War between Hamas and Israel

[N.E. Brigand]

This seems significant:

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Big lacrosse school. Or at least it was.

[N.E. Brigand]

And apparently an Iranian envoy at the United Nations has said that they will consider the matter closed unless Israel retaliates.

Here's an Iranian government tweet from yesterday about the attack: "The matter can be deemed concluded."



Several people have pointed out that the last phrase, in all caps, is very much in the style of Donald Trump!

[N.E. Brigand]

Well that's interesting:



President Biden would not be as old as the movies' version of Captain America, though.

[N.E. Brigand]

Information about how the U.S. and Israel knew of the attack in advance. (Iran told Saudi Arabia and others, who told the U.S.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Interesting thoughts on how Israel may repeat its failures in Gaza with an attack on Iran.

[N.E. Brigand]

ABC reports that Israel has struck a military supply depot in Iran near the city of Isfahan.

[N.E. Brigand]

The U.S. is going to announce sanctions (per Axios) against the "Netzah Yehuda" battalion of the Israeli Defense Force. This battalion is said to have violated Palestinian rights in the West Bank.

[N.E. Brigand]

Turning again to U.S. sentiments about this conflict...

I've seen multiple sources, including the New York Post, report that Jewish student was stabbed in the eye at Yale University yesterday by a pro-Palestinian protester, but none of them are entirely reliable, so handle with care.

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A couple days earlier, Columbia University seems to have gone too far in its crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors. Police were called in and told there was an emergency situation, and while they did indeed remove the protesters, they also said that the protesters were cooperative. Additionally, a number of students, including the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (Democrat of Minnesota), were expelled. Maybe they deserved it, but one of the expelled students says she learned this as she was rousted from her dorm at 2 a.m., given no time to pack her belongings, and deposited on the street.

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Did some of those Columbia students deserve expulsion? Well, this is reportedly one of the students who was expelled:



From a First Amendment persepctive, I think that's not a "true threat," and thus she wouldn't be prosecuted for it.

But from a campus safety perspective, I think she clearly has to go.

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And that happened just one day after Columbia's president floundered a bit during testimony to the House. One of her questioners, coincidentally I assume, was Rep. Omar, but the heat was coming mainly from the right. What I don't get is why she showed up when she wasn't subpoenaed. Unless you are very practiced and willing to be very aggressive yourself, you cannot "win" during Congressional testimony in the face of aggressive questions from Representatives.

(Edited to add the missing word "perspective.")

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Edited to add a helpful explanation about how that the official protest is limited to one small part of Columbia's campus. See the pictures at the link. Much of what is being shown on the media is happening on the steets outside of campus.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It seems to me (please correct me if I am wrong) that every university president that has been summoned to testify before the House about campus antisemitism has been a woman. There was former Harvard president Claudine Gay, former Penn president Liz Magill, MIT president Sally Cornbluth and now Columbia president Minouche Shafik. Is campus antisemitism only a problem at universities run by women? (Spoiler alert: the answer is no.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Edited to add a helpful explanation about how that the official protest is limited to one small part of Columbia's campus. See the pictures at the link. Much of what is being shown on the media is happening on the streets outside of campus.

I acknowledge that I may be part of the problem, having posted several times on this subject, but it does seem to me that there's a weird overemphasis on the pro-Palestinian protests at U.S. colleges, so I think maybe it would be worthwhile for me to explicitly show the two photos from that link. They were taken yesterday at Columbia University, which is currently viewed as the flashpoint for this activity. Here's the quad where the protest is taking place:



And here is that quad in context of campus as a whole:



It doesn't seem to be that big of a deal?

[N.E. Brigand]

Axios reports: "IDF chief Harzi Helevi and Shin Bet director Ronen Bar secretly visited Cairo on Wednesday for talks with top Egyptian officials about a possible Rafah operation."

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Meanwhile, the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz calls for the U.S. to recognize a Palestinian state.

[N.E. Brigand]

Actual exchange (video at link) between pro-Palestine protesters in New York:

“Do you know what NYU is doing?”
“About what?”
“About Israel. Why are we protesting here?”
“I wish I was more educated."

But down at the University of Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott had a bunch of people arrested in blatant violation of the First Amendment. (Charges were later dropped.)

[N.E. Brigand]

"US-led Gaza humanitarian aid pier comes under fire, UN officials say" (Army Times).

While no group has claimed responsibility for this mortar attack on the U.S.-led international effort constructing a pier to deliver food into Gaza, a "Hamas official told the Associated Press on Wednesday that the militant group will resist any foreign military presence involved with the port project."

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No, Jill Stein didn't say that "The Jewish people have Poland."

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A Columbia U. student sort of apologized today for an extended ranting video that went viral yesterday in which he said that all "Zionists don't deserve to live."

[N.E. Brigand]

Speaking (two weeks ago) of the Golan Heights:

About three hours ago, Iran reportedly launched hundreds of drones in an attack on Israel. ... I've seen reports indicating that the expected target is the Golan Heights. Some observers believe this attack may be meant as a face-saving measure by Iran ...

I had forgotten that there's a planned Israeli settlement there named for Donald Trump. Read more about Trump Heights here.



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In other news, Israel's national security minister, a far-right figure named Itamar Ben-Gvir, was injured earlier this week when his car flipped over after his driver ran a red light. Reportedly the staff who treated him were mostly Israeli Arabs. Ben-Gvir has called for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel.

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Happening now, a large protest in Tel-Aviv:



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I wonder what those Israeli protesters think of American student protesters at George Washington University posting signs that say they will leave their university encampments "when Israelis go back to Europe, U.S., etc. (their real homes)" (emphasis original). More than 70% of Israeli Jews were born in Israel, and 44% of Israeli Jews descend from African or Asian residents.

