The talking heads programs (Face the Nation, Meet the Press, This Week, etc.) were pretty tightly focused on the war in Gaza, especially because of the IDF attack on World Center Kitchen vehicles in Gaza that took the lives of seven aid workers.
IMO the attack put the Biden Administration on the horns of a real dilemma. On the one hand the president has been full-throated in his support for Israel for over a generation including a statement of support following Hamas’s attack on Israel six months ago. That makes it difficult for the president to “walk back” his support regardless of the domestic political consequences. On the other the attack raised the question of what Israel’s actual objectives in the war are.
One of the things I noticed is no one on any program that I heard made the critical point that Hamas could end the war tomorrow. All they need to do is surrender. The inescapable conclusion from that is that Hamas values its own members and their continued genocidal war against Israel more than they do the civilian population of Gaza.
My opinion as I have tried to make clear is that the Israelis are not our friends and Israel is not the 51st state. However, I also think that the members of Hamas are hostis humani generis—enemies of humankind. Their views are incompatible with ordinary decency let alone with liberal democracy. Talk of a “two-state solution” in the context of the continued existence of Hamas is a cruel fantasy. By its own admission Hamas doesn’t believe that any state is legitimate other than the Dal al-Islam (the abode of Islam).
Given a choice between Israel continuing to survive and Hamas continuing to survive, the preferred alternative is clear. Israel should continue and Hamas must be destroyed. That’s a step short of the full-throated support of Israel the Biden Administration appears to be trying to walk back.
Hamas is the predictable product of the Ashkenazi colonial project, a project which has been based on ethnic cleansing and actual genocide from the beginning some 76 years ago, a 100 if you count Balfour.
The horrors inflicted on the Ashenazis by the Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians and other Nazi allies do not justify the horrors inflicted on the native Palestinians by the Ashkenazi, nor do they justify the establishment of an Ashkenazi colonial state on Palestinian land.
The only way the conflict can be resolved is by the dismantling of the Israel state, its replacement by a native Palestinian state, and by the deportation of the Ashkenazi Jews back to their European and North American homelands.
PS. This is not a Muslim vs. Jew problem. The Ashkenazis are attacking all non-Jews, especially Christians. Christians have been targeted and killed, their homes, churches, schools, hospitals and historical monuments destroyed, including the third oldest church in Christendom.
I think part of the issue is that the murder of the World Kitchen people calls into credibility other Israeli claims. Israel claims it was just an accident. However, the plans had been filed with and confirmed by the Israelis. It took place in a deconflicted zone, an area designed to make these kinds fo accidents less likely. Also, this late in the conflict how many vehicles are on the road at 1:00 AM? The odds of Hamas being out in a convoy as practically the only vehicles on the road has to be close to zero. Either their system is poorly set up so that it makes it more likely to kill aid workers or the people running the system know that they can likely ignore safety protocols.
Steve
A. “IMO the attack put the Biden Administration on the horns of a real dilemma.”
Definition: Dilemma. Websters – 1) Michigan. 2) A voter under the age of 23.
B. Hammas. Only total destruction will do. It is naive beyond belief to think otherwise. One might even call them “animals.”
C. Israel. Yes, they may be heavy handed. Its an existential issue for them. In addition, what hypocrisy on Bidens part. Obama/Biden blew away quite a few citizens on their own watch. This is why you only go to war when you have to. There are no clean wars. We aren’t in Kansas anymore talking heads.
I’ve been commenting a lot about this over at OTB. Now that more information has come out, this is pretty bad for Israel IMO. I don’t think they knew they were WCZ vehicles and struck anyway, but negligence was pretty bad, on the level of some of the very worst mistakes the US made over the last 20 years.
This is all complicated by unique factors of this war:
1. The Western and media obsession with the Israel/Palestinian issue compared to other conflicts
2. The agreement of everyone that Palestinians should remain trapped in Gaza.
3. The nature of urban warfare itself, which always inflicts the worst casualties on civilians when they are present.
4. One combatant in the conflict that utilizes civilians and the intentional generation of civilian deaths for tactical and strategic purposes.
4. Points 2 – 4 are the primary and unique drivers of this conflict – in every other urban war, at least some civilians have been able to flee.
And so I’m frustrated there continues to be this persistent fantasy that people believe that all these things can be possible at once:
– You can have a major conflict in civilian-occupied terrain with low civilian casualties
– You can do that when one side is specifically trying to generate civilian casualties
– You can not only prevent civilian deaths in a war in urban terrain, but you can also feed and provide them aid via third parties with little risk to civilians or those third parties.
– You can fight in urban terrain with minimal destruction to buildings and infrastructure
– You can defeat an entrenched enemy force in urban terrain also occupied by civilians using “precision” counter-terrorism tactics.
All of that is pure fantasy. The historical record is unequivocal. The only way to prevent large numbers of civilian deaths in urban warfare is to make sure there are few or no civilians present. Unfortunately, the entire international community, including those who claim to be on the side of Palestinians, all agree that Palestinians should not have agency and be given the choice to leave.
That’s been my view. I even articulated a strategy that might have been employed to accomplish that. It would have been risky and I presume that’s the reason it was not adopted.
@Andy
Succinct comment, as always.
People have been lead to believe that smart bombs and drones can win wars. They have been assured that massive killing and destruction is no longer needed to win wars.
The “winner” needs the “loser” to accept defeat, and the only way to accomplish this is to inflict as much pain as possible. So, one side needs to kill as many civilians and destroy as many buildings, as possible.
In this case, I have no idea who will be the “winner” or who can be the “winner”.
I think issues are being conflated here. Of course there were going to be lots of civilian deaths. I put my cards on the table and said I expected and found it pretty acceptable after the barbarity of the attacks if there were about 50k deaths if they were just going for revenge, and 100k if they truly eliminated Hamas, not that I think that is possible. However, that’s in a fighting war for all of the reasons that have been articulated.
What is unique is the intent of Israel to starve so much of the population to death. Targeting in cities is hard, we get that that, but starving people is not a targeted action. Denying medical supplies is not a targeted action. Those are easily avoidable. It is in that context that we had the WCK people murdered. While I also think it was probably not deliberate it suggests such a level of negligence that it makes little difference. Israel manages to get rid of UNWRA with what were likely false claims, WCK jumps in to take up the slack and on their second delivery they accidentally get killed.
Steve
Contrary to the impression one might get from reading Bob Sykes’s comments, 2/3s of Israel’s Jewish population is either Sephardic or Mizrahi, i.e. culturally they’re more like North African and Middle Eastern Arabs than they are like Europeans.