Sixteen days after suffering the loss of 1,400 of its citizens to the surprise daybreak attack by Hamas terrorists out of Gaza, Israel is facing a terrible dilemma: do they go into Gaza with ground troops, and if so, how hard? Even after counting the bodies of the dead and enduring their funerals and hearing the stories of rape and torture and point-blank murder of young children and babies, deciding what kind of retribution you will exact on your enemies and how much is not an easy decision. As President Biden reminded the Israelis a week ago, our country made some very bad decisions after the terrorist attack on 9/11 that took more than 3,000 American lives. Due to those decisions, we went on to lose more than twice that many Americans in the wars we waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we caused the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqi and Afghan civilians.
First of all, the US must not get boots on the ground. The Israelis are big boys and they do what they do. It would be ill advised for Israel to try to destroy every Hamas terrorist when they have no way of making a distinction between good and decent Palestinians from Hamas terrorists. Israel has ruled with focus on apartheid. Sending a punk like Kushner to resolve this very complex issue was about as stupid as it gets. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem was another slap in the face. They bulldozed settlements and took land just because they could. A society can only be oppressed for so long before they fight back. Proportional response is a good description of what needs to be done considering we have over 200 hostages in the Gaza Strip. We need to resolve that and Israel needs to exercise restraint or we end up with another 200 bodies. The issue is, can Israel exercise restraint. Bibi has always been a brute especially in the last few years as he became trumpized. We have to remember, there are a billion Muslims in this world. There are 18 million Jews and many of those live in the United States. We should not allow Israel to gain a false sense of security that we will bail them out. As someone mentioned, Vietnam was about winning the hearts and mind of the people. The problem was that the average trigger puller did not appreciate the culture of the people and for the most part, they treated the Vietnamese like dirt. We are not good soldiers. We go in and before we fight, we build barracks, commissaries, and officer's clubs. Folks need to sit back and analyze this situation rationally. Killing tens of thousands of Palestinians is not rational nor is it a proportional response. Read McChrystal's comments about our response following 9/11. No one listened to Colin Powell and his doctrine. I don't entirely agree with McChrystal, but reviewing the Powell Doctrine would do all of us a lot of good. We need to pause and think rationally. The US does not need another war as we grow impatient very quickly and we do not have a functional congress. I apologize for the ranting and rambling.
Almost from the minute this started, Israel's losses have been swept under the proverbial rug and the sympathy in the mainstream media -- in the fucking NY Times, which a friend calls self-loathing Jews - has been routinely screaming about the displaced Palestinians. I read an article in the Israeli Times about a famous Tech innovator in Israel, who opened a facility to hire Palestinians and teach them skills; his daughter was killed by the terrorists. Mull that over when you are crying about the downtrodden Palestinian under the yoke of Hamas. They hide them, and abet them, and while many are innocent, the best among them have fled. No country in the region wants to open its borders, for good reason. There is barely any mention of the brutality of the treatment of the hostages, the beheaded infants, the young girls gang raped, although the NY Post today claims the Hamas terrorists were hyped up on a cheap version of cocaine, as if to explain away their inculcation since childhood to Kill the Jews. I was not alive for the Holocaust, but have often wondered, as a Jew, how I would've responded, and how so many people were led to the camps. Now I know; Hitler's propoganda demonized the Jews to the point that its citizens went along, some more enthusiastically than others while the Jews just couldn't believe what was coming. I can, and have worried for a long time about the rising tide of antisemitism in this country.
You, Lucian, are one of the rare journalists trying to maake sense of it all without bias, and I thank you. And even you cannot figure out what the right path is for Israel, but it seems like Hamas, and Iran, and whoever else is hoping for that excuse.
"What is a proportional response?" is a question for philosophers, I fear. To crib a title that referenced Vietnam, I think it's appropriate here: "War Without End, AMen."
Proportionality in international law is not about equality of death or civilian suffering, or even about [equality of] firepower. Proportionality weighs the necessity of a military action against suffering that the action might cause to enemy civilians in the vicinity.
"Under international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute, the death of civilians during an armed conflict, no matter how grave and regrettable does not constitute a war crime.... even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur. A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality)." — Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Court.
"The greater the military advantage anticipated, the larger the amount of collateral damage -- often civilian casualties -- which will be "justified" and "necessary." — Dr. Françoise Hampton, University of Essex, UK.
As the Israeli ground incursion into Gaza continues {{IN 2014}}, increased attention will be focused on the notion of "proportionality" in both the number of casualties on both sides and the sophistication of the weapons each side brings to bear. Britain's Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg characterized Israel's operations against Hamas in language that came close to an accusation of war crimes. "I really do think now the Israeli response appears to be deliberately disproportionate. It is amounting now to a disproportionate form of collective punishment." Even President Obama, who has been a firm advocate of Israel's self-defense in this instance, told reporters that he "encouraged" Prime Minister Netanyahu to "minimize civilian deaths."
An Israeli journalist called Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system "unsportsmanlike." He wondered what FIFA would say "if Germany, with its superior economy and industry, were to replace Manuel Neuer with a bionic goalkeeper... capable of calculating where each Argentine ball will come from, the exact position to stand in and amount of force needed to block it... On the modern battlefield (Israel) is a bionic Germany."
How unsportsmanlike!
Even among Israel's friends – and some Israelis – a "yes, but..." response is common. "Yes" Hamas started it; "Yes" Hamas puts military infrastructure in civilian neighborhoods; "Yes" Israel is entitled to self-defense, "Yes" the Israelis warn Palestinians. "But" more than 240 Palestinians have been killed to date and only one Israeli has died directly from rocket fire.
Isn't that the definition of "disproportionate?" No. It isn't.
One journalist labeled Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system "unsportsmanlike" because it protects Israel's civilian population too well. (Image source: IDF)
Proportionality in international law is not about equality of death or civilian suffering, or even about firepower returned being equal in sophistication or lethality to firepower received. Proportionality weighs the military necessity of an action against the suffering that the action might cause to enemy civilians in the vicinity. A review of expert opinion – none of which was written in relation to Israel – helps to clarify. [All emphases below added.]
Prof. Horst Fischer, Academic Director of the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, wrote in The Crimes of War Project:
The principle of proportionality is embedded in almost every national legal system and underlies the international legal order. Its function in domestic law is to relate means to ends... In the conduct of war, when a party commits a lawful attack against a military objective, the principle of proportionality also comes into play whenever there is collateral damage, that is, civilian casualties or damage to a non-military objective... attacks are prohibited if they cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, or damage to civilian objects that is excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage of the attack. This creates a permanent obligation for military commanders to consider the results of the attack compared to the advantage anticipated.
Exactly as Israel does when it aborts missions after finding civilians used as human shields on rooftops.
The Council on Foreign Relations notes:
According to the doctrine, a state is legally allowed to unilaterally defend itself and right a wrong provided the response is proportional to the injury suffered. The response must also be immediate and necessary, refrain from targeting civilians, and require only enough force to reinstate the status quo ante.
What constitutes status quo ante for Israel may be debatable – but surely a return to the period before 75% of Israel's citizens were terrorized by random rocket fire should be an acceptable definition.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, investigated allegations of war crimes during 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in 2006 published an open letter containing his findings. Included was this section on proportionality:
Under international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute, the death of civilians during an armed conflict, no matter how grave and regrettable, does not in itself constitute a war crime. International humanitarian law and the Rome Statute permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur.
A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality).
Finally, Dr. Françoise Hampton, University of Essex (UK) wrote about the concept of "military necessity."
Military necessity is a legal concept used in international humanitarian law (IHL) as part of the legal justification for attacks on legitimate military targets that may have adverse, even terrible, consequences for civilians and civilian objects. It means that military forces in planning military actions are permitted to take into account the practical requirements of a military situation at any given moment and the imperatives of winning.
What constitutes a military objective will change during the course of a conflict. As some military objectives are destroyed, the enemy will use other installations for the same purpose, thereby making them military objectives and their attack justifiable under military necessity. There is a similarly variable effect on the determination of proportionality. The greater the military advantage anticipated, the larger the amount of collateral damage - often civilian casualties - which will be "justified" or "necessary."
Civilian casualties are much to be mourned, but what becomes clear – absent the propaganda element or a shaky notion of sportsmanship – is that Israel has the right and indeed the obligation to defend its people, has the right to "win" the war of self-defense that it is fighting, and has taken account of the requirements of international law regarding "proportionality" and "military necessity." This, coupled with the willingness of Israel to accept the Egyptian-sponsored ceasefire, acceptance of a UN-sponsored humanitarian truce, and the continued provision of food, medicine, and electricity to the residents of Gaza, should help erase the "buts" of fair-minded people.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.
