War between Hamas and Israel

[Frelga]

I don't know what other solution anyone thinks is there realistically, but it's worth noting that Hamas also rejects a two state solution and their stated goal is the destruction of the Jewish state. As with Russia, who are you going to negotiate with, if you wanted to?

But, also as in Russia, you got to ask who was doing the polling, were they armed when asking the questions, and what did the respondents think would happen if they gave the wrong answer.

Meanwhile in California

Oakland menorah destroyed, thrown into Lake Merritt

[RoseMorninStar]

Who is doing this polling? I couldn't tell from the link.

[N.E. Brigand]

Apparently a bunch of young people in President Biden's administration are "principled enough to keep the White House internship on their resume, but not enough to resign in protest": they wrote a letter objecting to Biden's handling of the Hamas-Israel war, and they leaked it to the press, but they didn't sign it.

There are precedents, of a sort, for this kind of thing, like "Anonymous," eventually revealed to be a Dept. of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor, who anonymously wrote both a 2018 New York Times editorial titled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" and, after resigning, a 2019 book on that subject titled A Warning.

The interns demand that the Biden administration call for a "permanent ceasefire." Given that there just was a ceasefire which Hamas abandoned, I'm not sure how that would work. Also I object to the word "genocide" used to describe Israel's campaign in Gaza. While Israel's actions may or may not constitute war crimes, they are not genocide. Words matter.

Politico reports that the anonymous White House intern who organized this letter doesn't seem to be a White House intern at all.

[N.E. Brigand]

Haaretz, the Israelis newspaper whose editorial viewpoint is generally described as center-left, has published a new story: "Did Hamas Operate Under Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital? A Tour of the Tunnels Leaves No Room for Doubt. Israeli journalists were shown a conduit under the facility stretching over 170 meters. There's no way the hospital's managers didn't know what was going on."

[N.E. Brigand]

Writing in The New Republic, Hussein Ibish argues that "The Palestinian People Should Be Enraged at Both Israel and Hamas."

Palestinians should never forgive Hamas for the calamity unfolding in Gaza. Palestinian and international anger about the appalling suffering being visited upon the innocent 2.1 million residents of Gaza is understandably focused on Israel. Israel is indeed responsible for its own misconduct, such as cutting off all necessities of life for everyone in Gaza and disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks that have killed thousands of Palestinians in just a few weeks, most of them civilians. Yet it is essential to register the depth of Hamas’s guilt, because they intentionally provoked this disaster to benefit their own political fortunes, not the Palestinian national movement, let alone the well-being of the Palestinian people.

... well-understood grievances against Israel neither justify nor explain what Hamas did on October 7. By attacking southern Israel and essentially killing or kidnapping everyone they encountered, including Arab Bedouins and Asian laborers, Hamas effectively perpetrated two huge massacres: the first of Israelis on the day itself, and the second of the Palestinians being played out on a much grander scale by Israel. Hamas’s cynicism is so profound that it’s no exaggeration to call it an intentional human sacrifice of thousands of Palestinians in a desperate bid to increase the organization’s decades-long quest for dominance of the national movement.

Hamas knew what it was provoking, and that was the whole point of October 7. Since it was founded in 1987 by the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza during the first intifada, the primary aim of Hamas has been to take over the Palestinian national movement and, eventually, inherit the Palestine Liberation Organization with its invaluable global diplomatic presence, including U.N. observer state status and over 100 embassies around the world. Hoping to split the Palestinian movement between Islamists and nationalists, Israel has consistently facilitated and bolstered Hamas.

[N.E. Brigand]

Israeli forces accidentally killed three Israelis held by Hamas in Gaza.

[N.E. Brigand]

France24 has published a new analysis of the Oct. 7th attack, which upholds some earlier claims but undermines others.

[Frelga]

Curiosly, the depth of Hamas responsibility for the suffering of Gazan civilians seems to be more frequently aired in Arab countries (like the passionate speech by the Egyptian TV host I linked above) than in the Western media. The fact that Hamas planned the attack for two years and prepared no shelters, supplies or evacuation routes speaks to their willingness to pile up local casualties. After all, the tragic photos of Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs is what drives the fundraising that allows Hamas leadership to lead their lavish lifestyle in Qatar.

Incidentally, Visegrad reported with reference to Israeli press that Hamas leaders have quietly disappeared from Qatar, possibly following assassination threats from Israel.

And yeah, Netanyahu is a blight, and Israel should fucking do better. But the coverage in the West borders on frankly racist. As it only Israel should be held to the standards of moral behavior, because those other people can't be expected to be any better. Which is not only racist, but opens the line of reasoning that leads to horrific conclusions.

[RoseMorninStar]

Disclosure: I have not been following this conflict except in a extremely limited way. On my periphery. There is too much history, hate, violence, and awfulness all the way around that I just can't. In any case, what I think will not make one iota of difference. The goal of Hamas was to provoke an over-reaction in order to gain sympathy and gain supporters. Israel took the bait and played into Hamas hands. It's not a new tactic, it's a (violent) PR campaign stunt. As planned, it provoked outrage, sympathy, gained them new supporters, as planned. Those who started this likely aren't in the line of fire and everyone else pays the price. Like a gang war, such a conflict will never come to an end with even more violence, only with negotiation. Crushing the smaller force doesn't work, bringing them to the (negotiation) table does. I believe this is what happened in Ireland. The Boston Massacre started the American Revolution. It's all so very unfortunate. I have no answers.

"So much death. What can men(people) do against such reckless hate?"

[Sunsilver]

Rose, I agree with you and I said something very similar earlier: https://thehalloffire.net/forum/viewtop ... 52#p421752

[N.E. Brigand]

Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, has resigned following political pressure from (mostly) the right. (She will remain a tenured law professor at Penn.) From the linked column by Jonathan Chait at The New Republic:

The job of a college president involves constantly apologizing and promising to do better. This week, several elite college presidents’ object of their groveling was Congress, which subjected them to a series of largely impossible queries about antisemitism on campus at a hearing everybody agrees went quite poorly for them.

One of the most instantly infamous exchanges took place between Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, and the Republican representative Kevin Kiley from California. “If you were talking to a prospective student’s family, a Jewish student’s family right now,” asked Kiley, “could you look them in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter would be safe and feel safe and welcome on your campus?”

Gay replied, “We are absolutely committed to student safety.” Kiley noted acidly that Gay had dodged the question, that he repeated it but received the same answer.

And it is true that she failed to answer the question — because there’s no good answer. If Gay says Jewish students would feel absolutely safe on campus, she is denying the problem. If she says they wouldn’t, she is telling Jewish students they shouldn’t come to Harvard.

There are several underlying causes for the discomfort of the college presidents, not all of which have clear solutions. College campuses have been inundated with pro-Palestinian activism, which sometimes contains a threatening tone to Jewish students. Campuses have also been struggling for a decade or so with left-wing demands to make campuses “safe,” which has entailed cracking down on criticism of the political left.

Chait argues that universities went astray by policing speech rather than conduct. He notes in this piece, which was written before Liz Magill resigned, that she made exactly that point: "If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment, yes. ... if It is directed and sever, pervasive, it is harassment. ... [but determining what speech violates the schools' code of conduct] is a context-dependent decision". ...

OK, this is interesting. As you may know, political scientist Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, came under a lot of pressure when she and two other Ivy League college presidents -- including Liz Magill of Pennsylvania, who has since resigned -- weren't very nimble in Congressional testimony* when asked about campus policies regarding antisemitism. Gay has rejected calls for her to resign based on her testimony, and Harvard's board has backed her up, but all the media attention led to Gay's past academic writings being closely scrutinized and the discovery of as many as 27 instances of improper citation if not outright plagiarism in her work. This had led even some previous supporters of Gay to call for her resignation, because how else can Harvard uphold these standards for students and for other professors?

Some of Gay's defenders argue that any such investigations into her past, because they originate in over-the-top right-wing pressure, should be understood as "fruit of the poisoned tree" and the results ignored. I disagree. Yes, there are some horrible people among her critics. But I think Gay's position is similar to that of Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado-Boulder professor of ethnic studies who in 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, wrote a paper describing the victims as "Little Eichmanns" who deserved to die. University standards of academic freedom quite properly protected Churchill from repercussions for writing that -- although I wonder how that would hold up now if students argued that they felt "unsafe" in his classroom knowing that he probably believed some of them should be murdered -- but his past work was closely analyzed by his critics and found to include at least seven instances of plagiarism. After a very slow deliberative process, Churchill was fired in 2007. He then sued the university, and a jury found in his favor, awarding him $1 in damages, but the judge in the case subsequently ruled that the university was immune from the suit, and both a state appeals court and the state's supreme court upheld that ruling. (And his request for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court was turned away without any noted dissents.)

Matt Yglesias notes the irony that Gay's defenders, if they actually read her work, might not agree with it. For example, in a 2004 paper, Gay wrote that if more African Americans only knew how far left the Democratic Party had moved over the previous couple decades, they'd switch to the Republican Party. I wonder if Gay's backers would still be defending her if they knew that. (I hope so.)

