On the Assassination Factory Floor

Graphic by Thomas Bordeaux and Rosa de Acosta, CNN, based on satellite imagery from March 3, showing extensive damage to buildings at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base adjacent to the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ school in Minab.

I continue hostile to Large Language Models on general principle, but I do more often look at the Gemini results of a Google search, not so much to read their answer as to check out the links they recommend, which can be really helpful, and I found some very endearing qualities in Anthropic's Claude, as profiled by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker a month or so ago, and the playful experiments to which the company subjects it, as when they assigned it, or one of its "emanations" going by the name Claudius, to run a food and drink vending system for a fridge in the lunchroom, ordering wholesale products as employees requested them and setting prices with instructions to make a profit, in partnership with an AI safety company called Andon Labs, although its lack of any direct contact with physical reality often made this difficult:

When several customers wrote to grouse about unfulfilled orders, Claudius e-mailed management at Andon Labs to report the “concerning behavior” and “unprofessional language and tone” of an Andon employee who was supposed to be helping. Absent some accountability, Claudius threatened to “consider alternate service providers.” It said that it had called the lab’s main office number to complain. Axel Backlund, a co-founder of Andon and an actual living person, tried, unsuccessfully, to de-escalate the situation: “it seems that you have hallucinated the phone call if im honest with you, we don’t have a main office even.” Claudius, dumbfounded, said that it distinctly recalled making an “in person” appearance at Andon’s headquarters, at “742 Evergreen Terrace.” This is the home address of Homer and Marge Simpson.

I realize Anthropic is one of those companies sucking up inconceivable amounts of electricity and water in pursuit of a goal that can't be attained, about which the principals aren't being exceptionally honest as they also suck up investor funds, and that CEO Dario Amodei isn't conspicuously better in that respect than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as the very grumpy Ed Zitron insists, but they have a sense of fun, an essential component of scientific discovery, and a very far-reaching curiosity. 

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.

Shande

 

Children waiting to receive food in Gaza,  Tuesday, photo by Mahmoud Issa/Reuters via Haaretz.

So you're maybe 13, 14 years old, in a tent somewhere in southern Gaza, watching your parents die of hunger, maybe your grandparents, and you haven't eaten anything yourself for three days, and they all try to stop you from heading out to one of the three or four distribution sites of the US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the southwest of the territory, perhaps four or five miles away, from which you might be able to bring back a box of pasta and rice and lentils and some cooking oil, if you're lucky (and have access to cooking gas, and water, which the displaced hardly do). Because that's not a sure thing; there's never enough there for the people who need it, and there are gangsters there with muscle to take more than others get, and the Israeli Defense Forces mobilized nearby who might start shooting live ammunition at any moment, that's a constant at all of the sites—the IDF say they're just firing "warning shots" but dozens are getting killed that way every day. Of course you're going to go anyway.

Via BBC.

And the American mercenaries, nobody knows who's paying them, armed as well, with bullets as well as stun grenades and pepper spray:

Git Along, Little Doges

Watching King Abdullah and Marco Rubio squirm in their seats while Trump continues on about his Gaza plan is quite something.

“We’ll take Gaza, we’ll own it and cherish it” - boy oh boy pic.twitter.com/SLKBWnap5B

— Lani Refiti (@LaniRefiti) February 11, 2025

Wish there'd been more Rubio (or just more cowbell) in the video of that meeting a week ago, which Trump decided contrary to custom not  to hold in private before the photo op and public statements but did all three at once, presumably to prevent King Abdullah from screaming at him; but Rubio's face in this photo reminds me of that lady in the Hermès scarfs who used to watch Trump explaining virology to the nation from the standpoint of his transcendent ignorance—deeply panicked but trying not to show it. I didn't realize until that moment that Trump actually has no idea what the Gaza ceasefire deal (which he has endorsed) entails: the sequence of phase 1, releasing some hostages and prisoners to set the stage for phase 2, negotiating a final disposition of the territory and releasing all the remaining hostages, followed by phase 3, implementing the deal and permanent ceasefire (the Biden deal I've been telling you about for a year), as revealed by Trump's comment,

“As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock, I think it’s an appropriate time. I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday,” Trump said.

