My Bride is right; the latest military action is hopeless militarily. It cannot possibly "win" in the conventional sense. Any more than the airliners of September 2001 could "win" anything.
It can do what those airliners did, and what this photo does; firmly affix the image of a brute with a rifle destroying a helpless innocent family. Making that brute a hissing and a byword for horror.
Over at Nancy Nall's joint I said that, and was called out for cheap-shotting Israeli soldiers.
I replied:
"When you swing a butcher’s cleaver, you should not be surprised when people call you a butcher.
When Israel made the political choice to treat their Arab subjects like the apartheid regime treated its black citizens, it chose the mantle of apartheid.
When Israel goes into Gaza it will have to use the exact same methods the Germans used in Warsaw in 1943 and the Soviets in Berlin in 1945. It makes them neither Nazis nor Communists, but it will make them monsters in the way the SS in Warsaw and the Red Army in Berlin were monsters.
That’s not a cheap shot. That’s war, which, as Bill Sherman reminded us, is all Hell. And urban war, as I remind you, is a specially awful Hell that earns the maker the kind of bloodyhanded mantle that stains for generations.
That, I think, is Hamas’ entire intention. They want to generate a photo as iconic as the infamous one of the German soldiers herding the little kid with his hands up down the Warsaw street. They want the Arab world to associate that with Israel.
Feel free to call it what you like. But if Israel goes ahead with what I’m sure they will, that’s what they risk; becoming not just apartheid Afrikaaners but joining history’s great butchers."
And, thinking on this further, I see no reason to alter so much as a syllable of that reply.
3 comments:
I believe you are completely right.
Bibi is using bunker busters on the Gaza tunnels. That will fry the hostages as well. So has he given up on rescuing or ransoming them? Strange, as a dozen years ago he signed off on releasing a thousand plus Hamas from prison in exchange for one IDF Corporal.
I honestly have no clue what the Israeli "operational" objective is outside pure rage and revenge. Likud spent a ton of time and effort stroking Hamas to fuck over the PA, and now their dog has bitten them I think they're just as likely to be lashing out of blind rage.
I wrote this over at another site and I think it pretty much sums this up:
"If the new country was going to be a “Jewish state” (and my memory of the first sabras was that there were many pretty secular Israelis in the early days, but the goal was still “Jewish”) then anyone who was not-Jewish was gonna be by definition not-100%-Israeli. So the danger of what the Occupation made a fact – Israel as an anti-Arab apartheid state – was always kinda baked in.
If the Arab states had been less shirty about the issue, if Israel had been less threatened, if the Great Powers had been more concerned…well, they weren’t. So here we are.
And here we’re gonna be. All the killing, all the hate, all the vengeance…there’s no undoing any of that. There’s no getting around it. Too many people now see hating on the “others” as giving their own lives meaning…and Israel is caught inside their own history. They fear giving up the Territories (I had a friend (NB: this was Lisa back in 2012) "tell me flat-out “Israel cannot survive without the Golan” and that’s a widespread belief about the West Bank, too – they’re strategic depth) but to keep at least the West Bank means continuing apartheid at best, and flat-out ethnic cleansing at worst.
And for the Arab subjects? How galling it must be to look at how the world reacted to South Africa, how Mandela is revered and the armed wing of the ANC is overlooked no matter how many white farmer families they murdered (“one Afrikaaner, one bullet”), compared to how their own Bantustans are viewed.
Nope. It’s just grimdark no matter where you look."
I think it's gone past the point of trying to make sense. It's all hindbrain rage and fear.
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