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.

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:

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. 

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:

For the Record: Hippies Corner

 

Left to right, Tommy Smothers, John Lennon, Timothy Leary, and Yoko Ono, at a 1969 Bed-In, via Wikipedia.

Some thoughts on civilian casualties in World War II lead, improbably, to a wan little glimmer of hope.

Re Gaza,there are lots of people with very bad moral sensibilities who are just on the wrong side for very stupid reasons. But there are some who acknowledge that Israel is on the "right" side, but just have a fantasy that there is some way of beating a determined, immoral enemy…

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023

But I’m not talking about fire, bombing cities, or intentionally targeting civilians, these were just people who died in the course of urban warfare, or the Normandy invasion. Maybe more care could’ve reduced civilian casualties somewhat, but only that

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023

Ukraine Blogging

 

Weird message from Mr. Tucker Carlson a while back that was tagged by some observers, I think correctly, as of Russian origin:

This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States. https://t.co/5JkLuCKoBn

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) January 19, 2022

It's easy to call it propaganda, but I'm finding myself inclined to think of it as something a little bit different, really a message from Putin, one in the Whataboutist mode, seriously, asking for just a little understanding, bro—the Russian Federation really is kind of surrounded on its west, by NATO members some of which control nuclear weapons, all along the western borders of Russia or Belarus or Ukraine from Estonia to Turkey, from the north end of the Gulf of Finland to the eastern end of the Black Sea, members of an alliance that was specifically designed 70-odd years ago to thwart Russian movements in that direction. 

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: Clueless on Gaza

What Prime Minister Netanyahu likes to refer to as Israel's "eternal, undivided capital", with a stretch of the separation wall that divides it in the foreground (photo by Haaretz/Olivier Fitoussi). It's not eternal either, obviously. It was the administrative-religious center of an Israelite polity for much though nowhere near all of the time from the 9th century BCE to the 1st century CE, most often under the patronage of Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Seleucid, and eventually Roman overlords, but frequently totally destroyed and its inhabitants banished; when Romans or Christians were in charge Jews were not allowed to live there at all, so it was better for the few remaining local Jews, after Muslims were invented in the 7th century, to have them in charge, but the only Jewish state that existed anywhere between the last total destruction in 70 CE and the founding of Israel in 1948 was the kingdom of the Khazars extending from what's now Ukraine south and east to the Caucasus, who whimsically decided to become Jews by religion in the 8th or 9th century and lingered as a power until near the end of the 10th. Let's also remember that these were the days memorialized in the oldest parts of the Arthur cycle and the Nibelungenlied of the great Völkerwanderungen when the Franks pushed the Gauls our of France and the Goths took Iberia and most of Italy and the Saxons and others got Britain and the Finns and Ugrians and Turks pushed into their modern territory and the Mongols seized China for a couple of centuries and Arabs took control of practically the whole Mediterranean and nobody ended up with the homeland they were expecting, just saying.

Praying for Palestinian protesters in Gaza.

Praying for the perhaps many Israelis and Palestinians likely to suffer as this dangerous embassy move blows up.

Furious w/both Israeli and American governments for choosing, once again, power over peace, human dignity, human rights.

— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) May 14, 2018

She's a rabbi, so she has to be kind, but she's allowed to be angry. IDF soldiers have killed at least 58 Gazan demonstrators—reports keep saying they "died", as if the bullets were just hanging there to be wandered into—and shot more than 1,300, attempting to hit them in the legs so that they're merely disabled, putting the Gaza hospital system into terrible crisis, because they're just not equipped to handle that many shooting victims at once. In Washington, deputy press secretary Raj Shah suggests they're dying on purpose, just to make the Israelis look bad:

Not too scared

Moon goddess from the Ohoe tomb no. 4, 6th-7th century, Goguryeo (or ancient Goryeo). via Wikipedia.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018

I'm going to say it again: as you know, there's no button, and the procedure you need to follow to order that strike is a fairly complex one, which I think Donald Trump in his current psychological state might have a hard or even impossible time following:

From phone call to phone call — and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls — you could lose him. He could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him nor particularly considered what he said in response. (Michael Wolff)

And whatever they tell you, our military are trained carefully that they must not follow an illegal order, and I don't think there's any doubt about this one, as Marjorie Cohn was explaining a couple of months ago at the HuffPost:

Toward the state-and-a-half solution

Still from Rona Yefman's 2006 video, "Pippi L. at Abu Dis", depicting Pippi Longstocking, strongest girl in the world, attempting to take down the Wall separating Israel from Palestine.

Has there ever been anything in history quite as overdetermined as Trump's insistence on recognizing Jerusalem as the eternal capital (he didn't say "undivided", which may be a clue that he or his writers didn't mean all that much anyway) of the Jewish state and agreement to move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv at some point in the future? There are so many competing ways of explaining why it had to happen that it might be be more useful to ask what could have stopped it.

First there's Jared Kushner, designated unofficially by the Emperor-elect as Middle East Peace Tsar way back in November 2016—

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.

RIP Shimon Peres

No interest in litigating the case of whether Shimon Peres was a bad guy or a good guy, or a bad guy who became a good guy, but I can't liking this no-more-fcks alter kaker, very much.

Also, he totally deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he shared with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, though he didn't necessarily always honor it as a politician in the years immediately following—it's complicated.

