Yesterday the Chicago City Council approved a resolution condemning Hamas’s attack on Israel last weekend and in support of Israel. Demonstrators disrupted the City Council meeting. Tara Molina and Charlie De Mar report at CBS Chicago:

CHICAGO (CBS) — The Chicago City Council on Friday approved a resolution declaring solidarity with Israel, and condemning a brutal attack by Hamas over the weekend, after pro-Palestinian protesters angrily disrupted the proceedings.

Ald. Debra Silverstein (50th), the council’s only Jewish member, introduced the symbolic Israel Solidarity Resolution to show support for Israel, after Hamas militants launched a surprise attack from the Gaza Strip over the weekend, killing hundreds, and taking many more hostage.

“I urge my colleagues to be on the right side of history, and to take a stand against Hamas’ evil. The United States of America stands with Israel. President Biden and Vice President Harris stand with Israel,” Silverstein said.

During a special City Council meeting to debate Silverstein’s resolution, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrators repeatedly shouted at each other, interrupting aldermen on the council floor. Basically, I think it’s benign.

The cited article includes a photographic reproduction of the text of the resolution. I have been unable to find a plain text version online including at the City Council’s website.

I believe the resolution would have been improved by striking the clause “stand in support of Israel”. I believe that people have a right to demonstrate for or against the activities of the City Council outside City Hall. I believe that disrupting city council meetings is undemocratic on its face. I have stronger feelings than that but I’ll keep them to myself.

I believe that those who objected to the resolution should write a resolution of their own and reach out to their alderman to sponsor it. That’s the proper course of action. Every City Council resolution cannot be about everything.

I originally started out writing a post titled “Questions That People Aren’t Asking” but as I did my reading this morning I learned, somewhat to my surprise, that the editors of the Wall Street Journal are asking at least some of those questions:

If Hamas cared about Palestinian civilians, it would encourage them to leave Gaza. But instead it is demanding that they remain. The terror group intends to use its own people and the hostages it abducted from Israel as human shields. Their hope is that either Israeli concern about causing collateral damage or global opprobrium will force Israel to scale back its counter-invasion.

Egypt is the only place to which Gaza’s civilians can flee for now. Yet Cairo insists on maintaining its strict quota for entries from Gaza via the Rafah crossing—with only 800 able to leave on Monday, and the crossing reportedly closed in recent days.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi bears no warm feelings toward Hamas, which is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood that tried to impose an Islamist regime in his country not too long ago. He’s concerned that Hamas terrorists might slip across the border into Egypt with a tide of civilians.

That’s two of the questions:

1. Is Hamas organizing evacuations from the northern part of Gaza?
2. Are the Egyptians allowing Gazans to seek refuge in Egypt?

So much for Arab solidarity, even Gazan solidarity. Hamas is the government of Gaza. As far as I’ve been able to discover they’re doing the opposite of organizing evacuation of civilians from the northern part of Gaza. They’re encouraging them to stay presumably so they will function as human shields against an Israeli ground invasion. That should exhaust any sympathy you might have for Hamas.

And the Egyptians aren’t even allowing foreigners (like Americans) to exit Gaza into Egypt let alone Gazans. To my eye Gazans would be legitimate refugees and Egypt has a legal obligation to accept them. They aren’t. The reasons for that include the political, security, and just plain bigotry. Palestinians don’t seem to be particularly popular in the Arab world. Or, possibly more precisely, they’re popular as a cause to beat the Israelis, Europeans, and Americans over the head with but not otherwise.

Here’s another question. If you don’t think the Israelis should be bombing and invading Gaza, what do you think they should do? IMO if you disagree with what the Israelis are doing you have an intellectual and moral obligation to say outright what you think they should be doing. As a regular commenter here said in a thread at OTB:

The asymmetry between the standard for Israeli conduct and Hamas’ conduct is very revealing – Israel is held to an impossible standard where any killed civilians are immediately counted as war crimes and condemned. Hamas is held to no standard at all despite it being one long string of continuous and intentional war crimes and having an explicit goal is to murder Jews.