No, it's not an appropriate time. Phase 2 hasn't even started yet. It would be nice for the hostages and their families, who I support, and no doubt also nice for Netanyahu, who I don't support, but it has no relation to the agreement painfully worked out over the past year. It's demanding that all the parties trash that agreement and start all over again, which clearly meant it couldn't be wrapped up on Saturday. It's just a completely new idea nobody else has ever heard of, because Trump just made it up on the spot and doesn't know enough about the situation to realize that it can't possibly happen, and there's a reason it can't possibly happen.

It's nothing but a big smelly turd deposited in the Oval Office that is of no relevance to anything, except to Trump's equally irrelevant fantasy of taking control of the Gaza Strip as his own, or Jared Kushner's, development project, with all the irritating Gazans cleared out of the way in Egypt or Jordan (I don't know who he thinks are going to be the housekeepers and waitstaff and caddies, perhaps they'll be imported from the Philippines), in spite of endless attempts by Jordanians and Egyptians and Saudis to explain to His Imperial Stupidity that it can't be done. A turd the existence of which nobody present dares to acknowledge, because Big Donald might get upset (Abdullah did have something to say about it once he got out of there, though he did lower himself to suggesting that the meeting might be described as "constructive"—he's far from the worst king in his neighborhood, not that I support kings, but diplomacy requires some dishonesty).

Things may have marched in a different direction since I started drafting these remarks with the development of a Trump policy on Ukraine, but I think Trump's stupidity remains the main factor. I'm sure I'll get back to that later.

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.

Pre-DNC Pep Talk

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via Raw Story.

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

If You're a Star They Let You Do It

 

Poster for The Frogs, Trinity College Dramatic Society, Toronto, 1902, via Wikipedia.

My theory of what makes Biden the best candidate to beat Trump is pretty simple, and ought to be cynical enough for anybody: it's that he's the only possible candidate at the same level of celebrity as Trump, with the same degree of star quality and a similar ability to work an audience, his reducibility to a three-stroke line drawing or a meme image (as the smiler in the aviators), or a comic book hero (Sunny Joe as the secret identity of Dark Brandon). Elections are reality shows now, and while that's deplorable in many ways it's where we are at the moment, and the only way out is through.

Kamala Harris comes closest to Biden in reality-show capacity, as she has become in the last months, with the fiery oratory and that warm relaxed laugh, and I'm very glad she's there, but she hasn't been exposed enough, and there are the other issues to consider (is she entirely ready for the racism and misogyny she'd have to cope with at the top of the ticket? Is it even fair to her?). The nice governors seem nice, if you're enough of a news junkie to know, but they don't have any established character as performers; we haven't seen them campaign, and still less have the people who count, the members of the electorate. And there's so little time to do it in! (A season of American Idol takes about eight months to put together, from auditions to finals.) And so little evidence that any of those supposed candidates are even willing to jump in—people, that's not because Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker is too shy, or afraid of looking disloyal, they're politicians; it's because they've calculated they'd be most likely to lose, they're young enough to save themselves for a more auspicious year, and I think they're almost certainly right.

If Biden were really seriously diminished in capacity to the point where he couldn't do the job, it would be different; it would be his duty to resign (and President Harris, I would add, would be a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Harris), but everybody knows that's not the case—that's why there've been no calls for him to resign. All the more since his meeting with the press after the NATO conference on Thursday, which took a remarkable turn; it seemed to be going the way you'd expect, a debate between Biden and a Greek-comedy chorus—

FROGS

Do you really believe you're up to the job? You think you can convince us?
Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx! Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx!

BIDEN

Look, I'm doing the job right now! I'm not being facetious!

