Hand What Over, Exactly?

Gershom Gorenberg at Foreign Policy appeals for an end to new settlement construction in the West Bank, and an eventual evacuation. He theorizes a tipping point for the West Bank, where longtime failure to swiftly deal with the settlers dooms any future attempt.

The settlers’ growing power makes it harder for any Israeli leader to act. The head of the Shin Bet security agency recently described “very high willingness” among settlers “to use violence—not just stones, but live weapons—in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.” He was articulating a country’s half-spoken fears: Withdrawal involves more than the social and financial costs of moving hundreds of thousands of people. It poses the danger of civil conflict, of battles pitting Jews against Jews.

I appreciate the irony of creating Palestine in order to save Israel, but Gorenberg's piece, to me, only reiterates the impossibility of a two-state solution. How much of the West Bank are Israelis to evacuate? Having -- presumably -- moved the radicals behind the wall, but still over the Green Line, and therefore having risked and overcome civil war, what are the odds of moving these same people again, this time into Israel proper?

More to the point, what exactly will Israel hand over, and to whom? If two states were mandated today, they would be Israel-behind-the-fence and a West Bank run by the PA. Gaza would be a "protectorate." Would this new Palestine have a port? Free air space? Access to water and to the ground beneath it? Without water and a port, it's a shit country.

Given that, wouldn't Palestinians do well to nix nationhood and instead to agitate for Israeli citizenship? You want to dissolve the checkpoints, the dual roadways, the fence, the settlers' compounds? Take Avigdor Lieberman up on his offer: loyalty oaths for all!

And I'm sure the hero of the Russian Street would oblige, so long as the Arab vote was, say 3/5 of the Jewish vote, and so long as Arab demands for work were confined to date-picking and goat-milking. This is the RSA. This is Muammar's One-and-a-Half-State Solution.

Still, agitating for Israeli citizenship sounds like a far better deal than trying to obtain a doomed-from-the-start nation-state. What Palestinians get at the end of any peace process is de facto rule by Israel, an economy totally dependent on foreign aid, and the final entrenchment of the corrupt political caste that got them there in the first place: in other words, the best case scenario is The Now, minus a few roadblocks and checkpoints.

And this is the parallax gap in Israel//Palestine: the only way for Palestinians to have a state is to give up on having a Palestinian state.

I Don't Need Your Sympathy

...says Bilal Khbeiz in e-flux. His points, in sum and therefore in caricature, are:

Westerners sympathize with victims in Gaza and Beirut at a mediated remove; this depersonalizes the conflict, and occludes, for example, the feelings of superiority that survivors of the shelling feel;

Sorrow, like Nietzsche says, is the crocodile tears of the mighty thanking their stars that they were not born weak. Removed from the conflict, the Western Left's compassion is worthless.

The various forms of "courage" displayed in the conflict are something the victims of the conflict never asked for. Ditto the sympathy.

Offhand, this strikes me as the kind of abstract, hair-splitting, namby-pamby, criticality-for-its-own-sake that is bound to land you a spot curating the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. But that's not really fair, and I like the piece...

To begin, false consciousness / white left guilt / "catastrophe tourism" is the least of Gaza's concerns, isn't it? In America, as Khbeiz surely knows, sympathizers -- even we false-hearted colonialist sympathizers -- are hard to come by. Would he prefer to deal with bloodthirsty backwoods reactionaries? Perhaps; perhaps he's on a "radical honesty" therapy regimen. So, imagine a world without Left guilt checking, via the media, America's insane preoccupation with the preservation of Israel. Imagine the New York Times rooting Israel on. Would we have had Nicolas Sarkozy in country negotiating a cease-fire? Would we see George Mitchell as special envoy? I hate to sound like these measures are cure-alls; I know they're not. But imagine nothing at all happening. You don't need white guilt; fine, we'll just spend our time and money liberating something else. Zimbabwe, for instance. Or Sri Lanka.

Also, I'm waiting to see what benefit "survivor's glee" has brought to Palestinians. What is the political role of selfishness and opportunism? The man who happily clears the rubble of his neighbor's house is the one to be bombed next. What stops that? Show me the next ten words, beginning with Selfishness and Opportunism.

The false-hearted Western sorrow that Khbeiz so laments -- and which is so omnipresent in the States, or plain ubiquitous outside of Paris -- is you know a problem insofar as it exists. Khbeiz' problem here is that he caricatures the entire West as a (what, slightly more muscular, and frumpier?) version of the international art-fair jet-set. This is the same kind of myopia that obscures real people's suffering/joy from our Western eyes, and that Khbeiz is so eager to denounce. The West does not sit in committee at Art Basel Miami Beach. A joke/sham version of it does perhaps.

Returning to the point above, there are plenty of different kinds of Westerners, and lots of them would permit a completion of the Palestinian naqba as surely as the sun rises in the East.

Again, I'd like to stress that I find it hard to argue with a man who is in theater right now (I assume; maybe he's in Geneva and has mooted his own argument thereby). And the "catastrophe tourism" of the West, our occluded understanding, the scandals (in the Greek sense, lit. "a stumbling block") to our intellect, the glee of survivors, the pompous "courage" of Hamas' leadership chilling in Syria...all true, too true.

But people asked for this. Palestinians put Hamas in charge via free and fair elections. Hamas withstood Fatah storm troopers busting down people's doors in the night and regrouped in Gaza, only to find all trade blockaded, fuel held to a trickle, etc. Someone asked for an end to the siege: Hamas built tunnels; Hamas opened the border with Egypt via sledgehammers; Hamas got itself some human bargaining chips. All these things demand temerity at least. American politicians in the same circumstances would get themselves a sweet bribe from Israel and haul ass to Marseilles, on some shit like "Stopping those missiles. That's worth a lot of fuckin' money." You know, like Arafat did.

Hamas is responding to its constituents' needs, as any political party must. Their constituents need not to be bombed -- thank you Mr. Khbeiz for stating the obvious as if it were a revelation; what I've heard called "flipping the script" -- this is true. But their constituents also need not to live in a permanent penal servitude, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's Isaac Babel, describing, obliquely, what it's like to be a Jew under the Czar.
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Who's Got the One-and-a-Half?

Muammar's got the one-and-a-half state solution. Now, when the unelected leader of Libya promotes this, it doesn't have the same aura as when Eyal Weizman does. If Muammar had actually been able to say something like "Shoah and Naqba are flip sides of the same coin...there are not two catastrophes, but one shared catastrophe," then we might have believed him.

Quick read: it sounds like Qaddafi is out to sugarcoat the idea of a Palestinian majority in Israel by explaining that, don't worry folks, Arab Israelis will still be in the fields picking dates. The implicit trade for a one-state solution is some kind of political second-class citizenship, and this is because Muammar is obsessed with right-of-return. Right-of-return means Palestine becomes minority-Jewish; with voting rights for all, that puts Hamas in the Knesset, that makes the IDF defunct. Now, without voting rights for all, we're talking about a minority-rule state with an all-minority police force, like the RSA. And that's one and a half states, not one.
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...Swallowed a Bug...

NYT gets down on the kibbutz, where folks is scared:

Out in the fields abutting the Gaza border fence, Mr. Katzir, the potato grower, predicted that within two years, the Hamas rockets "will get to Tel Aviv."

Now this interested me. I understand that farmers' opinions may not be indicative of the populace at large, but this is at least one member of the populace expressing his concerns, and what politician would not listen?

It's clear that this war wasn't a response to a credible threat; it was a panic attack. The Israeli populace doesn't trust Kadima to run shit; Kadima reinforces their bloodthirst trustworthiness by means of a small war. Ehud Barak and senior Israeli military officials get to think up cool metaphors -- latest: "cutting the grass"! -- and generally do the Brando


and all is well, except that Mr. Katzir, the potato farmer is not appeased. He thinks Hamas will be able to hit Tel Aviv in two years. Is he right?

To hit Tel Aviv, 75 kilometers from Gaza, you need an Iranian Fajr-5 rocket or better, Cf. this 2006 piece on aerospaceweb.org. No one has offered more than speculation as to whether Hamas has the Fajr-5, has asked Iran for the Fajr-5, etc.

Thing is, evidence would be easy to find. See, the Fajr-5 is 2 by 3 by 10 meters long. It's mounted on a Mercedes chassis two-thirds the size of a semi-trailer, and probably comes with friends, as it started life as an MRLS. This is not the sort of thing that 6 dudes shove through a tunnel. Saying Hamas has this is like saying Osama's going to bomb our lunar colony.

Now, if by "Hamas will hit Tel Aviv" our friend on the farm meant "Palestinians will hit Tel Aviv from the West Bank," that's a whole other kettle of fish. From right across the wall, you can hit Tel Aviv with a katyusha. Of course, this hasn't happened for some time, as Palestinians in the West Bank have Fatah sturmers busting down doors in order to defend Israel. West Bankers haven't allowed upstart terrorists to shoot so much as a spitball in a couple years. And they're divided now.

So the question becomes, what happens when you give the people of the West Bank a reason?
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The Boss Has Lost It

WHEREAS we have no real notion of what the Gaza campaign has wrought in any terms other than the purely humanitarian, and since newspapers anyway are in the business of refusing to speculate on geopolitical motives for barbarity, choosing instead to project a humanitarianism-beyond-politics, with no system of beliefs beyond the overriding imperative of the lower body count,

Clearly it's time for the Process Story, whereby our crack team of researchers gets the inside story from the architects of the operation. And don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for the tidbits:

The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.

“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.

It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.

Couple things: this is clearly a retread of Nixon's "Mad Bomber." Retribution should be feared; fear deters aggression; everyone goes back to the bargaining table. It's just not a very good retread. "Mad Bomber" threats arguably did less to maintain the balance of terror than did rapprochement with China, crumbling Soviet infrastructure, aging bureaucracy on both sides; the miracle is not that the Soviet Union ever fell, it's that it stuck around so long. Detente did not emerge fully formed from the head of "Mad Bomber" tactics.

