I think I’ve mentioned this before but there is such a widely held misconception about people having some sort of inherent right to particular areas I felt it was worth repeating. The most immediate example of this is the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. They both use their holy books to prove that God has given them the land.

The reality is messier than that. As well as we can tell there have always been Jews in Israel and there have always been Arabs in Israel. What has happened over time is that one side or another has seized control of the land by force. In 1948 it was the Israelis. In 1967 and 1973 the Arabs retaliated, were defeated, and the Israelis took more territory. Since then the Israelis have negotiated some of the land they seized away.

In the 7th century it was the Arabs. In the 16th century it was the Turks. The Turks held Palestine from the 16th century to the early 20th century. During that period the only people who owned any land in Palestine were the Ottoman, Jews, and Christians. I have written about that extensively. Claims by the Muslim Arabs that their ancestors owned the land for hundreds of years are BS. They didn’t. They were tenants.

If you’re going to argue that might doesn’t make right, the only ones who have any reasonable claim to the land are the Maronites in Lebanon. Before the Israelites the Canaanites held the land (DNA tests have suggested that the Maronites are Phoenicians who were identical to the Canaanites). But reality intrudes once again: I’m quite sure that some time in the mists of history their ancestors seized the land from someone else.

That isn’t just true in ancient Palestine. It’s true practically everywhere. It’s true in the American Southwest where the U. S. government displaced the Navajo who had displaced the people who there before them who had displaced the people who were there before them. It’s true in the Northeast of the United States. It’s true in Egypt, in Britain, in France, in Germany, in India, in China. There may be some vestigial population in East Africa who have actually always been there but, frankly, I doubt it. I think the present inhabitants came from somewhere else.

The siege of Gaza continues. The Israelis are not allowing water, food, or fuel to enter the district until the Israeli hostages are released. The BBC reports:

“No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter,” said energy minister Israel Katz.

Israeli troops are mobilizing at the border.

How will this crisis end?

1. The hostages will be released, the siege lifted, and everything will go back to a dreary normal
2. The Israelis will conduct a house-to-house search of Gaza for the hostages with bitter urban warfare every step of the way. Some hostages will be found, some found dead, some not found at all.
3. The Israelis will stop bombing Gaza when they think they have exacted enough revenge, i.e. stop short of their stated objective.
4. The Israelis will clear a buffer zone between Israel and Gaza which will be surveilled around the clock. That also stops short of their stated objective.
5. The Israelis will assume the hostages are dead and kill every man, woman, and child in Gaza.
6. The present Israel-Hamas war will expand into a regional conflict.

I continue to believe that the situations with the Israelis and Palestinians are not symmetrical. The retort to that has been that events have not proceeded as I suggested they would to which I respond, how do they know? Every year in the last 30 years, indeed, since the founding of Hamas, Israel has experienced some terrorist violence, e.g. attacks, bombings, rockets and mortars, etc. For events to unfold as I have suggested the Palestinians would need to refrain from political violence for some period of time.

The Israelis and Palestinians have irreconcilable objectives. Both think the entirety of the land of Israel belongs to them. If the Israelis stopped ratcheting up their security measures, more Israelis would be killed. If the Palestinians stopped engaging in political violence, the Israelis might be able to relax their security measures. See? Not symmetrical.

We don’t support Israel’s goal—making Israel into a Jewish state or, worse, Greater Israel (present Israel plus “Samaria”, i.e. the West Bank and Gaza and parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon). We don’t support Hamas’s objectives: extermination of the Jews in Israel.

Full-throated support for Israel means implicitly accepting Israel’s goals.

Call it lazy or cowardly but the United States should tread a narrow line, opposing Hamas’s terrorism without supporting Israel’s broader goals. It’s not the path we’re on now.

I read the responses of the panel of experts assembled by The Guardian to the question “How should the U. S. respond to the Israel-Palestinian Crisis?” with a sort of grim amusement. Here are the experts and their responses:

Joshua Leifer: ‘The US has the power to stop the bloodshed’

Alex Kane: ‘Biden is giving the green light to an extremist coalition’

Yousef Munayyer: ‘The laziest thing the US can do is condemn Palestinian violence yet ignore the causes’

Libby Lenkinski: ‘Retain a sense of humanity for all innocent people’

Noura Erakat: ‘The US is a central part of the problem

I presume you get the gist of it.

Israel is not the ally of the United States. It is a client of the United States but it is a client like no other of which I am aware that dictates the terms and conditions of the relationship. In terms of U. S. politics support for Israel is a valence issue.

Consequently, Mr. Leifer is wrong. Yes, the U. S. could “stop the bloodshed” by bombing Gaza and the West Bank, Israel, or all of the above into oblivion but that isn’t what he means and in any event that won’t happen. Israel will not change their course of action if we say “Pretty please” and, as I note, support for Israel is a valence issue. We won’t hold our military assistance hostage to a change in Israeli policies.

Mr. Kane apparently does not read the U. S. news media. What he interprets as a “green light to an extremist coalition” (he means Israeli coalition) is interpreted by some in the U. S. as a green light to Palestinian atrocities.

Mr. Munayyer is correct. Condemning Palestinian violence and ignoring Israeli actions over which we have no influence is the laziest thing we can do. It’s also our most likely course of action.

Ms. Lenkinski’s remarks are a lament. I agree. It’s worthless and provides no guidance for action but I agree.

Noura Erakat is operating under the misapprehension that the Israelis would do things differently without U. S. support, verbal or material. Where’s her evidence? I don’t believe that is the case. Quite to the contrary the Israelis don’t need our permission and will do what they will regardless of what we say or do.

Injecting ourselves into the war is the last thing we should do. It is of no benefit to us and we’ll get blamed by somebody regardless. There is literally no upside.

