Author Topic: Israel, and its neighbors  (Read 879741 times)

Crafty_Dog

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DougMacG

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Re: Newsweek: Gaza War is unique
« Reply #2901 on: February 20, 2024, 09:59:40 AM »
I have had Newsweek filed in my mind as a predictable eye roll generator, but this piece is thoughtful and intelligent.
...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsweek

The magazine we knew as Newsweek closed over a decade ago.  The brand name bounced from Daily Beast (far Left?) to whatever it is today. Now they are essentially a newer internet news and opinion site carrying the brand name.  I have seen good conservative and objective articles, but on balance I think they lean Left.  Not nearly as left as Daily Beast days. 

If they are tried to cover world and national stories objectively and cover both left and right opinions, that is a good sign.  If so, it is much needed.

BTW, the Gaza war is unique.
« Last Edit: February 20, 2024, 10:09:22 AM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2902 on: February 20, 2024, 12:55:04 PM »
Story: 

IIRC:  Dick Harman, of Harman Electronics and the December husband to July bride and my 1992 Congressional opponent Jane Harman (she won haha) bought Newsweek for one dollar.

DougMacG

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2903 on: February 20, 2024, 02:33:36 PM »
"December husband to July bride and my 1992 Congressional opponent Jane Harman"

  - And you said, you must be very proud of your daughter.  ))

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2904 on: February 20, 2024, 02:45:25 PM »
 :-D :-D :-D


ccp

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Crafty_Dog

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2907 on: February 22, 2024, 04:40:13 AM »
I found that to be a very thoughtful piece.   Nice find.

Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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yemen
« Reply #2909 on: February 25, 2024, 07:54:34 AM »
A bit larger then California and with 34 million people.

Judaism was the predominate religion of the pre existing Himyarite Empire in what is now Yemen!!! :-o :-o :-o

circa ~400BC  ; from Wikipedia :

The Himyarites originally worshiped most of the South-Arabian pantheon, including Wadd, ʿAthtar, 'Amm and Almaqah. Since at least the reign of Abikarib Asʿad (c. 384 to 433 CE), Judaism was adopted as the de facto state religion. The religion may have been adopted to some extent as much as two centuries earlier, but inscriptions to polytheistic deities ceased after this date. It was embraced initially by the upper classes, and possibly a large proportion of the general population over time.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himyarite_Kingdom

Could one say that Muslim colonialism displaced the Jews. ?

ccp

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Body-by-Guinness

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Them Dastardly Right Wing Extremist Are At It, Again
« Reply #2911 on: March 01, 2024, 09:12:25 AM »
Never ceases to amaze me what one trick ponies “Progressives” are, with “right wing extremists are gonna get you if we don’t watch out” gross exaggerations being a favorite trick. This piece examines that habit in the context of the Israeli/Hamas war:

The terror of the right
It's so much easier to construct bogeymen than face up to murderous reality

MELANIE PHILLIPS
MAR 1, 2024

Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon
There’s a fixed belief in progressive circles that if only Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were to be removed from office, there would be at least a sporting chance of peace in the Middle East.

On Monday night, in an appearance on an NBC show, US President Joe Biden said that Israel must make peace with the Palestinians to survive. He warned that Israel’s “incredibly conservative government,” which includes the ultra-nationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and others, was “going to lose support from around the world. And that is not in Israel’s interest”.

American officials repeat, like a steady drumbeat, that the reason the Israelis are so resistant to the imposition of a Palestinian state and insistent on mounting an attack against the last bastion of Hamas in Rafah, contrary to American instructions, is that Netanyahu is in hock to “right-wing extremists”.

Some believe that the Biden administration is working to replace Netanyahu with a more pliable alternative, such as war cabinet member Benny Gantz. Isn’t such interference in another sovereign state by seeking to lever out its democratically elected prime minister the kind of thing that the left routinely denounces as US “imperialism”?

It’s apparently fine, however, for the Biden administration to do this to Israel because Netanyahu is, after all, leading a “right-wing extremist” government, which seems to mean he has no basis to be in power at all.

Of course, Biden is trying to appease the virulently anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party, which is causing him a major election-year headache.

More fundamentally still, his administration won’t permit Israel to derail US strategy for the region. Astonishingly, this involves empowering Iran, and ludicrously asserts that the solution to the Iranian war being waged against Israel and the west by using Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis as proxy terrorist armies is to impose a Palestinian state.

Biden wants Netanyahu gone because the Israeli prime minister is refusing to bend to American pressure and is standing in the way of the administration’s treacherous policy goals.

The “right-wing” meme is a potent weapon because it damns everything at which it is directed. To be “right-wing” in the circles that control western culture is to be utterly beyond the pale. Everything bad is “right-wing,” and everything “right-wing” is bad.

In Britain, even newspapers that are relatively well disposed towards Israel frame the conduct of the war as disproportionately belligerent because, well, Netanyahu runs an “extremist ultra-right” government.

In Israel, the left-wing press pounds out daily the message that absolutely everything Netanyahu is doing in this war is bad because it’s designed to save his skin and keep himself in power.

Since both the “settlers” and the “right-wing” are demonised as evil by so-called progressives, any opposition to a Palestinian state is also demonised as evil.

All this ignores a number of facts. Since the genocidal pogrom of October 7 — and with Hamas threatening to mount such atrocities over and over again until Israel is destroyed — Israelis are united as never before in opposition to a Palestinian state. They are also overwhelmingly committed to continuing with the war until Hamas no longer has the capacity to mount such attacks ever again.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the “settlers,” Ben-Gvir or Netanyahu’s desire to save his own skin. It is due to the fact that the vast majority of Israelis understand that they are fighting for their lives.