I’ll rise to my own challenge. I think the Israelis are doing pretty much what I would expect them to do. I don’t fully agree with the full set of objectives of any of the parties and in particular I disagree with how the United States has been managing its relationship with Israel. I think the United States should be anti-murder of civilians, anti-kidnapping, anti-beheading of babies, and anti-raping of women but I also do not believe that we support the goal of displacing all Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza. None of the Israeli settlements on the West Bank is self-supporting. Without the support of the Israeli government life would be even harder for the settlers than it already is. We should exert whatever influence we have on the Israeli government to discourage them from providing financial support for West Bank settlements.

In terms of Gaza I don’t believe there are any good options. Of the bad options creating a buffer zone of the northern, say, five miles of Gaza that is left as a no-go zone is probably the best but it’s pretty awful. The Israelis have told Gazans to evacuate. I don’t know if 24 hours is enough; honestly, I think they’d be condemned regardless of what they did. I think that a house-to-house, block-by-block search of Gaza is an error.

In looking through my archives I found this piece, which echoes the post I just wrote but was written in 2016, riffing off some remarks by George Friedman. Short version: nothing has changed.

I agree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal to the extent that I think we should be able to provide munitions to Israel and Ukraine without degrading our own defense capabilities. Where I think I disagree is over whether we are able to at present:

President Biden hinted Tuesday that he may ask Congress for appropriations for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. That makes military and political sense. The U.S. is confronting an authoritarian axis that is increasingly working together.

Iran, the ventriloquist for Hamas, is helping Vladimir Putin as he tries to subjugate Ukraine. Tehran is pouring drones into Russia’s war, and the Biden Administration has warned of deepening cooperation, including a new weapons plant in Russia. The two are allies in Syria. Mr. Putin is also dining out on his “no limits” partnership with the Chinese Communist Party. The axis wants to set the rules of the world and topple the relative global stability the U.S. has enforced since World War II.

Yet some in Congress want to separate Israel from Ukraine and force a false choice. “Israel is facing existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately,” GOP Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted this week. The Heritage Foundation is encouraging lawmakers to “resist attempts to link emergency military support for Israel with additional funding for Ukraine.”

The implication is that the U.S. can’t supply both at once. But the two conflicts are different enough that the U.S. has weapons that can help Ukraine and Israel. The Ukrainians are trying to break through entrenched defenses of concrete and mines, a different job than destroying Hamas in Gaza.

I sometimes wonder where the editors have been for the last 30 years. The story of the last 30 years of American enterprise is that businesses have wrung all of the excess capacity out of our economy. Now in order to produce significantly more of practically anything it isn’t enough to place an order and turn the spigot a little more. We need to build whole supply chains.

It isn’t 1941 any more. Eighty years ago with a little retrofitting typewriter factories could be changed into machine gun factories in short order. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of munitions manufacturers. Now there are just a handful of primary defense contractors. We don’t have excess production of steel, microchips, and thousands of other things necessary to producing munitions. The “arsenal of democracy” is no more.

Maybe we still have that capacity. I don’t believe we do. If we did we wouldn’t be depending on China (and Russia!) for mission-critical materials and components. Furthermore, I’m skeptical that we can reduce our use of coal and oil, replace them with wind and solar, and produce enough munitions to supply two conflicts using munitions at a pace greater than during World War II concurrently.

“We just have to!” is not a plan. It’s an aspiration.

Update

Here’s a brief history of American steel production:

Present utilization is estimated at between 80% and 90%. In other words we’re not going to produce 30% more steel, for example, in the near term. I suspect we’d be hard put to produce 10% more.

I encourage you to read David French’s account of what he sees as likely to happen in Gaza in the New York Times. In summary he believes that Israel is likely to approach Hamas much the way Iraq and the U. S. approached Daesh in Mosul. Here’s the kernel of it:

We are witnessing nothing like the immediate mass destruction of an indiscriminate attack, but large numbers of precision attacks can still inflict extreme (and deadly) damage.

If civilians aren’t evacuated from the combat zone, the intensity of combat makes significant civilian casualties inevitable, even if Israel fully complies with the law of war: I also spoke this week to James Verini, a contributing writer to The Times Magazine, who wrote “They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate,” perhaps the definitive on-the-ground account of the fight for Mosul, and two things he said stood out in the conversation.