The conflict is an instantiation of what happens when two peoples claim the same territory based on made up history, supported by their holy books. The panel’s reaction illustrates why we should not involve ourselves in such arguments in any but the most lofty terms.

Today is the 110th anniversary of my father’s birth. To my sorrow he did not live half that long. Like me my dad was a storyteller and just recently it was impressed on me that if my father’s stories were to be learned by the younger generations of my family it would be up to me to tell them. I’m going to make a concerted effort to tell my father’s stories.

I don’t recall whether I’ve told this one before or not. One day when my dad was about 14 years old (I assume shortly after his father’s death but before his grandfather’s death), his mom wanted to go down to the drugstore—not an enormous distance away but too far to walk. She didn’t drive. So, in characteristic style, he told her that he would take her to the drugstore. He had never driven before.

He went back into the garage and started up the old Model T that had been sitting idle since his dad’s death. He drove his mother the several blocks to the drugstore and at one point noticed that the car was handling oddly. He saw something rolling in front of the car. It was the car’s right front wheel which had somehow become detached.

Shortly thereafter my grandfather bought my dad a brand new Model A which he drove to high school and, I presume, to college. I assume that at some point he got a driver’s license—Missouri had been requiring them since 1903, one of the first states to do so.

If you infer from that story that my dad was headstrong and fearless, you would be correct.

I wanted to take note of one passage in Gerard Baker’s Wall Street Journal column concerning the Second Yom Kipper War:

Third, as this war escalates, it is important to understand that the savagery is essential to Hamas’s goals. Their wanton bloodlust is designed to work twice over. They murder, rape and mutilate Israelis, knowing that in its response Israel will wreak havoc on Palestinians. Israel, unlike its enemies, will do what it can to avoid punishing the innocent. But innocents will suffer, because Hamas has positioned them precisely for this purpose.

The terrorists’ objective is truly indiscriminate destruction. For them a dead Jew is a bonus, but a dead Palestinian is a trophy they can parade before credulous Western media to convey some supposed moral equivalence between their depravity and the actions of a beleaguered state seeking to preserve its very existence.

The highlighting is mine. I think that Mr. Baker is imposing his own assumptions and values on the Israelis. The Israelis believe in “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” not in “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” or “turn the other cheek”. In addition the majority of Israelis are or are descended from people who fled the Middle East and North Africa following the expulsions from Egypt, Iraq, Iran, etc. following World War II. Said another way their views may be more like those of the Palestinians than different from them.

The question will be whether the Israelis decide to stay their hands for strategic reasons. On that I have no idea.

I think that Mary Anastasia O’Grady is engaging in wishful thinking in her latest Wall Street Journal column:

I am reminded of the observation attributed to Winston Churchill that “Americans will always do the right thing, after having exhausted all the alternatives.” The right thing to do about the migration crisis is to return to a U.S.-led pro-growth agenda for the Western Hemisphere. Unfortunately all other alternatives aren’t yet exhausted.

Where she is mistaken is that South and Central Americans suffer from bad government, government for the benefit of the lucky few. There is literally nothing we could do or could have done to change that.

Our Central American neighbors have never really trusted us. From 1890 to 2010 we’ve used military force or our intelligence services against them more than 50 times. Our advice falls on deaf ears. Everything we say or do is suspect.

Many years ago the rationale behind the Israelis’ policy was explained to me like this.

Imagine that the Palestinians stopped defending themselves from Israeli attacks. The situation would become quiet. Over time and as trust between the Israelis and Palestinians was rebuilt, the conditions for both the Israelis and Palestinians would improve. It would be easier to commute from Gaza to Israel. The Israelis would not need to man the checkpoints that control transit.

Now imagine that Israelis stopped defending themselves from attacks by Hamas or Hezbollah. Thousands would be killed. All of the Jews in Israel would be at risk.

In other words the situations are not symmetrical.

Conditions are much worse now than when I had that conversation. The Israelis are more nationalistic and more of them are committed to uprooting the Palestinians from what they regard as “Greater Israel” than used to be the case. Every terrorist attack makes the case stronger.

I don’t agree with everything that Carlos Roa has to say in his piece at The National Interest but there is one passage I wanted to share:

The United States, traditionally Israel’s staunch ally, is also in a precarious situation. That Washington also didn’t see this attack coming speaks ill of its intelligence capabilities, especially in signals intelligence. The Biden administration will find itself under fire. Only mere days ago, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan argued that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now.” On the same day, Semafor revealed that Iran built a significant influence network that reached deep into the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. Finally, the administration’s decision to release $6 billion to Iran in exchange for five American hostages hostage will only face harsher criticism in the coming days; it is not unlikely that some of that money funded or otherwise supported Hamas’ current operation. Pressure to support Israel will be immense, complicating an already delicate situation with a public already tired of supporting conflicts abroad.

He refers to the conflict as the “Simchat Tora War”, in reference to the holiday on which the initial strikes fell and to the Yom Kippur War of fifty years ago.

Much has been said of Israel’s intelligence failure and I think that seeing a U. S. intelligence failure as well is a bit of a stretch. Just how responsible are we? It would be nice to think that our intelligence apparatus is tracking intelligence all over the world but I privately think that our Middle East intelligence in particular is awful and we are highly dependent on the Israelis there. Said another way if they didn’t know it, we wouldn’t know it.

Whether that should be the case is a different subject but I think it has been the case for a very long time.

Anyway, I think there will be a lot of fault-finding about this conflict. People will blame the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Iranians, and us (under the “no sparrow falls” theory). They will blame the Biden Administration and the Trump Administration and, probably, every U. S. administration of the post-war period.