[N.E. Brigand]

Negotiations by proxy between Israel and Hamas have been ongoing. Hamas was reported to have been willing to accept the two-state solution -- something which they'd previously refused in favor of the elimination of Israel -- but don't get your hopes up, because they also said that it would be dependent on the "right of return," i.e., for descendants of any Arab who left Israel in 1948 to be granted residency in Israel, which is a non-starter for Israel. On the other side, Israel has for the first time indicated a willingness to include an end to their operation in Gaza as part of the negotiations.

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On Thursday, the president of the Interational Court of Justice said in a BBC interview that when the ICJ issued a "provisional measures order" in late January in response to a claim of genocide committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, filed a few weeks earlier by South Africa, the ICJ did not determine that the claim was "plausible," as many have reported. Rather, "the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had a right to present that claim to the court."

[N.E. Brigand]

The Daily Mail today says that Israel fears that the International Criminal Court is going to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel's actions in Gaza. Believe me, I have no love for Netanyahu, but any such warrant that isn't issued simultaneously with warrants for the leaders of Hamas is trash. That would be like issuing a warrant in 2002 for the arrest of U.S. President George W. Bush for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan while not issuing a warrant for Osama bin Laden. It would be so ridiculous that it would, in my opinion, justify shutting down the ICC. (And that's despite the fact that the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin last year.) A body that acts that way is not to be taken seriously. That said, I'm not sure how reliable the story is. It may be meant to inflame.

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This interview in which one anti-Israeli protester at Columbia University explains how she reached her position is interesting to me. She grew up in the Bronx in a pro-Democrat household and even attended Barack Obama's graduation. Now she says that Obama was a terrorist. (Because of drone strikes. I still maintain that's it's no worse to be killed by a drone than by any other bomb. And never mind that there were twice as many civilian deaths caused by U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria during Donald Trump's presidency than during Obama's. And almost none during Joe Biden's term.) It's clear that she really doesn't know much about the situation in Israel and Palestine (she says as much explicitly; also notice the odd way she refers to the two-state solution). She attributes her positions to (1) a high school teacher who explained that "I don't think there can be much sympathy for [Israel's] position now, given the mass violence they've incited," and (2) what turns up on her Instagram feed.

The first one reminds me of something I mentioned before: a sixth-grade history teacher told the eleven- and twelve-year-olds in our class in 1984 -- and probably did the same to other classes over 30 years -- that, allowing Margaret Thatcher as an exception -- women weren't fit to be world leaders. How many girls lowered their ambitions at that moment? How many boys took that as validation of sexism that were imbibing from their families or friends? Teachers have great responsibility not to poison kids' minds.

The second one reminds me that yes, Russian's anti-Clinton disinformation online in 2016 obviously changed some people's votes!

Anyway, Israel has a pretty rotten government, and yes, Israeli civilians are responsible for electing that government. And yes, Palestinians are worse off than Israelis by almost every metric -- although some of that is likewise on the Palestinians for their own choice of leadership. But I feel confident that almost all of these American protesters, if they lived in Israel and had been subject to more than a decade of regularly running for a bomb shelter to evade rocket fired by Hamas and Hezbollah, and then saw the events of Oct. 6th, would have demanded that Israel respond forcefully to that atrocity.

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Edited to add this video of damage some pro-Palestinian protesters did at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt:



That's definitely vandalism and destruction of property, and it should be punished. But it's not really that extreme for college students. You see just as bad on many campuses when a sports team wins a championship. I remember at my university there was reporting on parked cars being set on fire when Halloween revelry got out of hand thirty years ago. And more than 100 years ago, J.R.R. Tolkien, joining in the town vs. gown hooliganism that was regular at Oxford, stole a fire truck!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The Daily Mail today says that Israel fears that the International Criminal Court is going to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel's actions in Gaza. Believe me, I have no love for Netanyahu, but any such warrant that isn't issued simultaneously with warrants for the leaders of Hamas is trash.

While I agree that the leaders of Hamas are at least as liable for criminal conduct as Netanyahu (or much more so), why would one depend on the other?

[N.E. Brigand]

The Daily Mail today says that Israel fears that the International Criminal Court is going to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel's actions in Gaza. Believe me, I have no love for Netanyahu, but any such warrant that isn't issued simultaneously with warrants for the leaders of Hamas is trash.

While I agree that the leaders of Hamas are at least as liable for criminal conduct as Netanyahu (or much more so), why would one depend on the other?

It would be like indicting FDR for the bombing of Dresden while not indicting Hitler for invading Poland: a decision clearly meant to send a political message and thus to implicitly endorse Hitler's actions or at the very least to claim that Hitler was beneath judgment. If the ICC has launched an investigation only into Netanyahu's conduct of this war and not into Hamas's leaders role in an attack that started the war, or if the ICC has determined that Hamas's leaders should not be indicted, then the ICC is a joke and should cease to exist.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

While I certainly see your point, on the whole I think the analogy does not hold.

1. The ICC didn't exist in the early 1940s, or any equivalent;
2. the bombing of Dresden, while it caused horrible loss of approximately 25,000 civilians, was an attempt to end a war started by Hitler that killed roughly 50 million people. The invasion of Gaza has caused roughly 30 times more deaths than the horrible 10/7 terrorist attack by Hamas, and untold more suffering (again, as horrible as the 10/7 attack was);
3. Hitler's invasion of Poland was an act of a world power invading a weaker country, completely different than Hamas' 10/7 terrorist attack;
4. Again, the question of whether Netanyahu violated international law in how he has conducted the invasion of Gaza is independent of whether Hamas violated international law. I'm not saying that I think that Netanyahu should be charged or that the leaders of Hamas should not be, just that the decision on each should be independent of each other.