People may detest Netanyahu, but they don’t detest his conduct of the war. They may hold him ultimately to blame for the systemic mistakes behind the catastrophic failure to anticipate the October 7 attack. They may think that he should no longer be in office. They may believe that he is unprincipled, devious, hypocritical, narcissistic, power-crazed, corrupt and with a dangerous messiah complex, as he is painted by his enemies.

Yet none of that means that they think the war should be waged in any other way. None of their dismay at Netanyahu as prime minister means they believe that anyone else would or should prosecute this war any differently.

They understand that making peace depends not on Israel, as Biden insists, but on its Palestinian Arab aggressors. They understand that if Biden gets his way and Hamas survives as a military force, there will be more October 7-style atrocities. They understand that the Palestinian state Biden is threatening to impose upon Israel will deliver October 7-style atrocities on steroids.

And so the more Biden applies the thumbscrews to Israel, the more he will actually increase Israeli support for Netanyahu, who will be applauded for standing up to such an unconscionable betrayal and defending Israeli lives.

Some people dismiss the realities of Israeli opinion about the war and the “two-state solution” because all they can see is the apparently demonic figure of Netanyahu. Such people are obsessed with him. Many Israeli journalists see nothing but this hate-figure looming in front of them. He fills the entire visual space between the hater and the political horizon.

But it’s perfectly possible to dislike Netanyahu and want to see him gone from office, and yet support his determination to destroy Hamas or oppose the imposition of a Palestinian state on the grounds that there is no alternative strategy that would protect Israelis against further genocidal attack.

So why are so many unable to distinguish between the man and the measures?

For a start, it’s so much easier to blame a man who can be removed from office rather than face up to a terrifying reality that’s far harder to address, such as the Palestinian Arabs’ implacable and brainwashed hatred of the Jews.

For exactly the same reason, it’s so much easier to believe that a Palestinian state would end that enmity, rather than face up to the actual evidence of a century of murderous Palestinian rejectionism that continues without end.

There’s also another reason, a clue to which was provided by certain reactions to the October 7 pogrom both in Israel and abroad.

Among many “progressives,” the atrocities produced a profound sense of disorientation. This was because the Palestinians — people whose cause they had promoted as the acme of conscience and enlightenment — turned out to be barbaric savages.

Even worse, people the progressives had opposed and stigmatised as the “far-right” because they had regarded the Palestinians as murderous foes turned out to have been correct all along.

Worse yet again, some people on their own side actually turned on them for supporting Israel against Hamas. This was a terrible and destabilising shock. That’s because the left is governed by a herd mentality. Their views have to conform to the opinion of similarly “enlightened” people. Anyone who isn’t part of the progressive herd is “right-wing” and wrong about everything.

Moreover, since progressives believe that they embody virtue itself, right-wingers aren’t just wrong but evil. Yet the October 7 massacre revealed that the people supported by the progressives were evil.

This put progressives in a terrible bind. They couldn’t accept anything that revealed their own narrative to be so morally bankrupt.

So they exaggerated the plight of Gaza civilians in the war, for which they blamed Israel not Hamas. In response to the tsunami of antisemitism consuming the west as a result of the Palestinian cause they themselves promoted, they focused instead on the evils of “Islamophobia”. And they redoubled the attack on Netanyahu as their scapegoat.

As a result, both the Biden administration and others who demonise “the right” are supporting the insupportable. If they have their way, more Israelis will be murdered, raped, beheaded and taken hostage; there will be more Islamist intimidation, subversion and violence in Britain and America; and the west will find itself in a terrible war for its survival not against “right-wing” bogeymen, but against truly sinister enemies whom western folly has so catastrophically empowered.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-terror-of-the-right?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR2badn9tX3mcgUYS9MX-CcKO1f3psi9a8rbv21YRnkmUb03EtxYwuUgWas&triedRedirect=true

ccp

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"Zionist case for ceasefire"
« Reply #2912 on: March 02, 2024, 12:42:31 PM »

Body-by-Guinness

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Re: "Zionist case for ceasefire"
« Reply #2913 on: March 02, 2024, 06:10:25 PM »
I don't agree but still worth the other view point:

https://www.readtangle.com/zionist-case-for-ceasefire-gaza-israel-palestine/?ref=tangle-newsletter

Because rewarding your enemy by allowing his human shield strategy will show all doing so will allow the “humanitarian” card to be played at some point.

I know you don’t agree, but ye gods, how many times does Lucy have to hoist the football before Israel is allowed to not fall for it?




Crafty_Dog

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2917 on: March 09, 2024, 05:16:16 AM »
Nice to have a proper breakdown of these numbers.

Also, the piece makes a very important point Biden, Austin et al are using Hamas's numbers!  And using them to justify funding Hamas under the rubric of humanitarian add!

Speaking of rubric, Biden's true "two state solution" is Michigan and Minnesota.

« Last Edit: March 09, 2024, 05:39:44 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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DougMacG

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2919 on: March 09, 2024, 06:08:21 AM »
"Biden's true "two state solution" is Michigan and Minnesota.'"

  - Ouch!!  I will get a little mileage out of that this morning.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2920 on: March 09, 2024, 08:56:11 AM »


 :-D :-D :-D

I must confess this bit of wit is not mine, I but play it forward in the same spirit as yours.

Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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Born Jewish Bernie leads the charge to cut off Israel's aid
« Reply #2923 on: March 12, 2024, 01:24:47 PM »
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/senate-bernie-sanders-joe-biden/2024/03/12/id/1156968/

Jewish

---->

Communist => fool

Agree with Michael Savage - it does sound like Bernie is talking with a corn beef sandwich in his mouth

Crafty_Dog

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GPF: Back up port in Cyprus
« Reply #2924 on: March 12, 2024, 04:08:20 PM »
Backup port. Israel plans to build a temporary pier in Larnaca, southern Cyprus, as an alternative to Haifa in case of war with Hezbollah, the Israel Hayom newspaper reported. Israelis would operate the port and conduct security checks.

Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Monsour Abbas is Arab and Proud Israeli
« Reply #2925 on: March 12, 2024, 04:25:36 PM »
second

Mansour Abbas Is an Arab and a Proud Israeli
The Knesset member’s conciliatory attitude has earned him admirers—and enemies on both sides.
By Tunku Varadarajan
March 12, 2024 5:56 pm ET


Many Arab politicians in the Middle East and beyond were equivocal in criticizing Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Not Mansour Abbas. “The massacre,” Mr. Abbas said on Nov. 6, “is against everything we believe in, our religion, our Islam, our nationality, our humanity.” He has also rejected the idea that Israel practices “apartheid” and has declared that “the state of Israel was born as a Jewish state, and it will remain one.”

Mr. Abbas, 49, heads the United Arab List, a political party that holds five seats in the Israeli Knesset. Mr. Abbas is a retail politician. What he wants most is a better life for Israel’s 1.9 million Arab citizens. He wants Bedouin villages in the Negev “regularized,” their houses fitted with “Israeli levels” of electricity and sanitation. He wants money for Arab schools and hospitals and, most of all, for measures that would reduce crime. In 241 of the 299 nonterrorist murders committed in Israel in 2023, both victim and perpetrator were Arab.

Mr. Abbas made history in June 2021, when he became the first Arab to join an Israeli governing coalition. After an indeterminate election left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unable to form a government, the United Arab List’s support enabled the conservative Naftali Bennet and liberal Yair Lapid to establish a coalition, which governed until December 2022.

Mr. Abbas had earlier discussed joining a coalition with Mr. Netanyahu, but the Religious Zionist Party of Bezalel Smotrich balked at joining a partnership with Arabs, and Itamar Ben-Gvir called Mr. Abbas a “mechabel,” a terrorist. Messrs. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are now finance minister and national security minister, respectively. Mr. Abbas has soured on Mr. Netanyahu and wants him to resign.

“I’m trying to be part of the political system in Israel as a representative of the Arabic citizens,” Mr. Abbas says in an interview in his Knesset office. He describes himself as having a “national identity” as an “Arabic Palestinian” and a “civil identity as a citizen in Israel.” He says fellow Israeli Arabs should “actively implement their Israeli citizenship” and become “part of the solution of the problems they face, and not just be the opposition.”

Mr. Abbas, a chubby former dentist, is an unlikely game-changer. “I used to do crowns, fillings, and root canals,” he says almost sheepishly. Making him yet more improbable as a catalyst for reconciliation, his politics are Islamist. His party represents the moderate and democratic “southern branch” of the Islamic Movement in Israel. The movement, founded by his mentor, Sheikh Abdullah Nimar Darwish (1948-2017), split in two in 1996, the “northern branch” continuing on a path of militant anti-Zionism. Darwish, who once sought to establish an Islamic state in Israel, spent time in prison for acts of terrorism in the early 1980s. After his release in 1985, his politics evolved rapidly toward nonviolence, culminating in an acceptance of the Oslo Accords.

Mr. Abbas’s conciliatory attitude has earned him enemies on both sides. The Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah faction accuses him of “throwing himself into the arms of Zionism.” The Jewish hard right views him as an Islamist Trojan Horse intent on subverting Israel from within the Knesset. Mr. Abbas says that’s bunk. “We are a local movement,” he says, “based in Israel. We consider ourselves citizens of Israel, and we’re working in Israel between two systems of rules—the rules of Islam, and the rules and laws of Israel, as a country and as a state.” (Fidelity to Islam can be seen in the list’s fierce opposition to gay rights.)

His party is “committed to Israel’s Knesset,” and he says, “At least 2,000 Jewish citizens voted for me in the last election. I hope there will be more in the coming elections.” In November Mr. Abbas called on one of his own legislators—Iman Khatib-Yassin, the first hijab-wearing woman in the Knesset—to resign after she denied that Hamas raped women and murdered babies on Oct. 7. She apologized and kept her seat.

To his admirers, Mr. Abbas is the most gutsy, pragmatic and stable home-grown Arab politician in Israeli history. A prominent professor who has served as a back-room adviser to several Israeli prime ministers says: “Abbas is the genuine article. Arab politicians usually speak with seven corners of their mouth”—a local idiom for untrustworthiness—“but with him, what you see is what you get.”

On Gaza, he sounds like a mainstream Western politician: “We want to see the war stopped, a prisoner exchange deal completed, and the kidnapped persons returned to their families.” There must be “international recognition” for an “independent, sovereign Palestinian state that gives hope to the Palestinians and works to rebuild the Gaza Strip and address the phenomenon of the spread of weapons among Palestinian factions.” He would entrust security in the strip to Arab countries.

Israeli Arabs, for their part, “have to be careful in choosing our words,” Mr. Abbas says. “You have to be careful not to make a link between the events of Oct. 7 and the historical conflict itself. . . . If you say the word ‘but’—‘but there is a conflict and the Palestinians are under occupation, et cetera, et cetera’—this will be understood as a justification for the criminal actions of killing people, of kidnapping people.”

