One Key Point I Should Have Added Yesterday

There is always a chance that Israel is faking a willingness to invade Rafah as a means of extracting concessions, because if they are, it only works if people truly believe it. But I never put the willingness to do something so reckless past Netanyahu, and I don't put the willingness to sacrifice their people on a scale so massive past Sinwar and Hamas. There has never been a war like this in Israeli history, and there have never been actors on either side willing to sacrifice Palestinians with this much carelessness. This is not just another eruption of brief limited war, this is war in the realest sense: not total war, but the nearest thing to it, and in true war, anything is possible. Whether the threat is meant as a fake or real, it almost doesn't matter, because whether the threat was meant to be real, Israel may be pulled into doing it anyway as a means of keeping their word.

Again: Just in case my feelings aren't clear

 

Israel should not, should not, SHOULD NOT go into Rafah: the city (town) in Gaza's south where a million to a million-and-a-half are currently situated, mostly refugees. In a territory where there are very few miles, Rafah has literally miles and miles of refugee camps. The more fortunate live in tents but live six or seven to a tent, surrounded by garbage they can't throw out and all the pollutants, parasites and infectious diseases which go with them. Rafah has no functional pharmacies and one functional hospital, the entire hospital has 40 beds and two operating theaters. Even the wounded who are administered to cannot be properly administered to, all their wounds are festering and cross-infecting one another.

Leaving aside any humanitarian issues, the fact remains, to be so close to the brink of something so cataclysmic and then let the suffering avoid the very worst is Statecraft 101. Speaking purely from a point of view of hard-headed realism, to pull out now is the perfect opportunity to let the lesson sink in of what happens if Gazans refuse to hold Hamas accountable. Whereas to not pull out is to ensure an attempt at a massive international and generational boycott that could leave Israelis and Jews more vulnerable than ever.

As I've said 100 times already, after Ehud Olmert ordered a pullout without warning in Southern Lebanon, most Israelis cried foul, but Hezbollah learned the most important lesson, and even as Hezbollah has vastly increased its rocket supply and efficacy, there's been minimal trouble on the northern border for nearly twenty years.

The idea that Israel's enemies will be defeated permanently, whatever the organization, has always been a delusion, but living in an uneasy perpetual detente with them, whether Hamas or Fatah or whomever else comes next, not peace but detente and cold war, is Israel's safest future in my lifetime.

Netanyahu knows all this, but at this point the war is perpetuated not for Israel, but for him and to appease the extremist twits in his cabinet. The longer the war goes, the safer Netanyahu gets. The more strongly Israel is boycotted, the safer Netanyahu gets. The more hated Jews become, the safer Netanyahu gets.

Netanyahu broke the State of Israel, not to keep himself from jail but for his own powerlust. He pretends he's the solution to the problem he caused, there's not a single Israeli who believes him, but they have to go along with it because the rule of law that keeps a democracy running no longer exists. Netanyahu broke Israel not to stop himself from going to jail, but because he wants unlimited power for the rest of his life. Israel's blindness about the necessity of compromise may have created the moral rot Netanyahu exploited, but Israel is only more morally blind than any other democracy because of its proximity to dictatorships, and any other country in Israel's situation would have acted exactly the same way. For those who think they're better than Israel, make no mistake, what happened in Israel can happen anywhere else, and for reasons far less justifiable.

On the other hand, I have interacted with people who are passionately anti-the Israeli point of view, whom when I mentioned Rafah, had never even heard of the city. I was literally giving them their own ammunition. To employ one of the ugliest words of our time, this is how 'performative' all this activism is. When people who know nothing about a conflict and read less are convinced of their points of view, they are the problem, not the solution.

Israel will lose so much if it goes to Rafah, including the Biden administration and bipartisan American support, and with Israel losing so much, so will American Jews. The Jewish world is on the verge of being implicated in something awful and avoidable. It's not genocide, it's probably not even ethnic cleansing, but it just might be a long series of war crimes that, whatever justification there might be for them, can result in a long series of crimes committed on Jews that such actions are meant to protect.