First, because precision weapons sometimes miss and intelligence often fails, airstrikes inevitably inflict serious collateral damage, including civilian casualties. Second, as the fight drags on and ramps up in intensity, concern for civilian lives often diminishes. That was the pattern for the less-disciplined Iraqi security forces, but we can’t for a moment presume that Israeli soldiers are superhuman. Most of them are draftees and reservists. They’re subject to the same fears and temptations under extreme stress and anger as any other soldier in any other army.

Then there’s the factor of time. Spencer observed that Israel always fights against the backdrop of a ticking clock. The United States is an independent economic and military superpower. We possess the world’s most powerful military and the world’s most potent economy. We have the luxury of fighting on timetables we set. If we want to slow down and take nine months to clear a city, we can take nine months to clear a city.

My view, as it has been for some time, is that U. S. interests do not align well either with those of the Israelis or those of the Palestinians but Hamas, by its actions and admission, is hostis humani generis and the Israelis will deal with it as such. I’m concerned that the Israelis will not be as scrupulous as Mr. French insists they will and our government should do what it can to ensure that it is. That does not align well with the position that the Biden Administration has been articulating.

Update

I hope the editors of the Washington Post are right:

At a time when the United States, and the world, desperately need decency and moral clarity, President Biden has provided both. His words regarding the wanton atrocities Hamas has committed against hundreds of Israeli civilians, as well as many Americans and citizens of other countries, in the past week have been unequivocal. In remarks to a gathering of American Jewish leaders Wednesday, he described the mass murder as “sheer evil” and likened it to “the worst atrocities of ISIS.”

In condemning the terrorism, and offering support to Israel’s military response, the president also reminded the new emergency war government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of its responsibilities under “the law of war.” These measured statements put the United States in just the right place: supportive of Israel but positioned, if need be, to influence and temper its response.

That would be a departure from the historic U. S. position. As I say, I hope they’re right.

In an interview at Foreign Policy of Israeli hostage negotiator Boaz Ganor by Tal Alroy, Mr. Ganor selects a variant o my option B from my musings over the likely outcome of the war between Israel and Hamas:

I would expect to see a military operation in large parts of Gaza changing into rescue operations here and there based on new intelligence on the whereabouts of the hostages.

The consideration of the Israeli hostages will become a minor consideration. The success of the military operation and the guarding of the lives of the Israeli soldiers would probably be the first priority.

I suspect it may start out that way but that won’t last long and it will transmogrify into something easier on Israel’s soldiers and harder on the Gazans.

Speaking of predictions William Galston’s prediction that the attacks by Hamas over the weekend are likely the end of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political career—that is confirmed by the opinion polls which are telling us that 4 out of 5 israelis blame him for Israel being caught flat-footed by the attack.

It looks very much as though prospects for preventing Israel’s war with Hamas from widening into a regional conflict have become much more difficult. The BBC is reporting that Syria is claiming that the Israelis have bombed the Damascus and Aleppo airports:

State media said runways had been damaged at both Damascus and Aleppo airports and flights would be diverted to Latakia, a city in north-west Syria.

Israel has not commented on the strike. It has previously attacked targets in war-torn Syria, linked to Iran.

Iran’s foreign minister was planning to fly to Syria on Friday.

Syria’s Damascus and Aleppo airports not only handle civil aviation but also host military bases, which are reportedly transit points for Iranian arms sent to Hezbollah – a militant group which is powerful in both Syria and Lebanon.

An unnamed military source quoted by Syrian state media said “simultaneous” Israeli strikes had “damaged landing strips in the two airports, putting them out of service”. The source called it a “desperate”Israeli attempt to divert attention from the Gaza conflict.

This is breaking news. Whether this is tactical or strategic or true at all is impossible to say.

I think that Zack Beauchamp is trying to thread a very tiny needle in his piece at Vox.com, “How to think morally about the Israel-Hamas war”. I respect his saying this:

Almost immediately after news of the attack broke, celebrations broke out among a group of Western leftists, hailing Hamas’s incursion as an act of “decolonization.” This was not merely a handful of isolated individuals, but included journalists with large followings, professors, and student organizations at elite universities. At a rally supported by the Democratic Socialists in America in New York, the crowd cheered Hamas’s success.