“This is not just a tactical position,” he says. “When we talk of Oct. 7, ‘but’ is not an ethical word.”


Crafty_Dog

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Israel will defeat Hamas in Rafah
« Reply #2927 on: March 15, 2024, 09:32:22 AM »


Israel Will Defeat Hamas in Rafah
We’ve incapacitated most of the terror group. Rafah is its last stronghold, and we must win there too.
By Ophir Falk
WSJ
March 14, 2024 5:39 pm ET


Mounting international pressure to end the war won’t weaken Israel’s resolve to accomplish its mission of destroying Hamas, freeing the hostages and guaranteeing that Gaza will never pose a threat to Israel again. Detractors dismiss total victory as implausible, but the facts on the ground indicate otherwise.

Israel has already dismantled 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, incapacitated more than 21,500 Hamas terrorists—about two-thirds of its force, including two of the top four leaders—and destroyed significant terror tunnels. By contrast, it took U.S. military forces nine months to take out 5,000 ISIS fighters in Mosul.

John Spencer, chairman of urban warfare studies at West Point, described Israel’s achievements as “unprecedented,” especially given the complex combat conditions above and below ground. Mr. Spencer says that Israel is setting the “gold standard” for avoiding civilian casualties.

Israel doesn’t need prompting to provide humanitarian aid or to act with caution. According to retired British Col. Richard Kemp, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza is about 1 to 1.5. This is astonishing since, according to the United Nations, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in urban warfare has been 1 to 9. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties, while Hamas seeks to maximize civilian casualties and use them as a propaganda tool. We cannot let Hamas’s strategy pay off.

Hamas has four terror brigades in Rafah. That city is Hamas’s last stronghold, and its defeat is a prerequisite for victory. Whoever pressures Israel to refrain from entering Rafah is preventing the destruction of Hamas and the freeing of Israel and Gazan civilians from Hamas’s stranglehold. Gen. David Petraeus, who led the 2007 American surge in Iraq, said last week that the “key now is to not stop until Hamas is fully destroyed.”

Asking Israel to stop the war now is akin to telling the Allies to stop halfway to Berlin in World War II. If Hamas isn’t eradicated, genocidal terrorists will continue to emerge. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told new Israel Defense Forces cadets last week, “when we defeat the murderers of October 7, we are preventing the next 9/11.” Global leaders should take note.

High-intensity combat will wind down after Rafah, humanitarian aid will no longer be hijacked by Hamas, and safety for civilians can be realized. Total victory is within reach. Israel will finish the job. Anything less will endanger the rest of the civilized world.

Mr. Falk is an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Crafty_Dog

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Zeihan
« Reply #2928 on: March 16, 2024, 07:09:50 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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George Friedman: This is not 1973
« Reply #2929 on: March 19, 2024, 03:59:48 PM »

For the US, 2024 Isn’t 1973
By: George Friedman
The culture of the Israeli military was shaped in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked without warning. Importantly, the assault represented a direct threat to American interests. Egypt and Syria were both armed by the Soviet Union, so an Israeli defeat might have given Moscow control over the Suez Canal and, through a Syrian occupation, access to Saudi oil. The situation quickly manifested itself with the Arab oil embargo, generating an economic crisis in the U.S. and the rest of the West. Thus, Washington rushed material support to Israel and launched a diplomatic process that benefitted itself and its Middle Eastern ally while blocking the Soviets.

It is easy to draw parallels, even unconscious ones, from moments in which the United States sees itself in profound danger. In looking at the Israeli position now, I think that that is what it has done, albeit mistakenly.

Deep in the Israeli psyche is the notion that the United States will not abandon Israel in extremis. But there is a saying that nations have no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. In 1973, the Israeli interest was to protect the whole of Israel – and that was absolute. The U.S. had what you might call a sentiment interest in Israel, but building strategy on sentiment is dangerous. What really mattered to Washington was the Soviet Union.

Israel is now engaged in a war with some similarities. There is the incompetence of Israeli intelligence and the belief that only a decisive defeat of the enemy will ensure national security. Its strategy, not to mention its political rhetoric, clearly assumes the United States shares Israel's interest in waging a political and financially expensive operation against Hamas. The war in 1973 lasted a few weeks, not a few months. This operation will incur costs without the obvious benefits of 1973. The theory is that a massive blow will obliterate Hamas and eliminate the threat of radical Islamism. It’s a far-fetched idea. Unless dealt with politically, this threat is a permanent reality. In 1973, massive blows shifted Egyptian policy. But this is not 1973, and Egypt’s perceptions of reality and Hamas are not the same. Nor are Iran’s. Israel dreams of another Battle of the Chinese Farm, where the Israelis crossed the Suez Canal and redefined the war in its favor. This year’s war is different, and a decisive battle is hard to imagine.

Most important is that in this war the U.S. does not have an overwhelming interest at stake, and what sentiment there is is marked by bitter division. What the two wars have in common is a massive intelligence failure. Even a defeat of Hamas only sets the stage for the next war, and Israel must deal with the possibility of the next intelligence failure.

War is not an arena of right and wrong. It is the sphere of intelligence and weapons.

The Israelis are fighting in highly constrained circumstances with a strategy in which they continue to engage serially Hamas concentrations. This is a very long path and a dangerous one. This is not 1973.

