Elham Farah was a Christian music teacher. She taught Gazan children to play the piano. When the bombs came, she sheltered with other Christians in the Church of the Holy Family. During a quiet moment, she left the church to see if her house was still standing, and an IDF soldier shot her in the leg. The people inside the church tried to help her, but every time they tried the IDF opened fire. She died slowly in the street. Later, an IDF tank rolled over her corpse.
In 1948 the circumstances of the creation of Israel were inevitably going to create an existential long term conflict. If a reasonable accommodation for the Palestinians had been created at that time there could have been a foundation set for an eventual coexistence. 76 years of progressive oppression have made that very difficult, maybe impossible. Perhaps a Mandela could emerge. Hamas is not going to ever dominate an independent Palestine as the US would never let that happen. Any Palestinian authority is going to care more about Palestinian rights than Israel has.
A "reasonable accommodation" was offered in 1948. The Israelis accepted it, the Palestinians rejected it. As they did every other "reasonable accommodation" offered ever since. Here's the timeline, if you're interested:
--In 1948, the Palestinians rejected the UN Partition Plan that the Israelis accepted.
-- The 1979 Egypt-Israel peace negotiations offered the Palestinians autonomy, which would almost certainly have led to full independence.
-- The Oslo agreements of the 1990s laid out a path for Palestinian independence, but the process was derailed by terrorism.
-- In 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to create a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank.
-- In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to withdraw from almost the entire West Bank and partition Jerusalem on a demographic basis.
Everything you write about Hamas is true. Why, then, did the Netanyahu government finance them? Anyone could have told Netanyahu that he was playing with fire, and likely did. But he knew better.
Nothing good can happen in Gaza as long as Netanyahu and Sinwar are running their respective shows.
So what I truly don’t understand at this point after months of fighting in Gaza, why don’t the Israelis yet have collaborators among the Gazans lined up to run start running things and to do some of the fighting? How do you get to an unconditional surrender of Hamas without creating a local opposition? They don’t need a truly mass movement, just offer some perks like getting families out and dangle some offers of Israeli citizenship and they’d start getting volunteers. Even the Russians can find collaborators in Ukraine, but it doesn’t look like Israel is even making the most minimal effort in Gaza.
I used to think that people with views such as WIll's were dehumanizing people who surely just wanted the same things that I'd want. Now I feel like things aren't so simple. Regardless, it's a hard problem. There are 2,000,000 people in Gaza, and they may or may not agree with Hamas, but, for the most part, I don't think that they are going to blame Hamas for what Israel has been doing. They are going to blame Israel. I'm worried that what is happening is only going to further radicalize a new generation. I don't know the solution, but not all problems can be solved through the military--Vietnam, for instance. I'm not sure what Will thinks that we were supposed to do there. It happened before I was born, but my understanding is that, regardless of whether someone supported the war, the conflict had become a stalemate, and continuing to send soldiers there was becoming untenable for us.
It is one thing to understand the difficulties in fighting Hamas. It is another to read the disgusting comments made by Israeli leaders about the Palestinian people... suggesting that it's OK to eliminate them, making it OK to kill them...and seeing the bombing that is clearly aimed at killing them, ruining their orchards, vineyards, crop fields... all the evidences of intended genocide, not allowing water and food in which is too obviously aimed at Palestinians.
Yep. Also it was just an absolute sinkhole for US blood and treasure. We didn’t have any other strategy. I’m not even blaming them. It’s just that (1) their was political consensus to leave, (2) we had no better ideas of what different to do and (3) even if we had a “different idea” we had so poisoned the well with the afghans that I’m not sure we could execute a perfect strategy.
The ending in Afghanistan was etched in stone the day that the Bush Administration went in there. What should have been a police action became a hopeless, futile occupation.
It’s definitely clear in retrospect. I probably should have known it before it happened.
What is so frustrating is listening to people now saying we should have stayed longer. I mean, the government we put into effect collapsed before we could even evacuate. That’s how awful it was.
I get wanting to do better but, man, we weren’t capable of doing it.
Who could possibly base a presidential vote on campus protests? I find all the hand wringing over "Biden must condemn campus protests to save the moderate vote". If we lived in a well informed and serious society it wouldn't matter bc all the discussions would be "Trump must admit he lost and agree to respect the results of the 2024 vote to have a chance with moderate voters" which leads me to the conclusion that we deserve a demented narcissistic crazy man bc of the fact he's even seriously being considered by enough people he has a legit shot to win.... 'Merica is doomed I'm moving l...