Goddamnit Evan you promised yourself you wouldn't get geshikkered ever again so here is more about the college protests

 

College is where we go to first encounter ideas. It is not where we go to understand them. Understanding them demands lifelong engagement while also engaging with their real world consequences. The amount of peiple who can encounter both circumstances, let alone have the intelligence to underatand what they encounter, is unthinkably small. For the rest of us, people like me and you, it's all guesswork.

When you look at history, the flames of revolution begin over and over in the universities. Those of you who haven't seen the otherwise marginal show Three Body Problem are missing a perfect demonstration of how Mao's Great Leap Forward began on college campuses. So did the Protestant Reformation. So did the Socialist International. So, believe it or not, did fascism. It always seems to begin with young people who only know enough about the world to know it's a shitty place, and think that with enough change, they can be the ones who do better.

Fuck, I'm too tipsy to know where I'm going with this. My duodenum feels like it's in the shape of a wooden stake.

Five run-on sentences about the college protests:

  I don't ever again want to hear, read, talk, or give two shits about the protestors, for or against. Why does anybody care what happens to a bunch of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel students at places like Columbia who will write their own tickets to an unlimited future when all this is over while the rest of the USA is worried they'll be unable to pay the electric bill in ten years? It's a complete and total distraction from the main story of what's going on over there. Whatever your point of view, it's at least understandable to be outraged about what happens in the main theater of war, but to get outraged about what happens on college campuses is an empty way for powerful people to get you outraged and distracted from the real issues.

All r

So what's going on with Iran and Israel?

 

No it's not WWIII, it's not even all out warfare between Israel and Iran. Iran sent a small convoy of weapons, Israel sent an even much smaller one. It was just a token weapons exchange, a pose for international news outlets.

But Iran has sworn extreme escalation if Israel retaliates, and knowing that Israel would retaliate, perhaps this all is just an excuse to provoke something very different. That escalation can take many different forms, and if Iran is just that determined to provoke another front in the war, what comes next may well be yet another proxy war, brutal in an all too familiar way. Is Iran that determined? I'd put the current odds around one-in-three.

On Israel's northern border is yet another terrorist government with its own state established in all but name in Southern Lebanon. Hamas had 20,000 rockets at the start of the war, and they're now estimated to have about 6,000. They cannot do all that much damage except in raids along their borders and suicide bombings. But Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets, it can saturate Israel with constant explosions and bring life in Israel to a near halt as everyone goes has to interrupt their lives with scurrying to bomb shelters. Israel's iron dome, stunningly effective against the Iranian missiles, cannot be nearly as effective against this kind of onslaught, and Israel will have to worry that any one of these missiles carries chemical weapons or is a 'dirty bomb' - not a nuclear weapon, but carrying nuclear radiation all the same.

All of this means, you guessed it, another ground invasion may likely be in Israel's future. Back into Lebanon, with another clearance operation against deliberate human shields, clearing the rockets out of hospitals, schools, and mosques. Even as Israel is worried about casualties within it that could dwarf October 7th, international opinion would grow ever more outraged with what they take to be Israel's murderous bellicosity. If people hate Israel now, they will hate Israel twice as much or more after the next invasion.

Iran's strategy is not full-scale war, Iran's strategy is public opinion, and it's a blinding success. Iran's strategy is to convince the world that Israel is the state with genocidal intentions, not them. Their victory depends on depleting Israel's resources, a process that will take the better part of a century, and if a full-scale war erupts before Israel is a shell of the country it currently is, their strategy is an instant failure. For all Iran's surprisingly advanced weapon technology and intelligence, Israel dwarfs them, and however much destruction they rein on Israel, Israel would rein much more, and Iran's mullocracy would collapse. But Iran knows that mass opinion is fickle, naive, lazy and dangerous, and if Israel's good will to the international public is depleted, so eventually will their resources.