=================

MARC: America's strategic concern here should be Iran, but Biden has taken out his dentures to give the mullahs fellatio.​
« Last Edit: March 19, 2024, 04:08:30 PM by Crafty_Dog »

DougMacG

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71% of Palestinians support the massacre
« Reply #2930 on: March 20, 2024, 09:40:02 PM »
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/387091

71% of Palestinians support the massacre

93% do not believe terror organization committed war crimes.

I won't write on the internet where I think these people should be resettled.



« Last Edit: March 21, 2024, 04:38:20 AM by DougMacG »


ccp

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2932 on: March 22, 2024, 07:54:29 AM »
problem is what does Israel do with the Hamas prisoners.

they would have to be stored somewhere for life.

and ~70% palestinians want them back to control Gaza......

what say you Blinks Sullivan and the rest -


DougMacG

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David Brooks tries to explain Hamas war to NYT readers
« Reply #2933 on: March 25, 2024, 09:38:46 AM »
https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F03%2F24%2Fopinion%2Fgaza-israel-war.html

Hopefully this link gets around the pay wall.

Brooks goes to great research and great effort to explain what is readily obvious to us. There is no alternative and there is no easy way to defeating Hamas.

I can't get into the thousands of comments but I imagine their readership is appalled.

ccp

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2934 on: March 25, 2024, 09:50:14 AM »
I am shocked the NYT editors allowed this piece to be published.

conclusion as Doug points out is obvious.

how many civilians were in Berlin when the US and Russia crushed it in 1945?

in answer to my own question I google this:

"2,807,405
The population of Berlin in August 12, 1945 was 2,807,4051and only 2.8 million of the city’s original population of 4.5 million still lived in the city"


Crafty_Dog

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What would you have Israel do?
« Reply #2935 on: March 25, 2024, 02:45:44 PM »
Saving this

There seems to be a broad consensus atop the Democratic Party about the war in Gaza, structured around two propositions. First, after the attacks of Oct. 7, Israel has the right to defend itself and defeat Hamas. Second, the way Israel is doing this is “over the top,” in President Biden’s words. The vast numbers of dead and starving children are gut wrenching, the devastation is overwhelming, and it’s hard not to see it all as indiscriminate.

Which leads to an obvious question: If the current Israeli military approach is inhumane, what’s the alternative? Is there a better military strategy Israel can use to defeat Hamas without a civilian blood bath? In recent weeks, I’ve been talking with security and urban warfare experts and others studying Israel’s approach to the conflict and scouring foreign policy and security journals in search of such ideas.

The thorniest reality that comes up is that this war is like few others because the crucial theater is underground. Before the war, Israelis estimated Hamas had dug around 100 miles of tunnels. Hamas leaders claimed they had a much more expansive network, and it turns out they were telling the truth. The current Israeli estimates range from 350 to about 500 miles of tunnels. The tunnel network, according to Israel, is where Hamas lives, holds hostages, stores weapons, builds missiles and moves from place to place. By some Israeli estimates, building these tunnels cost the Gazan people about a billion dollars, which could have gone to building schools and starting companies.

Hamas built many of its most important military and strategic facilities under hospitals, schools and so on. Its server farm, for example, was built under the offices of the U.N. relief agency in Gaza City, according to the Israeli military.

Daphne Richemond-Barak, the author of “Underground Warfare,” writes in Foreign Policy magazine: “Never in the history of tunnel warfare has a defender been able to spend months in such confined spaces. The digging itself, the innovative ways Hamas has made use of the tunnels and the group’s survival underground for this long have been unprecedented.”

In other words, in this war, Hamas is often underground, the Israelis are often aboveground, and Hamas seeks to position civilians directly between them. As Barry Posen, a professor at the security studies program at M.I.T., has written, Hamas’s strategy could be “described as ‘human camouflage’ and more ruthlessly as ‘human ammunition.’” Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of Palestinians who die and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out. Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion and on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel relents.

The Israelis have not found an easy way to clear and destroy the tunnels. Currently, Israel Defense Forces units clear the ground around a tunnel entrance and then, Richemond-Barak writes, they send in robots, drones and dogs to detect explosives and enemy combatants. Then units trained in underground warfare pour in. She writes: “It has become clear that Israel cannot possibly detect or map the entirety of Hamas’s tunnel network. For Israel to persuasively declare victory, in my view, it must destroy at least two-thirds of Hamas’s known underground infrastructure.”

This is slow, dangerous and destructive work. Israel rained destruction down on Gaza, especially early in the war. Because very few buildings can withstand gigantic explosions beneath them, this method involves a lot of wreckage, compounding the damage brought by tens of thousands of airstrikes. In part because of the tunnels, Israel has caused more destruction in Gaza than Syria did in Aleppo and more than Russia did in Mariupol, according to an Associated Press analysis.

John Spencer is the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, served two tours in Iraq and has made two visits to Gaza during the current war to observe operations there. He told me that Israel has done far more to protect civilians than the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Spencer reports that Israel has warned civilians when and where it is about to begin operations and published an online map showing which areas to leave. It has sent out millions of pamphlets, texts and recorded calls warning civilians of coming operations. It has conducted four-hour daily pauses to allow civilians to leave combat areas. It has dropped speakers that blast out instructions about when to leave and where to go. These measures, Spencer told me, have telegraphed where the I.D.F. is going to move next and “have prolonged the war, to be honest.”

The measures are real, but in addition, Israel has cut off power in Gaza, making it hard for Palestinians to gain access to their phones and information and, most important, the evacuation orders published by Israel. Israel has also destroyed a vast majority of Gaza’s cellphone towers and on occasion bombed civilians in so-called safe areas and safe routes. For civilians, the urban battlefield is unbelievably nightmarish. They are caught between a nation enraged by Oct. 7 and using overwhelming and often reckless force and a terrorist group that has structured the battlefield to maximize the number of innocent dead.