Hamas may or may not survive. It will, in the end, make no difference. Israel cannot continue to oppress a people, as they have, without another Hamas rising out of the ashes. Just like Irgun or the Stern Gang, a savagely oppressed people will spawn a violent resistance which operates outside of conventional morals believing that they have no alternative. Until the Palestinians are given the human rights and opportunities that are the God-given birthright of all men, there will be no peace. If Israel continues the policies of the current government, and, seemingly the popular will, they will cement their position as a global pariah as vile as the South African apartheid regime.
You’re right as far as it goes. But, what reason is there to think that the leadership of an independent Palestine would care about human rights? Palestine under Hamas would be about as free as Spain under Franco.
Look comparing the situation in Israel to our situation(s) in Vietnam and Afghanistan is just dumb. American forces aren't on the ground and the problem isn't that Israel is losing the war: it's not. It's losing the peace, which is worse.
I am not that knowledgeable about the founding of Israel, but the Bulwark readership is usually quite well-informed. Does anyone know why a Palestinian state wasn't created alongside the state of Israel? Why the powers that be at the time carved out one set of land and called it Israel, and didn't carve another set of boundaries and call it Palestine?
Even this is massively reductionist, but here goes:
In the 1940s, the whole area was a British colonial area. Britain eventually decides to wash its hands of the whole region along similar decolonization efforts, and there is a partition plan to divide it up into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem itself being an international neutral city. That's interrupted by the 1948 war, and arguably, you don't have a state of Israel at that time, you have various Jewish groups that coalesce into a state during/after the war. But when the dust clears, Israel has won the war, and controls the internationally recognized parts of Israel. The West Bank is (mostly) controlled by Jordan, and Gaza is controlled by Egypt, who had waded into the conflict.
You'll note that there is no indigenous Palestinian state in that trifecta. Since that point, the West Bank and Gaza have shifted who has been occupying them, but the Palestinians themselves have never been in political sovereignty unless you want to argue Gaza post 2005. And they've never developed any of the institutions normally associated with statehood.
In 1948 the Jews accepted the UN partition plan, the Palestinians didn't. Instead, they called on the surrounding Arab states to invade to destroy the resulting Jewish state. They tried, and failed. The decision not to set up a Palestinian state at that time was an Egyptian and Jordanian decision. The war didn't just happen.
I remember reading that there is an Arab recognized Gazan entity that isn't Hamas. So it seems that current Gaza isn't an entity that even Arabs/Muslims recognize. So why the heck should Israel or any country deal with Hamas, as it seems to be nothing more than a terrorist Muslim entity? And why aren't Egypt, Jordan, etc. involved in telling Hamas to show the F* up and free their populations from their terror? Where is their pressure on Hamas to stop it the fighting?
I mean, the 'recognized' (for whatever worth that sort of international recognition is) quasi-state governmental authority over Gaza still belongs to Fatah and the PLO. But they were as ineffective in Gaza as they were in the West Bank, and Hamas seized control after factional war during 2006-2007.
But people deal with Hamas because despite the lack of international legitimacy, they are the ones de facto in control of Gaza, and they're not going away anytime soon. And they do have enough power to command that kind of attention, so what else can you do?
As for why Egypt, Jordan, et al aren't applying pressure, why should they? They're hardly brimming with sympathy for the Palestinians or for Israel. As long as they're not being attacked themselves, why stick your hand into that proverbial scorpion pit?
When you've got people on your borders attacking their neighbors on the other border, it kind of affects you as well. Bombs/planes/drones tend to go to places they're not supposed to. Also, from a religious standpoint, aren't they fellow Muslims? Do they not care about them starving, dying, hurting? Why are Americans caring more about people thousands of miles away, and threatening to inflict a fascist on the US, because they think our president has a magical wand to fix that mess, than the countries who claim to love their fellow Muslims and who have been involved in that mess for decades? Where is the pressure on Iran and Hamas from the Saudis, Qatar, etc.? Kind of ironic that the students are protesting schools and people that have no control over those countries, yet ignore embassies of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, etc. who do have far more potential control than the US over Hamas.