Many people, particularly progressives, refuse to concede that many situations have no good options. They see suffering people and automatically believe that the suffering is inflicted directly. They see this war and believe that Palestinian suffering only has a direct author, rather than shared between Israel and twenty Middle Eastern dictatorships who for three quarters of a century use the Palestinian cause as a convenient means to whip up pan-Arab nationalism, Islamic extremism, and leftist outrage.

A large part of modern history is the history of left-of-liberal progressives finding common cause with totalitarian extremists in the fight against right-wing authoritarianism, thinking that totalitarians can be collaborated with, successfully throwing off the right-wing authoritarians, and then being killed off by the left-wing totalitarians in the maelstrom that inevitably follows - along with everybody else. This is the story of how the Soviet Union came to be with all its satellite states, it's the story of the French Revolution, it's the story of radical Islamic dictatorships, it's the story of anti-colonialist dictatorships all around Africa and the Middle East. The chances of an Islamic dictatorship in America is laughably small, but the naivete is inevitably breathtaking - Western left wingers think they can collaborate in resistance movements with political Islamists, but they can't even coexist with their country's own right wingers without viewing them as enemies. No such left-wing dictatorship seems likely until it happens, and by 2100, it's likely there will be some such Islamic dictatorship for a long period in some Western country, or certainly by 2150. Many European right-wingers exaggerate vastly the threat radical Islam poses to the West, but the threat is real, and will only get realer.

I'm an American liberal, I will always be a liberal, but I am no leftist and haven't been in more than twenty years, because few progressives or socialists seem capable of conceiving that some humans are evil enough to poison the solidarity of well-meaning peoples. They see the suffering of people like Gazans, and cannot fathom that there are evils still well beyond that. All too many of those evils are right wing - and American, but the 20th century was ample evidence that the biggest priority is to eliminate the threat of people being killed by the tens of millions, and in the 21st century, the goal of policies has to be to prevent people being killed by the hundreds of millions.

Or more? Or worse?

It's Six Months Today

 

I want to write something very different from what I'm about to write, but every time I think of writing, I get a whole new wave of exhaustion. I feel like I knew exactly what this would be like from the moment this happened, and excepting one development, nothing so far surprised me: including today's withdrawal from the South. I'm tired of dealing with this and I'm tired of dealing with beheymehs who think their view and theirs alone is the right one and everyone who disagrees is maliciously ignorant at best and evil at worst. I'm so very tired of people who post slogans on social media: don't ever believe a political meme, they're posted by lonely people who feel the need to belong to a community more than knowing what they're talking about. I'm tired of seeing old friend after friend turn on Jews in their moment of need, I'm tired of seeing Jew after Jew turn on Arab peoples in their perpetual need. I'm tired of people getting statistics from sources that deliberately lie. I'm tired of so-called experts who gather facts to fit their theories rather than form theories to fit the facts. I'm tired of true believers of all stripes that believe so much more than they know and are willing to ditch the principals they claim to cherish just so they can score one against the other side.

To anyone who knows the first thing about this sliver from the river to the sea, they know that moments like this are just another eyeblink in the world's most sought-after real estate. The history of this gorgeous land is an endless procession of killers and killed, a monument to folly that's forever built taller: the folly of power and the folly of belief, the folly of war and the folly of peace, the folly of hope and the folly of fear. The fighting started long before we were there, it will continue long after we're gone, and all through it, God just sits in the sky and laughs. We are just another act in his ongoing play, where society after society blunders their way onto that tiny stage. In every act, the clothing and the languages change, but the script stays the same.

