrats; for traditional Democrats in Congress, likely the party majority, it's hard to imagine questioning Israel on anything. 

And, most important. Netanyahu really doesn't care: he's the first Israeli prime minister to take open sides in a US election (for his old Boston private equity colleague Mitt Romney in 2012, and for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020), because he's confident it will never threaten American support for any government he puts together. Whatever Biden does has to deal with this lack of the leverage Americans had on earlier Israeli governments.

Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself. Maybe It Should Try Doing It.

Habima Square, Tel Aviv, November 11. Photo by Miriam Alster/Flash90 via Times of Israel.

Maybe this latest outrage, the IDF killing of three escaping Israeli hostages—they'd improvised a white flag and had their shirts off, I figure in the hope that would show they weren't suicide terrorists rushing the troops, and yet the troops fired—will really start making the Israeli public rethink what's being done in their names. "Israel has a right to defend itself," as the Hasbara always reminds us, but is that what it's doing? 

Then there's the other body count, of hostages killed with their captors under the collapsed buildings in the bombing raids, for which the latest number released by Hamas is 57 (of whom IDF has acknowledged 18, without, I think, releasing the names, if they have them). Israel is killing Hamas's prisoners!

And it's not obliterating Hamas, though some of those killed doubtless belonged to the organization—maybe as many as 40%, though that's only estimated by assuming that every male between the ages of 18 and 59 in the territory is a combatant, even though only a third of adults in Gaza expressed any support for Hamas in the October 6 survey.

New polling shows a hugely changed picture, though:

Elon Musk's Great Replacement

I'll try to post a real post here very soon. Meanwhile this.

Gaza Update

Photo by Janis Laizas/Reuters via Jerusalem Post.

Something is going on in Israeli cities, though I have no way of knowing if it's significant in the way I might want it to be, but it looks like a change in the character of the nightly demonstrations against the government, as Voice of America reports:

On Saturday night, thousands of Israelis took part in mass protests in Israeli cities calling for release of the 241 hostages being held by Hamas.

In Jerusalem, protesters gathered in front of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's residence, calling him to resign in light of the security failure over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

Another rally took place at the Tel Aviv Museum Square near the Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv to support the families of the Israeli hostages, and 40 others who are missing. The crowd chanted in Hebrew "now, now, now," the words of one of the hostages from the video posted by Hamas, stressing the urgency of the hostages’ release.

It's getting billed more like a whole new family of protests, but it reads more like a kind of coalition between the anti-Netanyahu demonstrators who have been doing this since the government began rolling out their ideas for the judicial coup at the beginning of the year and the relatives and friends of the hostages. Same demonstrations, new issue, presumably in the wake of the Hamas dangle on Thursday of an offer to exchange all the hostages for "all the prisoners in the Israeli detention centers".

Noam Alon, 24, told VOA his girlfriend, Inbar Haiman, was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival, where more than 260 revelers were massacred. He said the Israeli government should make more of an effort to bring the hostages home.

"They should put the hostages’ situation on top of their priorities, and pay any price, even if it says to release all the Palestinian prisoners, we are expecting them to pay any price to bring the hostages back — today," he said.

He is sleeping in a tent in the square, he said, his girlfriend "cannot speak for herself. We don’t even know what conditions she is in. I am here to speak for her."

It's as if the heavy, sullen, unslakable thirst for vengeance were gradually giving way to a healthier thirst, to get the family back together, something that's actually possible to achieve, though it will be very difficult (I understand you can't take the Hamas offer at any kind of face value). Incidentally freeing all the Palestinian prisoners would unleash some important Hamas enemies on the world; I'm thinking particularly of the Fatah veteran Marwan Barghouti, who's been in detention for 21 years and probably should have replaced 87-year-old Mahmud Abbas at the head of his organization a very long time ago. 

"We are expecting them to pay any price!" And so they should.

Netanyahu—the only Israeli in any kind of leadership who still refuses to acknowledge any responsibility in the October 7 disaster—is as unpopular as ever; his approval rating is 18%. Bringing the hostages home may be the only thing that can save him. Though I hope it doesn't—I hope the hostages are freed and somebody else gets the credit.

A Little Hopy-Changier

Palestinian farmer in Tubas, West Bank, after planting an olive tree, 2014. And in 2023...

BBC yesterday morning ran an interview on the Israel situation with retired general Dan Halutz, who was chief of staff of the IDF in 2005-07, and who said something that surprised me: that the reason Prime Minister Netanyahu is pushing so hard on these constitutional changes (they're kind of a national version of the Independent Legislature theory, taking away the Supreme Court's ability to practice judicial review and giving the Knesset power to override Supreme Court rulings, and also to put the nomination of judges wholly in the power of the government, i.e. of the prime minister and cabinet) is to increase his chances of staying out of prison. Period.

The interviewer (the great Rasia Iqbal) was surprised too, and made him repeat it—to the effect of (as I remember it, I don't have a transcript): "You're really saying that the prime minister wants to change the Basic Law to keep himself out of prison?" "Of course!" Halutz said. "Well, for one thing."