Thank you for this background on I guess what can be called the principles of armed conflict and inevitability of civilian deaths? I’m no expert so my words are inexact. It occurs to me as I read this, Richard, that yet another factor is at play in this situation - the purpose of response being to stifle the very real informed anticipation of the continuation of terror against the citizens and the state of Israel.
That being an amplified layer of consequence in this very particular situation. (The only other perhaps being the implacable decimation of the Armenian people by the Turks)
You're welcome Patris, I realized when I ran across this piece back in 2014 it made a number of important points. Btw the Greek-born woman who was an ownership partner with her husband at the job I worked at in 2000-2002, reminded me several times that Greeks are all too familiar within their national history, of having to deal with the worst aspects of the Turks, no doubt about that!
Gatestone Institute is much too right-wing in their overall perspective for me to "endorse them wholesale" - but individual articles I judge on a case-by-case basis, they do sometimes feature very disillusioned Palestinian and Arab critics of "the usual suspects" among Arab regimes and, of course, terrorist outfits like Hamas and Hizbollah ("The Army of God," now there's a tipoff to what's on offer!), critics who have a special access to comprehending subtle cultural distinctions and linguistic skills of their own, that really make their contributions notable. In fact if I can find a current example from Khaled Abu Toameh or Bassam Tawil - yes, something like these, see for yourself when you get time to read them, very informative.
Attempts by some Westerners to whitewash Hamas and portray it as a small group of fighters challenging Israel, one of the most powerful countries in the Middle East, have continued in spite of the atrocities committed by the group over the past 35 years. Bizarrely, the attempts have continued even while Hamas leaders themselves were stressing that their group has not changed and remains committed to slaughtering Jews and eliminating Israel.
In 2017, Western media outlets published stories arguing that Hamas has recognized Israel's right to exist by accepting the "two-state solution." The only problem is, it was not true.
The argument was based on a political program announced by Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal at a press conference in Doha, Qatar.
The British newspaper The Guardian then claimed that Hamas, in its new program, had made "the biggest concessions" by agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel.
The paper quoted a part of the program that says:
"[Hamas] considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of June 4, 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus."
Many in the international media, however, failed to report that the new program also states that:
"Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea."
Other sections of the political program, falsely presented by some media outlets as a sign of Hamas's purported moderation and pragmatism, actually reaffirmed the group's original charter, published in 1988.
The 2017 program includes these statements:
"The establishment of Israel is entirely illegal"
"There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity"
"Resistance and Jihad (holy war) for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honor for all the sons and daughters or our people and our Ummah (Muslim community)."
The 1988 Hamas charter states that "our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious." It quotes Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is an offshoot), as saying: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."
In its charter, Hamas makes it clear that it remains faithful to the words of the prophet Mohammed, who was quoted as saying:
"The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O' Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." (Article 7)
Article 13 of the charter emphasizes the importance of Jihad:
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
Hamas says in the charter that "the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day" (Article 11) and "the Jihad for the liberation of Palestinian is an individual duty of every Muslim" (Article 15).
Notably, the new Hamas program did not replace its 1988 charter. In fact, the program repeated Hamas's commitment to the destruction of Israel through Jihad, but pointed out that since this goal cannot be achieved under the current circumstances, the group is ready to accept a temporary state on any land it obtains as a first stage toward the annihilation of Israel. Hamas, in short, is saying: We will take whatever you (Israel) give us now – starting with a Palestinian state – and we will use this to slaughter you.
Additionally, no senior Hamas official has ever gone on the record to announce the revocation of the charter, which calls for the elimination of Israel and replacing it with an Islamic state. On the contrary; Hamas representatives have gone to some length to let it be known that they have not abandoned their desire to kill Jews and destroy Israel.
******* These two and several others featured on Gatestone can't be bothered to stifle their deep suspicion of the tendencies in much of the Western media to "look away from the horror" - to soft-pedal just how determined and downright genocidal Hamas is, all credit to them for that. It's when they start suggesting reservations about Israeli military tactics, or inject classic right wing smears into some of the material, that I just stop reading and size them up as uneven at best, and completely unhinged at worst, etc.
The sheer nihilism embedded in this credo is bone chilling. Self incriminating in its inherent, archaic brutality, violence reciprocal to that which they inflicted on Israel and Jews internationally. It leads me to fear there is little left to be said other than we must hope there are saner human beings among the Palestinians population than these medieval and dark voices.
There are indeed, but unfortunately just as is the case with another infamously oppressive regime now rooting for the slaughter of Jews in the region for multiple reasons, including a viciously anti-Semitic tradition that stretches past centuries, despite (or because?) having had Jews reside in Russia, prosper financially, and make noteworthy cultural contributions over the centuries as well - Putin's kleptocracy in the former Soviet Union -
a huge percentage of them are in exile, in prison, have been assassinated or somehow managed to survive botched assassinations overseas in the territories of staunch U.S. allies like the U.K. , and continue to speak out while risking various kinds of retaliation, such as the assassination plots.
People should always listen to this critic in particular, I know I will find something on point and current from him before even "just googling it":
Yes, and even better, it's a much more expansive overview that begins with his chess career in the old Soviet Union, where he observed the KGB security "up close and personal" every single time he traveled outside the national boundaries for tournaments or his world championship matches, right up to exactly the topics Lucian is hammering on so astutely in this newsletter:
"Garry Kasparov is considered to be one of the greatest chess players ever and in a recent wide-ranging interview with the Syrian-born American journalist Hayvi Bouzo and Benjamin Weinthal, Kasparov covered his new chess masterclass series, The Queen’s Gambit Netflix series, Israel and power politics across the Middle East and in Russia. These are edited extracts of that interview." (November 7, 2021), I also found a tweet/X post
from Kasparov suggesting on October 14 2023 that given Putin's ties over decades to all the terrorists in the region, the surprise would be if Russia was NOT involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks:
Putin is no one’s friend. As a dictator, he is much more comfortable with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iranian mullahs and Assad, because they see no value in human rights. They don’t respect the fundamental rights that we believe every individual has. So if it suits him to work with Israel against Hezbollah today, he will do that. This is the way dictatorships survive because it’s all about today. There is no long-term strategic plan. No permanent friends. Look at the relationship between Putin and [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, it’s love-hate. They keep attacking each other but at the end of the day they know that they can’t expect much from their counterpart.
Non-democratic countries always find a common interest in reducing the influence of democracy and eliminating any political opposition to their rule. So while Putin is happy to work with and to offer Israel some assistance, we should not forget that the KGB was, from the early days, behind the terrorist groups in the Middle East, and I don’t believe for a second that this relationship has been severed.
Yes, this is the classic "unholy mess" that wars almost always create sooner or later, the U.S. has seen it repeatedly in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s, and then in the examples LKTIV cites from more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of our involvement in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq involves the very real and sincere desire to help oppressed peoples experience their own democratic rights and freedoms, but can so easily spin into preposterously optimistic and/or arrogant "nation-building" projects, it's essentially doomed from the git-go.
Illuminating exposition on the concept of kill ratio (a particular nightmare calculus i recall with horror from Bob McNamara and the Vietnam war). Certainly Israel knows better than to believe - once the heat of the (horrific)moment kill lust following the massacre of October 7 even marginally subsides - that there can ever be, as you expertly say, any hope of ever achieving any “once and for all” situation. What then are they prepared to do?
It seems to me to come down to how many young soldiers they are ready to sacrifice to at the very least kill the architects of the horror and to eliminate the true believers of Hamas.
Chilling to think they have that number calculated. But I think they do, and they will.
One thing often either forgotten (intentionally?) or overlooked out of ignorance of how asymmetric warfare is fought today is that the "leadership" of Hamas is likely not in Gaza. It is in Iran, Qatar and maybe even in Riyad. Israel can kill all the foot soldiers it wants in Gaza and Hamas will resurrect itself somewhere else with the money and leadership form the aforementioned places and supporters. You cannot kill an idea and the idea behind Hamas and Hezzbolah are to destroy Jews in Israel. No matter how long it takes and not matter what nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia have to spend to do it financing surrogates.