But even if we accept that the model worked in that case, there is no analogy here. US:CCCP::Israel:Palestine does not fly. The US and USSR were fighting for spheres of influence. Neither populace was in the condition of Gaza's. Israel might see itself as fighting for influence -- thus the pompous military attache comparing the IDF to Nixon -- but it's fighting for soil. And its presumptive partner at the bargaining table is no Brezhnev: two governments, no contiguous territory, no economy, no transport, nothing that Israel wants and also nothing to lose.

"The Boss Has Lost It," in another Nixonian echo, casts foreign policy as work for a failing used-car salesman. Probably this is the kind of thing to fall on deaf ears, as, you know, there are not that many retail opportunities in the Strip.

These are, for the record, the best military metaphors I've heard in a long time. Cribbed from common folks' usage, full of connotative spurs and branches, and utterly accurate. "Cast lead" is for toys and bombs, presumably like the cluster munitions dumped on South Beirut last time around. "Crazy Boss" covers all the bases: we are your Boss, first of all, and this is the last time you'll see these prices, and you never know what's next.

But the kicker for me is that in the haste to gloat about the IDF's clever language, their spokesperson led the NYT reporter to "It is a calculated rage," which, you know, is what we said here on Day One. Forget "this is not a proportionate response," it wasn't even a response. The long Gaza blockade was not -- as the unfortunately-isolated Brian Eno would have us believe, our hearts bleeding -- an "experiment in provocation," since the assault appeared on 27 Dec 2008 to be all but unprovoked. Gazans did not respond to the bait that Eno thinks was laid. And now it's all clear, the rage was calculated.

Now what that means is anyone's guess. If the IDF has to concoct from thin air a passion for fighting, whereas Hamas has blood on the ground to motivate it, what does that mean for Israel's chances the next time around? And if the IDF knows that this is the last time in a generation that it might see deep support for actions against the Palestinians, mightn't that mean it's time to strip the Strip totally? That Gaza Redevelopment Authority is gonna need some room, after all. Doesn't a pullout at this point mean that Ehud Barak is more concerned about keeping Bibi Netanyahu out of power than he is with cleansing redeveloping Gaza? And if it turns out that the motivation for this exercise in terror was provincial Israeli politics, then the boss has lost it for real...
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Die Cast

Oferet Yetzuka, named for a Hanukkah gift, a cast-lead dreidel, has paused its gift-giving.

Perhaps only part of the strip will now become Gaza Beach Redevelopment District / Business-Opportunity Zone.

And if Abbas/Fatah have any balls at all, they will listen to Dion Nissenbaum at Foreign Policy: Abbas can't walk back into Gaza as its Israeli-appointed viceroy. We've known this since June 2007. He is a politician without constituents.

If Abu Mazen is more than a Vichy turd, he will resign rather than reign over a broken Gaza. Dissolve the PA's fake parliament, call new elections, and demand the release of Marwan Barghouti.

He can, in effect, become the most popular man in Palestine only if he no longer wants to be its most powerful.

Burn This MF Down

Paul Ging and Christopher Gunness have called the IDF and Ehud Olmert liars. Ging, who, it turns out, was in contact with the Israeli Army up until the moment his warehouse was bombed,

questioned why Israeli liaison officers had never mentioned Hamas activity in the area[...]

which is sort of begging the question. If I tell you there's Hamas in your building, and you flee, does not the Hamas also flee? Ging's point, of course, is that there were no militants in the building, thus no need for either the bombing or the forewarning of a bombing. And since he was in "constant contact" with IDF before the bombing, Ging has another problem: he has Israeli bomb-spotters working for him. He has a mole.

Gunness backs up Ging, saying that Israeli Army officers had "privately admitted" bombing the wrong site. That accounts for yesterday's confusion. Then Gunness ups the ante, saying three white phosphorus shells hit the UN warehouse. And that accounts for why the whole place, hit with three shells, is on fire in all the photos.

Just a refresher: we used white phosphorus on civilians in Iraq. Fine as a flare, but as an anti-personnel weapon, white phosphorus use will get you a date in the Hague. This is largely because it's such an effective anti-personnel weapon:

White phosphorus results in painful chemical burn injuries. The resultant burn typically appears as a necrotic area with a yellowish color and characteristic garliclike odor. White phosphorus is highly lipid soluble and as such, is believed to have rapid dermal penetration once particles are embedded under the skin.

I think it's part of our shared humanity to kill things, to kill them personally, on a human scale, with what weapons we can wield. The thing about WP is its indiscriminate nature: it binds to lipids, anybody's lipids; it seeks out fat and turns it into light. Humans, to Willy Pete, are so much candle wax. So, my point is that anyone who says eradication of most of the population of Gaza for the dual goals of security and leisure is not Israel's goal here is taking you for a ride.
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Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

Olmert has given Ban Ki-Moon the explanation for today's bombing he so gravely demanded: Hamas was in your compound. We know this, because that's where our bombs landed. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Probably this rhetorical device came out in the Iraq lessons-learned briefings. The US's real problem was not that there were no mobile bio-chem weapons labs, no centrifuges, just a bunch of yellow pigment in a baby-food plant, no no, our problem was that we kept trying to find evidence. Every overturned semi-trailer was inspected for anthrax; every general's lawn was cut up in the hunt for radiation.

Why not just say the bombs got it? It worked with the phantom Syrian nuclear program, right? "Trust us, it was there. Of course, there's no evidence of that now. But it surely was there because that's where our bombs went."

Also, for the record, Hosni, if you're listening, Fatah is dead. Don't wait for the return of Fatah. And also, anyone watching this knew in advance -- in advance of the New York Times' crack news analysis staff, anyway -- that Fatah was dead.

On second glance, this part was news to me. Possibly it is real news, as opposed to analysis:

Israel is proposing, with the tacit agreement of Egypt and the United States, to place the Palestinian Authority at the heart of an ambitious program to rebuild Gaza, administering reconstruction aid and securing Gaza’s borders.

A Palestinian pro calls Fatah's involvement "silly" and "naive."

Odds are he called it worse than that, you know, something like "a royal fist-fucking of the Palestinians by a bunch of Vichy turds in BMWs"

But the interesting part is that Israel floated the idea to Fatah at all. I mean, if you're going to pull some Robert Moses shit on a million and a half people, which come to think of it is Moses' scale, you need obstacles cleared. Israel needs to make sure that Fatah sees its chances of survival as related to Israel's chances of success. What's really being said is, "We're going to make Gaza into prime beachfront property, you can get on board or get out of the way."

There isn't going to be a role for Fatah beyond "shut the fuck up." A truce still hinges on commercial traffic into and out of Gaza being restored. And Israel has no intention of allowing that. After all, why stop now? From a PR standpoint, there is no difference between "a little bit monstrous" and "monstrous." It is a binary condition. Since a truce is going to cost something, namely opening Rafah, or else it won't hold, why not choose annihilation?
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Why Can't Hosni Mubarak Play Hardball?

My apologies, Dear Reader; what I thought was expert analysis-in-advance turns out to be little more than conventional wisdom come a few days early. For instance, see the 8 January piece:

Egypt has to come out of negotiations with a truce that opens Gaza, or Mubarak risks losing his country to the Muslim Brotherhood just when he wants to pass control to his son.(emphasis added)

Now comes the NYT on the mental state of folks in Cairo:

Nowhere in the Arab world is the gap between the street and the government so wide as here in Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel and has refused to allow free passage of goods and people through its border with Gaza, a decision that has been attacked by Islamic and Arab leaders and proved deeply troubling to many Egyptians.

Same as it ever was: Mubarak cannot be trusted, his government came out early against Hamas, the MB is attracting new support, and now government-puppet imams are being told to go on and let off some steam at the Jews.

That was one of the funny parts about Mubarak's apparent response to his street problem: that he sees it as a PR crisis, rather than a failure of policy. Instead of taking the direct route and opening Rafah unilaterally, or sending out Egyptian bulldozers to tear down chunks of wall, or working indirectly and just using the threat of unilateral action in negotiations to get the border open, he's decided that all his people really want is to hate the Jews, and that the cathartic experience of listening to Friday prayers at the state-run mosque will ease their pain.

Is Mubarak loath to jeopardize US aid to Egypt? It is a lot of aid, after all. (Christian Science Monitor has $50B as the figure.) Less than gov't aid to AIG, but a lot per year, billion-plus. Thing is, Hosni's been telling US presidents for 28 years that he's their only shot at peace in the Middle East's largest nation. He's warded off local and national elections, rephrased our appeals for help on terrorism into political street-sweeping, etc. He can tell the US that either he gets what he needs, or he dissolves parliament, Egypt has free elections tomorrow and a Muslim Brotherhood plurality the day after that.

But the really interesting thing is that Mubarak longs for Fatah supremacy, in the way that one would bring '88 back. Seriously, throwback politics will destroy Egypt's tranquility. So here are some notes for the Premier, or the Generalissimo, whatever Hosni calls himself:

Yasser Arafat is dead,

Even if he were alive, Fatah would still be a corrupt edifice with a PR-savvy former revolutionary as its figurehead, like Mandela and the ANC,

And decades of one-party government, anywhere in the world, except perhaps Russia where people have vodka instead of ambition or hope (sorry), causes people to "seethe" as you no doubt read in the NYT today

You cannot simultaneously blackmail the US (as I've basically urged you to do) with the spectre of an MB takeover of Parliament and yet pine for the return of Fatah to Gaza, as if Palestine hasn't already shown its preference, as if it doesn't already have a "street" to be appeased or broken.


And I guess that's the thing. Mubarak wants Israel to break the Gaza street. He expects Fatah to step into a void. And he's wrong. If there is a void in Gaza, Israel will step into it. And the Gaza street won't disappear, it will move somewhere, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, maybe Egypt.

See what I'm saying, Hosni? Either you play hardball now and get your borders open, or next year when the IDF is resettling one and a half million Gazans, you become their unwilling host and they your unwilling guests. And I wonder what kind of wack-ass speeches your trained imams will have to give out then...
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Read This One More Time...

...and see if you don't agree that the United Nations has reason to believe that its relief and welfare operations in Gaza are the target of the Israeli offensive. Accordingly, UN spokespersons have been authorized to describe in detail the mass deaths of civilians that have occurred in the past 48 hours.