So to step back: What do we make of the current Israeli strategy? Judged purely on a tactical level, there’s a strong argument that the I.D.F. has been remarkably effective against Hamas forces. I’ve learned to be suspicious of precise numbers tossed about in this war, but the I.D.F. claims to have killed over 13,000 of the roughly 30,000 Hamas troops. It has disrupted three-quarters of Hamas’s battalions so that they are no longer effective fighting units. It has also killed two of five brigade commanders and 19 of 24 battalion commanders. As of January, U.S. officials estimated that Israel had damaged or made inoperable 20 to 40 percent of the tunnels. Many Israelis believe the aggressive onslaught has begun to restore Israel’s deterrent power. (Readers should know that I have a son who served in the I.D.F. from 2014 to 2016; he’s been back home in the States since then.)

But on a larger political and strategic level, you’d have to conclude that the Israeli strategy has real problems. Global public opinion is moving decisively against Israel. The key shift is in Washington. Historically pro-Israeli Democrats like Biden and Senator Chuck Schumer are now pounding the current Israeli government with criticism. Biden wants Israel to call off its invasion of the final Hamas strongholds in the south. Israel is now risking a rupture with its closest ally and its only reliable friend on the U.N. Security Council. If Israel is going to defend itself from Iran, it needs strong alliances, and Israel is steadily losing those friends. Furthermore, Israeli tactics may be reducing Gaza to an ungovernable hellscape that will require further Israeli occupation and produce more terrorist groups for years.

Hamas’s strategy is pure evil, but it is based on an understanding of how the events on the ground will play out in the political world. The key weakness of the Israeli strategy has always been that it is aimed at defeating Hamas militarily without addressing Palestinian grievances and without paying enough attention to the wider consequences. As the leaders of Hamas watch Washington grow more critical of Jerusalem, they must know their strategy is working.

So we’re back to the original question: Is there a way to defeat Hamas with far fewer civilian deaths? Is there a way to fight the war that won’t leave Israel isolated?

One alternative strategy is that Israel should conduct a much more limited campaign. Fight Hamas, but with less intensity. To some degree, Israel has already made this adjustment. In January, Israel announced it was shifting to a smaller, more surgical strategy; U.S. officials estimated at the time that Israel had reduced the number of Israeli troops in northern Gaza to fewer than half of the 50,000 who were there in December.

The first problem with going further in this direction is that Israel may not be left with enough force to defeat Hamas. Even by Israel’s figures, most Hamas fighters are still out there. Will surgical operations be enough to defeat an enemy of this size? A similar strategy followed by America in Afghanistan doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

A second problem is that the light footprint approach leaves power vacuums. This allows Hamas units to reconstitute themselves in areas Israel has already taken. As the United States learned in Iraq, if troop levels get too low, the horrors of war turn into the horrors of anarchy.

Another alternative strategy is targeted assassinations. Instead of continuing with a massive invasion, just focus on the Hamas fighters responsible for the Oct. 7 attack, the way Israel took down the terrorists who perpetrated the attack on Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972.

The difference is that the attack on Israelis at Munich was a small-scale terrorist assault. Oct. 7 was a comprehensive invasion by an opposing army. Trying to assassinate perpetrators of that number would not look all that different from the current military approach. As Raphael Cohen, the director of the strategy and doctrine program at the RAND Corporation, notes: “In practical terms, killing or capturing those responsible for Oct. 7 means either thousands or potentially tens of thousands of airstrikes or raids dispersed throughout the Gaza Strip. Raids conducted on that scale are no longer a limited, targeted operation. It’s a full-blown war.”

Furthermore, Hamas’s fighters are hard to find, even the most notorious leaders. It took a decade for the United States to find Osama bin Laden, and Israel hasn’t had great success with eliminating key Hamas figures. In recent years, Israel tried to kill Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, seven times, without success.

The political costs of this kind of strategy might be even worse than the political costs of the current effort. Turkey, a Hamas supporter, has made it especially clear that Israel would pay a very heavy price if it went after Hamas leaders there.

A third alternative is a counterinsurgency strategy, of the kind that the United States used during the surge in Iraq. This is a less intense approach than the kind of massive invasion we’ve seen and would focus on going after insurgent cells and rebuilding the destroyed areas to build trust with the local population. The problem is that this works only after you’ve defeated the old regime and have a new host government you can work with. Israel is still trying to defeat the remaining Hamas battalions in places like Rafah. This kind of counterinsurgency approach would be an amendment to the current Israeli strategy, not a replacement.

Critics of the counterinsurgency approach point out that Gaza is not Iraq. If Israel tried to clear, hold and build new secure communities in classic counterinsurgency fashion, those new communities wouldn’t look like safe zones to the Palestinians. They would look like detention camps. Furthermore, if Israel settles on this strategy, it had better be prepared for a long war. One study of 71 counterinsurgency campaigns found that the median length of those conflicts was 10 years. Finally, the case for a full counterinsurgency approach would be stronger if that strategy had led to American victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, which it did not.

A fourth alternative is that Israel should just stop. It should settle for what it has achieved and not finish the job by invading Rafah and the southern areas of Gaza, or it should send in just small strike teams.

