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"The war has made it all worse, not better, the logical madness of HAMAS and Likud, locked in a deadly embrace."
There used to be a cartoon, with two dinosaurs fighting each other as they approach a mile-high cliff. They approach and then descend the mile-high drop, continuing to fight each other all the way down.
In 20 years, the whole middle east will be uninhabitable due to climate change.
For years now there have been reports of water shortages and claims the region is headed for 'water wars', though outside of Gaza and the West Bank it hasn't happened.Quote:
Originally Posted by Del06
Or maybe they will just live in the sky?
"“Neom Stadium will be the most unique stadium in the world,” Saudi’s committee wrote in an outline of its bid. “With a pitch situated more than 350 meters above ground, stunning vistas, and a roof created from the city itself, the stadium will be an experience like no other.”"
Saudi Arabia Unveils Bold World Cup Bid Despite No Competition (frontofficesports.com)
Israel has assassinated so many HAMAS officials over the years, has it made a difference? This article argues Netanyahu uses violence instead of diplomacy, and believes he has undermined President Biden, and made peace harder than ever, both in general Israeli-Palestinian relations, and with specific regard to Gaza. But also suggests Netanyahu does not want even a modest rapprochement between Iran and the 'West'. Well Netanyahu has been addicted to war most of his life, but the other question is, these days, are there any Israeli politicians who have a radically different view? Yitzhak Rabin was one such politician with a radical position, and he was murdered for it.
But a good read
Assassination again shows Netanyahu’s disregard for US-Israel relations (msn.com)
"We cling to this idea that the arc of history tends towards liberty and democracy. Have you been shaken out of that feeling?
I have been pessimistic about this place for a long time. If you look at the trajectory of what has happened here, it is a story of increasing Israeli expansion and Palestinian constriction into smaller spaces. If you just project forward, we are headed towards a fate like that of the Native Americans for the Palestinians."
Nathan Thrall: ‘The scale and brutality of the Israeli response in Gaza hasn’t surprised me, no’ | Books | The Guardian
The latest bombing of a school being used to house displaced Palestinians begs a number of questions.
1) Israel says it was a targeted attack and that "at least 20 fighters, including senior commanders, were among the dead". Every attack that results in the death and injury of men women and children is blamed on HAMAS using the facility targeted, while also claiming the elimination of however many HAMAS 'fighters' were there.
But never tells us their names, never proves that anyone from HAMAS was there. Indeed, this has been standard procedure for most of the 'forever war' with an organization Israel has supported since its foundation in the first Intifada in 1988.
2) After 10 months of the most savage and relentless bombing and military campaign in Gaza in its history, either HAMAS has an inexhaustible supply of 'fighters and commanders', or Israel is not doing a very good job of 'eliminating HAMAS' as Netanyahu says it is doing. This suggests that Israel can never eliminate HAMAS.
3) But this either means Israel accepting it cannot defeat HAMAS and therefore negotiate an end to this war, including the release of Hostages and a reconstruction programme, or just more of the same. More of the same is the preferred option of Smotrich and his extremist colleagues, because in reality the war in Gaza is merely an extreme version of what Israel has been doing since 1967 -making life for Palestinians so miserable and pointless that they pack up and leave. After all, if there was Genocide in Gaza, there would be little left by now of its 2 million inhabitants.
So expect more 'targeted attacks' (= targeting ordinary people, unless Israel really thinks every Palestinian in Gaza is HAMAS), more excuses from Israel, maybe more rockets from HAMAS into Israel (how after 10 months?), and of course, more scenes of carnage with most of the world indifferent to it all, and without doubt having no intention of taking any radical action to stop it, and move both parties into a different scenario in which something called Peace has a chance.
Israel strikes on Gaza school site kill at least 80, Palestinian officials say | Gaza | The Guardian
Although the press reports that Blinken thinks this might be the last chance to secure a deal, and some think it is close, the reality is that Israel and HAMAS both have enough objections to each other's proposals to reject them, though I ought not to be so cynical, even though Netanyahu and HAMAS have world records in cynicism and cruelty. Whatever.
The main obstacles are as Gershon Baskin notes in the article linked below-
-Israel wants to retain a presence in Gaza, to maintain and 'police' the southern border area with Israel along the Philadelphi Corridor or buffer zone with Egypt, HAMAS wants the IDF out of Gaza. I also believe Israel has or intends to create a buffer zone in the north similar to the one it is creating on the border with Lebanon.
(Displacement and Buffer Zones are becoming common, eg Turkey in Northern Syria and Northern Cyprus, Ukraine in Kursk, Russia in Eastern Ukraine)
-Israel wants to monitor internal movements in order to prevent HAMAS 'operatives' (soldiers?) from relocating, but it is not clear who the soldiers are or if Israel knows, other than what Arab informers tell them some of which might just be revenge for some other complaint, who knows? HAMAS, which has not been, and will not be militarily defeated objects to any attempt by Israel to control the territory, but this particular aspect could be dropped by Israel as long as the IDF remain in Gaza in some form.