Ban Ki-Moon is calling for an investigation into the deaths of 40 Palestinians at a UN-run school that was shelled by the IDF. One of its drivers was killed at Kerem Shalom Thursday; two trucks were bombed Monday. The Red Cross was fired on at Netzarim Thursday during the second 3-out-of-48-hour ceasefire, and has halted relief operations.

20-odd dead aid workers per 200 dead Hamas fighters is a ratio indicative of targeting. The UN and Red Cross are targets, and are fighting back in the press. Whether that works, whether a media blitz has any sway at all over Ehud Barak, who's having the time of his life, is another question entirely.
I'm pretty sure we're past the point where language wars, negotiations, etc. have any relevance. The talking cure is dead. And if it's grim enough to convince the Vatican to use the phrase "concentration camp," yeah, no one's getting talked down from this war.

As soon as the first aid convoy was struck, that's when Israel's intentions were made plain. NGOs are the last barrier to Israeli supremacy in Gaza; they are the last people watching, as journalists are still verboten; absent Hamas, they are the only people who teach children, deliver water and take out the trash. When they disappear, Gaza disappears.

So look for more UN spokespersons to tell us more stories of children with their mothers' corpses, but don't look for any cease-fire until Gaza is swept and cleared.
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Hezbollah is in the Game?

From AP:

The rockets from Lebanon raised the specter of renewed hostilities on Israel's northern frontier, just 2 1/2 years after Israel battled the Hezbollah guerrilla group to a 34-day stalemate. War broke out between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 as Israel battled Palestinian militants in Gaza, on Israel's southern borders.

No group claimed responsibility. Lebanon's government condemned the attack, and Hezbollah — which now plays an integral role in Lebanon's government — denied any responsibility for the rocket fire, which lightly injured two Israelis.

If Hezbollah can't be scared back into sitting on its hands in Parliament, then Egypt and Jordan have problems -- as neighbors to the Palestinians with a long history of screwing the Palestinians who are not currently in the game -- Egypt in the near term, Jordan at one remove.

Egypt has to come out of negotiations with a truce that opens Gaza, or Mubarak risks losing his country to the Muslim Brotherhood just when he wants to pass control to his son. If Hezbollah distract the IDF enough to take the heat off Gaza (witness 2006, where the Gaza tit-for-tat was occluded by war in the north) Mubarak could be weakened enough to allow slightly more free elections. That's the foot in the door for the MB, and Egypt's days as a tidy little dictatorship are done.

Jordan will have a problem first when refugees from this conflict end up in the West Bank, and start reminding people of how the Palestinians got screwed by their brether'n and sister'n across the River. Jordan will have another problem later when Israel starts to move settlers to a more-easily-managed version of the 1967 border and slowly prepares an assault on the West Bank. Expect a restless West Bank for the three years before Israel declares "all-out war" on all Palestinians, a timeframe I'm thinking will be mid-2010 to end of 2013, during which period expect multiple suicide attacks in Amman, and a spectacular bombing of the Port of Haifa.

On 27 December, ds wrote:

Egypt has no further incentive to keep Rafah closed. Ditto Syria and a tight leash on Hezbollah.

which, you know, we think of here as an obvious conclusion. When the balloon goes up, etc. But, you know, not everyone sees things this way. Today the NYT lede is "Hezbollah is not a problem; peace is being brokered in Cairo; we're done here." The same article contains the terms of this miraculous peace:

The senior Israeli official raised the possibility of reaching “tacit agreements” with Hamas to end rocket fire, while also persuading Egypt to allow American and perhaps European army engineers to help seal its border with Gaza above and below ground.

Hamas is insisting that any new arrangement include the reopening of border crossings for trade with Israel and the reopening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt for people.

Clearly, I jumped the gun on calling the end of NYT's wishful thinking. This shit is candyass.

To translate: first, walking out of Cairo with a real truce is not important, because Israel can always draw up "tacit agreements" with Hamas. Please provide examples of such. Second, this truce must contain a hermetically sealed Egypt-Gaza border AND an open Rafah crossing. That's not some merely onerous diplomatic task; it's an antinomy.

These discussions are a joke. Mubarak will realize this soon enough. The only question I have is, Does anyone in the Arab world have the balls to open Rafah?
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No More Wishful Thinking at NYT

How indeed to square "ground invasion is a course no one is advocating," with

This time, Israeli military commanders are leading from the front, not trying to direct the infantry from television screens. This time, the military has clear plans, in stages, drawn up with a year’s preparation. This time, there is no illusion about winning a war only from the air.

Couple days ago, no one was preparing for the shit, today they've been preparing for a year.

The scales fall from the eyes of the NYT Jerusalem bureau...We're all men now...
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Personal Best for the IDF

Israel is allowing aid into Gaza. For three hours a day. Journalists are still verboten. But this is the lede in a story that goes on the parrot the IDF's cover for shelling civilians. IDF says a Hamas mortar team was inside the UN-run (although I suppose everything in Gaza that is administered at all is UN-run) school in Jabaliya. McClatchy had an anonymous source (which we might as well assume is the IDF) saying that the mortar crew (two dudes) was in the school. NYT identifies its source and says one of the men was "in the area."

Also, butchers prefer Pepsi. Can that piece be real?

640 at this point, though as NYT says, "no reliable and current figures in recent days."

