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.

For the Record: Miscellany

 

Olivia Wise/San Francisco Examiner.

Twitter is just about as awful as they tell you now, and I'm spending more time at Bluesky (anybody wants an invite let me know in Twitter DMs), but things still happen at Twitter that I don't want to miss, and I keep getting involved.

Queen Qanon of the Space Lasers wants to know why a gag order isn’t imposed against the cyclist who called her a fascist. pic.twitter.com/kti7HvbZPC

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) October 18, 2023

"Guards! Guards! Put that bicyclist under arrest!"

"For what?"

"She disrespected me!"

Also Margie:

I can only imagine how embarrassed Marje is gonna be when she finds out that Doug’s actions disenfranchised thousands of voters. pic.twitter.com/QPE2hE2qpn

— Qtalk (@Q__talk) October 18, 2023

Here's how Mackey did the "crime of posting memes", if you don't remember:

Israel's 9/11

Beach in Gaza City, 1950s, via Quds News Network.

If I'd been a blogger around the time of the 9/11 catastrophe—I was already an opinion-haver, in any case—I'd have written something about the prospects of the Cheney administration launching a punitive expedition to Afghanistan, with or without the aim of capturing Osama bin Laden: that it wouldn't do any good, but was inevitable anyway, if only for political reasons, and it wasn't worth trying to stop it from happening.

It wouldn't do any good in the sense that it wouldn't change any hearts and minds one way or the other; it wouldn't persuade any of those Taliban to recognize the dread consequences of defying the United States, or convince any of their local enemies to resist them, or frighten anybody out of trying to do another 9/11, and I didn't think it would inspire them to violate the traditional law of hospitality by turning their Al-Qa'eda guests over to the Americans. And of course a bunch of civilians would die (in the event, in last three months of 2001, starting from the beginning of "Operation Enduring Freedom" on October 7, between 1,000 and 1,300, according to the Project on Defense Alternatives, killed in US airstrikes, plus maybe 3,200 more of "starvation, exposure, illness, or injury sustained" while they were running away from the bombing), but that couldn't be helped, because the American people, as the politicians understood them, were crying out for vengeance, for the lives lost in the Twin Towers and the other casualties of the day, and the politicians were probably right.

So I could see it would kill a lot of innocent people and accomplish nothing, but I still wouldn't have tried to stop it. What would be the use? Instead, I'd have recommended limiting it, as much as possible, to the status of a punitive expedition, like General Pershing's vain pursuit of Pancho Villa in northern Mexico in 1916-17. I'd have begged Bush not to reject out of hand the Taliban's offer to turn Osama over to a third country after the first week of bombing

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."

West of Eden: Surrender Documents

Jews and Palestinians sharing the street at the Jaffa Gate in Old Jerusalem before World War I, via +972.

This is making it pretty explicit:

The famous Jared Kushner "peace plan", part of which the White House unveiled a sketchy picture of over the weekend, isn't a settlement but a surrender in which Palestinians are being asked to permanently abandon their claims of nationhood in return for something more than $25 billion (but much less than the $50 billion you'll see in the headlines, since almost half of that is devoted to funding projects in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan) in bribe money over ten years, ponied up not by Israel or the United States but by the "wealthy Gulf states and nations in Europe and Asia, along with private investors" who should be represented at the formal rollout in Manama, Bahrain, this week—no Palestinians, who are boycotting the conference, will be there, and no Israelis either; since they have no obligations under the proposal, why should they bother?

Nor will the "regional business leaders" the plan depends on, according to the Washington Post. Why wouldn't they want to invest a billion dollars in Gaza and West Bank tourism? Well, there's not going to be an airport for the West Bank, and the only internal options are buses, shared taxis, or a dicey experience with a rental car:

West of Eden: We've Captured Brooks

Tear gas at the Gaza border. Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images via Toronto Globe & Mail.

I'm in the unexpected position of being grateful for a David Brooks column, enough to want to not criticize it (very hard), on this week's Gaza demonstrations ("The Gaza Violence: How Extremism Corrupts"):

I see the situation through the “extremism corrupts everybody” narrative. My narrative starts with the idea that the creation of the state of Israel was a historic achievement involving a historic wrong — the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians.

