Middle Eastern Conflagration, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran

[L.Washington]

We could’ve prevented this by posting about the cease fire in here in a more timely manner.

[goofy]

As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by...

Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme.

The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation.

The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were “liquidated”. References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.

Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.

Knowing that I had previously warned of genocide, the students were especially keen to show me that they were humane, that they were not murderers. They had no doubt that the IDF was, in fact, the most moral army in the world. But they were also convinced that any damage done to the people and buildings in Gaza was totally justified, that it was all the fault of Hamas using them as human shields.

They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systematic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residences and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable. They viewed any criticism of Israeli policies by other countries and the United Nations as simply antisemitic.

Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.

Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy’s fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding close to these shelters. After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don’t destroy them. We simply have no choice.

Two days after the Hamas attack, defence minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly,” later adding that Israel would “break apart one neighbourhood after another in Gaza”. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett confirmed: “We are fighting Nazis.” Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Israelis to “remember what Amalek has done to you”, alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek’s “men and women, children and infants”. In a radio interview, he said about Hamas: “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.” Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote on X that Israel’s goal should be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. On Israeli TV he stated, “There are no uninvolved people … we must go in there and kill, kill, kill. We must kill them before they kill us.” Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stressed in a speech, “The work must be completed … Total destruction. ‘Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’” Avi Dichter, agriculture minister and former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, spoke about “rolling out the Gaza Nakba”. One Israeli 95-year-old military veteran, whose motivational speech to IDF troops preparing for the invasion of Gaza exhorted them to “wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children”, was given a certificate of honour by Israeli president Herzog for “providing a wonderful example to generations of soldiers”. No wonder that there have been innumerable social media posts by IDF troops in Gaza calling to “kill the Arabs”, “burn their mothers” and “flatten” Gaza. There has been no known disciplinary action by their commanders.

This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic “stab-in-the-back” myth, which attributed Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis.

[LouisCyphre]

https://x.com/mehdirhasan/status/1824927407427739770

[commonWealth]

Are they in North Gaza? Or the soon to be bulldozed and rebuilt South Israel?

My prediction on 10/14/23

@commonWealth

I’m starting to think what’s going to happen is they’re going to completely level the northern segment of Gaza, close it off with a new fence/wall, and confine the Palestinians there to the Southern ~half. They’ll say it’s necessary to secure/protect border towns. God knows how many civilians this will kill, but they’ll say they gave fair warning, etc.

There will probably be a few hundred Palestinians killed in the West Bank too, and the Western world will shrug that off as well.

When the dust settles they’ll be even harsher on what’s left of Gaza, and around and round we’ll go until Hamas decides to carry out another atrocity and another round of awfulness happens.

Just looked it up, 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, including 75 children.

I’m not so sure about my last paragraph, though. That may have been too optimistic.

[pvn]

well yeah at least some of the IDF guys have explicitly said they’re doing exactly this

[goofy]

We served on Israel's Sde Teiman base. Here's what we did to Gazan detainees

non-paywall link

Rough read, interviews with several people who were stationed there.

[LouisCyphre]

Israel Tortures Healthcare Workers: Daily Brief

Once in Israeli custody, mistreatment began immediately. Healthcare workers reported being forced to strip publicly at once and remain kneeling for long periods, outside and exposed to the elements.

Second, they were removed from Gaza to detention facilities in Israel and the occupied West Bank. There, they recount, they were beaten, blindfolded, and handcuffed for weeks on end. Israeli interrogators tried to force them to confess to being members of Hamas, using various threats, like endless detention, rape, and the killing of their families back in Gaza.

Former detainees describe how their mistreatment in Israeli custody also included being held in appalling conditions, deprived of adequate food and water, and denied medical care.

And again, these were all healthcare workers, none of whom was ever informed of the reason for their detention or charged with an offense.

[kerowo]

Good thing those are all going to be seen as lies or it would be tough to support Israel anymore…

[goofy]

Very cool:

If they’re looking for “militants” in the West Bank, I can think of some much more obvious places to find them than Palestinian cities

[LouisCyphre]

https://x.com/yashar/status/1828867147592011818

I guess that’s the kind of antisemitic smears you can expect from far-left extremists like Cindy McCain.

[commonWealth]

It is mind-boggling that Israel has managed to fire on aid workers multiple times and it hasn’t meaningfully changed mainstream perceptions.

[akm]

you apparently underestimated how much americans hate islam

[goofy]

[pvn]

it’s a mystery!