The magic number here is 1,191, the UN count of civilian dead in Lebanon in the 2006 war. Let's add about 500 (the world's best guess at the number of Hezbollah fighters killed then) for a total of 1,691. At 60 dead a day, Gaza's going to smoke that record.

And with 4 dead IDF by friendly fire, Israel can boldly claim another personal best, beating Hamas at its own game.

Much mazel!
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Covering All My Bases; Murderers Who Should Be Clubbed To Death

From the Dispatch on New Year's Day:

"Israel has the moral right and responsibility to defend its citizens," wrote Marsha F. Hurwitz, president and chief executive officer of the Columbus Jewish Federation, in a statement to The Dispatch.

"It is reacting as any nation would that is under constant attack. Imagine if there were terrorists in Worthington firing missiles that were falling at Broad and High streets. What would we as citizens demand from our government in order to protect us?"

This is why Israel has carte blanche to conduct actions verging on genocide. Among those Americans who have any reason to care about the Middle East (admittedly few, and people can and should care about whatever they want, not judging) cunts like Marsha outnumber real human beings 5-1.

If there were terrorists in "Worthington" firing "missiles" at Broad and High, I would expect them to be rooted out. On this Marsha and I agree.

What we don't agree on, obviously, is the facts. Namely, that Worthington OH is closer to a densely populated territory (downtown Columbus) by a factor of 2 than anywhere in Gaza is to any dense Israeli population. Second, Gazans have glorified bottle rockets, not "missiles". This is why, not to belabor a point, up until the current fighting, 2 count them two Israelis had been killed by katyushas in the past year. And third, if my government were responsible for locking the people of Worthington inside their city because of how they vote, if the people of northern Franklin County were bound by treaty to shoot anyone from Worthington trying to escape, if Worthington by virtue of the lockdown had 100 percent unemployment, I would damn well expect violence.

Anybody ever been to Columbus' East Side? If Marsha Hurwitz wants to have a discussion, I know a halal joint on Cleveland Avenue. Or the Pita Pit on N. High.

Peace
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Gaza Beer-League Assessment Piece

I understand that events outpace our ability to make sense of them, but really: "Is the end of Hamas rule Israel's real aim?" By the time this story was up, Israel was in Gaza, boots on the ground. By the time I had read it, the IDF owned Gaza City. And yet, as of 11AM Sunday, no edits to this:

Implicit in Mr. Benn’s argument, however, is that the only way to stop Hamas from gaining legitimacy is for Israel to fully occupy Gaza again, more than three years after removing its soldiers and settlers. That is a prospect practically no one in Israel or abroad is advocating.

Somebody was advocating invasion because troops were massed on the border all weekend; Israeli diplomats when asked about a truce were pondering the nature of language instead of working on one; and oh right, women and children continued to die. Are we to believe that the men who said "all-out war" on a Tuesday are going to revise their comments on Saturday?

This is some slo-pitch, beer-league bullshit. With evidence to the contrary mounting, we are meant to believe Israel's motivations to be sincere? That this isn't the last part of a years'-long land-grab? That this isn't a model for how the West Bank will be won? That somehow, protection from the strategic equivalent of bottle rockets requires aerial bombardment of densely-packed civilian areas?

"Hamas rule" is what's being attacked, not Palestinians? I don't think Bin Laden resorted to that kind of craven, self-exculpatory language when he last killed American civilians, you know, "We are against the rule of Bush," "The rule of Clinton in America must end," etc.

The sooner we stop sugar-coating this thing, and start talking about where refugees will go, how to get doctors into the region, how Hamas will gain political power in the West Bank, etc., the better.

"Who will lead Gaza when Hamas is gone?" Try, "Who will lead Hamas when Gaza is gone?"
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Quickly, now...

Quick. First, the fact that Israel is "running out of targets," leads MSNBC to conclude that "Diplomacy Gains Steam." Once there's nothing left to argue over, then we can argue. Can we talk about Proportional Response? Can we talk about the average pothole a Katyusha leaves in the street? Let's leave the President out of this one, though, because he seems to believe that kids cowering in basements are committing acts of terror...

AP has hundreds of Palestinians allowed to leave Gaza, as though that were somehow magnanimous. Isn't the point to rid Palestine of Palestinians? Isn't that what checkpoints, doubled roads, the long wall, the spread of Jewish settlements, what all that is for?

Civilians leaving is the worst thing possible for Hamas. The threat of civilian casualites (Again, a distinction whose goalposts move. Is a Hamas parliamentarian asleep in his home a combatant? When a fourteen-year-old throwing rocks is killed by IDF small arms fire, it's a combat fatality. When he is bombed to death alongside his mother and sisters, it's civilian. The only sure non-combatants, according to the UN, are women. How much you wanna bet that distinction changes once there is no Gaza for those women to return to?), like I said, the threat of civilian casualties, we presume, is the only thing holding Israel back. They leave, and all bets are off. I mean, if we assume that this is something other than the apocalypse.