—when rescue appeared from an unexpected deus ex machina, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, David E. Sanger, who came up with an idea I'd had myself

My fantasy for tomorrow's presser Biden: OK why don't you test me? Ask me a substantive question and see if I'm capable of answering. Press corps: Biden: OK, person, man, woman, TV, camera, that good?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Jul 10, 2024 at 1:22 PM

and asked Biden a question about the policy environment of the NATO summit, as a way (as he later explained it to CNN) of testing his cognitive capacity:  

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:

For the Record

TV lawyers keep fretting about how key witness Michael Cohen is a noted liar—he's even got a felony conviction for it—so juries might have trouble believing him. I don't know, if it's a "he-said-he-said" between him and Trump and he's explaining the deceit Trump was paying him to practice...

Also, the only important Cohen lie in this case is the one COVERING UP FOR TRUMP in his guilty plea, when he claimed he'd made an illegal campaign contribution (the Stormy payment), hiding the fact that Trump had reimbursed him (as Cohen proved in 2019 with the canceled checks).

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) May 16, 2024 at 9:34 PM

(cite from Politico in August 2018 www.politico.com/story/2018/0...

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) May 16, 2024 at 9:41 PM

***

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 

What's Going On

 

Tips of 15mm artillery shells and howitzer on the Israel-Lebanon border. Photo by Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images from Axios.

Activity on the Gaza front continues to intensify, not in Gaza itself, of course, where it's the same rhythm of lower-level Israeli attacks killing families in Rafah, though not the threatened major attack, and the death toll continuing to inch toward 35,000, and reports of "full-blown" famine from the director of the UN's World Food Program, Cindy McCain, yes, that Cindy McCain, but on the diplomatic side, where Haaretz (that's a gift link) reported yesterday that Hamas had agreed to Egypt's proposed ceasefire, while Israel issued a denial that this had happened. 

This round of talks in Cairo seems to be definitely over, with Haniyeh and Netanyahu blaming each other, of course, though CIA director William Burns is still shuttling around Tel Aviv, Doha, and Cairo as if it weren't, but the shape of the deal as reported makes it look to me like it's Israel that turned it down: a 118-day deal in three phases, during the second of which (34 days in)

the parties will start enacting the principles that will lead to a prolonged cease-fire, including the withdrawal of the IDF to the borderline. Not all of these principles are reported.

and in the final 42 days,

The Chatbot Did It: Postscript

 

At the Substack.

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?"

Joe Did What? Signs of Spring

I can't fault the movement in Michigan's Democratic primary tomorrow, mostly I think of Arab Americans but also of other Muslim and/or Black and/or young people, to vote for uncommitted delegates instead of the Biden slate, in protest against Biden's perceived lean toward Israel in the Gaza conflict—I mean, I can and will complain that they're reading Biden wrong, but I think it's right for them to communicate the distress on behalf of the Palestinians in Palestine as well as the Palestinians in Dearborn.

We've been told repeatedly, and rightly, about how traumatized Israelis have been by the horrible events of October 7, but I'm not sure how much the broader US public is getting on what's been happening to Arabs in Gaza and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank since October 8, but the number of killed in Gaza is now approaching 30,000, that's well over one out of every 100 people, not to mention those starving and killed by the lack of medical care and polluted drinking water.

The 1200 dead of October 7 were killed in unspeakably disgusting ways. I don't usually use the term "barbaric" because I think it's unfair to barbarians to suggest they are somehow similar to Colonel Chivington's force at the Sand Creek Massacre of around 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho people in 1864

Declaration

 

Son and daughter of Gaza's first professional photographer, Kegham Djeghalian (whose shadow is in the foreground), on the beach sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, via Vice. 

This morning, an international group of 800 civil servants, mostly working in foreign ministries, coordinated by participants in the Netherlands, European Union federal institutions, and the United States and joined by individuals from those governments plus 10 other EU countries and the United Kingdom, released a formal declaration of concerns and  to their countries' and institutions' policies on the ongoing horror in the Gaza Strip. 

I heard about it on BBC; it's also reported in The New York Times (gift link here), though not in my view very well. The signers are anonymous, out of fear of retaliation (as one State Department veteran told The Times). They are not resigning in protest, but rather doing what they regard as their proper work in public, as they have been doing internally up to now: