Israel-Gaza war

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Bruh.

https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1721070704806989884?t=lBcBa13yzPZsPl0W...

He has to be talking about a tactical nuke.  A large nuclear weapon dropped in Gaza will kill almost as many Israelis as Palestinians.

Yeah.
Would still be stupid though.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish/
Anti-Israeli government policies piece written by an East Jerusalem Palestinian published on an anti-Zionist Jewish publication.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Good lord, this is just sad. I can speak some Arabic, so I might be judging this particularly harshly...

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Small but positive step from the Biden administration.

https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1725976743234683347?t=XQctaMPpnlwDkwZ8rtVI...

Wow!

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Oh great...

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Elon Musk visits Kfar Aza Kibbutz with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Elon Musk

https://youtu.be/6nWwzR-I0iw

Elon's facial expression caught my attention. Very flat.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Says Itamar Ben-Gvir on Twitter:
עצירת המלחמה = פירוק הממשלה
(Stopping the war = dissolution of the government)*
https://twitter.com/itamarbengvir/status/1729567921989419239?s=20
*=to be clear, this is the tweet fed into Heb->Eng in Google Translate

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

A statistic that blew my mind is that area-wise the entire Gaza Strip has a smaller size than the city of Bakersfield, California.

It's basically half the size of NYC.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine
This 2020 piece by Peter Bainart made for interesting reading, given the current situation.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

67% of people aged 18-24 in this Harvard-Harris poll view Jews as oppressors.  Note the wording, Jews and not Israel government or Zionists.

I can see why they voted that way, the wording is misleading, they wanted certain results, so they decided to not follow their narrative.

The poll question is just awful.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Let's stop beating around the bushes and say the obvious:

Hamas has won!

Hamas knows that it can't beat Israel militarily, so it baited Israel into committing genocide for the entire world to see.

Israel is now more isolated than ever and every terrorist killed will be replaced with 10 new ones.

Hamas is a victim of their own success. They underestimated the damage they would do on October 7th and had no plan on what would happen afterwards. Now Sinwar is hiding in a tunnel under a refugee camp desperately trying not to get caught. Pretending this is some brilliant tactical coup by the Hamas leadership is such a big brain take that I'm not even sure how to respond.

Hamas isn't primarily fighting for military supremacy. It's fighting for the support of the Arab street. And in that it has been largely successful.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Let's stop beating around the bushes and say the obvious:

Hamas has won!

Hamas knows that it can't beat Israel militarily, so it baited Israel into committing genocide for the entire world to see.

Israel is now more isolated than ever and every terrorist killed will be replaced with 10 new ones.

Hamas is a victim of their own success. They underestimated the damage they would do on October 7th and had no plan on what would happen afterwards. Now Sinwar is hiding in a tunnel under a refugee camp desperately trying not to get caught. Pretending this is some brilliant tactical coup by the Hamas leadership is such a big brain take that I'm not even sure how to respond.

Hamas isn't primarily fighting for military supremacy. It's fighting for the support of the Arab street. And in that it has been largely successful.

Its secondary aim is surely to turn people outside the Arab/Muslim world against Israel - it looks like that is also happening to at least a degree.

Yes, that also looks fairly successful at the moment.
On a sidenote, the Chinese nationalist plan in the early stages of the (Second) Sino-Japanese War was pretty similar. Show the world that something is happening here, act with the knowledge our opponents will get blamed for everything, and harm their war machine by cutting it off from foreign help.
The last one is going to be hard but they've been pretty successfully done the first two to varying degrees. The first in particular, the first has been completely successful. It is clear that Palestinian resistance, however you may feel about it, is still kicking.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

The Chinese still needed British and American help to remove the Japanese. There is no external military intervention coming that can stop Israeli aircraft from bombing at will.

Without US’s protection, Iran would come right through the front door.

Iran is actually a complicated thing for Israel. Iran's a roadblock to Islamic world unity which could profoundly threaten the Israelis' freedom of action, while they both make for good foils to each other (useful for domestic stability to have outside boogeymen). At the same time there's significant bad blood that is well known. If the Iranian state collapsed tomorrow it would not be a necessarily positive thing for the Israelis.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

The unfortunate reality is that the Israeli settlers are unhinged enough of an interest group at this point that even if Hamas didn't exist there would be no respite. Israel's military engages in hostage taking and various things extremely similar in character to the things it attacks its opponents for and if Hamas wasn't there, the short-term situation for Palestinians would be worse.