Substitute "Russia" for "Hamas" in Will Silber's analysis, and you have an understanding of the war in Ukraine as well. Russia does not share our values--no matter what trump and MAGA say. The US and NATO must aid Ukraine all the way to victory, not set it up for a bad bargain.
Yes, the Doha agreement was a surrender agreement, signed off on by the former administration - one more way in which he jeopardized our national security. And yet who gets blamed for Afghanistan? Pres. Biden. I am SO sick of the pass that tfg continually gets, while Pres. Biden is held to such a higher standard. As JVL has said, it's so asymmetric.
Re A.B.'s piece, I agree with all of it, esp more strongly calling out the Left's anti-semitism. But she didn't address how Biden wins MI, which he must do to win the EC, where enough of the pro-Palestinian voters could cost him the win there.
Biden won the 2020 election in MI by 155k votes. The number of uncommitted primary votes were 101k. Will those voters “come home” to Biden in the general? Time will tell, but I can’t see it.
Let me make it worse for Biden. Spoler alert: You will be depressed by these facts.
The Muslim vote in MI is 13% of the electorate (550,000 votes). 2.8% of the general election electorate are Jewish. (I think this explains why he didn’t clearly call out the anti-Semitism in his remarks on the protests as A.B. noted.)
And then there’s these voters from a recent Post-Ipsos poll: Fewer Black Americans plan to vote in 2024, most of which are young Blacks. In MI, 14% of the electorate is Black.
RFK, Jr qualified for the ballot in MI two weeks ago. The recent polling shows him taking votes away from Biden. I don’t see how Biden can win MI’s Jews, Muslims and young Blacks. That's gonna take some really superior messaging and turn out organization.
Or maybe it's time to get an alternate candidate at the convention in August - Whitmer should be able to knock off Jr and take MI, yes?
Why in the world would Trump worry about Melania's feelings? It's not like she wasn't aware of his proclivities since she was participating in them when he was still married to Marla Maples.
Ending Hamas does not end Israel's problems. They need to enter into a defense agreement with all the other actors in the Middle East who don't care much for Iran. Ending Iran's support of it's proxies would go much further in securing Israel's future than ending one of them.
Elham Farah was a Christian music teacher. She taught Gazan children to play the piano. When the bombs came, she sheltered with other Christians in the Church of the Holy Family. During a quiet moment, she left the church to see if her house was still standing, and an IDF soldier shot her in the leg. The people inside the church tried to help her, but every time they tried the IDF opened fire. She died slowly in the street. Later, an IDF tank rolled over her corpse.
In 1948 the circumstances of the creation of Israel were inevitably going to create an existential long term conflict. If a reasonable accommodation for the Palestinians had been created at that time there could have been a foundation set for an eventual coexistence. 76 years of progressive oppression have made that very difficult, maybe impossible. Perhaps a Mandela could emerge. Hamas is not going to ever dominate an independent Palestine as the US would never let that happen. Any Palestinian authority is going to care more about Palestinian rights than Israel has.
A "reasonable accommodation" was offered in 1948. The Israelis accepted it, the Palestinians rejected it. As they did every other "reasonable accommodation" offered ever since. Here's the timeline, if you're interested:
--In 1948, the Palestinians rejected the UN Partition Plan that the Israelis accepted.
-- The 1979 Egypt-Israel peace negotiations offered the Palestinians autonomy, which would almost certainly have led to full independence.
-- The Oslo agreements of the 1990s laid out a path for Palestinian independence, but the process was derailed by terrorism.
-- In 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to create a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank.
-- In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to withdraw from almost the entire West Bank and partition Jerusalem on a demographic basis.
Everything you write about Hamas is true. Why, then, did the Netanyahu government finance them? Anyone could have told Netanyahu that he was playing with fire, and likely did. But he knew better.
Nothing good can happen in Gaza as long as Netanyahu and Sinwar are running their respective shows.
So what I truly don’t understand at this point after months of fighting in Gaza, why don’t the Israelis yet have collaborators among the Gazans lined up to run start running things and to do some of the fighting? How do you get to an unconditional surrender of Hamas without creating a local opposition? They don’t need a truly mass movement, just offer some perks like getting families out and dangle some offers of Israeli citizenship and they’d start getting volunteers. Even the Russians can find collaborators in Ukraine, but it doesn’t look like Israel is even making the most minimal effort in Gaza.