For two generations, in what we can call the Yitzhak Rabin era, the leaders of Israel and of Palestinians tried, sometimes dysfunctionally and bloodily, to address this wrong and find two homelands around the pre-1967 borders.

But sometime in the 1990s, a mental shift occurred. Extremism grew on the Israeli side, exemplified by the ultranationalist who murdered Rabin, but it exploded on the Palestinian side. Palestinian extremism took on many of the shapes recognizable in extremism everywhere.

That's a very remarkable concession in the top paragraph, from someone of his position, and a place where a little bothsiderism is welcome for a change. His critique of the current Israeli government, sort of projected, not wrongly, from his critique of Trumpian conservatism—

By and large, Israel has taken the former path. The shift from the politics of Rabin and Shimon Peres to that of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman is a move from pluralism to ethnocentrism, from relentless engagement to segregation. It’s a shift from tough realism to the magical thinking that Palestinians are somehow going to go away.

—is well founded, and more accurate (when he's talking about US Republicans, he's evading his own and his friends' responsibility for the disaster, and when he's talking about Likud he's not).

I disagree, obviously, with the specific bothsides balance Brooks finds here—I think failing to recognize the gigantic aymmetry of financial and military power between the sides spoils the analysis, and I think he's specifically wrong about what happened to Palestinians after the 1994 Oslo accord and the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, which was not a march to extremism but a confused variety of reactions of despair, including the shockingly un-Palestinian growth of gloomy religiosity. They were in despair at what we might now realize was an increasing rejection on the Israeli side of the peace process altogether—the growth of Israeli extremism was exemplified not by one assassination but by the slow death of the Labor Party and the successive governments of Netanyahu, Sharon, and Netanyahu abandoning the promise of Oslo and instituting what amounts to an apartheid system, with the difference that South African whites provided jobs to black Africans, and Israeli Jews prefer importing Filipinos.

The way Brooks makes the contrast—

Yasir Arafat was once a terrorist, but at least he used terror to win practical concessions. The actions today — the knife attacks, the manipulation of protesters to rush the border fence — are of little military or strategic value. They are ventures in suicidal theater.

—is wry, but slips over the chronology in an unhelpful way: the "suicidal theater" of the Gaza border rush is an echo of the First Intifada of 1987-91, which is as close as Palestinians ever came to a Ghandian practice of nonviolent resistance, and also the most politically effective strategy they ever employed [update: and as Ten Bears notes in the comments, "manipulation" is bullshit]. What happened on Tuesday, horrible as it was because of the hysterical IDF response, was a look back to that effectiveness—it's even shaken Brooks!

Can Jared Kushner Do His Job? What Job?

In my film version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, I'm casting John Kelly as the unnamed governess, Donald Trump as poor little Miles, and Jared Kushner as the unspeakably evil, but possibly imaginary, ghost of Peter Quint. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

I can't get over all the solemn concern as to whether Jared Kushner will be able to do his job without a security clearance—like Mara Liasson audibly shaking her head on NPR: "He won't be able to read the President's Daily Briefing!", that single page of amply illustrated bullet points highlighting stories where the president's name shows up. Imma come right out and speculate there isn't that much classified information in the PDB anyway, not only because the governess is afraid Trump might get angry, or pass what he learns to Putin or Netanyahu or who knows who, just by way of showing off how clued in he is, but because there's no real positive point in it—what useful thing would Trump be able to do with such information? He doesn't even believe it if it doesn't show up on Fox.

Too many things coming to a head here

My screengrab.

If Emperor Trump wanted to create some kind of Reichstag fire excuse for declaring a national emergency, if you know what I mean, he couldn't do better than declaring that the Palestinian peace process is dead and that from the US point of view Israel is basically all the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. I'm not saying that's what he did—I don't think it is at all what he did—but I'll bet at some point as Mattis and Tillerson were trying to talk him down from his decision to proclaim his intention of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, one of them said it would provoke terrorist incidents, possibly even inside the US, and he made one of those dumb macho responses to the effect that we can't let the terrorists tell us what to do.