As to that one development which surprised me, it's this: the quickness with which the 'g-word' spread. It shouldn't have, but it did. If Israel killed even 3% of Gazans, it would be justified to call it an ethnic cleansing. You could even make an argument that since Israel destroyed so much of Gaza's north, that constitutes ethnic cleansing - it's not a great argument but it's a legitimate argument. But this is war against an organization that pledges genocide against Jews (not just Israelis) and deliberately uses its citizens as human shields, and to call the death of 1.5% a genocide while Gaza's population doubles in every generation? While no violence was pursued in the occupied West Bank except vigilante violence outside government control? While polls show that a majority of the 2.1 million Palestinian citizens inside the Israeli mainland would not trade their lsraeli citizenship for any Palestinian citizenship? While Article 7 of Hamas's own charter says: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."? All I will say is how fucking dare you. Our survivors are still walking the streets. In the non-Russian part of Europe, 85% of Jews were killed. They could have fled Germany to Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland, then Holland, then France, then Yugoslavia, then Greece, and still they would have been gassed. You may condemn Israel as much as you like, you may consider Gaza an open air prison - and you might be right, you may be horrified as I am by the likelihood that 1.5% of Gazans are dead and likely 1.5-2% permanently wounded, you may be as aghast as I was that the Israeli army came so close to using famine as a weapon of war - which may well have resulted in ethnic cleansing, you may hate Netanyahu as much as we do and think he means to establish himself as a permanent ruler of a Jewish state that permanently relegates its Arab population to unbreakable apartheid for hundreds of years, and the day may yet come when a far more religious Israel truly pursues a genocide, but to accuse THIS Israel, even Netanyahu's Israel, of genocide, is an antisemitic slur as bad as k*ke or zh*d. I will not be friends with anyone who says it in any kind of public square, and somehow, sixteen people I know have done it just on facebook, some of which, once upon a time, were fairly close friends. You will, no doubt, find Jews who give you their blessing for using the word and even praise you for it, but there is no circumstance under which I would do anything but shun. I don't know why this surprised me, but it really did, and it terrified me.

I'll probably put together some analysis later, but first, let me go to the bathroom...

I want it perfectly clear ...

 I've said this before, but I want it perfectly clear for anyone who has read all this verbiage I've set down over the last six months.

At no point was I anything more than ambivalent about Israel's actions in Gaza. All I've done is refuse to condemn it, which I refuse to do even now, especially now. People don't understand Hamas because their imagination fails to perceive how evil on that level can exist, but if it didn't, we'd have been spared Stalin, Mao, and yes, Hitler. However much so many people I know disagree, it's more obvious to me than ever that Hamas is at fault, that they are an organization of the deepest evil, longing to kill their own populace as a means of waging holy war, and that any populace whose plurality voted in Hamas is no less responsible for these results than any Israeli whose prosperity made them naive about the necessity of severe compromises to their territory. I don't know what else anyone could possibly do when faced with threats like Israel is faced with, but so long as Israel is controlled by Netanyahu or anyone like him, there is no end to this that does not result in an eventual apartheid of its Arab population, within the occupied territories and without, not now but in twenty years - maybe much less, and yes, as Israel's religious population grows to dwarf its secular population, an eventual genocide perpetrated by Israel around its territories and neighbors as an all too easy next step - not now, but in fifty years, which, in turn, would leave Jews open to a retributive genocide against them if their ability to defend themselves is ever taken away. Genocide is absolutely not what's happening in 2024, and even now, it has to be so much worse before it rises to that level. If today's Israel were intent on a genocide, we might worry that not a single Muslim would be left within a hundred miles of any Israeli border. But there's no doubt, this situation emboldens the most toxic elements of Israel, which in turn emboldens Hamas and all their allies, locking them into a holy war that can grow even so much worse than it is currently, until heads prevail that, exhausted by genocide - the real thing, grow so much cooler than today's ketzenkops are. The whole point of what Hamas did was to use their own people as grist for a mill, so they could hold the whole project of a Jewish state up to the world as the real grinder of death, not they, who would throw the whole region on a pyre if it meant thereafter that the Middle East would be free of Jews.

Well, they've succeeded in fooling the world and then some, but that does not mean Israel has no blame in this, and it does mean that, in some ways, Israel brought it on itself. As usual, there's so much more to say, but the more people say, the less anybody listens.All reactions: