Middle Eastern Conflagration, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran

goofy · January 26, 2024, 7:03am

It says a lot about the state of the world that Nvidia finds no reputational risk in associating (to the extent that matching donations to charities via a third party platform is “associating” at all, which is pretty f’ing weak) with “Fund for the Development of the Binyamin Region and Settlements” (arming illegal West Bank settlements) or “American Friends of Israel Navy SEALs” (exactly what you’d expect), but the fucking Palestine Children’s Relief Fund is a bridge too far for their deplorable asses

goofy · January 26, 2024, 7:16pm

When you’re a very serious country:

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, was the first Israeli official to react to the judgment, writing on X: “Hague-schmague.”

You’ll be shocked to hear that another official called it antisemitic.

SensiblePerson · January 26, 2024, 11:13pm

Thoughtful piece from Ezra Klein in NYT:

Magic link

goofy · January 27, 2024, 12:06am

This is well-said:

This is not a problem you can solve by firing college presidents or blackballing student radicals. Israel is losing the support of a generation, not a few student groups. And it is losing it because of what it does, not what it is.

I listened to the most recent episode of his podcast, with Thomas Friedman, where he made similar points. It was good but the one thing that drove me insane was Friedman making this argument (transcript):

There is a big, not a small kernel of truth, which is that Netanyahu was trying to make them invisible in the current context by trying to do a normalization with Saudi Arabia that would require him to do nothing. So there is truth in all of this. It’s just that the only way to get at that was not necessarily through violence.

What if Sinwar had sent a million Gazans to walk to the border carrying the Arab Peace Initiative, not one, not 10,000, a million. What if a million Gazans announced that they were walking to the border peacefully, each carrying the Arab Peace Initiative? And what if their brethren in the West Bank said, as Israelis did in resisting Netanyahu’s attempted judicial coup, every Saturday night for the rest of our lives, we are going to block every road in the West Bank with a map of the Arab Peace Initiative and a two-state solution?

I would argue they’d be a hell of a lot better off right now. They would have gotten just as much visibility, maybe a lot more. And I think the pressure on Israel, if that were sustained, would have been significant.

I mean I guess he’s got us on “literally half the population of Gaza, not 10,000” but did this get totally memory-holed??

Israelis shot several thousand Palestinians and killed hundreds! The world didn’t care!

goofy · January 29, 2024, 11:06pm

non-paywall link

A thoughtful article about fault lines in the American Jewish community over Zionism.

In November Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, argued in the Forward that since October 7 “the messy mainstream of American Jews is energized anew toward identification with Israel and the Jewish people, expressing that identification with levels of belonging that represent a reversal of decades of assimilation and decline.” The recovery of this “big tent,” he argued, was made possible in part by a “rupture between the Jewish left and the rest of the Jewish community to which it was once attached.” With their “open repudiation of Zionism” and their “tendentious rhetoric about colonialism, the Israeli perpetration of genocide, and other left dogmas,” he suggested, groups like INN and JVP had planted “their commitments squarely outside the framework of Jewish communal respectability.”

For those of us who insist that protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is not only about ending an ongoing injustice but also about reclaiming Jewish identity in accord with our progressive beliefs, it is insulting to be told that we have separated ourselves from the Jewish community writ large, or that we must. But Kurtzer’s premise is not so easily dismissed. Despite the much-discussed and growing generation gap, his views on Israel still align far more closely with those of most American Jews than do those of the anti-Zionist left. JEI’s November poll, after all, suggested that a narrow majority of even the youngest cohort of American Jewish adults was still standing with Israel in the aftermath of the attacks. Nearly all mainstream American Jewish institutions remain powerfully tied to Israel, from the well-funded lobbying groups that represent Jewish interests in the political arena to the major organized Jewish religious denominations, including the Orthodox Union, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and the Union for Reform Judaism.

The young, non-Zionist Jewish left has been able to protest the collective punishment of Gaza at the cost of often painful alienation from the American Jewish mainstream those organizations represent. Aside from a few relatively small magazines, activist groups, and scattered individual anti-Zionist congregations, there seem to be few institutions where we can congregate as Jews, and few occasions for us to speak and to be counted as fully welcome members of the Jewish community. In the eyes of most elected officials, meanwhile, that community is the sum of its major denominations and donor-funded institutions, virtually none of which reflect the feelings of the Jewish left toward Israel. For all the progress anti-Zionist Jewish activists have made, they have yet to win over the sitting Democratic president or the majority of Democrats in Congress, let alone any Republicans. So when Kurtzer warns that “the Jewish left will have no seats at any tables besides the ones they set for themselves,” those of us who identify with the Jewish left need to take seriously the possibility that he’s right.

