All the troubles in the world, January 2024 edition

 Couple of quick thoughts today.

1. Israel vs South Africa in the International Court of Justice

A quick reminder that the ICJ, along with a lot of the other "international law" and "law of war" institutions are effectively creations of the last truly horrific global episode of mass death, the Second World War.

That's why, for example, things like the bombings of London during the Blitz, Dresden, the fire-raids over Japan in 1944 and '45 are now officially the "war crimes" that Curtis LeMay admitted he'd have been hung for had Japan won the Pacifc War.

The supposed key is "proportionality". Even in war, if someone attacks you without provocation ('making aggressive war", also a war crime that George Bush could easily have been prosecuted for going into Iraq in 2003...) you're fully justified in hitting them hard.

But not TOO hard. You can't firebomb their cities and kill millions of their people to get the political and military leaders who war-crimed you when they attacked. You've gotta try and kill those people without butchering job-lots of their countrypeople who had nothing to do with the original crime.

What I think is "wrong" with the ICJ case that South Africa is bringing is that it accuses the Israelis of "genocide".

I don't think for a moment that if the Netanyahu government could genocide the Arabic former residents and descendants of those residents of the Ottoman province of Palestine they wouldn't because they're just nice guys.

They're vicious ethno-supremacists, who have utterly embraced the idea that only they are truly human and the Palestinians are some sort of two-legged humanoid vermin. Don't be surprised; had you asked a typical frontier American anytime between 1750 and 1900 of their opinion of the various native groups they were pushing out of their vicinity you'd have gotten a damn near identical answer.

The Gaza "campaign" is just the hot phase of the war that Israel has been fighting against the Pals since the mid-1940s. Including the long march to apartheid since 1967 - something that a South African would be expected to be brutally familiar with.

The equally vicious bastards who engineered the attack on 10/7 know that better than anyone, and that was their plan all along; to rip the smile off the pretty Israeli girl soldier and bare the teeth behind it. They intended to bait the Israelis into what they're doing. Netanyau's people responded like the junkyard dogs they are, and here we are.

The problem I see is this.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is clearly a war crime. It's not proportionate to kill tens of thousands of innocent women and kiddies who happen to be in the vicinity of war criminals. It's not within the bounds of whatever the fuck "international law" is to be doing ethnic cleansing. We - the U.S., that is - bombed the fuck out of the Serbs for that, remember?

But I don't think it rises to the level of "genocide".

So I think the ICJ will rule in favor of Israel.

Which, as Juan Cole points out here, is troublesome just because "(i)f the justices fail in their duty to uphold International Humanitarian Law in this instance, the failure could be fatal to what is left of the legitimacy of international institutions, throwing us back into the jungle."

I note that, per the BBC today, Israel's "response" to the charge is that they are acting in "self-defense".

I'll keep that in mind the next time my neighbor takes a swing at me. Because when the cops show up at the smoking ashes of his house I can point to the ruins, the corpses of his family, and explain how I was acting in self-defense. 

I'll be curious to see how that'll fly.

2) The airstrikes in Yemen

Bret Devereaux has an excellent breakdown of why a) this is entirely expected and - as opposed to the Israeli clusterfuck we've just discussed - is entirely within the bound of international law, and b) likely to lead to a difficult and troubling escalation.

The real problem is the methods.

Airstrikes are a big, blunt hammer. As John Paul Vann said about how they were useless in Vietnam, the best weapon in counterinsurgency is a knife. You try and "pacify" an insurgency from fifteen hundred feet AGL all you're likely to do is piss off the surviving civilians whose homes, businesses, churches and schools you flattened.

But the alternative is doing a Shores of Tripoli sort of punitive expedition, which in the IED-and-cheap-automatic-weapon-casualty-averse world of Western powers is a nonstarter. There's no way for an Anglo-American landing party to do an O'Bannion in Yemen without a hellishly high risk of losses. 

And if so the Anglo-American public, who in general has no fucking idea where Yemen even is, much less the issues of freedom of navigation, the Saudi-Yemeni War, what's going on in Israel and Gaza, and the geopolitical balance between the Saudi-Gulf States and Iran, would rouse from the latest episode of "90 Day Fiance" in wroth and pillory their various governments for...well, something.