If the settler militias exist, the IDF (in the form it is now in, with all the oh-so-laudable institutional practices) exists, and the pogrom reality in the West Bank exists, then Hamas isn't the principal problem. It's representative of problems that make a solution difficult, but the side actually likelier to achieve FTRTTS (which would be the greatest evil here, moreso than October 7th or the current Israeli shelling of Gaza even under the most uncharitable interpretations) isn't Hamas and its allies. In this perverse status quo, Hamas having fighting ability checks the FTRTTS dreams of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, net improving the situation for the Palestinians despite the undeniable atrocities that they've committed.

The onus lies on Israel to manage its own house and protect the rights of the Arabs to whom it has as subjects, all of them, and their neglect of this duty has led to this mess never going away. We should be asking, why are settler pogroms still running amok in the West Bank? Won't anyone control them?

Israel wants and has a mini Empire, but it doesn't want to pay the price needed to maintain it in an orderly state. It is a human entity with human virtues and human flaws. And just like many similarly human states in the Fertile Crescent throughout history (or other regions for that matter), it has responsibility to handle its own messes. For the sake of the people who would suffer if things go hot, on both sides of the Jew-Gentile divide, it would be much preferable if it appreciated what this actually meant.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Let's stop beating around the bushes and say the obvious:

Hamas has won!

Hamas knows that it can't beat Israel militarily, so it baited Israel into committing genocide for the entire world to see.

Israel is now more isolated than ever and every terrorist killed will be replaced with 10 new ones.

Hamas is a victim of their own success. They underestimated the damage they would do on October 7th and had no plan on what would happen afterwards. Now Sinwar is hiding in a tunnel under a refugee camp desperately trying not to get caught. Pretending this is some brilliant tactical coup by the Hamas leadership is such a big brain take that I'm not even sure how to respond.

Hamas isn't primarily fighting for military supremacy. It's fighting for the support of the Arab street. And in that it has been largely successful.

Has it actually? This feels like the most tepid response from the Arab street essentially ever. There are no protests anywhere calling for intervention, which I remember were a thing in the 2006 war, and you have countries semi-openly taking Israel's side (like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain shooting down missiles), not denying that they are taking Israel's side behind the scenes (as with Egypt or Jordan), or particular sides in civil wars just openly taking Israel's side (as with the anti-Houthi STC in Yemen just celebrating Israeli victories).

The odd thing about this war compared to every other war Israel has ever fought is that the response from, like, every part of the world is more favorable than it has ever been. (Might say more about how intensely unfavorable global opinion used to be, but, well, it never made a dent in the actual situation).

In terms of who is the most visible anti Israel actor (a more valuable niche than ever, one with considerable prestige) Hamas has entrenched itself and claimed additional relevance atop that. Anything else is probably secondary to Hamas (well, except maybe the patronage of Iran, which has additional proxies such as PIJ). Opposition to Israel is like water in a storm, it's inevitably going to manifest into something. Hamas itself is just the most recent actor to fill that niche. The public is protesting Western multinationals such as Starbucks instead of directly calling for their countries to join, perhaps something that has gotten more highlighting since the settlements in the West Bank are funded in significant part due to Western money. The general feeling is that boycotts are a tactic that can be relied on to work.

Israel's situation isn't actually that bad short-term on a PR front, despite their manifest incompetence/complacency on this (like seriously, what purpose does yellow stars in the UN serve? What friends do you make by demanding the UN Sec Gen resign?). A lot of people have made fun of the calendar thing and that's the more long-term cost coming into play... If people don't trust you, then they won't listen to what you have to say. Hamas is a far more professional outfit than in the past. It's possible that for Israel, while things are among the best they've been diplomatically in regards to concrete action (the anger is expressed more through words than anything else, at least in the First and Second Worlds), other facets are more against them. It's ironic, maybe. It is what it is.

It will be hard for either side to claim clear-cut victory here. And both sides are inclined to overweight their victories.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

The Chinese still needed British and American help to remove the Japanese. There is no external military intervention coming that can stop Israeli aircraft from bombing at will.

Without US’s protection, Iran would come right through the front door.

And there wouldn't be an Iran five minutes after that.

LOL.

Iran is no match for the United States, but Israel is another story.

I mean, yeah, fundamentally it is unlikely that Israel could beat an Iranian army in the field...but Israel is also a nuclear-armed state, and Iran is not. If Israel's survival came down to beating an Iranian army in the field, then there would just no longer be an Iran. (If 'Samson Option' stuff is true, and Israeli nuclear policy follows US/Soviet Cold War examples, then probably many other countries would also be hit at the same time and also essentially cease to exist, as punishment for failing to stop the war. Both the US and Soviet Union planned to hit neutral countries -- famously Finland would've been annihilated twice over if there were a nuclear war between the 1950s and 1980s).

