Israel: Turn Right for the Abyss

[Stavros]

I will take whatever you are smoking ��

The same baccy Sadat was smoking when he went to Israel in November 1977.

The same baccy Margaret Thatcher was smoking when her Govt opened a back channel with the Provisional IRA during the Hunger Strikes of 1981.

The same baccy the Palestinians and the Israelis were smoking when they started their secret talks in Oslo in 1993.

The same baccy Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat were smoking on the White House lawn in 1993 'Enough bloodshed and tears' -remember that?

The same baccy Tony Blair's Govt was smoking when, the day after the election victory in 1997. Mo Mowlam went to Northern Ireland to begin the end game of the Troubles that produced the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998.

It has been done, it can be done. All it needs is courage.

Don't need a smoke. Need a drink. A stiff one. Preferably single malt, many times.

[Stavros]

"Despite widespread international opposition, lawmakers voted overwhelming on Monday evening to approve two bills essentially barring the UN agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants from operating in Israel, and severely curtailing its activities in Gaza and the West Bank."
Knesset approves laws barring UNRWA from Israel, limiting it in Gaza and West Bank | The Times of Israel

While the Knesset decision has been widely condemned, it should come as no surprise. When I was doing research in the Middle East in the 1990s I was in a library and found a small pamphlet published in Israel -it was published in the 1960s- that condemned UNRWA, the point being that Israel has been opposed to this UN Agency since the day it was created.

The argument from those Israelis who supported this measure, was that UNRWA could not serve Palestinian refugees because they do not exist. It is an extension of Golda Meir's claim that Palestinians don't exist, and is part of the broader argument about Palestinian identity not having any 'national' significance before 1967. Just as Palestinians 'left' their territory in 1948, so they were not refugees but migrants, though few people, states or institutions accepted this view. It also enabled pro-Israeli writers to claim that 'Jordan is Palestine' and thus encourage Palestinians on the West Bank to cross the river, a sentiment that is probably even stronger now than it was after the 1967 war.

There is an obvious problem with the simple fact that Arab and Jew have lived in this land for millennia, though right now the opportunity for two sides to share what they have does not look realistic, as the militants on both sides have done all they can to create bitterness, hatred and violence. One wonders who the Falustin of the Bible were, just as the 'Jordan is Palestine' argument becomes a sham when the Likud Party's definition of 'Erez Israel -the creation of which is its mission- includes the Biblical lands of Moab, Gilead, Ammon and Edom which are on the East Bank of the River Jordan.

Perhaps when Netanyahu declares he is creating a 'new Middle East' he means a Greater Israel which has two buffer zones -the Philadelphi Corridor on the Egyptian border, the Buffer zone in what is currently Southern Lebanon (emptied of over a million people to serve Israel's strategic but ultimately also its social and economic interests), while Israel will expand East of the River Jordan. However fanciful this sounds, bear in mind that for decades nobody thought Israel would actually ban UNWRA, that it would build walls to shut out people it doesn't like when everyone else was tearing them down, and repeat in the Gaza District what Israel did in the Palestine Mandate in the 1940s.

Gaza is now uninhabitable, which is what Netanyahu and the Crazies have wanted for a long long time. Where will the people go? They don't care, as long as it is not in Israel. In the end, it is the US which will have to pick up the tab for this expensive folly, though I doubt either Harris or Trump will agree to take in 4 million Palestinian refugees.

It's as if nobody really cares enough to do anything to help them, stateless, without rights, without homes, without hope.

[Stavros]

"More than 1,000 figures from the literary and entertainment industry – including several Nobel laureates, Pulitzer prize, and Booker prize winners – have signed an open letter against “illiberal and dangerous” cultural boycotts.The letter was released by the nonprofit body Creative Community For Peace [CCFP], which campaigns against cultural boycotts of Israel, after more than 1,000 book industry figures pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that “are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians”."
Nobel and Pulitzer winners denounce ‘dangerous’ Israel cultural boycott | Israel | The Guardian

First off, I don't support these kinds of boycott, because they are offensive, and because they don't work. Netanyahu could not care a damn about culture, or rather, his only culture is violence, so a boycott is pointless with so vulgar a man.

Second, have we not reached a point where the 'right of self-defence' that Israel claims must be set against the international law of armed conflict as well as humanitarian law to ask what Israel's proportionate response should have been? The collective punishment that has effectively destroyed the Gaza District is illegal, but raises the question was Israel merely waiting for the moment to impose its 'end game' on Gaza -that is, to find a way to get the people out, something Netanyahu's more extreme partners in Govt have declared is their aim?

Third, horrific as Oct 7th was, three times as many Palestinians were slaughtered in the refugee camps in Beirut in 1982 by Christians while the IDF formed a cordon around the camps to maximize the casualties -or are we to say some lives are worth more than others?

Lastly, these writers of books, makers of theatres might be asked this: after HAMAS, which hated cinema, who destroyed Gaza's cinemas, its theatres, its Libraries (making it impossible for anyone to borrow a book by David Grosssman) and cultural treasures in the form of historic mosques and churches? Israel did.

Have any of the 1000 condemned this cultural annihilation?

Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024 – Librarians and Archivists with Palestine

Gaza’s Cinemas & Theatres — afikra | عفكرة

Two Palestinian Artists Condemn Israel’s Destruction of Gaza's Iconic Theater - Palestine Chronicle

100 days of war in Gaza: More than 23,000 dead and a society in ruins | Middle East Eye

[Stavros]

Channel 3 News reported on this last week, and when the channel's Irish reporter asked one of the zealots what should happen to the Palestinians in Gaza, he said 'Maybe Ireland and the UK can taken them'.

