Israel at War

[Burning Petard]

Symbols are useful. They can strew confusion and they can facilitate communication. Thus there is a Miami University in Pennsylvania, a town called Zilwaukee just North of Saginaw Michigan (also famous for the only draw bridge on a US Interstate Hiway). It is why I flew the Yellow Gadsden flag on September 12; and I will not fly it now.

snailgate

[datsunaholic]

The Interstate bridge on I-5 between Washington and Oregon would disagree with the drawbridge in Michigan being the only one.

[liberty]

I have been accused of cheerleading, but It’s not cheerleading to speak the truth. I don’t have a team to cheer for, and even if I did would not cheer. War is not a game one plays for amusement; it is a dirty business that kills, cripples and mutilates both military and civilian alike.

I have principles of life that I believe in; one of which is, what one does to one’s enemy that enemy has a right to do in return. I don’t believe the Israeli army will do to the Palestinians what Hamas did to the Jews. But they do have a right to destroy Hamas and it doesn’t matter how many human shields stand in the way.

There is one aspect of this Gaza situation that turns me against Palestinians. There are Palestinian-American fathers in Gaza city that are keeping their families there so their children can be human shields for Hamas. Don’t tell me they can’t get out of the city; it is not that big; they can walk out. What kind of father would sacrifice his minor children on the altar of propaganda in an effort to save terrorist? My opinion is that a father whose children are killed or injured in Gaza City should face criminal charges on arrival back in the US.

[MajGenl.Meade]

[rubato]

Now THAT is a handsome dung beetle with a most impressive ball of dung. Any lady dung beetle would be proud to have commingled genes with him.

Yrs,
Rubato

[rubato]

Now THAT is a handsome dung beetle with a most impressive ball of dung. Any lady dung beetle would be proud to have commingled genes with him.

Yrs,
Rubato

Now THAT is a handsome dung beetle with a most impressive ball of dung. Any lady dung beetle would be proud to have commingled genes with him.

Yrs,
Rubato

Oh, wait I think it’s the lady dung beetles who do the dung balling so this is a trans dung beetle.

Yrs,
Rubato

[BoSoxGal]

I’m watching a documentary called King Bibi, about Netanyahu. There is very little in it which I don’t recall living through, being a lifelong news junkie and of course having lifelong interest in Israel. But it is weird to see it all again from this age, and with the hindsight of what’s happened. I still have a clear recollection of the night Rabin was assassinated, my first year in graduate school in my apartment with my recently adopted humane society kittens - it was a kind of trauma as assassinations always are and are meant to be, plus in the course of my sadness alone with my cats that night in my little apartment I had some realizations about my own life, my family, which were unsettling and so that colored the memory and made it one that is etched more deeply. Looking back on it now and on the whole rise of Netanyahu and the bad path that set Israel on - it’s so saddening. What could have been, peace?

The parallels between cult of Bibi and cult of Trump are chilling, before this documentary I was not so much aware of how Netanyahu had been covered by media in Israel and how he’s manipulated public opinion toward media in exactly the same way Trump and other budding authoritarians do. If anything good comes of this horrible time, may it please be the permanent jettisoning of Netanyahu from power in Israel.

Of course this has gone well off the rails, this Israeli response to the Hamas terrorist attack. But I wonder how it might have been different? It’s like wondering how we might have responded with Gore in the White House on 9/11/01. Where the voters had chosen for him to be.

Crooked timbers, men are made of. Nothing straight or wholly good comes of them. I’m adopting a philosophical approach to watching the next year unfold here in the USA. The stage is set for sound and fury.

[Sue U]

If anything good comes of this horrible time, may it please be the permanent jettisoning of Netanyahu from power in Israel.

That is the hoped-for outcome; something like 80% of Israelis blame Netanyahu for the Oct. 7 attack, and once the current military action is ended I would expect a no-confidence vote in Knesset. Likud was already sliding in the polls before the war (Blue/White coalition would have taken a 3-seat Knesset majority in a September poll), and last week Bibi was polling at 28% support while 48% thought Benny Gantz would be a better PM. While I have no love for the "centrists" in Blue/White, either Gantz or Yair Lapid would be a better choice than Netanyahu, who should be in jail.

[BoSoxGal]

How can the intelligence inside Gaza be so good it tells you to find one of the key leaders of Hamas hiding in a bunker under a refugee camp full of women children and elderly but the intelligence wasn’t good enough to ferret out a massive invasion and attack plan that was bubbling in the open air for two years?

WTF is going on?? Can this really be the state of things or is there a nefarious purpose to these intelligence failures and ‘successes’?

[Big RR]

Or are the "successes" just damage control and a pack of lies? It could be either, maybe both.