*By the way, there's a Wikipedia article specifically about that Congressional hearing, and despite having been edited some 800 times, it's quite poor, including even a misspelling of Rep. Elise Stefanik's last name (as "Stafinak").

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And speaking of plagiarism, the New York Times today sued Open AI and Microsoft for artificial intelligence programs stealing writers' work.

[N.E. Brigand]

Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, has resigned following political pressure from (mostly) the right. (She will remain a tenured law professor at Penn.) ...

OK, this is interesting. As you may know, political scientist Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, came under a lot of pressure when she and two other Ivy League college presidents -- including Liz Magill of Pennsylvania, who has since resigned -- weren't very nimble in Congressional testimony* when asked about campus policies regarding antisemitism. Gay has rejected calls for her to resign based on her testimony, and Harvard's board has backed her up, but all the media attention led to Gay's past academic writings being closely scrutinized and the discovery of as many as 27 instances of improper citation if not outright plagiarism in her work. This had led even some previous supporters of Gay to call for her resignation, because how else can Harvard uphold these standards for students and for other professors?...

Claudine Gay has resigned from her position as the president of Harvard University.

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To get back to the thread's original topic:

Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri killed in alleged Israeli strike in Beirut.

Hezbollah, the terrorist group / Iran-backed political party in Lebanon, has previously warned that Israeli attacks on Hamas leaders in Beirut would be met with reprisals.

[N.E. Brigand]

Grim:

The head of psychiatry at the Tel Aviv hospital caring for released hostages said they had undergone the worst abuse and trauma she had witnessed in her career.

Among the 14 former hostages treated at her center, she said, were child hostages who had been drugged by their captors -– including with ketamine –- and were suffering from withdrawal, those who had subjected to or witnessed sexual abuse, a woman who had been kept in a tiny cage, and another who had a breakdown after being kept in complete darkness for days.

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Meanwhile, the United States rightly continues efforts to deescalate the conflict:



The U.S. has also been pushing for Israel to narrow its objectives and reduce its forces in Gaza.

[N.E. Brigand]

There are some wild conspiracy theories being spun about Israel on social media. Two I've seen today are that DNA testing is illegal in Israel (it's not) because it would show that Jews didn't live in the Middle East prior to the 20th Century (they did). And then there's this one, nicely rebutted by just one photo:



To be fair, many such conspiratorial posts come from random nobodies, but there are a lot of them!

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Looking beyond social media, this truck (for which Josh Marshall coined the term "BloodLieMobile") has been driving around New York City:



That particular smear derives from a lousy 2009 story in a Swedish newspaper about something that happened in the 1990s. Here's a report about that report:

The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.

Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer."

Hiss said: "We started to harvest corneas ... whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family."

However, there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to take their organs, as the Swedish paper reported. Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians as saying young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs. The interview with Hiss was released by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley who had conducted a study of Abu Kabir.

She was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that while Palestinians were "by a long shot" not the only ones affected, she felt the interview must be made public, because "the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, [is] something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered."

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Sen. John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, explains his views on Israel in an interview for Semafor:



Some pandering to the right there, I think, but Fetterman was always pretty centrist.

[N.E. Brigand]

One consequence of Oct. 7th attack: a new iteration of a periodic poll finds that the portion of Israeli Arabs who say they feel themselves "to be part of the state of Israel" rose from 48% to 70% between July and November.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Very interesting, though I wonder whether the number went back down as the scale of the Israeli response in Gaza became apparent.

[Frelga]

I am suspicious of all polling, but it is also consistent with what I hear anecdotally, from Jewish Israelis about their Arab neighbors. (yes, it's all complicated)

There is also a significant amount of support toward Israel, or at least of anti-Hamas sentiment, from the Iranian and Iraqi diaspora. They know who the enemy is.

[N.E. Brigand]

A small step in the right direction (but there's a missing "to" in Rosenberg's tweet):

[N.E. Brigand]

Ugh. Now Benjamin Netanyahu is saying that Israel will never agree to a Palestinian state. He's got to go.

[N.E. Brigand]

Elizabeth Dwoskin has a new article in the Washington Post about "Oct. 7th 'trutherism,' a growing movement that denies basic facts about the Hamas massacre. It’s about connections to Holocaust denial, QAnon, and the power of the interneet to erase history." There are examples in the replies to that very tweet.

I was at a marching band competition three hours from here with my phone turned off to save battery when the news broke, and I had learned about it checking for message during an intermission when my mom texted me and I quickly read up on the news. I texted her back, "Israel is going to kill thousands of Palestinians, I expect. Damn."