I used to think that people with views such as WIll's were dehumanizing people who surely just wanted the same things that I'd want. Now I feel like things aren't so simple. Regardless, it's a hard problem. There are 2,000,000 people in Gaza, and they may or may not agree with Hamas, but, for the most part, I don't think that they are going to blame Hamas for what Israel has been doing. They are going to blame Israel. I'm worried that what is happening is only going to further radicalize a new generation. I don't know the solution, but not all problems can be solved through the military--Vietnam, for instance. I'm not sure what Will thinks that we were supposed to do there. It happened before I was born, but my understanding is that, regardless of whether someone supported the war, the conflict had become a stalemate, and continuing to send soldiers there was becoming untenable for us.
It is one thing to understand the difficulties in fighting Hamas. It is another to read the disgusting comments made by Israeli leaders about the Palestinian people... suggesting that it's OK to eliminate them, making it OK to kill them...and seeing the bombing that is clearly aimed at killing them, ruining their orchards, vineyards, crop fields... all the evidences of intended genocide, not allowing water and food in which is too obviously aimed at Palestinians.
Hamas and the Israeli right have a great deal in common: both are autocratic, corrupt, racist, and violent; neither gives a damn about Palestinians.
Yep. Also it was just an absolute sinkhole for US blood and treasure. We didn’t have any other strategy. I’m not even blaming them. It’s just that (1) their was political consensus to leave, (2) we had no better ideas of what different to do and (3) even if we had a “different idea” we had so poisoned the well with the afghans that I’m not sure we could execute a perfect strategy.
The ending in Afghanistan was etched in stone the day that the Bush Administration went in there. What should have been a police action became a hopeless, futile occupation.
It’s definitely clear in retrospect. I probably should have known it before it happened.
What is so frustrating is listening to people now saying we should have stayed longer. I mean, the government we put into effect collapsed before we could even evacuate. That’s how awful it was.
I get wanting to do better but, man, we weren’t capable of doing it.
Who could possibly base a presidential vote on campus protests? I find all the hand wringing over "Biden must condemn campus protests to save the moderate vote". If we lived in a well informed and serious society it wouldn't matter bc all the discussions would be "Trump must admit he lost and agree to respect the results of the 2024 vote to have a chance with moderate voters" which leads me to the conclusion that we deserve a demented narcissistic crazy man bc of the fact he's even seriously being considered by enough people he has a legit shot to win.... 'Merica is doomed I'm moving l...
Let's Go Knicks!
Hamas may or may not survive. It will, in the end, make no difference. Israel cannot continue to oppress a people, as they have, without another Hamas rising out of the ashes. Just like Irgun or the Stern Gang, a savagely oppressed people will spawn a violent resistance which operates outside of conventional morals believing that they have no alternative. Until the Palestinians are given the human rights and opportunities that are the God-given birthright of all men, there will be no peace. If Israel continues the policies of the current government, and, seemingly the popular will, they will cement their position as a global pariah as vile as the South African apartheid regime.
You’re right as far as it goes. But, what reason is there to think that the leadership of an independent Palestine would care about human rights? Palestine under Hamas would be about as free as Spain under Franco.
Look comparing the situation in Israel to our situation(s) in Vietnam and Afghanistan is just dumb. American forces aren't on the ground and the problem isn't that Israel is losing the war: it's not. It's losing the peace, which is worse.
I am not that knowledgeable about the founding of Israel, but the Bulwark readership is usually quite well-informed. Does anyone know why a Palestinian state wasn't created alongside the state of Israel? Why the powers that be at the time carved out one set of land and called it Israel, and didn't carve another set of boundaries and call it Palestine?
Even this is massively reductionist, but here goes:
In the 1940s, the whole area was a British colonial area. Britain eventually decides to wash its hands of the whole region along similar decolonization efforts, and there is a partition plan to divide it up into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem itself being an international neutral city. That's interrupted by the 1948 war, and arguably, you don't have a state of Israel at that time, you have various Jewish groups that coalesce into a state during/after the war. But when the dust clears, Israel has won the war, and controls the internationally recognized parts of Israel. The West Bank is (mostly) controlled by Jordan, and Gaza is controlled by Egypt, who had waded into the conflict.
You'll note that there is no indigenous Palestinian state in that trifecta. Since that point, the West Bank and Gaza have shifted who has been occupying them, but the Palestinians themselves have never been in political sovereignty unless you want to argue Gaza post 2005. And they've never developed any of the institutions normally associated with statehood.
