There's not really much I can add to the rolling clusterfuck which is the Hamas-Israeli War or whatever we're going to call it. I said pretty much all there is to be said back in October and nothing has changed.
Except this:
There can be only two reasons for the conduct of the current Israeli war assuming we take the Israeli government at its' word that the objective is to "destroy Hamas".
It intends to utterly exterminate the Palestinian population of Gaza.
Because, given the brutality that such a mechanized industrial offensive must inherently entail, the survivors of that offensive will be so violently infuriated that they will spend the rest of their lives taking bloody revenge.
Therefore the offensive can only succeed if there ARE no survivors.
Or it is meant to placate the Israeli public's and government's thirst for revenge for the Hamas butchery of 10/7, and will cease when enough dead Arabs are piled in heaps to glut that bloodlust...to then resume the apartheid misery for Israel's Arab chattels.
In either case...then what?
Return to the original borders? That'll let the bloody reservoir of Gaza refill with merciless hatred.
Resume the Occupation? There's a reason that Israel withdrew from Gaza in the first place.
Exterminate the brutes? Can even Israel manage that Roman level of savagery in the 21st Century?
So on the first hand "success" must mean genocide.
But to even imagine that will be possible in a post-Roman world is so ambitious as to be almost insane. The Nazis had years and absolute power and couldn't genocide every Jew in Europe, and this would mean genociding every Arab in Gaza who aren't helpless behind wire but will fight, or hide, or flee to return when the heat is off, as it must eventually be, to get revenge.
If that's the objective? It's a stupid objective.
On the other hand there's no real "success" at all. Just a bunch of dead people, ruin, and merciless hatred and everyone right back in the apartheid-prison shit, only angrier and meaner.
That's even stupider.
This whole fucking thing is idiotic, whatever the idea is; Israel's "plan" looking more like the limbic spasm of a nation that has run out of not-stupid ideas.
I don't know if there ever was a not-stupid idea, frankly.
The idea of creating an invasive religious ethno-state in the Ottoman province of Palestine was pretty fucking stupid to begin with; this sort of eternal-war-or-genocide was kinda baked in from the jump.
But this? It won't "work" because it can't "work". There's no way short of genocide to make it work, and there's no way to make the genocide work unless the Arab victims obediently just agree to die.
This just kills a lot of people and turns stupid up to eleven.
And I have no idea what anyone will do, or can do, to change that.
Nope.
Sometimes you're just fucked.
8 comments:
I cannot disagree with anything you've written; it's not only remarkably stupid, it was remarkably predictable, and perhaps inevitable. The only question is how high the bodies will be stacked before they call for a break.
At this point it's almost immaterial; the brutal carnage is already too much.
I don't see an "endgame" here. Like I said; there's no way to successfully genocide every Arab in Gaza (even disregarding the appalling moral loathsomeness...), and, if you can't do that...what?
I think Bibi is thinking "we keep killing them" without realizing how this makes his nation a leper outside the Pinochet Was Too Gentle faction of the Wingnut Right.
Bibi's priorities were always to get back to doing what he really wants, which is erode any controls over him and continue to make life unbearable for Palestinians.
Nobody is really doing anything to hold him back. It's notable that the West doesn't see the need to do something to minimise the carnage in the way they did with e.g. former Yugoslavia.
Peace takes people willing to engage out of their comfort zone, in good faith for a greater good. There is no indication of anyone in power on any side doing this.
If what I've been hearing about Israeli demographics is correct, then what Netanyahu is doing is trying to insure that his faction holds onto power. Personally, I don't think he cares about a Gaza War "endgame", any more than Donald Trump or Bush 43 did.
Once people like that manage to exit out the back door, holding the boodle, it's "game over" as far as they're concerned. And the fact that the fire they started is still burning people alive is simply not worth a second thought.
Netanyahu and his predecessors have been using Hamas as a convenient bogeyman to keep their increasingly right-wing Israeli electorate in line for decades, so the present rolling catastrophe isn't a great leap of policy.
But it does push psychotic depravity to depths we haven't seen much of since the US was similarly baited into shooting itself in the ass, 22 years ago.
DF: I think the huge difference is that there was a viable ground force for the NATO air campaign to support. My understanding of the initial NATO incursion should be better, but I think the gist was "air support for Croatian infantry and armor". Basically NATO pounded the Serbian troops flat and let the Croats do the dirty work of fighting them in Bosnia itself.
Okay, looked it up, and, yes; something called "Operation Deliberate Force" in 1995 used NATO air to support Croat maneuver forces (plus something called the ARBH - a Bosniak ground combat organization) to kick Serbian ass and get them to Dayton.
There's nothing like that here. There's no way in hell the Seventh Fleet provides air support for Hamas, and just bombing IDF troops? Not just no but fuck no.
Peace requires not just engagement in the positive sense but dissuasion in the negative "not in the face!" sense. If one side is too weak to present a genuine threat we're in Thuycididean "the strong do what they can..." territory.
Stormcrow: I kinda get that.
But at the same time, where's Bibi gonna go with his bag o' swag? Switzerland? He's working up to a Milosevic-grade level war-criminal rep. So he's gonna be THERE, in Israel, having to deal with whatever-remains-of-his-life-long assassination attempts and bus bombings motivated by this random butchery.
If ever there was a circumstance that called for Vann's "the best tool is a knife..." prescription for UW this would be it.
I've read several assessments that knock on the IDF for letting the occupation push them towards stupid brutality. Instead of the battlefield-centered, tactically-clever outfit that emerged from 1948 to win in '67 and '73, for fifty years the average IDF grunt has been kicking around helpless Arabs. There's no real need for military skills to do that, but you have to be kind of a massive dick.
There's a reason that the combat record of the German concentration camp guards is...well, zero. You didn't send a good troop to be a murderous cage-kicker; the camps got the dregs, and when the Allies showed up? They just lay down or disappeared.
The IDF is better than THAT...but...
I guess what's really frustrating to me is to see that despite the obvious 1) viciousness of the Occupation and 2) worthlessness of Israel as an "ally", most of the US public still clings to Israel as some sort of weird fetish object.
I don't want Israelis to be butchered. I don't want Arabs to be butchered, either. Given the current situation, I see no reason to back one side over the other. Fuck 'em both, or back 'em both. Neither seem to me to be "good guys" or "bad guys" here, so the choice should be purely strategic.
And let me clarify; I am NOT comparing the moral situation of the IDF to Nazi camp guards.
The comparison should be, rather, to Afrikaaner police thugs whose "training" consisted of beating ANC protesters in the bantustans.
That's...not as bad as murderous Nazis.
But that's not real great, either.
IF I was an Israeli grunt, I'd just as soon not be in a position for some random American to even think of that association, even if the second thought was "No, no, they're not THAT bad..!"
About the comparison of the IDF to the Afrikaaner cops: yeah, pretty much. And it doesn't bode Israel very well in the long run.
Back when Martin van Creveld was in his prime, he spelled out the core of the problem in "The Sword and the Olive":
he who fights the weak will himself become weak
He spend most of that book taking the IDF out behind the woodshed.
Their operational art used to be built around indirect approach.
Today all they know how to do is beat their foes with hammers, and when the hammers break, send to stores for bigger hammers. Too many years of wog-bashing, instead of actual combat experience.
Post a Comment