And things would have been a lot better for Palestinians and Israelis if he had won the 1996 election instead of Netanyahu, or had some other better chance later on at leading a Labor coalition for a full term. That's something nobody's saying either because they're rightists or because they're too nice to be partisan on this sad occasion or because they're purists who can't accept any progress unless it's everything, but it's true.

My Ali

Photo by Len Trievnor/Express/Getty Images via Independent.

Boxing was on TV for free all the time in those days before Pay-Per-View—there was a lot more of it altogether, I think, and the purses were probably a lot smaller—and my dad was a fan, so we saw a lot of it. I didn't like it much, not that I realized how violent it was, but just because it didn't work for me aesthetically (unlike, especially, basketball, but Dad wouldn't turn on the TV until the last five minutes of a basketball game); but when there was only one screen in the house, if your parents had something they wanted to watch, you just watched it with them regardless of preference, maybe with a book in your lap.

I could add—Dad was a Stevenson liberal, a man who assumed he was in line with Eleanor Roosevelt and the young Hubert Humphrey, and would never display any conscious racism, but he was not incapable of showing bias when he didn't know he was showing it—the standards were a lot lower back then—and he didn't refrain from rooting for a Great White Hope, as in the trilogy of duels between Floyd Patterson and the Ingemar Johansson in which the Swede began well in 1959 and ended utterly crushed in 1961. I knew there was something wrong about his enthusiasm, though I wouldn't know why for years.

Cheap shots: Piece in Our Time

At the counter-terrorism nuclear summit in Washington, April 1, via The Independent.

Because of all the dreadful things in our long national horror show, Obama's countless crimes and contempt for common decency, the worst, for Victor Davis Hanson, the thing that somehow caps them all, the most insulting, is... when he flashed a peace sign at an international meeting?

Really?

Imagine a Right-Wing PAC Campaign Ad in 2008 . . .

By Victor Davis Hanson — April 4, 2016

West of Eden: Imagine

Displaced people from the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp queue to receive aid in Syria on 16 April 2015. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images.

In September 2013 I issued a proposal for a nonviolent approach to ending the war in Syria: Just get the civilian population out of danger, massively, four or five million in decent refugee accommodations, and leave the Assad government forces and the Caliphate and the other bad Sunni actors with nobody to bully and exploit and destroy but each other.

This was back when it still seemed possible to many otherwise rational observers (as opposed to Senator McCain and his drooling companions, who still believe or affect to believe) that a "moderate Sunni" military force could play a significant role, when Sunni extremists were dominated by the Qa'eda-affiliated al-Nusra front and the Caliphate was just beginning to be a thing. Now it should be clear to almost everybody not a Republican or a "fighter" with the FSA that that alternative is hopeless.

While it so happens that a similar proposal is circulating for a different objective, solving the Mediterranean refugee crisis, in particular from the UN Special Rapporteur for migrant rights, François Crépeau:

West of Eden: Friedman has a hangover

Peace, from Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good Government, Siena, 1337.

Mr. Pierce and Driftglass invite us to contemplate a bizarre paragraph from Friedman's piece yesterday:

O.K., so we learn to live with Iran on the edge of a bomb, but shouldn’t we at least bomb the Islamic State to smithereens and help destroy this head-chopping menace? Now I despise ISIS as much as anyone, but let me just toss out a different question: Should we be arming ISIS? Or let me ask that differently: Why are we, for the third time since 9/11, fighting a war on behalf of Iran?

Pierce, with his clinical interest in amnesia, is mainly interested in reminding us that the other times we were fighting a war on behalf of Iran had to do with Friedman asking someone or other he didn't like to Suck On This.

I had to read this several dozen times before I understood that the middle question wasn't a typo, because I was getting it as "are we sure we're doing the right thing arming ISIS?" and I was positive we were supposed to be not doing that, or at least trying pretty hard not to, but it's now pretty clear that he meant the Friedman-pitch contrarian question, "are we totally sure we're doing the right thing not arming ISIS?" and he doesn't mean it to be taken seriously or anything. He means in this crazy old world it just keeps getting harder to arm or not arm anybody or bomb them to smithereens or anything without giving a boost to somebody you don't like. Ha ha ha.

Netanyahu is now saying he continues to support Palestinian statehood but reality is unfortunately against it:

Exchange

Tonle Sap, Cambodia. Via.

At Corey Robin's blog, an important post on an important problem for us in the post-Vietnam more-or-less pacifist more-or-less left, the question of the sense of a moral imperative to "do" something military in the face of mass slaughter and horror, against our hard-won knowledge that we don't want to be violent ourselves, whether from fear of the karma or the understanding that it just doesn't make anything better. Out of embarrassment at an unserious response, I tacked on something I hope is more thoughtful, and reproduce it below:

Interlocutors

Zurich striker Loris Benito copes with a marten on the field, March 2013. Photo by Marcel Bieri.

So I'm listening to the Steve Inskeep interview of the president on foreign policy this morning, basically on the above-the-fold wars, in Ukraine and Syria, and it sounds to me, to tell the truth, as if he's waffling—waffling and maybe blustering a bit, using a lot of words like "robust" and "success", but the thing is: he's not arguing with me.

Or rather, he's not arguing against me; the imaginary person he's debating is the one represented in Inskeep's questions, who's worried or affects to be worried [jump]