-Israel in the past has released Palestinian prisoners in exchange for hostage(s), but this time Israel is refusing to release named prisoners that HAMAS wants released. This could be the hardest element to crack for it could be that Netanyahu would agree to it but Smotrich and Ben-Gvir reject it, threatening to collapse the Coalition Govt which could fall anyway if the two lunatics think even Netanyahu has sold them out for the return of those hostages who are still alive. The jury is out on this one, for the cynical and cruel reasons noted previously.
As for Baskin's final comments, these reveal the fantasy land still under occupation-
This is what Baskin says-
"There must be a new path to a negotiated end of the larger conflict, but it begins by ending this war, Israel withdrawing from Gaza, Israeli hostages coming home and the establishment of a secure border between Gaza and Egypt. That would pave the way for the creation of a responsible and legitimate non-Hamas government in Gaza, an Arab-led international force in Gaza for a limited period of time, new elections in Palestine, new elections in Israel and then a regional peace process that will bring about the two-state solution, with an end to the Israeli occupation, a free democratic Palestine, and freedom, peace and security for all."
These ceasefire talks have been doomed to fail – Netanyahu and Hamas have tied negotiators’ hands | Gershon Baskin | The Guardian
As usual Palestinians have to accept someone else making their decisions, someone else telling them who can govern them (not HAMAS), some other military on their streets. Israel is never going to allow a separate Palestinian state to exist, so the mere idea of it is plain stupid, in addition to which no supporter of the idea ever tells us what the currency in this state will be, where its borders will be, what its trading relations will look like, though they do tell us who the govt will be, as if the same people were not aware that HAMAS has increased its presence in the West Bank and will grow stronger if Settler attacks on Palestinian villages carry on.
The irony is that if people accept there is a de facto single state, the so-called 'Democratic Israel' which in reality denied 4 million people living in the country basic or equal rights, the only solution is to re-structure this single state into a Confederation in order to force Israelis and Palestinians to do what they were doing before the Nationalists tried to change the place beginning in the 1880s. Zionism, or Jewish Nationalism as it is dressed up to be, has failed, much as all religious nationalism has failed, and will fail, because Nationalism is the cause of human division, human violence and human misery.
Two people, one land. Share it or fight for it? After 100 years of fighting the solution should be obvious. If only the US was not such a coward when it comes to dealing with Netanyahu, there might be one step forward. Though one has to believe there will then be two steps back. In my lifetimes? I doubt it.
If it is the case that the latest dead hostages were executed by HAMAS (their claim is they were killed by an IDF operation in the tunnel), it might be another example of 'I can be more cruel than you' in this wicked conflict, as in a previous 'deal' between the parties, two of the three now dead were on a list to be released. This fact has been an additional spur to the protests in Tel-Aviv by people who believe Netanyahu is deliberately delaying a deal, or adding clauses that he knows HAMAS will reject.
It has been pointed out, for example, that Netanyahu's insistence on the IDF remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor was not part of any previous deal with the obvious question, why not? Moreover, if Netanyahu describes the whole of the Gaza District as, in effect, a 'terrorist camp' that Iran will (or even does) use to attack Israel, it speaks of the long-established view that Gaza is a problem whose solution is the expulsion of most or all of its population, a 'policy' that has been in and out of the in and out tray of Israel politicians since the 1950s (see the Depopulation link below).
I guess if the US were to agree to take 4 million Palestinians that might solve the problem, but where to -Wyoming?
And if Gaza is an existential threat to Israel, so are Lebanon, and Jordan, bearing in mind in the latter case the Likud lays claim to 'historical' 'biblical' lands of Northern Jordan in ancient times known as Moab, Ammon and Edom. At which point on the map of the Middle East does Israel think it will have a 'secure border'?
Israeli Attempts to Depopulate Gaza, A Brief History (beehiiv.com)
'100-200,000, Not Two Million': Israel's Finance Minister Envisions Depopulated Gaza - Israel News - Haaretz.com
Israel’s ‘Plan B’ for the Gaza Strip | Opinions | Al Jazeera
Israel’s Plans for Gaza Are Moving Forward in Plain Sight - DAWN (dawnmena.org)
As if we did not know by now, Israel's world leadership in telecomms and its less popular adjuncts has been on display to lethal effect - exploding phones, spyware in the software you are probably using, if not to see this, to chat with your chums, and now exploding pagers.
The key point is not that Israel can do it, or that Israel and Hizbollah have been in an in and out dog fight -for so many years it would take me some time to construct a timetable- but that the attacks inside Lebanon have followed pleas from the US for Israel to do anything but escalate its tensions with Lebanon.