[Burning Petard]

Please note that ALL of Gaza is a Palestine refugee camp. The news here is just a mess. I learned today via NPR that the Hamas leaders are all hiding in tunnels built underground. I simply wondered where else one might put a tunnel. I hear the chants of 'From the River to the Sea' by so-called supporters of Palestine people, ignoring that that means destruction of Israel. Hamas is the legally chosen leadership of the 'refugees' in Gaza. There is consensus among all those Palestinians that the two state solution is no solution. After many international agreements, those suffering refugees have convinced the people of Israel that there is no point in trying to create a two-state solution. The Palestinians are convinced they can reproduce faster than Israel is willing to kill them. I have been trying to find a convincing rebuttal to 'The War of Return' by Schwartz and Wilf with no success.

snailgate.

[MajGenl.Meade]

As usual, the Eye sees it as it is:

[MajGenl.Meade]

It all worked so well in Lebanon

In 2006, a full-blown war broke out between Hezbollah and Israel, triggered when Hezbollah carried out a deadly cross-border raid.

Israeli troops invaded southern Lebanon to try to eliminate the threat from Hezbollah. However, it survived and has since increased its number of fighters and obtained new and better weapons.

BBC World News

Rinse and repeat

[Jarlaxle]

They didn't do it properly. Done properly, the threat is over because there is nobody left to carry it out.

[BoSoxGal]

They didn't do it properly. Done properly, the threat is over because there is nobody left to carry it out.

Are you suggesting the Israelis should kill all 14 million Palestinians in the world?

Nevermind that they aren’t the only folks who hate Jews. The Jews could never keep up with killing all the idiots who hate them. Also it kind of goes against their core ethics as a people, despite the poor example being exhibited by Netanyahu’s right wing nut job coalition and the extremist settlers in the West Bank.

[Burning Petard]

kind of goes against their core ethics as a people,

Yep. But they would not be the first group of humans to choose survival over ethics.

Those core ethics are what has provided meaning to that culture for at least the last three thousand years of diaspora. I think the human race would be impoverished were it to fade into just survival. I write as one who shares a spiritual subculture of less than 200 years history, which short experience includes an 'extermination order' from the governor of a sovereign state within the USA.

snailgate.

[Econoline]

They didn't do it properly. Done properly, the threat is over because there is nobody left to carry it out.

Interesting that you have to reach back to 146 BCE in order to find an example of "done properly".



(BTW, Carthage was rebuilt as a Roman city and became quite prosperous, then survived as an important city well into the Byzantine period; it was conquered by the Vandal Kingdom and then re-conquered a century later by the Byzantine Empire and remained a Byzantine Exarchate until it was conquered and destroyed by Arab Muslims under the Umayyad Caliphate in 698 CE. Today, Carthage is an upscale coastal suburb of Tunis.) (I learned all this just now...when all I intended to do was to look up the date of the Roman conquest of Carthage.)

[Jarlaxle]

They didn't do it properly. Done properly, the threat is over because there is nobody left to carry it out.

Are you suggesting the Israelis should kill all 14 million Palestinians in the world?

Nevermind that they aren’t the only folks who hate Jews. The Jews could never keep up with killing all the idiots who hate them. Also it kind of goes against their core ethics as a people, despite the poor example being exhibited by Netanyahu’s right wing nut job coalition and the extremist settlers in the West Bank.

No, just Gaza.

[liberty]

This is a small scale thing relatively speaking, but I decided to share it nonetheless.

A week or two ago I changed my Facebook profile pic from the Ukraine flag which it has been since the invasion to the Israeli flag, after watching remarks by secretary Blinken upon visiting Israel.

In the time since I’ve been getting a lot of really nasty comments to any public posts I’ve made, including a comment I made about the Maine mass shooting today which got me many angry anti Israel comments from people I don’t know but who are attacking me on that issue just because of the profile pic. When I counter with my pro Palestinian anti terrorism stance they come back harder and call me a Zionist ***.

I wish I could believe it was just bots.

I’m sorry you have to deal with fanatics; they’re probably pro-Hamas lunatics, but as long as they don’t know who you are, I don’t think you have a lot to worry about. However, it’s always a good idea, in all cases, to be aware of your surroundings and be on guard to some extent. It is easy for me to say don’t let it bother you, but I am me and you or you. At any rate, I hope you start feeling better soon.

[BoSoxGal]

It’s Noirvember over at Kanopy, your local library’s free streaming service for cardholders. I started this rainy cold day going through the Noirvember featured offerings and settled on a viewing of Orson Welles in The Stranger. Anyone familiar with the movie would get the not entirely tenuous connection to this thread.

It was another coincidence that during a break I read this article about the view from inside Germany as the fascist right is rising again, with the potential to be in power in the next government.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... minorities


Living history is always interesting, I’m sure, and we are cursed to live In especially interesting times. When I said at the outset I wondered what awful things would happen next, I only meant that I had some uncertainty as to the exact form. I have to admit however that I didn’t anticipate (and glad I’m not alone in that feeling) the shocking levels of antisemitism that have been unleashed in these last weeks. The veneer of civility is always thin, but especially so these days.

Back to The Stranger and my attempts to bury my head in the sand because I just can’t watch anymore. Except I clearly can’t look away.