Which is the funny part about Nasrallah's allegation of a grand Arab plot against the Palestinians, whereby the leaders of the softie Arabs (Egypt, Jordan, Turkey i guess) give Israel carte blanche until Monday. At which point, Nasrallah says, the tanks turn back into pumpkins. Hassan Nasrallah may be the Islamic world's premiere satirist. How much more could he shame the Arab governments, so obviously powerless to come to Gaza's aid? Well, by mocking their pretension to power. "Oh yeah, I heard it from Mubarak, he's gonna give the Israelis 5 days, and then he's gonna bring the hammer down. You know, really fuck 'em up. Ha."

So Nasrallah knows this is the end, that Israel is going to wipe the map clean, that the first step was pulling its settlers out, that the ultimate intent is to resettle Gaza with Israelis. Pretty coastline, great weather. You can grow excellent strawberries there. Somebody check my Leviticus, what's the Hebrew for cleanse?

Peace on Earth

As if the end of capitalism-as-we-know-it weren't enough to bring out the pre-millenial tension, now comes what looks an awful lot like endgame for Gaza.

Opening the routes to commerce was Hamas’s main goal in its cease-fire with Israel, just as ending the rocket fire was Israel’s central aim. But while rocket fire did go down drastically in the fall to 15 to 20 a month from hundreds a month, Israel said it would not permit trade to begin again because the rocket fire had not completely stopped and because Hamas continued to smuggle weapons from Egypt through desert tunnels. Hamas said this was a violation of the agreement, a sign of Israel’s real intentions and cause for further rocket fire.

Why now? This is not an off-the-cuff response to an immediate threat, remember. Every police and fire station in Gaza is a target; this isn't a fine-bore assassination. The stated provocation -- Hamas' unwillingness / inability to halt rocket attacks absolutely, despite the recent ratcheting down of same by 90 percent -- is incommensurate to Israel's response. A planned operation; so, timing matters.

Does the Bush-Obama interregnum matter here? Is this attack one last bash in the days of carte blanche? Is this a pre-election surprise? Ehud called off his campaign a la the Air Pirate, after all. (What if McCain had had something to bomb back in October? What if...) Is this, in short, something other than the end times for Palestine?

The possible net gain for Israel is so small (0 rockets a month from 10-20), indeed at this point is negative, as 70-odd rockets were launched in response to the raids, and the risk so ludicrous that the Road Map cycle (raids, talks, breakdowns, raids) is now obsolete.

Egypt has no further incentive to keep Rafah closed. Ditto Syria and a tight leash on Hezbollah. Israel has to imagine that overwhelming force will eliminate the threat from Gazastan, and trump any response from the broader community of militants. Which is not exactly what we saw in Lebanon, but selah.

Then: Israel carpet-bombs Gaza, which experiences Beirut-2006-like casualties, world opens its heart to Hamas. At this point, we either get back on the Road Map, and kids lose their hands for next 20 years playing with cluster bomblets, or the bombing doesn't stop, and our children will talk about Palestinians the way we talk about Tasmanians.
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Dabbling in pacifism...

K: Secretary Rice is finally dabbling in pacifism...and her guru is Bashar al-Assad!

Here's a Syrian spokesman two weeks ago, calling for Israeli-Lebanese talks:

The president hinted that it would not be in Lebanon's interest if it did not have its own talks if Syrian-Israeli talks advanced[...]

And here's Condi one week ago, calling for Israeli-Lebanese talks:

I also told him that the United States believes the time has come to deal with the Chebaa Farms issue[...]

And here's Israel calling for Lebanese talks. Oh, and Olmert's going to meet Assad in Paris in July, for crepes, presumably.

So the same Sec. Rice three weeks ago was on the Dick Cheney, Bloodthirsty Persians tip. Partly this is a matter of tailoring the message to the audience; Rice bellowed bellicose for AIPAC, and -ahem- detumesced for the Lebanese. In theory, rhetorical fireworks can accompany Israel's land-for-peace negotiations with Syria and Lebanon, and the prisoner-exchange negotiations with Hezbollah. The unique aim is to pick allies off of Iran's branch.

But the timing of Bill Kristol and John Bolton's rabies attack doesn't serve that strategic purpose. War fervor is already plenty high: Israel just finished a dry-run for an attack on Natanz, dudes. Nor is this an escalation of rhetoric by people who currently have real jobs. These are dudes with the same security clearance as you and me...

More to the point, Kristol and Bolton aren't responding to similar Iranian bloviations; they're calling out Americans. State just proposed sending an American mission/outpost/charge d'affaires to Iran. Whammo! Like squirrel blood to hammerheads! All the unemployed sharks have to remind us of the "nature of the threat..." They're calling Rice out.

Clearly spooked by the power of language to change "facts on the ground," having just watched the administration's war of words provide Israel cover to bomb Syria, to war-game a Natanz raid, etc., Condoleezza decides it's time to throttle back the warmongering, at last joining Ali Larijani on some calmer-than-you-are shit...

Hope for a cooler summer...and I like to think my prediction was not totally wrong...
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Reruns of wars...

John the Evangel was an oil industry tout.

