18,000

The first thing to say about that number is there's no way it can be trusted, that's different than saying there's no way it can be true, but we should be extremely skeptical about this number. If nobody comes up with agreed on totals in the Russo-Ukraine war dead within a few hundred thousand, how can we rely on the totals here to the last digit from the health ministry of a totalitarian dictatorship? Even if they've been 'fairly accurate' in the past (as they were rated by Human Rights Watch), this is 'the big one', and Hamas is dependent on optics as never before. Don't misunderstand, I'm sure the real total is well over a few thousand, it may well be quite a bit over 10,000, I would imagine 15,000 is the upper limit, but I suppose it's theoretically possible that the true number is higher than what the Gazan Health Ministry estimated. But even if the Gazan Health Ministry is filled with people of irreproachable integrity, their lives have been threatened by Hamas every day for seventeen years. Long before this war, the lives of Gazan doctors were threatened by Hamas just like anybody else's. If the Health Ministry doesn't release plausibly high death tolls, every person a doctor cares about may become the casualties they refused to make up.

Ask yourselves, if the Gazan Health Ministry is so trustworthy, then how did no one in the Gazan Health Ministry ever warn the world that the central node of Hamas's tunnels with all its weapons was beneath al-Shifa hospital? No one can plausibly claim the medical community didn't know. What would have happened to any doctor or nurse had they warned the world? Would they have died? Would all their co-workers have died? Their families? Would Gaza's largest hospital have been dismantled?

But IF the number is true, even if I doubt it is, then this is a very important number. This is now the most blood Israel has ever spilled in a war. It's generally agreed on that Israel killed a rough total of 17,000 in Lebanon, and that was over a period of 18 years. If Israel appears to kill at this number for an entire year, that total will be somewhere between 100 to 115,000, putting Israel and the Netanyahu administration in a terrible category - even that would not necessarily be a genocide, but it would count as the next worst thing: a democide on the widest possible scale, comparable in scale to 90s Sudan and Somalia even if not in intent - and once it's at that scale, who cares about the difference?

But even if the number is not true, and it probably isn't, the vast world majority will take it on faith that it is, and even if the total number by the time this is over isn't even 18,000 (and no matter what the total, it will eventually be higher than that), the vast majority of the world will insist on proceeding as though this is a Milosevic-level crime. It is, almost certainly, not that, but it's worse, a set stage for much bloodier crimes to come.

Think of here in America: with the news that Jack Smith is moving to the Supreme Court to try to prosecute Trump, this week may be the last realistic chance we get to see if prosecuting Trump can prevent him from becoming President again. If Donald Trump can't in any meaningful sense be prosecuted, then there was no sense in pursuing prosecution to begin with.

How do we know that?

Well, look at Israel. I doubt Netanyahu would have ceded power had he not feared going to jail, but the entire Jewish world disagrees with me. 99% of the Jewish world believes that had Netanyahu not feared prosecution, he would be gone, and we might have had a competent Prime Minister who paid more attention to his intelligence services. If it's true that Netanyahu would have left for a guarantee he wouldn't be prosecuted, then it was never a good idea to prosecute him.

And if that's true for Netanyahu, who clearly likes the job far more than Trump ever did, then it's definitely true for Trump. If we can succeed where Israel has thus far failed with Netanyahu, it will have been worth it, but that is beginning to look so much less than likely.

So look to the future. How will this play out?

There's no way of knowing for sure, but there is an historical precedent right in front of us.

On New Year's Eve 1999, the massively corrupt Boris Yeltsin gave us Vladimir Putin because he needed someone ruthless enough to protect him and his family from jail. Yeltsin, sadly a democrat by Russian standards, still managed to kill somewhere between 30,000-130,000 civillians in Chechnya (let's not get started on the divergence in totals between the two sides...) and displace more than half a million.

Where Putin took his country I don't need to tell you, but look to the Ukraine war for a moment. No one can say just how many are dead, the totals are so incredibly confusing, but what remains clear is that hundreds of thousands are dead and many more yet will die.

The US Republicans may well be about to cut off Ukraine funding because they want accountability for how the bills are paid in a war setting where there is no possible accountability. If Ukraine loses its US funding, Ukraine is almost certain to lose. The biggest bloodbath may be yet to come, and once it's over, Putin will move on: to Belarus? The Baltics? To Moldova? Georgia? How long until Russia is caught red handed in an unforgivable act against a sovereign EU country?

How this could parallel the future of the US is not the purview of this diary, and though it may come up some other day, we're here to talk about Israel.

Netanyahu is not an historic war criminal, modern Israel is not an historic aggressor, not yet at least, but both may just be warmup acts for the real thing. Not now, but in 2035 or 2040. If the Republican party is about to rule the US without a serious challenge for a generation, Israel will have full protection, and being seen already as a state of war criminals, what is the point of holding back? Israel would move against every single threat to its security with its full military might: Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, wherever an Islamic fundamentalist threat comes from next. The oil plutocrats would be more than happy for Israel to eliminate its biggest religious threats and Israel would just be another authoritarian state grown out of a stale democracy that refused to reform itself until it was too late.

Did six million of us get killed only to...