Doesn't Israel have the equivalent of our special forces? The response is going to have to take time in order to weed out the Hamas murderers from the civilians they control. Going in with great force will likely result in prolonged conflict with civilian losses in Gaza... and Israel will have walked into a trap...Hamas will put out photos of dead civilians and say "see, we told you..." and remember, in order to achieve the kill ratio you want, you put more of your soldiers at risk. I could see this turning into a war of attrition, which is the least effective way of waging war.
I saw all of those Cal, they mattered not, I understood what you meant. I type slowly, (my skill level), so that I have more time to see the words, and still I make mistakes that I catch later 🤷♂️, sometimes several days later, but better late than never as they say, whoever they are. This is a good essay to think about. I learn so much from all of you. 🙏
I taught Ethics at the Joint Forces Staff College. I would have used this for a reading assignment since we had Americans, NATO, and other allied officers, including Saudis, Egyptians, Lebanese, Turks, and many others from around the world. It would have made a great discussion piece.
"Cold calculus" is a perfect title to describe this ongoing disaster. Hamas clearly put a great deal of time and planning into their murderous rampage. They knew with certainty that Israel would strike back with a vengeance. Allegedly they have built 100's of miles of underground tunnels where they can ride out the inevitable airstrikes and let civilian casualties mount up - all part of their terrorism "math". I would have to think that Hamas has amassed a large supply of drones and anti-tank weapons and seen what the Ukrainian's have done to the Russians using those weapons. Sadly, this "calculation" is far from finished.
I well remember our "Hearts & Minds" programs in South Vietnam which were designed to peacefully win the support of the South Vietnamese. This 75 years long conflict Israel vs. Palestinians is way past that kind of campaign; the hatred is immeasurable. Only giving the Palestinians lots of land with access to the sea has any chance of bringing peace to Israel. Israel is mostly post-1947 conquered land; they can afford to give some of it up.
Sadly, you have just proving my point. I’m not gonna get into an argument with you, but you’re very misguided and one thing I will say is that it was never Palestinian land. And if you’ve ever seen the size of Israel, they can’t afford to give any of it up.
The history of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire really confuses people, as you imply here AJ, and it seems the mass media in the USA and most other nations has almost no interest in educating people about the period in the region before that collapse, say 1880 to the runup to World War 1 circa 1910, or the period during the WW1 that includes the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the incredible massacres of Jews, really sizeable pogroms, in the period from 1918 - 1947/1948, and even at that point, after Haj Amin Al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had conspired with Hitler, helping recruit a Waffen SS division among other sordid deeds, with the State of Israel now recognized by the United Nations, elucidation by our feckless mass media of the invasion of the new state by five Arab armies (with much encouragement of the local non-Jewish population by those invading states to flee cities and villages up and down what is now Israel and Gaza, rendering them refugees, which the invaders apparently thought would clear the way for their inevitable victories as they destroyed Israel, when the refugees could return!) is not really a focus of much discussion, or the 1956 war, or later events before around the 1970s/1980s.
It's completely inept, bogus "history" to proceed like that, but there it is. Israel is about the size of New Jersey, and the 1400 dead and kidnapped on 7 October would, if compared with the U.S. population, be the equivalent of the United States losing 48,000
dead and kidnapped in ONE DAY, attacked by an organization on any number of "designated international terrorist" lists - just imagine the response here if 9/11 had killed close to 50,000!
And AQ was hoping for far more casualties than even that number, why they attacked so early in the morning is a happy accident that doubtless saved many tens of thousands of lives that day.
One would think that the ultimately successful Zionist object of having a physical land of their own is a desire which is parallel to the goal of the Palestinians. Yet, I see no empathy there at all, just occupation and repression by sheer military power.
As to Israel's present size, any Cub Scout comparing the size of Israel today with its original1947 size, would have to say "Wow--what happened?"
To suggest a solution is to give Palestine more land is to ignore the reality that Israel has a neighbor run by a terrorist organization, whose sole purpose is to destroy the Jewish state, so I don’t see how more land would change that. In fact, this is a very sad story that pretty much illustrates the self destruction of Gaza. And the very sad ending of this is his daughter was killed by Hamas.
Eyal Waldman, Israeli high-tech tycoon, founder and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, stunned the tech industry and the entire Arab world by creating R&D centers five years ago, first in the West Bank and then two years ago in the Gaza sector, employing hundreds of Palestinians of programmers.
He said then: "Today we have 25 employees in Gaza. There are talented and smart people out there, it pays off. We have good staff, within an hour zone, highly motivated, availability and opportunities. And I think it's very important for the two nations to unite. People used to be scared of each other and not talk. But the positive is created when people start working together and see how tensions are reduced and cooperation works. This is good for all sides. "
On October 7, 2023 Hamas killed Danielle's daughter. It happened near Kibbutz Reim, less than a mile from where her father opened the most innovative factory in Gaza.
Wow - I think you mean "Hamas killed Waldman's daughter Danielle," but what a barbaric rebuke to good faith cooperation and hopes of real shared progress!
THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT - SANTAYANA
^^^^^ This will be as comprehensive a summary as anything you're likely to locate online, here's the opening precis:
George Santayana
First published Mon Feb 11, 2002; substantive revision Thu Jul 23, 2020
Philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle, fight off idealisms, and provide a striking and sensitive account of the spiritual life without being a religious believer. His Hispanic heritage, shaded by his sense of being an outsider in America, captures many qualities of American life missed by insiders, and presents views equal to Tocqueville in quality and importance. Beyond philosophy, only Emerson may match his literary production. As a public figure, he appeared on the front cover of Time (3 February 1936), and his autobiography (Persons and Places, 1944) and only novel (The Last Puritan, 1936) were the best-selling books in the United States as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Edmund Wilson ranked Persons and Places among the few first-rate autobiographies, comparing it favorably to Yeats’s memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Remarkably, Santayana achieved this stature in American thought without being an American citizen. He proudly retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life. Yet, as he readily admitted, it is as an American that his philosophical and literary corpuses are to be judged. Using contemporary classifications, Santayana is the first and foremost Hispanic-American philosopher.
1. Biography
2. Philosophy, Literature, and Culture
3. Development of Santayana’s Philosophy
4. Naturalism
5. Ethics, Politics, and the Spiritual Life
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries *******
Ok, looks like I will follow this ad hoc thread of topics and see if I can finish this article before finishing my second cup of coffee, or reading accounts of how the 2-4 Vikings managed to upset the visiting 5-1 San Francisco 49ers last night, c'est la vie!
Upvoted for asking the right kind of question, but amazed at the absence of any attempt to answer it - "what happened" was, among other things, repeated refusals by the Palestinians to accept peace offers involving a "two-state solution":
ESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,449, February 16, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The consistent and enduring Palestinian rejection of any and all peace initiatives with Israel, most recently the “Deal of the Century,” calls into question the commitment of the Palestinian leadership not only to peace but to the very welfare and safety of the Palestinian people.
Taking into account all the peace initiatives proposed to end the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs over the last 83 years, we must consider the possibility that the Palestinians—or at least their leaders—do not want to establish their own state.
Their sight is currently set on the big prize—the entire state of Israel—and they are playing for time. In the meantime, they plan to continue to subsist on monies donated by the Arabs and the Europeans. Many of the Arab states have grown disenchanted with this enterprise, and their assistance, particularly from the Saudis, has been discontinued in recent years.
President Trump has also reduced the flow of US support. Only the Europeans remain committed to the implacable Palestinian narrative.
A survey of Palestinian rejectionism
The Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, said in his testimony to the British Peel Commission, established in January 1937 to find a way forward for cooperation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, “Most residents of Jewish lands will not be awarded citizenship in our future country.” The Mufti suggested that the Jews be deported from Palestine. Rejecting the idea of a Jewish state, he promised that if such a state were established, every last Jew would be expelled from a Palestinian Arab state.
The UN partition plan
In November 1947, the same Mufti refused to adopt the UN partition plan that offered to establish two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. The Mufti rejected a two-state solution until the day he died, a choice ordinary Palestinians may well regret. Had he agreed to the UN plan, they would have gained a much larger area than what is on offer today.
Yasser Arafat
The successor to the Mufti, Yasser Arafat, continued to reject any legitimacy for the State of Israel, refusing even to acknowledge its existence. For many years, he raised the PLO banner of a military and terrorist struggle against Israel. In addition to masterminding decades of bloody terror in the streets of Israel, Arafat was responsible for devastation across the Middle East, including a civil war in Lebanon (1975-1991) and Jordan’s Black September (1970). He also threw the PLO’s support behind Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991.
When Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Arafat’s PLO called for Egypt to be boycotted. The Arab states adopted that boycott and prevented Cairo from participating in the Arab League from 1977 until 1989. Most Arab ambassadors in Egypt were recalled and Arabs visiting Egypt were considered either traitors or spies.
The Oslo “Peace Process”
The Palestinians responded to Israel’s attempts to implement the Oslo Accords by sending waves of suicide bombers to the streets and buses of the cities of Israel, a blatant violation of their commitment to the agreements and a clear statement of their rejection of the idea of peace with Israel. At the July 2000 at Camp David summit, Israel PM Ehud Barak offered Arafat a series of far-reaching concessions as part of a comprehensive peace arrangement. In return, Arafat was asked to end the conflict. The PLO summarily rejected the Israeli proposals and never offered a counterproposal. Instead, the PLO-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) initiated a massive premeditated wave of violence. Arafat’s war of terror (the so called “al-Aqsa Intifada”) was unparalleled in the scale and relentlessness of its terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. A total of 1,184 Israelis were murdered.
Disengagement
In August 2005, the government of Israel, headed by PM Ariel Sharon, carried out the unilateral evacuation of all Israeli villages from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank. In response, the Palestinians have been launching missiles and rockets on Israeli towns and villages from the Gaza Strip for years, some of which reaching as far as Tel Aviv.
Instead of using the enormous Israeli concession as an opportunity to achieve peace, the Palestinians used it to empower Iranian-backed terrorist organizations. In June 2007, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in a violent coup. Ever since the Hamas takeover, the villages of southern Israel have been subjected to a more-or-less nonstop downpour of rockets and missiles fired from Gaza. The number of rockets/missiles and mortar shells fired into Israel from Gaza since 2007 is in the tens of thousands.
Mahmoud Abbas
In 2008, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert offered Arafat’s successor as PLO Chairman and PA president Mahmoud Abbas a sweeping peace proposal. Abbas rejected it outright. He claimed that “the gaps are too wide,” meaning there was too great a distance between what the Palestinians demanded and what the Israelis were offering. “I will wait until all the Israeli settlements have been frozen,” he said.
According to Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestinians, “We are not in a market or a bazaar. I came here to determine the boundaries of Palestine from 1967 without budging an inch, without removing one stone from Jerusalem or any of the holy places to Islam or Christianity in Jerusalem.” The Palestinians refused Olmert’s offer because they found his unprecedented territorial concessions insufficient and because they insisted on the right to manage the holy sites in Jerusalem in place of the Jordanians.
Deal of the Century
The Palestinian leadership rejected the current US proposal a year ago, before they had seen it. They also refused to participate in the economic conference held in Bahrain at the end of June 2019 and prevented other Palestinians from participating.
As soon as the plan was published, it was a given that Abbas would oppose it strongly. “We say a thousand times no, no, no to the Deal of the Century,” he said. “We refused this deal from the beginning and we were right. Two days ago, they said to listen. Listen to what? Shall we get a country without Jerusalem for every Palestinian, Muslim, or Christian child?” he asked.
Mahmoud Abbas is now calling the deal a conspiracy that “will never pass… Our strategy focuses on the struggle to end the occupation. The plans to eliminate the Palestinian agenda will fail and fall away.”
As has been said many times, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Their leadership claims that every suggestion is a conspiracy and every initiative a trap. Making peace takes courage. Will a Palestinian Sadat ever arrive?"
Jews have fled hostility for eons, hence, the term “wondering Jews”. Stateless migrants sought a safe haven, having been expelled from their historic homeland, Israel.
Finally we are given “a little piece of rotten earth” (my alt-name for Israel), and we are immediately challenged and condemned for maintaining security against hostile invaders who are sworn to complete destruction of the reconstituted, fledgling nation.
Think about the technology that has been brought to the arid region and the stability and and prosperity. Is in envy that arouses such hatred?
Consider the persistence of antisemitism. Even in the court of world opinion (the UN), the very international body that granted sovereignty as a Jewish State, has steadfastly issued resolutions condemning Israel for defending itself.
I think the IDF casualties would/will be much higher. There are 300 miles of Hamas tunnels. Even if they’re blown at the openings, there will still be a significant amount of infantry fighting - and Hamas owns those tunnels. They’re for the most part bombproof, so IDF will be faced with some very nasty options.
Lucian, your ability to write a balanced analysis such as this one is phenomenal. It’s a pleasure to read it. I shy away from entering the discussion for fear that I will inevitably offend one side or the other. Unintentionally. A situation as intractable as this one cannot produce a winner. Winning has no meaning because everyone loses. Yahoo has to go, and he won’t survive this catastrophe politically, but he may make it worse before he’s jettisoned. My admiration of Biden has grown exponentially as he has managed to walk through the minefield so far, even though he is being condemned by elements of both sides. He may yet be the hero when a longer view is taken. Deescalating this crisis is the only real alternative, difficult as it obviously is. That would certainly require the Israelis to swallow hard. Getting out the hostages safely has to happen, and Hamas absolutely has to pay a price. If only the UN could finally do its job. I’m not holding my breath.
Although both I and my two older brothers were educated by Oxford-educated English Benedictine monks, with some of whom I have maintained lifelong friendships, I give modest donations to the FFRF: the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
You might have seen Ronald Reagan‘s son stumping for them in television ads, proudly proclaiming that he’s not worried he will burn in hell.
I recognize the positive role religion plays in the lives of many, and try to be respectful of that. But the boiling religious tea-kettle of the Middle East brings out the absolute worst in humanity, given its central role in stoking enduring tribal hatreds.
About the only thing I can think of that might head off the explosion of violence that is already spinning out of control would be for Israel to do the unthinkable and adopt a nation-state level of turning the other cheek to the horrific atrocities Hamas has just inflicted on it.
I think even Jesus would agree that given the persecution the Jewish people have experienced for centuries — and most grotesquely the European genocide in the 40s — not to mention the ongoing anti-Semitism that saturates the globe, asking Israel to do this after the latest attack would be a truly superogatory demand.
Having said all that, here goes:
Step one would be to remove Netanyahoo from power and, ideally, put him in prison, along with several of his warmongering Orthodox-fundamentalist top lieutenants.
Next: remove all of the settlements that have occurred, particularly under Netanyahoo’s government, but also under previous Israeli governments. Restore ownership of the land to the people who were forcibly moved off, or to their descendants.
Third: establish some type of forum of reconciliation, which would include damages payments for the lives and property lost due to Israeli aggression toward Palestinians.
Fourth: give Palestinians and all Arab citizens of Israel full citizenship rights, equal to those of Jewish Israelis, and strike down any Israeli laws that give any preferential treatment to any citizen on the basis of religion.
I could go on, but you see where this is going, and you will likely also realize that it’s about as likely as 300 million-plus Americans deciding to give all the land we call the USA back to the people we used to call the Indians, along with paying trillions of dollars in reparations to all of the black citizens whose ancestors were brought here as slaves.
Speaking of which, if you’ll forgive this FFRF supporter for invoking the Almighty, I will close with this stirring passage from Lincoln‘s Second Inaugural Address:
“If God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
I’m not a praying man, but I certainly hope that the “judgments of the Lord“ that may be soon visited upon us do not include the vaporization and irradiation of a significant percentage of our species, due to a religion-based conflict.
Hamas shouldn't have done what they did on 07 OCT.
Period.
Israel will probably respond in unenlightened ways. Israel is culpable for that in precisely the same way that USA is culpable for our unenlightened, ineffective ways post 9/11.
First of all, the US must not get boots on the ground. The Israelis are big boys and they do what they do. It would be ill advised for Israel to try to destroy every Hamas terrorist when they have no way of making a distinction between good and decent Palestinians from Hamas terrorists. Israel has ruled with focus on apartheid. Sending a punk like Kushner to resolve this very complex issue was about as stupid as it gets. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem was another slap in the face. They bulldozed settlements and took land just because they could. A society can only be oppressed for so long before they fight back. Proportional response is a good description of what needs to be done considering we have over 200 hostages in the Gaza Strip. We need to resolve that and Israel needs to exercise restraint or we end up with another 200 bodies. The issue is, can Israel exercise restraint. Bibi has always been a brute especially in the last few years as he became trumpized. We have to remember, there are a billion Muslims in this world. There are 18 million Jews and many of those live in the United States. We should not allow Israel to gain a false sense of security that we will bail them out. As someone mentioned, Vietnam was about winning the hearts and mind of the people. The problem was that the average trigger puller did not appreciate the culture of the people and for the most part, they treated the Vietnamese like dirt. We are not good soldiers. We go in and before we fight, we build barracks, commissaries, and officer's clubs. Folks need to sit back and analyze this situation rationally. Killing tens of thousands of Palestinians is not rational nor is it a proportional response. Read McChrystal's comments about our response following 9/11. No one listened to Colin Powell and his doctrine. I don't entirely agree with McChrystal, but reviewing the Powell Doctrine would do all of us a lot of good. We need to pause and think rationally. The US does not need another war as we grow impatient very quickly and we do not have a functional congress. I apologize for the ranting and rambling.