How about Michigan?

"Since the war in Gaza began, there has been renewed international focus on Israeli settlements and settler violence in the West Bank. Unprecedented pushback has come in the form of US, British, and EU sanctions.Weiss, under sanctions from Canada herself, says she is undeterred by criticism from abroad, pointing to what she claims is her personal success of establishing 300 settlements in the West Bank, where 500,000 Israeli settlers now live.
“I took all my experience from 50 years of dealing with settling the mountains, and I’m mobilising it to create a new reality in Gaza,” she said. “You think what I am saying is imaginary, some kind of fantasy. It is not.”".

‘The Arabs will disappear’: buoyant Israeli settlers eye return to Gaza | Israel-Gaza war | The Guardian

[Stavros]

Nominating Mike Huckabee to be the US's ambassador to Israel is purely transactional -the 'Evangelicals' gave him their vote, he gives them Huckabee. But Huckabee himself has had to admit he doesn't make policy, and it is clear that as far as that goes, Huckabee's appointment contradicts Trump's desire to be the 'peacemaker' in the Middle East, and of course get a Nobel Prize for doing so.

The problem is that when the UAE signed up to the 'Abraham Accords' it was explicit that this did not endorse the annexation by Israel of the West Bank, which is the opposite position of Mike Huckabee, and it is unlikely that Trump, seeing as he does the amount of money Kushner has got from the Saudis is going to put a principle before profit, so in this sense, Huckabee's appointment is a cosmetic blush, and not much more, though in terms of tone, it does send a bleak message to the Palestinians wherever they live: You are Nothing, Nobody Cares About You, You Have no Future.

Some links, and note that there are just as many critical remarks from Jewish outlets as others-

The Real Reason Trump Picked Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel - The Atlantic

What Trump Israel Ambassador Mike Huckabee Has Said About the Middle East | TIME

How Mike Huckabee could derail Trump's promised Israel policy – The Forward

Trump ambassador pick Huckabee says administration could back West Bank annexation | The Times of Israel

[Stavros]

A predictable burst of outrage has followed the ICC warrant for the arrests of Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant and Mohamed Deif. That said, while Netanyahu has condemned it, and while his supporters in the UK, Hungary and the US have also done so, I am not sure they have condemned the warrant for Deif, maybe they don't mention him because it would raise the question: why him and not them?

The core of the legal argument is that Israel has deliberately deprived the population of Gaza of the basic needs of life, an argument that is proven every day on the footage we are allowed to see, given that Israel restricts reporting from the Gaza district. Depriving people of their homes, as is also the case in southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut, is also a crime.

It is clear that in the past, Israel supported the creation of HAMAS as a means of undermining the PLO/Fateh in the West Bank. It is clear that for all the tit for tat rockets and border clashes, first Sharon and then Netanyahu believed their strategy of containment was working, just as Netanyahu turned the screws on settlements on the West Bank until HAMAS believed it could not longer just lob rockets into Israel with minimum damage.

It is also the case that the Kushner Accords with the Gulf and other Arab states was seen by HAMAS a blow, but just as they thought the average Arab in the street opposed them (and most did), HAMAS underestimated the reaction of the Gulf states in particular if, as happened on October 7th 2023 HAMAS decided to change the status quo and push for a radical break with the preceding 25 years of misery. Detached from the political bureau in Qatar, much as the PLO leadership was isolated in Tunis between 1982 and the 1990s, Sinwar and Deif in my opinion miscalculated the Arab reaction -there was no repeat of the reaction to the October War of 1973, it left HAMAS on its own, its closest supporters in despair at the actions it took on October 7th.

One key point is the vexed problem of self-defence and a proportionate response to an attack. We have seen over the years that Israel's retaliation for an HAMAS attack was always disproportionate, thus since 2023 Israel's response has not just been disproportionate, is suggests that Netanyahu and his Cabinet of Lunatics, October 7 2023 not only changed the parameters of the 100 year old conflict, it has presented Israel with an opportunity to repeat 1948 and expel the Arabs from the Gaza District, first by making it uninhabitable, and soon I fear, the mass 'transfer' of Arabs out, where to I don't know.

If this is worthy of a court case, some may argue why Israel and not others, though others have been indicted and in the case of the former Yugoslavia tried and imprisoned.

Throughout the war of liberation in Algeria, the French military did respond to various bombings and killings with a 'ratonnade', rounding up Arabs, treating them badly in prison, and so on. But as with the British following the pub bombings in Birmingham in 1974, and the bombing of the hotel in Brighton Margaret Thatcher was staying in for the party conference in 1984, neither party responded by carpet bombing cities, be it Algiers or Oran, Belfast or (London)Derry. We never saw the Bogside or West Belfast churned into rubble, the Catholic population in whom the IRA and INLA were embedded (perhaps with more local support than HAMAS had in Gaza), bereft of their homes, squatting in fields or parks, or marched south into the Republic of Ireland.

Israel's response is thus not just a violation of International Law as is also the case with HAMAS, but suggests more than self-defence is at work here. It is an agenda which the new US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee may support, though it remains to be seen if the old family friend of Netanyahu, Trump, gives Israel the freedom to do whatever it wants.

One thing is sure -there will not be any reduction in the violence soon, the tragedy rolls on, the world seemingly powerless to stop it.

(1) UK would comply with Netanyahu arrest warrant, says No 10 – UK politics live