Surf · February 2, 2024, 12:49pm

Analyst Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, said the Houthi missile, traveling at about 600 mph (965 kph), was likely about 4 seconds from hitting the US warship when it was destroyed by what was likely a 2- to 3-second burst of machine gun fire by the Gravely’s Phalanx system.

US warships have defeated dozens of previous Houthi missile attacks using longer-range defenses, likely the Standard SM-2, Standard SM-6 and Evolved Sea Sparrow missiles, analysts say. Those defensive missiles engage their targets at ranges of 8 miles (about 12 kilometers) or more.

But on Tuesday night that didn’t happen for reasons that have not been revealed.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/02/middleeast/phalanx-gun-last-line-of-defense-us-navy-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

Jman220 · February 2, 2024, 1:06pm

The technology involved in those guns is pretty impressive. Just the fact that it’s able calculate in seconds, aim, and fire to stop something that small going 600 mph…

SensiblePerson · February 4, 2024, 12:33am

When you’ve lost Kristof, of all people, you might want to pause for a minute and think about things…

Non-paywall link

goofy · February 7, 2024, 3:11am

Israel’s like “we’re not doing war crimes” while their soldiers are all over social media like “yoooo look at us doing war crimes this is fucking siiiiick”

Thread from one of the authors with lots of highlights and details:

https://twitter.com/arictoler/status/1754858189785272821

MrWookie · February 7, 2024, 3:51am

I dunno, man. The Israeli government has been pretty forthcoming about doing warcrimes as well.

kerowo · February 7, 2024, 1:02pm

Lots of war criminals, not a lot of war police around to do anything about it.

Jman220 · February 7, 2024, 1:03pm

commonWealth · February 9, 2024, 6:53am

By the way, in case you missed it during Biden’s “My memory is fine,” press conference, he said Israel’s response in Gaza was “over the top.”

Pretty significant statement. We’ll see if there’s anything to back that up policy wise.

goofy · February 9, 2024, 7:01pm

“It is impossible to achieve the war goal of eliminating Hamas and leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah,” the Israeli prime minister said in a statement, rejecting a warning from the Biden administration that it could not support an offensive against Rafah. “On the other hand, it is clear that a massive operation in Rafah requires the evacuation of the civilian population from the combat zones.”

With more than half of Gaza already under evacuation orders, widespread destruction throughout the coastal strip, and continuing fighting, it was unclear where such a large number of people could safely be moved.
…
Situated on the southern border with Egypt, Rafah’s prewar population of several hundred thousand has increased massively as about half of the territory’s 2.3 million people have sought shelter in the city and surrounding areas.

Very cool and normal stuff happening here

commonWealth · February 9, 2024, 7:10pm

It’s genocide and Biden needs to stop it.

commonWealth · February 12, 2024, 6:01pm

So Israel killed 100+ people while providing “air cover” to rescue two hostages. They apparently blew up a refugee camp in Rafah. They launched the attack shortly after kickoff of the Super Bowl.

LouisCyphre · February 17, 2024, 9:36pm

What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation

goofy · February 21, 2024, 7:16pm

EmpireMan · February 21, 2024, 8:40pm

I do still believe in that, but I think when people say it, they usually mean that human civilization is slowly becoming more moral because we eventually learn from our mistakes. And I think that’s naive. I’d say that it’s laughable but I don’t find it funny.

We’re the same as we always were. Still, I do believe that on long timescales the world gradually gets better, at least in the sense that more people are less awful to each other. The world at least gets easier, and maybe kinder.

But that’s almost all because of technology. When everyone has more, there’s just less to fight over. The competitive part of our nature is never going away, but as the stakes go down, greed can seem less urgent and less contagious.

Unfortunately as technology keeps coming up with better ways to improve our lives, it will also keep coming up with easier ways to destroy us all. I think it’s going to be a photo finish.

commonWealth · February 21, 2024, 9:46pm

The moral arc may have bent towards justice from WWII until 2016ish or 2020, but that doesn’t mean it is an automatic condition of the universe.

Moral justice is a cyclic thing.