[goofy]

https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1829475010819612720

[commonWealth]

Not a shocking incident, anymore. The shocking part is the inaction of so many other countries to pressure them to knock it off.

[LouisCyphre]

Thread:

https://x.com/MSF/status/1829953746127745142?t=EzPjWq4aM2E_1QYBgE8EiA&s=19

[goofy]

WaPo gift link: Protests escalate in Israel after 6 hostages’ bodies are recovered in Gaza

Israelis reacted with shock and fury Sunday after the bodies of six more hostages were recovered by the military from Gaza, with Israeli authorities saying they were killed by their captors in recent days.

Tens of thousands of protesters were expected to take part in nationwide protests Sunday night, and Israel’s largest labor union called for a general strike Monday — threatening to shut down the country until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agrees to a deal with Hamas to return the remaining captives.

Hamas is still holding 97 hostages, including two children under the age of 5. Of those, 33 have already been declared dead by Israeli authorities. Over nearly 11 months of agonizing uncertainty, many of the hostage families have accused Netanyahu of prioritizing his political survival over a deal that would bring their loved ones home, and on Sunday they demanded he address the nation.

What they got instead was a recorded statement from his office: “The fact that Hamas continues to commit atrocities like the ones it committed on the 7th of October obliges us to do everything so that it cannot commit these atrocities again,” Netanyahu said.

“Whoever murders hostages does not want a deal,” he said, saying Hamas has refused “to conduct real negotiations.”

Yet it is Netanyahu, negotiators say, who has been one of the main barriers to a deal. He has insisted on maintaining an Israeli presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, a strategic buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt that Israel says is used by Hamas to smuggle weapons, a claim denied by Cairo. On Thursday, the Israeli cabinet voted to remain in the corridor, despite warnings from high-ranking members of the security establishment that the move could torpedo a deal.

As evening approached in Tel Aviv on Sunday, the demonstrators seemed to come from all directions, many carrying Israeli flags. “Alive, alive, we want them alive,” one group chanted to drums. “The blood is on Netanyahu’s hands” read a sign along the protest route.

Sefi and Deborah, two elderly women from a kibbutz in central Israel that is hosting evacuees from a community near the Gaza border and who did not give their last names, said they have attended protests every week, “but today is different.”
…
Dozens of restaurants, theaters, businesses and municipalities announced that they were shutting their doors Sunday in solidarity with the protests, and the national workers union announced an open-ended general strike starting Monday.

“We can no longer stand by while our children are suffering and being murdered in the tunnels of Gaza,” Arnon Bar-David, the head of the Histadrut labor union, said in a statement Sunday after meeting with hostage families. “This is unacceptable, and it must stop.”

[goofy]

‘There was no mercy, even on children’: trauma in the West Bank after Israeli...

When Israeli soldiers arrived at the modest house along an alleyway in Nur Shams camp on Wednesday night, they sent the women and four of the children out into the street, but kept hold of Malak Shihab.

They took the muzzle off their dog and it went straight up to the slight 10-year-old girl and sniffed her. Terrified, she pleaded to be with her mother, but the soldiers seemed to have just one phrase in accented Arabic: “Open the doors.”

The platoon pushed her up to each of the doors in her aunt’s house, according to Malak’s account, while they remained braced behind her ready to fire at whoever might be inside.

[goofy]

Haaretz editorial:

The Israeli public's moment of truth

Under the deal to free the hostages that has been discussed in recent months, Goldberg-Polin, Yerushalmi and Gat were all supposed to be freed in the first “humanitarian” phase. This means they would have come home alive. But the government, with Benjamin Netanyahu at its head, preferred keeping troops in the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border rather than saving the hostages’ lives.

It was Hamas terrorists who pulled the trigger, but it was Netanyahu who sealed their fate. The prime minister likes to think of himself as Mr. Security, but he will go down in history as Mr. Death and Mr. Abandonment, written in the hostages’ blood. After long months of neglect and delay, after torpedoing one deal after another, the security cabinet voted Thursday night to put a spoke in the wheel of any hope of the hostages returning home alive by passing a resolution declaring Israel won’t leave the Philadelphi corridor.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant – who once again proved himself to be the only man in a security cabinet where there are no men – warned that this decision meant burying the deal and sentencing the hostages who were still alive to death, but to no avail. Nor was anyone moved by Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi’s arguments that the army could reoccupy the corridor if needed. It made no difference to Netanyahu, who isn’t driven by security considerations, and certainly not by humanitarian ones.