Sincere and impassioned arguments about matters of great consequence are always on the agenda!
Almost from the minute this started, Israel's losses have been swept under the proverbial rug and the sympathy in the mainstream media -- in the fucking NY Times, which a friend calls self-loathing Jews - has been routinely screaming about the displaced Palestinians. I read an article in the Israeli Times about a famous Tech innovator in Israel, who opened a facility to hire Palestinians and teach them skills; his daughter was killed by the terrorists. Mull that over when you are crying about the downtrodden Palestinian under the yoke of Hamas. They hide them, and abet them, and while many are innocent, the best among them have fled. No country in the region wants to open its borders, for good reason. There is barely any mention of the brutality of the treatment of the hostages, the beheaded infants, the young girls gang raped, although the NY Post today claims the Hamas terrorists were hyped up on a cheap version of cocaine, as if to explain away their inculcation since childhood to Kill the Jews. I was not alive for the Holocaust, but have often wondered, as a Jew, how I would've responded, and how so many people were led to the camps. Now I know; Hitler's propoganda demonized the Jews to the point that its citizens went along, some more enthusiastically than others while the Jews just couldn't believe what was coming. I can, and have worried for a long time about the rising tide of antisemitism in this country.
You, Lucian, are one of the rare journalists trying to maake sense of it all without bias, and I thank you. And even you cannot figure out what the right path is for Israel, but it seems like Hamas, and Iran, and whoever else is hoping for that excuse.
"What is a proportional response?" is a question for philosophers, I fear. To crib a title that referenced Vietnam, I think it's appropriate here: "War Without End, AMen."
And for the law of armed conflict, here's one perspective:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4462/proportionality-doctrine
The Doctrine of Proportionality
by Shoshana Bryen
July 20, 2014 at 5:00 am
Proportionality in international law is not about equality of death or civilian suffering, or even about [equality of] firepower. Proportionality weighs the necessity of a military action against suffering that the action might cause to enemy civilians in the vicinity.
"Under international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute, the death of civilians during an armed conflict, no matter how grave and regrettable does not constitute a war crime.... even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur. A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality)." — Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Court.
"The greater the military advantage anticipated, the larger the amount of collateral damage -- often civilian casualties -- which will be "justified" and "necessary." — Dr. Françoise Hampton, University of Essex, UK.
As the Israeli ground incursion into Gaza continues {{IN 2014}}, increased attention will be focused on the notion of "proportionality" in both the number of casualties on both sides and the sophistication of the weapons each side brings to bear. Britain's Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg characterized Israel's operations against Hamas in language that came close to an accusation of war crimes. "I really do think now the Israeli response appears to be deliberately disproportionate. It is amounting now to a disproportionate form of collective punishment." Even President Obama, who has been a firm advocate of Israel's self-defense in this instance, told reporters that he "encouraged" Prime Minister Netanyahu to "minimize civilian deaths."
An Israeli journalist called Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system "unsportsmanlike." He wondered what FIFA would say "if Germany, with its superior economy and industry, were to replace Manuel Neuer with a bionic goalkeeper... capable of calculating where each Argentine ball will come from, the exact position to stand in and amount of force needed to block it... On the modern battlefield (Israel) is a bionic Germany."
How unsportsmanlike!
Even among Israel's friends – and some Israelis – a "yes, but..." response is common. "Yes" Hamas started it; "Yes" Hamas puts military infrastructure in civilian neighborhoods; "Yes" Israel is entitled to self-defense, "Yes" the Israelis warn Palestinians. "But" more than 240 Palestinians have been killed to date and only one Israeli has died directly from rocket fire.
Isn't that the definition of "disproportionate?" No. It isn't.
One journalist labeled Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system "unsportsmanlike" because it protects Israel's civilian population too well. (Image source: IDF)
Proportionality in international law is not about equality of death or civilian suffering, or even about firepower returned being equal in sophistication or lethality to firepower received. Proportionality weighs the military necessity of an action against the suffering that the action might cause to enemy civilians in the vicinity. A review of expert opinion – none of which was written in relation to Israel – helps to clarify. [All emphases below added.]
Prof. Horst Fischer, Academic Director of the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, wrote in The Crimes of War Project:
The principle of proportionality is embedded in almost every national legal system and underlies the international legal order. Its function in domestic law is to relate means to ends... In the conduct of war, when a party commits a lawful attack against a military objective, the principle of proportionality also comes into play whenever there is collateral damage, that is, civilian casualties or damage to a non-military objective... attacks are prohibited if they cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, or damage to civilian objects that is excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage of the attack. This creates a permanent obligation for military commanders to consider the results of the attack compared to the advantage anticipated.
Exactly as Israel does when it aborts missions after finding civilians used as human shields on rooftops.
The Council on Foreign Relations notes:
According to the doctrine, a state is legally allowed to unilaterally defend itself and right a wrong provided the response is proportional to the injury suffered. The response must also be immediate and necessary, refrain from targeting civilians, and require only enough force to reinstate the status quo ante.
What constitutes status quo ante for Israel may be debatable – but surely a return to the period before 75% of Israel's citizens were terrorized by random rocket fire should be an acceptable definition.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, investigated allegations of war crimes during 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in 2006 published an open letter containing his findings. Included was this section on proportionality:
Under international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute, the death of civilians during an armed conflict, no matter how grave and regrettable, does not in itself constitute a war crime. International humanitarian law and the Rome Statute permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur.
A crime occurs if there is an intentional attack directed against civilians (principle of distinction) or an attack is launched on a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage (principle of proportionality).
Finally, Dr. Françoise Hampton, University of Essex (UK) wrote about the concept of "military necessity."
Military necessity is a legal concept used in international humanitarian law (IHL) as part of the legal justification for attacks on legitimate military targets that may have adverse, even terrible, consequences for civilians and civilian objects. It means that military forces in planning military actions are permitted to take into account the practical requirements of a military situation at any given moment and the imperatives of winning.
What constitutes a military objective will change during the course of a conflict. As some military objectives are destroyed, the enemy will use other installations for the same purpose, thereby making them military objectives and their attack justifiable under military necessity. There is a similarly variable effect on the determination of proportionality. The greater the military advantage anticipated, the larger the amount of collateral damage - often civilian casualties - which will be "justified" or "necessary."
Civilian casualties are much to be mourned, but what becomes clear – absent the propaganda element or a shaky notion of sportsmanship – is that Israel has the right and indeed the obligation to defend its people, has the right to "win" the war of self-defense that it is fighting, and has taken account of the requirements of international law regarding "proportionality" and "military necessity." This, coupled with the willingness of Israel to accept the Egyptian-sponsored ceasefire, acceptance of a UN-sponsored humanitarian truce, and the continued provision of food, medicine, and electricity to the residents of Gaza, should help erase the "buts" of fair-minded people.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.
Thank you for this background on I guess what can be called the principles of armed conflict and inevitability of civilian deaths? I’m no expert so my words are inexact. It occurs to me as I read this, Richard, that yet another factor is at play in this situation - the purpose of response being to stifle the very real informed anticipation of the continuation of terror against the citizens and the state of Israel.
That being an amplified layer of consequence in this very particular situation. (The only other perhaps being the implacable decimation of the Armenian people by the Turks)
You're welcome Patris, I realized when I ran across this piece back in 2014 it made a number of important points. Btw the Greek-born woman who was an ownership partner with her husband at the job I worked at in 2000-2002, reminded me several times that Greeks are all too familiar within their national history, of having to deal with the worst aspects of the Turks, no doubt about that!
