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The Silver Symposium's avatar

I'll be frank here. I am someone who absolutely believes that Israel is allowed to defend itself, that it has a right to exist, that it is not a colonial power as such, and that it does in fact face threats. Half of my own family is Jewish. I reject most of the heated rhetoric about genocide that my fellow liberals use.

But let's call a spade a spade here. Let's not beat around the bush. Israel is not accomplishing anything. It is not defeating Hamas. It is not making itself safer. It is not preparing the region for a post-Hamas rule. It has no plan. It's leadership, long concerned with their own survival over the survival of the nation, are paralyzed by a lack of options to defeat an enemy that they themselves helped gain power. The Netanyahu government helped Hamas gain power specifically because it felt that this would help it maintain domestic support without any threat, because it considered Hezbollah the greater enemy. That blew up in its face.

The reality of the situation is that Israel continues to drop bombs as a way to show that it's doing something without having a real plan for what it wants to achieve. If the plan is to defeat Hamas, it will never accomplish this; it can kill its leaders, but movements are not limited to geographical regions. Furthermore, every bomb Israel drops creates five new Hamas sympathizers for every one it kills. That's not a strategy that will succeed. Rumors are that Israel wants a ground invasion, and for what? How will that be any more successful than what they've already been doing?

The reality is that Israel has no plan here. Questions like 'who is going to run Gaza once Israel leaves' are not answered. The Palestinian Authority has no interest in ruling it and has no support. Israel cannot annex the territory, because it's filled with anti-Israel individuals due to how much bombing they've been doing. Annexation would also lead credence to the talk of colonialism; to say nothing of the fact that it would amount to the world's largest prison state. If Israel simply leaves, Hamas is just going to get back into power, as they were elected before.

Talk of ceasefire is good, but the reality is that there is no plan from the Israeli side that anyone on that side can accept. Israel's population does not wish to annex Gaza and then have to pay for all the humanitarian aid and also to rebuild the place now that the IDF has leveled large parts of it. Israel's current government however, cannot simply disengage because it knows that this would amount to admitting defeat. But there's no 'winning' here, anymore than the US could 'win' against the Taliban, who are current back in power. Israel currently faces it's own Vietnam; a quagmire where the local population are continually turned against the attacking power because the attacking power cannot discern between combatants and non-combatants, and fundamentally cannot solve the political problem it faces with military force. Anyone Israel installs as 'ruler' over Gaza, if they took that path, would be as illegitimate as Big Min in South Vietnam.

The context for the strike on aid workers is not a 'mistake' that happened in a vacuum. It's part of a pattern of actions by a military whose politicians demand accomplishments, and who then take riskier and riskier actions in order to try and create them. When politicians dictate strategy, you get strikes on aid workers, because the military are trying to create some kind of actual results to justify the actions they're taking. So they drop more bombs, hoping that eventually they'll find a victory that does not exist.

The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs used in WW2, and they still couldn't win. Israel faces the same problem: you cannot solve a political problem with military action, anymore than you could solve poverty with military action. The only solution that exists, if they wish to continue using military force, is actual genocide. Which also wouldn't create a situation that Israel can deal with, because they would probably lose the support of what supporters they currently have.

The reason that the US was able to conduct it's war on terror for two decades was because the governments they toppled lasted months, not years, and then they did counter insurgency. But those were wars against governments that had actual organizations. Currently, Israel faces down a threat closer to the Vietcong, where they are loosely organized, tied to the local population, and possess neither state infrastructure nor a government to be toppled. There will always be more Hamas members. You can blow up the tunnels, and they will dig more. You can kill one, and create ten. This is not a plan.

In Vietnam, the US plan was to simply create large amounts of dead bodies in the hopes of convincing the population at home that they were actually, you know, winning. But the result of that was an endless war where they couldn't actually win, because the conditions for their 'victory' had never been decided. The idea that they could just create a pro-US state there was laughable because they spent all their time burning down people's homes. Israel faces the same problem. It wants a pro-Israel state in Gaza, but it can't accomplish that so long as it keeps bombing the citizens and leveling their homes. It can't hope to have a peaceful population when it's blowing up aid workers due to it's military trying to get any successes it can.

Israel has no plan. It has no goals. It is paralyzed by bad leaders who were never expecting to be in this position. Based on the current street protests in Israel, it's likely it doesn't even have the support of its own people, and perhaps in the coming days, not even its own military. This conflict is a long, slow suicide of the Netanyahu government and ideal of governing, perhaps it's very idea of Israel as a nation.

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kathi in va's avatar

Y'all's pal, Gregg Nunziata, wrote: "A confident conservative majority, grounded in originalism and textualism, now controls the Supreme Court. The white whale of Roe v. Wade—long emblematic of lawless usurpation of policymaking by the Court—fell . . ." and "Corners of the right even echo the former president’s strange affinity for foreign strongmen".

Umm, no thanks, I think I will pass on reading the whole thing. The "confident conservative majority" is grounded in originalism and textualism when it is convenient to their desired outcome. And don't even get me started on the characterization of Roe v. Wade as a lawless usurpation. But to then say that CORNERS of the right echo t****'s affinity for strongemen... like... is this guy living in the same reality the rest of us are? CPAC WENT TO HUNGARY. I would hardly consider them to be a "corner" of the right. Tucker freaking Carlson went to Russia to s*** Putin's d***. The vast majority of the House wants to abandon Ukraine because that is what Putin wants. How is this a "corner" of the right? I mean... what is left in that square, if this is the corner?? A handful of cowardly politicians from purple districts who are afraid to stick their neck out, lest their orange jesus train his sights on them? Give me a freaking break.

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