This is now the official Biden position. The national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has argued that Israel can destroy Hamas in Gaza without a large invasion but “by other means” (which he did not elaborate on). The United States has asked Israel to send a delegation to Washington to discuss alternative Rafah strategies, which is good. The problem is that, first, there seems to be a budding disagreement over how much of Hamas needs to be destroyed to declare victory and, second, the I.D.F. estimates that there are 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters in Rafah. Defeating an army that size would take thousands of airstrikes and raids. If you try to shrink the incursion, the math just doesn’t add up. As an Israeli war cabinet member, Benny Gantz, reportedly told U.S. officials, “Finishing the war without demilitarizing Rafah is like sending in firefighters to put out 80 percent of a fire.”

If this war ends with a large chunk of Hamas in place, it would be a long-term disaster for the region. Victorious, Hamas would dominate whatever government was formed to govern Gaza. Hamas would rebuild its military to continue its efforts to exterminate the Jewish state, delivering on its promise to launch more and more attacks like that of Oct. 7. Israel would have to impose an even more severe blockade than the one that it imposed before, this time to keep out the steel, concrete and other materials that Hamas uses to build tunnels and munitions, but that Gazans would need to rebuild their homes.

If Hamas survives this war intact, it would be harder for the global community to invest in rebuilding Gaza. It would be impossible to begin a peace process. As the veteran Middle East observers Robert Satloff and Dennis Ross wrote in American Purpose, “Any talk of a postwar political process is meaningless without Israel battlefield success: There can be no serious discussion of a two-state solution or any other political objective with Hamas either still governing Gaza or commanding a coherent military force.”

So where are we? I’m left with the tragic conclusion that there is no magical alternative military strategy. As Cohen wrote in Foreign Policy: “If the international community wants Israel to change strategies in Gaza, then it should offer a viable alternative strategy to Israel’s announced goal of destroying Hamas in the strip. And right now, that alternate strategy simply does not exist.”

The lack of viable alternatives leaves me with the further conclusion that Israel must ultimately confront Hamas leaders and forces in Rafah rather than leave it as a Hamas beachhead. For now, a cease-fire may be in the offing in Gaza, which is crucial for the release of more hostages.

Israel can use that time to put in place the humanitarian relief plan that Israeli security officials are now, at long last, proposing (but that the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has not agreed to so far). Israel would also have to undertake a full-scale civilian evacuation of Rafah before any military operation and then try to take out as much of Hamas as possible with as few civilian casualties as possible. Given the horrors of this kind of tunnel-based urban warfare, this will be a painful time and painfully difficult. But absent some new alternative strategy, Biden is wrong to stop Israel from confronting the Hamas threat in southern Gaza.

Finally, like pretty much every expert I consulted, I’m also left with the conclusion that Israel has to completely rethink and change the humanitarian and political side of this operation. Israel needs to supplement its military strategy with an equally powerful Palestinian welfare strategy.

Israel’s core problems today are not mostly the fault of the I.D.F. or its self-defense strategy. Israel’s core problems flow from the growing callousness with which many of its people have viewed the Palestinians over the past decades, magnified exponentially by the trauma it has just suffered. Today, an emotionally shattered Israeli people see through the prism of Oct. 7. They feel existentially insecure, facing enemies on seven fronts — Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. As Ross has noted, many often don’t see a distinction between Hamas and the Palestinians. Over 80 percent of West Bank Palestinians told pollsters they supported the Oct. 7 attack.

As the columnist Anshel Pfeffer wrote in the Israeli paper Haaretz, “The very idea that Israel needed to take any responsibility whatsoever for the place from which those who had murdered, raped and pillaged had emerged was seen as a moral abomination.”

Pfeffer continued that because of this attitude, “the government’s policy on humanitarian supplies to Gaza is a combination of vengeance, ignorance and incompetence.” He quoted unnamed I.D.F. officials who acknowledged that of course Israel is responsible for the welfare of the people in the area it controls but that the civilian leaders refuse to confront this.

On occasions when Israel has responded to world pressure and shifted policy, it has done so in secret, with no discussion in the cabinet.

An officer whose duties specifically include addressing the needs of civilians told Pfeffer that he didn’t have much to do except for some odd jobs.

Israel is failing to lay the groundwork for some sort of better Palestinian future — to its own detriment. The security experts I spoke with acknowledge that providing humanitarian aid will be hard. As Cohen told me: “If the Israeli military takes over distributing humanitarian aid to Gaza, they will likely lose soldiers in the process. And so Israelis are asking why should their boys die providing aid to someone who wants to kill them. So the United States needs to convince Israel that this is the morally and strategically right thing to do.”

For her book “How Terrorism Ends,” the Carnegie Mellon scholar Audrey Kurth Cronin looked at about 460 terrorist groups to investigate how they were defeated. Trying to beat them with military force alone rarely works. The root causes have to be addressed. As the retired general David Petraeus reminded his audience recently at the New Orleans Book Festival, “Over time, hearts and minds still matter.”

Israel also has to offer the world a vision for Gaza’s recovery, and it has to do it right now. Ross argues that after the war is over, the core logic of the peace has to be demilitarization in exchange for reconstruction. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, he sketches out a comprehensive rebuilding effort, bringing in nations and agencies from all over the world, so Gaza doesn’t become a failed state or remain under Hamas control.

Is any of this realistic given the vicious enmity now ripping through the region? Well, many peace breakthroughs of the past decades happened after one side suffered a crushing defeat. Egypt established ties with Israel after it was thoroughly defeated in the Yom Kippur War. When Israel attacked Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006, the world was outraged. But after the fighting stopped, some Lebanese concluded that Hezbollah had dragged them into a bloody, unnecessary conflict. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was forced to acknowledge his error, saying he didn’t know Israel would react so violently. The Lebanese border stabilized. Israel’s over-the-top responses have sometimes served as effective deterrents and prevented further bloodshed.

Israel and the Palestinians have both just suffered shattering defeats. Maybe in the next few years they will do some difficult rethinking, and a new vision of the future will come into view. But that can happen only after Hamas is fully defeated as a military and governing force.

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David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author, most recently,  of “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” @nytdavidbrooks

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: What Would You Have Israel Do to Defend Itself?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe


ccp

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Re: Israel, and its neighbors
« Reply #2937 on: March 25, 2024, 04:03:41 PM »
" Who Were the 1948 Arab Refugees?"

interesting
so here all along I am thinking they are descendants of the Philistines of David and Goliath and Samson lore...... and thus long term non Jewish
Semites of Canaan Judea Palestine Israel etc

Crafty_Dog

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Bernard-Henri Levy: What if Biden helps Hamas Win?
« Reply #2938 on: March 26, 2024, 05:54:06 PM »
What if the U.S. Helps Hamas Win?
The path Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have chosen means the end of any hope of peace.
By Bernard-Henri Lévy
March 26, 2024 4:08 pm ET


Let’s imagine that Israel yields to the pressure. Pushed by an American president already under fire from a segment of the electorate that objects to his support for a “genocidal” state, Israel refrains from entering Rafah to finish off Hamas’s four surviving battalions. Israel agrees to the general cease-fire of indeterminate duration that the U.S. administration seems to push amid increasingly virulent antisemitism.

The idea that Washington unconditionally supports Israel is a longstanding myth. While the U.S. often vetoes anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council, the one that passed Monday was far from the first exception. Recall Resolution 1701 (2006) to halt Israel’s Lebanon offensive at the Litani River—thus sparing what remained of the Hezbollah units.

So the supposition that the U.S. pushes Israel into capitulating isn’t implausible. It is the path forward that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who styles himself the Jewish state’s shomer, or protector, has chosen. It isn’t hard to picture an Israel that is sermonized, impeded and prevented from dealing with Hamas the way the U.S. dealt with Al-Qaeda and ISIS a few years back—an Israel forced into defeat.

If that came to pass, what would happen? Hamas would declare victory—on the verge of defeat, then the next minute revived. These criminals against humanity would emerge from their tunnels triumphant after playing with the lives not only of the 250 Israelis captured on Oct. 7, but also of their own citizens, whom they transformed into human shields.

The Arab street would view Hamas terrorists as resistance fighters. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—nations that signed the Abraham Accords or were leaning toward doing so—Hamas’s prestige would be enhanced. In the West Bank as in Gaza, Hamas would quickly eclipse the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, whose image would pale next to the twin aura of martyrdom and endurance in which Hamas would cloak itself.

After that, no diplomatic or military strategy would prevail against the iron law of people converted into mobs and mobs into packs. None of the experts’ extravagant plans for an international stabilization force, an interim Arab authority, or a technocratic government presiding over the reconstruction of Gaza would stand long against the blast effect created by the last-minute return of this group of criminals adorned with the most heroic of virtues.

Hamas would be the law in the Palestinian territories. It would set the ideological and political agenda, regardless of the formal structure of the new government. And Israel will never deal with a Palestinian Authority of which Hamas is a part. Goodbye, Palestinian State. Hope for peace harbored by moderates on both sides will be dead.

This is why the world has one choice. Instead of putting all their energy into trying to get Israel to bend, leaders should push Hamas to surrender. The Biden administration should redirect the time it is spending in useless negotiations with the Qataris—experts in double-dealing—to calling the Qataris’ bluff by demanding that they push the “political” leaders of Hamas, whom they host and protect, to live up to their responsibilities.

Those who portray themselves as praying for the end of this war and a negotiated peace on “the day after” must recognize there is only one path to that end. First, the release of all hostages. Next, the evacuation of civilians from the zone of imminent combat. When will the world recognize that Israel, having been forced into this war, is doing more than any army ever did to prevent civilian deaths?

And finally, in Rafah, the destruction of what remains of Hamas and its death squads. Without this military victory, the endless wheel of misfortune will begin to spin yet again, though faster. This is the terrible truth.

Mr. Lévy is author of “The Will to See: Dispatches From a World of Misery and Hope” and author and director of the documentary “Slava Ukraini.” This article was translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy.

ccp

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for the hundred thousanth time US Israel talks
« Reply #2939 on: March 27, 2024, 01:18:28 PM »
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/defense-secretary-meets-with-israeli-counterpart-as-tensions-grow/ar-BB1kAqDe?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=066673229ef847fabb8d6bae09add543&ei=21

how many times does the Biden admin. have to talk in circles?

God how annoying.
Let Israel do its job to defend itself and do the best they can to rid of Hamas
for God's sakes.

Can Israel get arms from other countries ?


Crafty_Dog

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I call for a Russia-ISIS Ceasefire!
« Reply #2940 on: March 27, 2024, 03:21:04 PM »
Russia must respect international law.

Isis must get a State on Russia's border.

Russia must feed ISIS and give it fuel.

DougMacG

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Israel, Biden official resigns, risking future of her one year career
« Reply #2941 on: March 28, 2024, 06:34:23 AM »
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/opinions/gaza-israel-resigning-state-department-sheline/index.html

Here is the depth of one of those government workers making way more than productive sector workers.

What was she paid to do, make sure Hamas has everything they need?

Body-by-Guinness

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Israel's Kid Gloves
« Reply #2942 on: March 28, 2024, 07:17:36 AM »
Piece explores Israel's unprecedented efforts to minimize civilian casualties:

https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286