Gatestone Institute is much too right-wing in their overall perspective for me to "endorse them wholesale" - but individual articles I judge on a case-by-case basis, they do sometimes feature very disillusioned Palestinian and Arab critics of "the usual suspects" among Arab regimes and, of course, terrorist outfits like Hamas and Hizbollah ("The Army of God," now there's a tipoff to what's on offer!), critics who have a special access to comprehending subtle cultural distinctions and linguistic skills of their own, that really make their contributions notable. In fact if I can find a current example from Khaled Abu Toameh or Bassam Tawil - yes, something like these, see for yourself when you get time to read them, very informative.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20089/hamas-represent-palestinians
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20045/hamas-iran-slaughtering-jews
Hamas and Iran: Slaughtering Jews for Decades
by Khaled Abu Toameh
October 12, 2023 at 5:00 am
Excerpt from deep into this lengthy article:
Attempts by some Westerners to whitewash Hamas and portray it as a small group of fighters challenging Israel, one of the most powerful countries in the Middle East, have continued in spite of the atrocities committed by the group over the past 35 years. Bizarrely, the attempts have continued even while Hamas leaders themselves were stressing that their group has not changed and remains committed to slaughtering Jews and eliminating Israel.
In 2017, Western media outlets published stories arguing that Hamas has recognized Israel's right to exist by accepting the "two-state solution." The only problem is, it was not true.
The argument was based on a political program announced by Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal at a press conference in Doha, Qatar.
The British newspaper The Guardian then claimed that Hamas, in its new program, had made "the biggest concessions" by agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel.
The paper quoted a part of the program that says:
"[Hamas] considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of June 4, 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus."
Many in the international media, however, failed to report that the new program also states that:
"Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea."
Other sections of the political program, falsely presented by some media outlets as a sign of Hamas's purported moderation and pragmatism, actually reaffirmed the group's original charter, published in 1988.
The 2017 program includes these statements:
"The establishment of Israel is entirely illegal"
"There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity"
"Resistance and Jihad (holy war) for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honor for all the sons and daughters or our people and our Ummah (Muslim community)."
The 1988 Hamas charter states that "our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious." It quotes Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is an offshoot), as saying: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."
In its charter, Hamas makes it clear that it remains faithful to the words of the prophet Mohammed, who was quoted as saying:
"The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O' Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." (Article 7)
Article 13 of the charter emphasizes the importance of Jihad:
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
Hamas says in the charter that "the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day" (Article 11) and "the Jihad for the liberation of Palestinian is an individual duty of every Muslim" (Article 15).
Notably, the new Hamas program did not replace its 1988 charter. In fact, the program repeated Hamas's commitment to the destruction of Israel through Jihad, but pointed out that since this goal cannot be achieved under the current circumstances, the group is ready to accept a temporary state on any land it obtains as a first stage toward the annihilation of Israel. Hamas, in short, is saying: We will take whatever you (Israel) give us now – starting with a Palestinian state – and we will use this to slaughter you.
Additionally, no senior Hamas official has ever gone on the record to announce the revocation of the charter, which calls for the elimination of Israel and replacing it with an Islamic state. On the contrary; Hamas representatives have gone to some length to let it be known that they have not abandoned their desire to kill Jews and destroy Israel.
******* These two and several others featured on Gatestone can't be bothered to stifle their deep suspicion of the tendencies in much of the Western media to "look away from the horror" - to soft-pedal just how determined and downright genocidal Hamas is, all credit to them for that. It's when they start suggesting reservations about Israeli military tactics, or inject classic right wing smears into some of the material, that I just stop reading and size them up as uneven at best, and completely unhinged at worst, etc.
The sheer nihilism embedded in this credo is bone chilling. Self incriminating in its inherent, archaic brutality, violence reciprocal to that which they inflicted on Israel and Jews internationally. It leads me to fear there is little left to be said other than we must hope there are saner human beings among the Palestinians population than these medieval and dark voices.
There are indeed, but unfortunately just as is the case with another infamously oppressive regime now rooting for the slaughter of Jews in the region for multiple reasons, including a viciously anti-Semitic tradition that stretches past centuries, despite (or because?) having had Jews reside in Russia, prosper financially, and make noteworthy cultural contributions over the centuries as well - Putin's kleptocracy in the former Soviet Union -
a huge percentage of them are in exile, in prison, have been assassinated or somehow managed to survive botched assassinations overseas in the territories of staunch U.S. allies like the U.K. , and continue to speak out while risking various kinds of retaliation, such as the assassination plots.
People should always listen to this critic in particular, I know I will find something on point and current from him before even "just googling it":
Yes, and even better, it's a much more expansive overview that begins with his chess career in the old Soviet Union, where he observed the KGB security "up close and personal" every single time he traveled outside the national boundaries for tournaments or his world championship matches, right up to exactly the topics Lucian is hammering on so astutely in this newsletter:
"Garry Kasparov is considered to be one of the greatest chess players ever and in a recent wide-ranging interview with the Syrian-born American journalist Hayvi Bouzo and Benjamin Weinthal, Kasparov covered his new chess masterclass series, The Queen’s Gambit Netflix series, Israel and power politics across the Middle East and in Russia. These are edited extracts of that interview." (November 7, 2021), I also found a tweet/X post
from Kasparov suggesting on October 14 2023 that given Putin's ties over decades to all the terrorists in the region, the surprise would be if Russia was NOT involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks:
https://www.jpost.com/international/chessmaster-gary-kasparov-talks-masterclass-israel-queens-gambit-684235
Excerpt, from deep into the article:
Putin is no one’s friend. As a dictator, he is much more comfortable with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iranian mullahs and Assad, because they see no value in human rights. They don’t respect the fundamental rights that we believe every individual has. So if it suits him to work with Israel against Hezbollah today, he will do that. This is the way dictatorships survive because it’s all about today. There is no long-term strategic plan. No permanent friends. Look at the relationship between Putin and [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, it’s love-hate. They keep attacking each other but at the end of the day they know that they can’t expect much from their counterpart.
Non-democratic countries always find a common interest in reducing the influence of democracy and eliminating any political opposition to their rule. So while Putin is happy to work with and to offer Israel some assistance, we should not forget that the KGB was, from the early days, behind the terrorist groups in the Middle East, and I don’t believe for a second that this relationship has been severed.
Thank you for this. Meanwhile, it was posited that there's been no ground incursion because that would put Biden in war crimes territory.
Yes, this is the classic "unholy mess" that wars almost always create sooner or later, the U.S. has seen it repeatedly in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s, and then in the examples LKTIV cites from more recently, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of our involvement in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq involves the very real and sincere desire to help oppressed peoples experience their own democratic rights and freedoms, but can so easily spin into preposterously optimistic and/or arrogant "nation-building" projects, it's essentially doomed from the git-go.
For mans first kill.
Watch the opening of the film 2001.
We will not quit until the "Last man Standing."
My High School classmates meet a couple of times a year for a Last man standing breakfast . Were down to about 6.
Illuminating exposition on the concept of kill ratio (a particular nightmare calculus i recall with horror from Bob McNamara and the Vietnam war). Certainly Israel knows better than to believe - once the heat of the (horrific)moment kill lust following the massacre of October 7 even marginally subsides - that there can ever be, as you expertly say, any hope of ever achieving any “once and for all” situation. What then are they prepared to do?
It seems to me to come down to how many young soldiers they are ready to sacrifice to at the very least kill the architects of the horror and to eliminate the true believers of Hamas.
Chilling to think they have that number calculated. But I think they do, and they will.
One thing often either forgotten (intentionally?) or overlooked out of ignorance of how asymmetric warfare is fought today is that the "leadership" of Hamas is likely not in Gaza. It is in Iran, Qatar and maybe even in Riyad. Israel can kill all the foot soldiers it wants in Gaza and Hamas will resurrect itself somewhere else with the money and leadership form the aforementioned places and supporters. You cannot kill an idea and the idea behind Hamas and Hezzbolah are to destroy Jews in Israel. No matter how long it takes and not matter what nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia have to spend to do it financing surrogates.
You are correct. This is an idea - dogmatically held and worse, steeped in religious belief, that cannot be killed.
Self-righteous beliefs, a potent weapon that has little regard for kill tallies on either side of the borders.
Doesn't Israel have the equivalent of our special forces? The response is going to have to take time in order to weed out the Hamas murderers from the civilians they control. Going in with great force will likely result in prolonged conflict with civilian losses in Gaza... and Israel will have walked into a trap...Hamas will put out photos of dead civilians and say "see, we told you..." and remember, in order to achieve the kill ratio you want, you put more of your soldiers at risk. I could see this turning into a war of attrition, which is the least effective way of waging war.