As I've said before, the object of these people is never to prevent bad things happening but to dramatize the difference between the Good, us, and the Evil, them.

Serious

Arab-owned olive grove on West Bank, surrounded by 30-foot wall and fences on all sides. Via Lighthearted Locavore.

As Trump Arrives in Israel, His Deal-Making Skills Face a Test

Says the Times headline writer. A "serious test" says the teaser headline on the online front page, but I can't imagine what they think is serious about it. They're talking about the deal between Israel and the Palestinians, which has eluded generations for almost 70 years, and which he himself has called "the ultimate deal" but also insists is "frankly, maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years."

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has shown what he thinks the prospects are in the friendly gestures he's chosen to build confidence: for the Palestinians, at Trump's request, some permits to build houses on land they own in Area C of the West Bank and a temporary easing of border crossing restrictrions at the Allenby Bridge, and for the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, a three-year program to legalize unauthorized settlements and hilltop outposts. Saying to the Palestinians, in effect, this is what you'll get if you make a deal, and to the settlers, don't worry, there won't be a deal.

Dog paddling in the Rubicon

Image via tenor.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Cabalisticus, is so adorable sometimes. He really is the reasonable, kind-hearted liberal Zionist he'd like everybody else to be, as when he generously characterizes the Israeli prime minister:

Netanyahu is a leader who is forever dog paddling in the middle of the Rubicon, never ready to cross it. He is unwilling to make any big, hard decision to advance or preserve a two-state solution if that decision in any way risks his leadership of Israel’s right-wing coalition or forces him to confront the Jewish settlers, who relentlessly push Israel deeper and deeper into the West Bank.

Oh, please, Tom. Netanyahu is forever sending you selfies where he's posing on a diving board on the opposite bank and you're thinking, "Well, he must have jumped in by now." He hasn't. He never will. He has no interest in your two-state solution, and he never has had. He used to make these vague gestures toward it, to gratify his American patrons, but now he hardly bothers, because he knows the money will never stop flowing no matter what he does. He is stonewalling for the moment when the two-state solution will no longer be possible, some think that moment came quite a while ago, and the Americans will leave him alone, except for the cash.

West of Eden: Lede, exhumed

The Fallujah caravanserai, ca. 1914. Via Wikipedia.

Maybe I just wasn't reading carefully enough, but when the Iraqi government forces were reconquering the Anbar city of Fallujah from Da'esh, culminating over the weekend, I never saw the news that interested me most until I got to Professor Cole's wrapup of the operation: namely, who those government forces were, and whether they included any Sunni soldiers, which it turns out they did, in the form of tribal levies from the

clans of the Dulaym in al-Anbar Province who opposed Daesh just as many of them had opposed al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the predecessor of Daesh that was organized to fight the US military occupation of the country. Tribes are kinship units in rural Iraq, and while they are religiously conservative they typically are not fundamentalists, and they dislike Daesh for condemning their Muslim traditionalism in favor of a hyper-fundamentalism.

They also included Shi'ite militias including some, such as the Badr Corps, that are directly backed by Iran, and Cole seems to think that the actual Iraqi regular army, a mess, was probably the least useful element. There are allegations of bad behavior among the militias, that they have been razing buildings in the city to punish the Sunni residents. But the fact that the Sunni tribal levies participated and played an important part is a really good sign that Prime Minister al-Abadi may finally be beginning to work effectively towards integration, and that Obama's policy of handing out US assistance in a way that encourages it is finally starting to pay off. Cole is dubious, but not hopeless:

West of Eden: Fascism may be here.

Image via emaze.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Malinconicus, is in a saturnine humor as regards a former favorite country of his:

Israel has recently been under intense criticism on the world stage. Some of it, like the “boycott, divestment, sanctions” (B.D.S.) campaign, is a campus movement to destroy Israel masquerading as a political critique. But a lot of it is also driven by Israel’s desire to destroy itself — thanks to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s steady elimination of any possibility that Israel will separate itself from the Palestinians in the West Bank.

That somewhat comical formulation—"This is no time to be committing suicide, there are people out there trying to kill you!"—points at some kind of truth, but it's not something Tom really wants to hear.

