When They Tell You Who They Are...

Fred Kaplan has a piece up at Slate discussing the one real tell in this whole Israel-Hamas donnybrook; the West Bank settler murders.

It's not a bad piece, per se, but, well...

"Israeli officials must (arrest and try the murderous settlers) to dissociate the Israeli government from these killings, to make clear that it does not equate Palestinians with Hamas and that it is committed to protecting innocent Palestinians in the West Bank.

If officials do not do this, then they are asking for the world to conclude that they do endorse (or at least don’t much mind) the settlers’ killings, that they draw no distinction between Palestinians and terrorists.

There is a great moral distinction between Israel and Hamas. Israel at least warns civilians before dropping bombs; Hamas does nothing to protect its own subjects from those bombs and even deploys them as human shields. Israel’s targets are not Palestinian people per se, even when their airstrikes (disproportionately and unforgivably) kill quite a few; Hamas leaders say that the aim of the Oct. 7 raid was to kill as many Jews as possible and that their ultimate aim is to wipe the state of Israel off the map.

However, if the Israeli government does not denounce, arrest, and prosecute the settlers who have killed Palestinians in the West Bank, then its officials should feign no surprise when more Palestinians are radicalized; when still larger numbers of people elsewhere—who already criticize Israel’s airstrikes in Gaza as a “disproportionate” response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack—come to view Israel (or at least this Israeli government) as a criminal enterprise; when, in short, they, justly or not, draw moral equivalences between Israel and Hamas."

...Kaplan misses the point - that the current Israeli government clearly DOES "equate all Palestinians with Hamas".

So, as thoughtful as the whole piece is, he might as well be discussing commercial applications of phlogiston chemistry. 

As I said earlier; the only point of the current plan of the Israeli war in Gaza is for there to be no survivors, or as close as possible. 

The Israelis intend to do this the Roman Way; "make a desert and call it peace".

Now. I think that's a  stupid plan, as I've made clear. It won't work.

But I also think that it's clear that that IS the plan. 10/7 has, apparently, knocked off whatever pretense or lip-service the Netanyahu government gave to the whole "Palestinians are humans with human rights" thing.

So any other expectation?

Go ahead, make a plan based on that. I'm retired. I got time. I'll wait here.

Like I said before; revenge. I get it.

But like the saying goes; before you go hunting for vengeance, dig two graves.

If I were Israeli, or Palestinian, I'd probably be okay with that as a plan.

As someone who is neither? 

Fuck, no. That's still a stupid plan.

But the Israeli government has told us all by their deeds what they believe.

We should believe them, and base our foreign policy on that, rather than some naive belief in a world that exists only in our heads.

Like I said; I'll wait.