In 1948 the Jews accepted the UN partition plan, the Palestinians didn't. Instead, they called on the surrounding Arab states to invade to destroy the resulting Jewish state. They tried, and failed. The decision not to set up a Palestinian state at that time was an Egyptian and Jordanian decision. The war didn't just happen.
I remember reading that there is an Arab recognized Gazan entity that isn't Hamas. So it seems that current Gaza isn't an entity that even Arabs/Muslims recognize. So why the heck should Israel or any country deal with Hamas, as it seems to be nothing more than a terrorist Muslim entity? And why aren't Egypt, Jordan, etc. involved in telling Hamas to show the F* up and free their populations from their terror? Where is their pressure on Hamas to stop it the fighting?
I mean, the 'recognized' (for whatever worth that sort of international recognition is) quasi-state governmental authority over Gaza still belongs to Fatah and the PLO. But they were as ineffective in Gaza as they were in the West Bank, and Hamas seized control after factional war during 2006-2007.
But people deal with Hamas because despite the lack of international legitimacy, they are the ones de facto in control of Gaza, and they're not going away anytime soon. And they do have enough power to command that kind of attention, so what else can you do?
As for why Egypt, Jordan, et al aren't applying pressure, why should they? They're hardly brimming with sympathy for the Palestinians or for Israel. As long as they're not being attacked themselves, why stick your hand into that proverbial scorpion pit?
When you've got people on your borders attacking their neighbors on the other border, it kind of affects you as well. Bombs/planes/drones tend to go to places they're not supposed to. Also, from a religious standpoint, aren't they fellow Muslims? Do they not care about them starving, dying, hurting? Why are Americans caring more about people thousands of miles away, and threatening to inflict a fascist on the US, because they think our president has a magical wand to fix that mess, than the countries who claim to love their fellow Muslims and who have been involved in that mess for decades? Where is the pressure on Iran and Hamas from the Saudis, Qatar, etc.? Kind of ironic that the students are protesting schools and people that have no control over those countries, yet ignore embassies of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, etc. who do have far more potential control than the US over Hamas.
Substitute "Russia" for "Hamas" in Will Silber's analysis, and you have an understanding of the war in Ukraine as well. Russia does not share our values--no matter what trump and MAGA say. The US and NATO must aid Ukraine all the way to victory, not set it up for a bad bargain.
Yes, the Doha agreement was a surrender agreement, signed off on by the former administration - one more way in which he jeopardized our national security. And yet who gets blamed for Afghanistan? Pres. Biden. I am SO sick of the pass that tfg continually gets, while Pres. Biden is held to such a higher standard. As JVL has said, it's so asymmetric.
Re A.B.'s piece, I agree with all of it, esp more strongly calling out the Left's anti-semitism. But she didn't address how Biden wins MI, which he must do to win the EC, where enough of the pro-Palestinian voters could cost him the win there.
Biden won the 2020 election in MI by 155k votes. The number of uncommitted primary votes were 101k. Will those voters “come home” to Biden in the general? Time will tell, but I can’t see it.
Let me make it worse for Biden. Spoler alert: You will be depressed by these facts.
The Muslim vote in MI is 13% of the electorate (550,000 votes). 2.8% of the general election electorate are Jewish. (I think this explains why he didn’t clearly call out the anti-Semitism in his remarks on the protests as A.B. noted.)
And then there’s these voters from a recent Post-Ipsos poll: Fewer Black Americans plan to vote in 2024, most of which are young Blacks. In MI, 14% of the electorate is Black.
RFK, Jr qualified for the ballot in MI two weeks ago. The recent polling shows him taking votes away from Biden. I don’t see how Biden can win MI’s Jews, Muslims and young Blacks. That's gonna take some really superior messaging and turn out organization.
Or maybe it's time to get an alternate candidate at the convention in August - Whitmer should be able to knock off Jr and take MI, yes?
Why in the world would Trump worry about Melania's feelings? It's not like she wasn't aware of his proclivities since she was participating in them when he was still married to Marla Maples.
Ending Hamas does not end Israel's problems. They need to enter into a defense agreement with all the other actors in the Middle East who don't care much for Iran. Ending Iran's support of it's proxies would go much further in securing Israel's future than ending one of them.