The formula on BDS is a little like one of those Radio Yerevan jokes from the former Soviet Union:

West of Eden: Deeply unpleasant

Olive groves in Farata, West Bank, during the settler attacks of October 2010, via Piglipstick.

And here's our old friend, dean of the foreign correspondents, the gracious-living A.J. Liebling of the postmodern era, Steven Erlanger, who has for some reason given the Times his Yelp review of a disappointing holiday spot in the um Occupied West Bank, or Samaria as the locals call it, well, some of the locals, if you know what I mean, at a "studio house" in the illegal settlement (so illegal the Israeli government has attempted to demolish it every once in a while) of Havat Gilad, booked through Aibnb for just $111 a night, with

several rooms, sparely furnished and not completely finished, and a lot of junk outside, including empty ammunition crates used for storage. The views over the hills are of a Palestinian village, Farata, and another hilltop Israeli settlement, Ramat Gilad.

Ah, charming Farata. Did he see any of the famous olive trees, I wonder?

We're off to slay the Wizard!

David Brooks has a peculiar memory:

The fact is, for all the problems we may have with Wall Street or Washington, our biggest problems are systemic — the disruptions caused by technological progress and globalization, mass migration, family breakdown and so on. There’s no all-controlling Wizard of Oz to slay.

Watch your tropes, David! The job isn't to kill the Wizard, it's to get him to send you back to Kansas, where Toto buried your happiness out behind the storm cellar. And the problem is he—the Wizard, not Toto—can't do it for you, it's really up to you:

Image via.

Power, and potency, are on Brooksy's mind today. He's riffing off a fun essay by Anand Giridharadas on the theme of the 2016 election campaign being—this is a case where most sides do it—that whoever you are, you think somebody else has all the power:

Clarification

Shorter Binyamin Netanyahu:

I never said I was opposed to the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, in fact I totally support it. I simply said it wouldn't be achieved while I was prime minister. Unfortunately I'm an insuperable obstacle to the achievement of my desires. What do you expect me to do about it?

Oh well

Via.

Not the worst thing about the Israeli election results, but one of the most disheartening to me, is what the takeaway might be over here for Likud's US allies in the Republican Party, that Netanyahu's craziness on the last day, promising that there would never be a Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister and calling his supporters specifically to counteract the behavior of certain Israeli citizens who were Voting While Arabic in larger than expected numbers as if that were somehow indecent or unaccaptable, is what brought him over the line at the end, and that doubling down on violence and racism in the last hours of a campaign is a great way to win an election in general.

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, mystax aegypticus, released from the need to talk sense to the Israelis and engaged once again with the voices in his head, thinks it isn't all that important that Netanyahu's finally admitting publicly that he opposes the two-state solution:

Tut, tut! It looks like an occupation?

Jodi Rudoren expanding in the Times:

West of Eden: The situation

Corsola Evolutions. By Tariq SP at DeviantArt.

I used to write a good deal about the Israel-Palestine situation, and I don't much any more partly because I don't have anything new to say about it and lots of better-informed people (many of them blogrolled here—I just added Mondoweiss) have lots. On the latest attempt to maintain Gaza as an Israel-run prison camp without any guards*, the most recommendable thing I've seen lately is (no surprise) by Professor Juan Cole:

Intifada Dada

Thomas L. Friedman writes:

RAMALLAH, West Bank —I've often wondered why Ahmed and Mohammed haven't gotten around to demanding their seat in the back of the Israeli bus by staging a Third Intifada. Indeed, I even announced they were doing it back in 2006 but they let me down, as Arabs will. But seriously, I mean, the first one, with the stones, got them Oslo, and the second one, with the rockets, lost it, so why wouldn't they be giving it another shot?* Palestinians here have been telling me that the problem is it didn't work before, but what the hell kind of logic is that?

Centerpiece by partypro.

 *Maybe they just can't affjord it, heh-heh.

Ya think so?

In other news, the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist.

The article by Jodi Rudoren, who did not write this sublimely idiotic headline, is actually of some interest, but not perfectly lucid: it's about a debate over the Palestinian assertion that [more]