"A day before the coordinated sabotage, Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser to Joe Biden, was in Israel urging Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials against an escalation in Lebanon."
Exploding pager attack in Lebanon is another blow for US peace hopes | US foreign policy | The Guardian
In other words, Netanyahu has told the US to go fuck itself, he will make the decisions, and all the US must do is to continue supplying the arms and the funding, until his old family friend, Trump, is back in the White House, which is what Netanyahu wants.
How will the US react? In a tame way, of course. And if there is an escalation, no doubt Israel will declare it has a right to defend itself, as if nobody else in the region also had that right, least of all the 8 year old girl who lost her life yesterday.
Netanyahu simply does not believe in peace or negotiations. On the basis Israel will win every war it gets involved in, war is his only item on the agenda, and everyone else must accept it. I think this is what is called the politics of despair.
Another day, another crime. It is beyond doubt that the exploding pagers and now the exploding walkie-talkies are a violation of international law, just on proportionate violence alone. That HAMAS doesn't care how many people die for its cause, so Israel views every Arab as an existential threat, or rather Netanyahu and his Likud and Coalition partners do, so who cares if the 'events' in Lebanon kill men, women and children regardless of any links to Hizbollah?
But this is really about the US. If the CIA did not know about this tactic, then it suggests that their intelligence gathering is not that good, and/or that Mossad and other intelligence agencies in Israel are not sharing information with the CIA, another failing.
If the CIA did know, my guess is that they strongly opposed using this kind of warfare, and this is where the action is: Netanyahu telling the Biden Administration to go fuck itself, Israel will act alone, but still expect the US to defend it, or maybe Netanyahu is trying to provoke Biden into a negative reaction so he can paint Harris as a danger to Israel, without openly advising the American people to vote for his guy, his old family friend Trump, though when it started it was actually Trump's daddy who made friends with a young Bibi when the latter was based in NYC.
Two selfish men addicted to their own survival, and if this means sacrificing the lives of innocent people, so be it.
All that time and money, all that intelligence and expertise, the manufacture of products, the infiltration of supply chains, to achieve what? Killing people, rather than saving them. Is this a tactical success that has exposed the weaknesses in Hizbollah, but a strategic mistake? Escalating the war with Lebanon is not a problem for Netanyahu because he believes Israel can and will win every war it takes part in, and is a reminder that in 1982 when his predecessor Begin launched the invasion of Lebanon, it was to destroy the PLO, a war that failed, that resulted in some of the most gruesome massacres even the Middle East has seen. That just over 10 years later the same PLO was signing a peace treaty with Israel is something that sticks in Netanyahu's throat and won't go away, he hates it.
He loves war, so does HAMAS. Can nobody intervene to stop these maniacs? You would think after 100 years the record shows it doesn't produce solutions.
An editorial in today's Observer concludes with this-
"Gaza is Biden’s biggest failure, bigger even than Ukraine. Yet, rather than urgently repair the damage, officials in Washington are suggesting that a ceasefire is unlikely before his successor takes office in January. So what is US policy now? In a word, containment. Unable to stop the war, the White House appears merely intent on preventing it spreading further before the November presidential election, for fear it could harm Kamala Harris’s and the Democrats’ chances. It’s not really a policy at all. It’s a cop-out, a green light for hardliners and extremists on all sides to do their reckless, abominable worst. Which is why, more so now than ever, the Middle East totters on the brink."
The Observer view on the Middle East crisis: Biden’s failure on Gaza is fuelling wider war | Observer editorial | The Guardian
I am not sure what Biden has done wrong in the sense that US policy toward Israel has not changed much since 1967 and I am sure if asked Biden officials would argue the commitment is to Israel, not Netanyahu. If the US were to say, reduce funding or weapons sales, would this pressure Netanyahu to change course and negotiate with HAMAS? I doubt it. He is a belligerent man and loves conflict, indeed, it is the only reason he is on politics, other than whatever personal gains he makes from the office.
Unless something is happening behind the scenes, neither HAMAS nor Netanyahu appear to be willing to conclude the latest phase of this conflict, indeed Netanyahu is banking on Trump becoming President and thus insults Biden at every opportunity. HAMAS is not going to agree to anything that does not preserve their organization, in Gaza and the West Bank (where it is more popular than ever), and will not agree to the IDF remaining in Gaza. If reports are true, that Netanyahu wants to transfer the Palestinians in the North of Gaza to the South, the prospects for a negotiated settlement are even more remote, the fate of the hostages from uncertain to very grim indeed.
Netanyahu sees Biden as a lame duck Democrat, he is holding on. Iran need only carry on doing what it has been doing even if there is discontent in Lebanon with it and Hizbollah, with no alternative in sight to re-structure Lebanese politics.
So it is not really Biden's fault, he is trying to bring two bullies to the negotiating table, and they are not willing yet to make a deal.
Another lose-lose situation in the Middle East.