I agree. As i mentioned previously. No ground investigation. Extremely pinpoint air attacks. Go back to what was done in the past.
Eliminating the leaders.
A 18 year old kid given a guy and told to kill is not a high value target.
I meant Invasion.
Jeewiz
Gun not guy.
Im sure a robot is changing stuff?????
I saw all of those Cal, they mattered not, I understood what you meant. I type slowly, (my skill level), so that I have more time to see the words, and still I make mistakes that I catch later 🤷♂️, sometimes several days later, but better late than never as they say, whoever they are. This is a good essay to think about. I learn so much from all of you. 🙏
Thank you
It's an intense time, intense atmosphere, give yourself a break for even paying attention to this at all!
Lucian,
I taught Ethics at the Joint Forces Staff College. I would have used this for a reading assignment since we had Americans, NATO, and other allied officers, including Saudis, Egyptians, Lebanese, Turks, and many others from around the world. It would have made a great discussion piece.
Thank you for posting.
Peace,
Steve
"Cold calculus" is a perfect title to describe this ongoing disaster. Hamas clearly put a great deal of time and planning into their murderous rampage. They knew with certainty that Israel would strike back with a vengeance. Allegedly they have built 100's of miles of underground tunnels where they can ride out the inevitable airstrikes and let civilian casualties mount up - all part of their terrorism "math". I would have to think that Hamas has amassed a large supply of drones and anti-tank weapons and seen what the Ukrainian's have done to the Russians using those weapons. Sadly, this "calculation" is far from finished.
But what happens when they come up from their underground tunnels and there are no people left for them to rule?
Sadly, I think they're counting on ruling the survivors. But they won't be the ones to make sure that there are any.
Yes, sadly, true.
I well remember our "Hearts & Minds" programs in South Vietnam which were designed to peacefully win the support of the South Vietnamese. This 75 years long conflict Israel vs. Palestinians is way past that kind of campaign; the hatred is immeasurable. Only giving the Palestinians lots of land with access to the sea has any chance of bringing peace to Israel. Israel is mostly post-1947 conquered land; they can afford to give some of it up.
Sadly, you have just proving my point. I’m not gonna get into an argument with you, but you’re very misguided and one thing I will say is that it was never Palestinian land. And if you’ve ever seen the size of Israel, they can’t afford to give any of it up.
The history of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire really confuses people, as you imply here AJ, and it seems the mass media in the USA and most other nations has almost no interest in educating people about the period in the region before that collapse, say 1880 to the runup to World War 1 circa 1910, or the period during the WW1 that includes the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the incredible massacres of Jews, really sizeable pogroms, in the period from 1918 - 1947/1948, and even at that point, after Haj Amin Al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had conspired with Hitler, helping recruit a Waffen SS division among other sordid deeds, with the State of Israel now recognized by the United Nations, elucidation by our feckless mass media of the invasion of the new state by five Arab armies (with much encouragement of the local non-Jewish population by those invading states to flee cities and villages up and down what is now Israel and Gaza, rendering them refugees, which the invaders apparently thought would clear the way for their inevitable victories as they destroyed Israel, when the refugees could return!) is not really a focus of much discussion, or the 1956 war, or later events before around the 1970s/1980s.
It's completely inept, bogus "history" to proceed like that, but there it is. Israel is about the size of New Jersey, and the 1400 dead and kidnapped on 7 October would, if compared with the U.S. population, be the equivalent of the United States losing 48,000
dead and kidnapped in ONE DAY, attacked by an organization on any number of "designated international terrorist" lists - just imagine the response here if 9/11 had killed close to 50,000!
And AQ was hoping for far more casualties than even that number, why they attacked so early in the morning is a happy accident that doubtless saved many tens of thousands of lives that day.
One would think that the ultimately successful Zionist object of having a physical land of their own is a desire which is parallel to the goal of the Palestinians. Yet, I see no empathy there at all, just occupation and repression by sheer military power.
As to Israel's present size, any Cub Scout comparing the size of Israel today with its original1947 size, would have to say "Wow--what happened?"
To suggest a solution is to give Palestine more land is to ignore the reality that Israel has a neighbor run by a terrorist organization, whose sole purpose is to destroy the Jewish state, so I don’t see how more land would change that. In fact, this is a very sad story that pretty much illustrates the self destruction of Gaza. And the very sad ending of this is his daughter was killed by Hamas.
Eyal Waldman, Israeli high-tech tycoon, founder and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, stunned the tech industry and the entire Arab world by creating R&D centers five years ago, first in the West Bank and then two years ago in the Gaza sector, employing hundreds of Palestinians of programmers.
He said then: "Today we have 25 employees in Gaza. There are talented and smart people out there, it pays off. We have good staff, within an hour zone, highly motivated, availability and opportunities. And I think it's very important for the two nations to unite. People used to be scared of each other and not talk. But the positive is created when people start working together and see how tensions are reduced and cooperation works. This is good for all sides. "
On October 7, 2023 Hamas killed Danielle's daughter. It happened near Kibbutz Reim, less than a mile from where her father opened the most innovative factory in Gaza.
Wow - I think you mean "Hamas killed Waldman's daughter Danielle," but what a barbaric rebuke to good faith cooperation and hopes of real shared progress!
THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT - SANTAYANA
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana/
^^^^^ This will be as comprehensive a summary as anything you're likely to locate online, here's the opening precis:
George Santayana
First published Mon Feb 11, 2002; substantive revision Thu Jul 23, 2020
Philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle, fight off idealisms, and provide a striking and sensitive account of the spiritual life without being a religious believer. His Hispanic heritage, shaded by his sense of being an outsider in America, captures many qualities of American life missed by insiders, and presents views equal to Tocqueville in quality and importance. Beyond philosophy, only Emerson may match his literary production. As a public figure, he appeared on the front cover of Time (3 February 1936), and his autobiography (Persons and Places, 1944) and only novel (The Last Puritan, 1936) were the best-selling books in the United States as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Edmund Wilson ranked Persons and Places among the few first-rate autobiographies, comparing it favorably to Yeats’s memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Remarkably, Santayana achieved this stature in American thought without being an American citizen. He proudly retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life. Yet, as he readily admitted, it is as an American that his philosophical and literary corpuses are to be judged. Using contemporary classifications, Santayana is the first and foremost Hispanic-American philosopher.
1. Biography
2. Philosophy, Literature, and Culture
3. Development of Santayana’s Philosophy
4. Naturalism
5. Ethics, Politics, and the Spiritual Life
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries *******
Ok, looks like I will follow this ad hoc thread of topics and see if I can finish this article before finishing my second cup of coffee, or reading accounts of how the 2-4 Vikings managed to upset the visiting 5-1 San Francisco 49ers last night, c'est la vie!
Upvoted for asking the right kind of question, but amazed at the absence of any attempt to answer it - "what happened" was, among other things, repeated refusals by the Palestinians to accept peace offers involving a "two-state solution":
https://besacenter.org/palestinian-rejectionism/
ESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,449, February 16, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The consistent and enduring Palestinian rejection of any and all peace initiatives with Israel, most recently the “Deal of the Century,” calls into question the commitment of the Palestinian leadership not only to peace but to the very welfare and safety of the Palestinian people.
Taking into account all the peace initiatives proposed to end the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs over the last 83 years, we must consider the possibility that the Palestinians—or at least their leaders—do not want to establish their own state.
Their sight is currently set on the big prize—the entire state of Israel—and they are playing for time. In the meantime, they plan to continue to subsist on monies donated by the Arabs and the Europeans. Many of the Arab states have grown disenchanted with this enterprise, and their assistance, particularly from the Saudis, has been discontinued in recent years.
President Trump has also reduced the flow of US support. Only the Europeans remain committed to the implacable Palestinian narrative.
A survey of Palestinian rejectionism
The Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, said in his testimony to the British Peel Commission, established in January 1937 to find a way forward for cooperation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, “Most residents of Jewish lands will not be awarded citizenship in our future country.” The Mufti suggested that the Jews be deported from Palestine. Rejecting the idea of a Jewish state, he promised that if such a state were established, every last Jew would be expelled from a Palestinian Arab state.
The UN partition plan
In November 1947, the same Mufti refused to adopt the UN partition plan that offered to establish two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. The Mufti rejected a two-state solution until the day he died, a choice ordinary Palestinians may well regret. Had he agreed to the UN plan, they would have gained a much larger area than what is on offer today.