Imagine if "wars and rumours of wars," had hit the headlines last week, when light sweet crude hit 135 on speculation that it would reach 150 later. This, to my illiterate eye, looks like self-fulfilling prophecy, or a corrupt enterprise, but that's how markets work. Add to the rumor some dick-waving by the man in charge of Israel's school buses:

Traders also zeroed in on remarks by an Israeli Cabinet minister who was quoted as saying his country will attack Iran if it doesn't abandon its nuclear program. Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz added that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "will disappear before Israel does,"[...]

and we got ourselves a party!

This is why I never get tired of deflating expectations of all-out war in west Asia. There's always some illiterate villager transported into the spotlight, ready to spike oil prices with a phrase.

Mr. Mofaz, of course our friend Mahmoud will be gone before Israel is: Ali Larijani got elected Majlis speaker last week, and has promptly set about persuading the world of Iran's pragmatism. (Also, he's persuading Iranians to develop issues-based politics, rather than the politics of personality. Since it took the French 200 years -- from the Marquis de Lafayette to Charles de Gaulle -- to figure that out, Dark Steer wishes luck to the Iranian Majlis.) Rather than call the IAEA a bunch of little devils, he points to the time and money they're wasting, sounding for all the world like Bob Novak talking about the prosecution of Scooter Libby, viz.:

[...] Fitzgerald's long, expensive investigation found no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, if only because Plame was not covered by it.

In fact, Larijani and the American Right should come to terms at what I'm now calling the Plame Nexus: external investigations, national sovereignty, and presidential prerogative. Both see obfuscation and stonewalling as legitimate secrecy in the interest of national security; both resent special investigators, call their enemies evil, and rig elections. Both quash challenges to their rule by the backdoor; one by removing from election rolls all progressive politicians, the other by firing insufficiently Bushite Assistant Attorneys General.

The Iranian regime, in effect, is a wet-dream version of the Bush adminstration. Imagine the power to shut down newspapers, imprison journalists, exile agitators! The Patriot Act is for fags...

The main difference between Bushites and the incipient Larijani administration is that only one group sees its influence over Middle Eastern geopolitics as stabilizing. Bushites are content to let havoc reign, begging Israel to pop off at Lebanon again, or Syria, or Iran; ignoring the fatal conflict between our arming Sunnis in Iraq and officially backing a Shiite central government; making sure the shadow-conflict with Iran is still audible amid the continuous din of news in the acutal world. Larijani, on the other hand, remains on some Walter-Sobchak-calmer-than-you-are shit.

So wait for the Speaker to make some comments on oil prices soon. Maybe the administration will finally get the idea, and the next time someone's Minister of Motorboats talks shit, someone else will be there to flip his wig...
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Congratulations, Sahib!!

To recap, sahibs:

Sunni radicals are having a government-sponsored bitchout in advance of a government-sponsored interfaith summit in Mecca.

Mohammed el-Baradei is going to Syria. Syria says that's fine.

Sunnis in Lebanon are being truculent about the compromise government.

The President has said some wack shit about Iran. So has John McCain.

Hezbollah released the remains of (at least) two Israeli soldiers in exchange for one live hezbollahi.

Everywhere around the Middle East are the wriggling vestigial tails of Bush's Iranienkampf. As the second term winds down, the strategy of mollycoddling Sunni governments to check Iran has devolved into watching each state in the region pursue its interests catch-as-catch-can.

Thus is the administration reduced to feebly attempting to sabotage peace when it comes by another's terms; to nudging action through language; to wheedling for more oil; to averting its eyes from repression.

Ehud Olmert, unlike the President, is capable of admitting defeat and moving on. Having seen that Hezbollah can simultaneously frighten his people, snarl his military, win the hearts of hitherto-moderate Lebanese, and win a PR victory, he's decided to sue for peace. Bush's response (or someone's response, because I'm sure he doesn't give a real shit) is to lash out at Iran. Yawn.

Negotiators and technocrats the world over roll their eyes. Syria suggests to Israel, "Hey, while we're at it, let's settle with Lebanon over the Chebaa Farms." Israel: "Aight." Iranian conservatives, for their part, back Ali Larijani for speaker of Parliament, snubbing our old friend Mahmoud. And the Lebanese back off the brink of civil war, form a government, and no one even bats an eye when Bush's boy Fuad Saniora remains prime minister.

What we're learning, slowly, is the absolute limit of American influence in the Middle East. Israel humored our request for an airstrike in Syria, found nothing, and has had it with our slam-dunk intelligence services; they're negotiating for peace. Egypt is working with Hamas to stabilize Gaza. Hezbollah is going to have a plurality of power in Lebanon; Moqtada al-Sadr is going to have a share in Iraq. The things everyone from the Weekly Standard to the Atlantic thought were portents of the end of time will all happen.

A hush will fall on west Asia, and we will pay 5 dollars a gallon for gas. Certain men will make noise about the catastrophe to befall the US in the region if we let X or Y happen. Other men will bruit about the benefits of sticking it out, as if the House of Saud were populated by leprechauns with a cache of black gold. In short, we will be irritated.

But everyone else will be cool.

So in the next few years, when some retro-Bushite lets out a war whoop, or some imam talks about the Devilish Occupier, and you want to scream for the region to calm down, think instead of the Dude and Walter, and imagine the placid faces of Khalid Meshaal, Ali Larijani and Bashar al-Assad all saying in unison:

"Calmer than you are."
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