This is all academic, because if there's one thing this war has taught us it is that the Palestinians keep alienating their allies. Iran didn't intervene in this war, and won't in the next one. (Also not entirely clear where such a conflict would take place).

(Also, "without US help Iran would go through the front door"...literally where and how? They don't border each other and Iranian interventions in Iraq/Syria/everywhere have met with large-scale local resistance.)

Unfortunately for Israel, Trump threw out the Iran nuclear deal.

A blunder that was.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

This is a good day to be a popcorn seller.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Cutting ties with Israel would have negative consequences for US intelligence gathering in the region. It would also harm the US' ability to defend its interests in the region. Despite the extreme behavior from many Israeli factions, dissolving the US-Israel relationship completely would not be in the interest of the United States.
We could stop giving them a blank check, but for us to do that we as a country will have to realize it's a more nuanced situation than what the mainstream in this country has long thought.  Change on this front won't come from politicians, it'll have to come from a sea change in the society itself towards equal rights for all - Jew and Gentile - in the Holy Land. Politicians in a majority of scenarios are mere managers after all.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

At this point the descendants of those evicted in Nakba have as good as a claim to the land they lost in the later 1940s as the descendants of Germans kicked out of East Prussia do.
Right of return is reasonable for either both sides or none of them, but in the former case it definitely should not entail getting the exact land back. It'd be more reasonable for them to get new communities with government backing under the framework of a state with equality for both communities.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

At this point the descendants of those evicted in Nakba have as good as a claim to the land they lost in the later 1940s as the descendants of Germans kicked out of East Prussia do.
Right of return is reasonable for either both sides or none of them, but in the former case it definitely should not entail getting the exact land back.

The Germans didn't get their land back - any claim to that was dropped in 1990 - but they did get right of return to nearly all of it when Poland and Lithuania joined the EU. Not many of them bothered to exercise it.

Framing that as a right of return is interesting. It would be in line with the version of it I mentioned there than the type we see idealistically mentioned...

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

To highlight the barbaric scale of destruction in Gaza, nearly 70% of all homes there are either destroyed or damaged. Yes, 70%.

The Wall Street Journal reports that almost half of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the war there, a figure that also accounts for almost 70 percent of its 439,000 homes.

The report cites analysis of satellite photography of the Strip and other remote sensing methods.

The paper noted buildings hit include factories, houses of prayer, schools, shopping malls and hotels. Israel has said many schools, mosques and other buildings have been hit after being used for military purposes and as bases of operation by Gaza terror groups.

WSJ adds that only eight of Gaza’s 36 hospitals can accept patients, and that most basic infrastructure including water, electricity and communications is demolished.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/some-70-of-gaza-homes-damaged-or-destroyed-wall-street-journal-analysis/

The goal here was displacement/ethnic cleansing.

The UN has already labelled what is going on as a domicide.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Salah Al-Arouri, number 2 in Hamas, was assassinated in Beirut by an airstrike an hour ago.


Let the third Lebanon war begin...

Military wing or political wing?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Israelis desecrate and destroy mosque in Gaza:
https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1741198228823883805
Reminds me of the Imperial Japanese vandalizing Hui Muslim religious places in Northern China during the Second Sino-Japanese War
No one deserves this.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Salah Al-Arouri, number 2 in Hamas, was assassinated in Beirut by an airstrike an hour ago.


Let the third Lebanon war begin...

Nah, Hezbollah made it clear a while ago that they’re smart enough not to join Hamas’ suicide mission.  They’ll likely launch some rockets as well as huff and puff a bit, but no more than that.  Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas, but Israel could still wipe them out without breaking a sweat if push truly came to shove.

Israel has already lost a war to Hezbollah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Lebanon_conflict_(1985%E2%80%932000)

That wasn’t a true push comes to shove/all-in war, certainly not for Israel.  In any case, if Hezebollah thought there was any chance they could tip the balance, they would’ve attacked Israel too as Hamas by its own admission believed they would.

Hezbollah getting involved directly is not wise, especially with the reality that it would only encourage greater US backing.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Smotrich is a Titanium HP and so is Ben Gvir.
Israel doesn't deserve to be bedevilled by those two and nor do its subjects in the West Bank or Gaza.
Zionism in its current form, if it has an undoing, if and when it comes, it will in significant degree be because of evil politicians with net value as human beings lying in negative territory. These two men, and the radical and extremist voter base they represent, stand fundamentally against the best interests of Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land alike.
Not that the current government cares about that.