Yasser Arafat
The successor to the Mufti, Yasser Arafat, continued to reject any legitimacy for the State of Israel, refusing even to acknowledge its existence. For many years, he raised the PLO banner of a military and terrorist struggle against Israel. In addition to masterminding decades of bloody terror in the streets of Israel, Arafat was responsible for devastation across the Middle East, including a civil war in Lebanon (1975-1991) and Jordan’s Black September (1970). He also threw the PLO’s support behind Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991.
When Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, Arafat’s PLO called for Egypt to be boycotted. The Arab states adopted that boycott and prevented Cairo from participating in the Arab League from 1977 until 1989. Most Arab ambassadors in Egypt were recalled and Arabs visiting Egypt were considered either traitors or spies.
The Oslo “Peace Process”
The Palestinians responded to Israel’s attempts to implement the Oslo Accords by sending waves of suicide bombers to the streets and buses of the cities of Israel, a blatant violation of their commitment to the agreements and a clear statement of their rejection of the idea of peace with Israel. At the July 2000 at Camp David summit, Israel PM Ehud Barak offered Arafat a series of far-reaching concessions as part of a comprehensive peace arrangement. In return, Arafat was asked to end the conflict. The PLO summarily rejected the Israeli proposals and never offered a counterproposal. Instead, the PLO-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) initiated a massive premeditated wave of violence. Arafat’s war of terror (the so called “al-Aqsa Intifada”) was unparalleled in the scale and relentlessness of its terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. A total of 1,184 Israelis were murdered.
Disengagement
In August 2005, the government of Israel, headed by PM Ariel Sharon, carried out the unilateral evacuation of all Israeli villages from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank. In response, the Palestinians have been launching missiles and rockets on Israeli towns and villages from the Gaza Strip for years, some of which reaching as far as Tel Aviv.
Instead of using the enormous Israeli concession as an opportunity to achieve peace, the Palestinians used it to empower Iranian-backed terrorist organizations. In June 2007, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in a violent coup. Ever since the Hamas takeover, the villages of southern Israel have been subjected to a more-or-less nonstop downpour of rockets and missiles fired from Gaza. The number of rockets/missiles and mortar shells fired into Israel from Gaza since 2007 is in the tens of thousands.
Mahmoud Abbas
In 2008, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert offered Arafat’s successor as PLO Chairman and PA president Mahmoud Abbas a sweeping peace proposal. Abbas rejected it outright. He claimed that “the gaps are too wide,” meaning there was too great a distance between what the Palestinians demanded and what the Israelis were offering. “I will wait until all the Israeli settlements have been frozen,” he said.
According to Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestinians, “We are not in a market or a bazaar. I came here to determine the boundaries of Palestine from 1967 without budging an inch, without removing one stone from Jerusalem or any of the holy places to Islam or Christianity in Jerusalem.” The Palestinians refused Olmert’s offer because they found his unprecedented territorial concessions insufficient and because they insisted on the right to manage the holy sites in Jerusalem in place of the Jordanians.
Deal of the Century
The Palestinian leadership rejected the current US proposal a year ago, before they had seen it. They also refused to participate in the economic conference held in Bahrain at the end of June 2019 and prevented other Palestinians from participating.
As soon as the plan was published, it was a given that Abbas would oppose it strongly. “We say a thousand times no, no, no to the Deal of the Century,” he said. “We refused this deal from the beginning and we were right. Two days ago, they said to listen. Listen to what? Shall we get a country without Jerusalem for every Palestinian, Muslim, or Christian child?” he asked.
Mahmoud Abbas is now calling the deal a conspiracy that “will never pass… Our strategy focuses on the struggle to end the occupation. The plans to eliminate the Palestinian agenda will fail and fall away.”
As has been said many times, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Their leadership claims that every suggestion is a conspiracy and every initiative a trap. Making peace takes courage. Will a Palestinian Sadat ever arrive?"
© 2023 Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies
Jews have fled hostility for eons, hence, the term “wondering Jews”. Stateless migrants sought a safe haven, having been expelled from their historic homeland, Israel.
Finally we are given “a little piece of rotten earth” (my alt-name for Israel), and we are immediately challenged and condemned for maintaining security against hostile invaders who are sworn to complete destruction of the reconstituted, fledgling nation.
Think about the technology that has been brought to the arid region and the stability and and prosperity. Is in envy that arouses such hatred?
Consider the persistence of antisemitism. Even in the court of world opinion (the UN), the very international body that granted sovereignty as a Jewish State, has steadfastly issued resolutions condemning Israel for defending itself.
Your final conclusion is deeply unsettling - but unfortunately spot on.
Thanks for the brilliant analysis. You put it all together so well.
I think the IDF casualties would/will be much higher. There are 300 miles of Hamas tunnels. Even if they’re blown at the openings, there will still be a significant amount of infantry fighting - and Hamas owns those tunnels. They’re for the most part bombproof, so IDF will be faced with some very nasty options.
Lucian, your ability to write a balanced analysis such as this one is phenomenal. It’s a pleasure to read it. I shy away from entering the discussion for fear that I will inevitably offend one side or the other. Unintentionally. A situation as intractable as this one cannot produce a winner. Winning has no meaning because everyone loses. Yahoo has to go, and he won’t survive this catastrophe politically, but he may make it worse before he’s jettisoned. My admiration of Biden has grown exponentially as he has managed to walk through the minefield so far, even though he is being condemned by elements of both sides. He may yet be the hero when a longer view is taken. Deescalating this crisis is the only real alternative, difficult as it obviously is. That would certainly require the Israelis to swallow hard. Getting out the hostages safely has to happen, and Hamas absolutely has to pay a price. If only the UN could finally do its job. I’m not holding my breath.
Although both I and my two older brothers were educated by Oxford-educated English Benedictine monks, with some of whom I have maintained lifelong friendships, I give modest donations to the FFRF: the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
You might have seen Ronald Reagan‘s son stumping for them in television ads, proudly proclaiming that he’s not worried he will burn in hell.
I recognize the positive role religion plays in the lives of many, and try to be respectful of that. But the boiling religious tea-kettle of the Middle East brings out the absolute worst in humanity, given its central role in stoking enduring tribal hatreds.
About the only thing I can think of that might head off the explosion of violence that is already spinning out of control would be for Israel to do the unthinkable and adopt a nation-state level of turning the other cheek to the horrific atrocities Hamas has just inflicted on it.
I think even Jesus would agree that given the persecution the Jewish people have experienced for centuries — and most grotesquely the European genocide in the 40s — not to mention the ongoing anti-Semitism that saturates the globe, asking Israel to do this after the latest attack would be a truly superogatory demand.
Having said all that, here goes:
Step one would be to remove Netanyahoo from power and, ideally, put him in prison, along with several of his warmongering Orthodox-fundamentalist top lieutenants.
Next: remove all of the settlements that have occurred, particularly under Netanyahoo’s government, but also under previous Israeli governments. Restore ownership of the land to the people who were forcibly moved off, or to their descendants.
Third: establish some type of forum of reconciliation, which would include damages payments for the lives and property lost due to Israeli aggression toward Palestinians.
Fourth: give Palestinians and all Arab citizens of Israel full citizenship rights, equal to those of Jewish Israelis, and strike down any Israeli laws that give any preferential treatment to any citizen on the basis of religion.
I could go on, but you see where this is going, and you will likely also realize that it’s about as likely as 300 million-plus Americans deciding to give all the land we call the USA back to the people we used to call the Indians, along with paying trillions of dollars in reparations to all of the black citizens whose ancestors were brought here as slaves.
Speaking of which, if you’ll forgive this FFRF supporter for invoking the Almighty, I will close with this stirring passage from Lincoln‘s Second Inaugural Address:
“If God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
I’m not a praying man, but I certainly hope that the “judgments of the Lord“ that may be soon visited upon us do not include the vaporization and irradiation of a significant percentage of our species, due to a religion-based conflict.
Hamas shouldn't have done what they did on 07 OCT.
Period.
Israel will probably respond in unenlightened ways. Israel is culpable for that in precisely the same way that USA is culpable for our unenlightened, ineffective ways post 9/11.
It's not good. It's not moral.
It's human nature.
This too shall pass.
Today October 26th - I personally feel that everyone needs to see or listen or both to
Democracy Now. Org and here is the link - https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/26/palestine_israel_hanan_ashrawi - Thank you.
It.s grim and we're caught in the middle of it. It's a no way out situation, for us as well as for the Israelis.