This cheerleading for murderous terrorists is ghoulish and self-discrediting: “a betrayal of the left’s most fundamental values,” as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz writes.

It is also, in a way, revealing. The moral failures of the fringe left show us how not to think about the ongoing horrors in Israel and Gaza — and, in doing so, point to a better way.

It needed saying. He continues:

Currently, the Israeli government is preparing a ground invasion of Gaza that threatens to come with unimaginable human costs. The callousness with which they are talking about civilian deaths in Gaza is appalling. An anonymous Israeli official told Israeli reporter Alon Ben David that their response would turn Gaza into “a city of tents.” A parliamentarian from the ruling Likud party said, on national television, that Israel should not concern itself with the safety of any Gazans who “chose” to stay in the Gaza Strip. (With crossings into Egypt and Israel blocked, Gazans could not leave if they wanted.)

This, too, is evil.

I do not pretend to know exactly what the right choice is for Israel going forward. But I know that if the Israeli Defense Forces do slaughter civilians indiscriminately, the Israeli government will be committing abuses on moral par with those of Hamas.

It takes him a while to arrive at his “alternative”:

I agree with Winant, broadly, that American policy prior to this conflict has been far too tolerant of the deepening of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. After the current emergency, the Biden administration ought to reconsider what it can do to put pressure on Israel to cease its cruel and counterproductive policies.

I agree with that. So far, so good. He continues:

This moment, to put it mildly, is not a time when anything like that will happen. But what we can do now is bolster the forces who support peace and equality on the Israeli side in other ways.

Israelis will never feel safe making concessions if they don’t, well, feel safe.

Surprisingly, bombs, rockets, and mortar attacks have a way of making one feel unsafe.

He continues:

More broadly, we need as outside observers to maintain basic human values in ourselves: to see the victims on both sides as humans, to care about suffering, and to attune our statements and activities toward finding ways forward that can improve the situation. If we allow ourselves to slide into moral solipsism, we won’t merely justify atrocities; we will blind ourselves to the steps that can be taken to actually make life better on the ground.

That’s pretty vague. But I agree with this, too:

We can and should extend sympathy to Israeli victims, but we should not let that shade into justification for retaliatory atrocities. We should condemn Hamas terrorism, but we should also condemn Israeli abuses against Gazans.

and here’s his conclusion:

Criticize Israel when it slaughters Palestinians, and criticize Palestinians when they slaughter Israelis. Note the asymmetries — both Israel’s vastly superior power and Hamas’s much greater disregard for rules about targeting civilians — but do not allow those differences to obscure the most basic moral truth: that human suffering is, in and of itself, wrong.

This is not just how we say the right things about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It’s how we, in the end, will figure out how best to contribute to peace down the line. To think otherwise, and find fault only with one side, leads to the moral oblivion of cheering the slaughter of children.

I agree with that, too. Nowhere does he explain how supporting leaders who advocate uncritical support for Israel can be reconciled with the views he’s expressing. In the end he makes common cause with them for electoral reasons which is not a moral judgment.

I found this piece at The Hill Judy Kurtz amusing in a grim sort of way:

Sen. John Fetterman said Wednesday that America “is not sending their best and brightest” to represent them in Congress.

“Sometimes you literally just can’t believe like, these people are making the decisions that are determining the government here. It’s actually scary,” the Pennsylvania Democrat said during an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

My former business partner once said something we referred to as the “reverse Voltaire”: “I may agree with what you say but I reject your right to say it”. I believe that Sen. Fetterman is referring to the House but it applies equally if not more so to the Senate. Elections are not assessments of cognitive ability. I find it simultaneously amusing and depressing that people insist that they are.

Over the years I’ve encountered quite a few politicians socially. My experience is that they have typically been pretty ordinary members of the professional class. Not stupid but not brain trusts, either. When you add that our Congress is increasingly ideological and ideology has a way of making people stupid, it explains a lot.