Israel’s in the process of taking over Gaza entirely, Benjamin Netanyahu indicated on Monday, as the military began a new operation in the besieged enclave.
We should be clear: There’s still no post-war plan for Gaza. There’s not even a “concept of a plan,” to quote Donald Trump’s description of his health care reform strategy. This is a failed statelet the size of Philadelphia where the fate of nearly two million people is completely indeterminate.
Last week, Israel killed Mohammed Sinwar, Yahya’s brother. As far as I’m aware, that leaves only Izz al-Din al-Haddad left alive among senior Hamas military commanders of any stature. Netanyahu’s out of people to kill. Almost literally.
I’m sure there’s an answer to this, but I’ll ask it as though there isn’t: What happens to the hostages if Hamas’s politburo in Qatar can’t raise anybody in the tunnels under Gaza? They’re not communicating via telepathy, after all, and whatever’s left of the rank and file presumably doesn’t have the office number in Doha if they have phones at all.
There was some hope Mohammed Sinwar’s death might facilitate a final ceasefire to the extent he was irretrievably obdurate. Of course, everyone said the same thing when pictures of his brother’s split-open head were front-page news in October.
One way or another, you have to leave someone alive with on-the-ground say-so, or you risk having no one to negotiate with. I don’t think this is well understood: Hamas isn’t sending delegates to Qatar, the delegates live in Qatar. They aren’t the same people as the guys holding guns on the hostages, and that relationship — between the politburo and what’s left of Hamas in Gaza — isn’t always what I’d call harmonious.
If your question’s whether that means the President of the United States wants to accept a $400 million jet as a gift from a government which affords Hamas’s political leaders a lifestyle of high luxury, the answer’s “yes.” It’s a f-cked up world out there, folks.
Don’t forget: The infamous cash suitcases which sustained Hamas in the years leading up to the October 7 attacks were part and parcel of an Israeli government strategy, coordinated with Qatar. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s common knowledge, even as most people have a hard time coming to terms with the rather brutal reality of it.
Anyway, as part of the new IDF operation, Netanyahu’s lifting the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid to Gaza. And not because he, let alone the fanatical Israeli right, wants to. One of Netanyahu’s advisers, in what I can only describe as a comically callous remark, said Monday that although there’s “no starvation” yet, “it’s getting close and we don’t want to reach a red line.”
It’s hard to know what to say about that. What were these brain storming sessions like? “What we want to do is push it right up to the starvation line, but not across it — so, not 1992 Somalia, but as close as we can get without the Security Council intervening.”
That’s dark satire. As in, it’s not a real quote. But Bezalel Smotrich’s Monday remarks suggest it more or less sums up the government’s thinking. Israel had to let food in, he explained, because “otherwise, the world would force us to stop the war.” Paraphrased: “We had to stop starving these people if we wanted to keep bombing them.”
Netanyahu echoed Smotrich’s assessment. “We must not reach a point of starvation,” he mused, describing a prospective famine in Gaza as “a diplomatic issue.” If Israel starved Gazans to death, he went on to explain, in a social media video, the war effort “will simply not be supported.”
And, so, Israel will lift the blockade, conquer Gaza and occupy it, ceasefire or not. At this point, there’s really no other option, I’ll grant Netanyahu that. But Gaza’s not the West Bank. It’s the Wild West now. Mad Max. A lawless wasteland. The infrastructure’s gone, but the people aren’t. How’s this going to work?
Smotrich has some ideas. “This time [it will be] occupation, cleansing and holding the territory,” he said. “[W]e are destroying everything that is left of the Gaza Strip, because everything there is one big city of terror.”
So they are following the Jacksonian playbook.
On some level, the complete destruction of Gaza, the 45k+ dead, children dying daily from, I’m sorry, starvation, is beyond comprehending. Yes, I get the terrible thing Hamas did and I have no idea what a commensurate response would have been, BUT in what universe is this behavior OK. There is no plan for Gaza, except for Netanyahu’s which apparently is ‘no more Gaza’. Is he shocked that he’s getting away with it?
I watched an astonishing Breezy Politics episode titled “Think Israel Is Bad? Wait Until You See Its Society!” The host, who (if I understood him) described himself as a non-practicing Jew, bluntly stated that current “Israel is a lunatic state”.
In one scene, there are travelers partaking in “Genocide Tourism”, as well as Israeli school children on a field trip — of course all being a safe distance from the hellish Palestinian existence — taking turns looking through a coin-operated telescope focused on a smoky Gaza as Palestinian non-combatants — mostly Palestinian children — are being deliberately starved to death via Israeli blockades of foreign food aid; or they’re being blasted by the frequent IDF bombing runs courtesy of unconditional-use U.S.-taxpayer-supplied top-tech weaponry.
(Good Lord, I’m actually considering that perhaps having one’s internal organs crushed by an exploding smart bomb’s air-compressive blast may be a comparably mercifully quick death as opposed to slowly starving to death!)
In one scene, a conservatively-dressed young Jewish woman shockingly casually calmly says to the interviewer: “I just think we need to kill them. Every one of them. And that’s it. The [Israeli] government won’t allow it. The least we [Jews] can do is kill them.”
Surveys show this isn’t just a fringe opinion. One study revealed that, while only 8 percent thought it’s been too much slaughter of and suffering by Palestinian non-combatants, 99 percent of Jewish Israeli society felt it’s been either not enough or the appropriate amount of killing, maiming and/or starving of Palestinians, including so many children.
Of that 99 percent, almost 60 percent felt it’s been too little suffered by the Palestinians, while 36.6 percent thought it’s been the right amount.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1h5kshVfAM
H-Man, the inhumanity that Hamas foisted on Israel with the attack seems to have replicated itself with the inhumanity that Israel is foisting on Gaza. So how many fingers do we cut off before justice has been served?
As for the Israeli hostages, one wonders how many Palestinians, including children, have been (over the many decades since the creation of Israel) held in Israeli detention centers or jails without being charged for long periods of time, even years?
Part of me thought the article’s title was a nod to Trumpism’s attempt to destroy the “left.”
Sadly and shamefully, while some peoples have been brutally victimized throughout history a disproportionately large number of times, the victims of one place and time can and sometimes do become the victimizers of another place and time.
All lives and needless suffering should matter; but that’s much easier for a conscience to dismiss when one considers another an innately much lower lifeform. Human beings are being seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic, relatively civilized and supposedly Christian nations.
A somewhat similar reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in prolongedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken regions. In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’. And it’s even easier for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower lifeform.
With each news report of the daily civilian death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in the late 1980s.
… I often say that people should avoid believing, let alone claiming, that they are not capable of committing an atrocity, even if relentlessly pushed. Contrary to what is claimed or felt by many of us, deep down there’s a potential monster in each of us that, under the just-right circumstances, can be unleashed — and maybe even more so when convinced that ‘God is on our side’.
I’m actually confused by most of the conversation on Gideon’s chariots /the current phase of the war, it feels like people are relitigating the past
It’s very clear there is no infrastructure left and everything has been destroyed. If there was any wisdom in the “Trump plan” it was the plain recognition of that fact that seemed to escape so many of our so called global elites. It’s also clear the current government will start expelling the population imminently, and nobody is willing or able to stop them.
It feels like the real debate behind closed doors are the Arab states fighting to keep the Palestinians locked up in “refugee camps” along the border vs. taking in refugees. Europe is siding with the Arab states as they know where the refugees will ultimately want to go and they’re not nearly as charitable towards Syrians and Palestinians when they have to put their money where their mouth is.
The whole thing is just so depressing it’s hard to identify any good guys in this fiasco.