Decereaux sums things up neatly, if ominously:

"So on the one hand, the Houthis are unlikely to back down over just a few airstrikes – they’ve shown tremendous resiliency in the past against air campaigns. On the other hand, Houthis have endangered the vital national interests of many countries which are substantially stronger than they are. Historically speaking, piracy and indiscriminate trade disruption were not long-term successful strategies and states have been willing, when necessary, to employ extreme levels of violence to make those activities stop. I don’t think that has changed. Unfortunately, many of the people of Yemen – who have little say in what the Houthis do – are likely to suffer as the Houthis find out why is has been, historically speaking, a terrible idea to indiscriminately try to close down the seas."

Talk about eating soup with a knife.

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.

If It's Stupid and It Doesn't Work, It's Just Stupid.

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.

Mourning the lost

 

A friend of mine and I were drinking and the conversation turned to the disaster that is the former Ottoman province of Palestine. We both agreed that it was all just hell and fucking disaster and that neither of us could see a way out.

I mourned that I as an Army-mad kid had idolized the Tzahal, the Israeli Defence Forces. I'd repainted my little plastic model Sherman and M3 halftracks in IDF colors to wargame the Six Day War with the Israelis as the heroes, and that it hurt to see my old heroes fighting women and kids and guys who just wanted the land they, too, grew up in.

My friend replied that he had been raised to see Israel as heroic as well, as a vision of strength for a kid growing up Jewish. But even more, that he - as a child and an adult - had been confident that Judaism was different from the other religions. That the long history of persecution, that the long tradition of thoughtful rabbinical exegesis surrounding the Torah, would defend his faith from the sorts of sectarian horrors that had so often visited so many other religions. That Jews would be better.

"It turns out..." he mourned, "...that we aren't. We just lacked the opportunity."

My ancestors were used by their English masters to help them run their apartheid state of Ireland. That's what "Scots-Irish" means; Scottish imported to Ireland to be reliable Protestant muscle for the English project to keep the Irish down. I'm the spawn of the "settlers" of 17th and 18th Century Ireland, no different from some ultraorthodox swinging dick gunning for Arabs in the West Bank.

My gaffers didn't lack the opportunity, either.

I was lucky; some time along the road my clan escaped that ugly cycle, came here to the US where the earlier wave of "settlers" had done the ethnic cleansing of the original natives for them, so no need to bloody their own hands.

Is that what we are? Is that all we are? Just one wave of conquerors after another? One more round of oppression and murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred?

I honestly don't think I want to know the answer.

I do know this; no matter how much killing Hamas has done this past week it will not kill the problems of the people of Palestine.

And no matter how much killing my old heroes of Tzahal will do in the coming weeks it will not change the problems of Israel with the people of Palestine.

And yet the killing will go on and on.

I can do no better than Wright did, ending his long discussion with a quote from Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz:

“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

As it was written...

 I thought it was worth reposting this. I wrote it initially as a comment over at Nancy Nall's joint.

"What frustrates me most about this Gaza mess is the obvious fact that it IS an Israel problem, or at least it was. 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 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…"

That's the saddest part.

There might have been another path...if people were different than they are. Kind, gentle, thoughtful...to those others not their own.

But we're not, most of us. We're the same fang-baring monkeys we've always been.

So, no. The moment you set yourself up as a "......" nation; white, black, Christian, Mormon, sun-worshiping...is the moment you make the other the Other, a danger and a threat, the Outsider.

So it was written.

So it is being done. Selah.

Update 10/13: Jim Wright has a thoughtful rumination on the same subject.

Into the Ghetto

 

As an addendum to my post below, a reminder: this, I think, is Hamas' goal.

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.

There is no peace

 ...in Israel today.

That's from 2012, by the way. Same shit. Different day.

I don't see a point in writing a deeper dive into this Gaza-Israel disaster than I already have multiple times.

Here, back in 2006 (and the other three parts of that series are worth a look, because I was a fun read back in those days. Glib and snarky, but funny...)

And here and here, the last time a bunch of people died in and around Gaza in 2012.

Here's my conclusion from 2012:

"Now I'm more than willing to own my own country's atrocities and vileness in genociding the pre-1492 residents of the place I live. If a native American "terrorist" organization started rocketing North Portland and blowing up Tri-MET buses I'd shake my head in grim sympathy - before arming up to exterminate them like vermin. In that fight I'd completely understand WHY my enemies were fighting, and at the same time understand that there was no middle ground there; we both wanted exactly the same thing, and for them to win I and mine would HAVE to lose. And I'd choose for their women and kids to die rather than mine.

But at the same time, I'd also understand that that would make me a monster. I wouldn't make excuses for myself. I would be doing wrong, and willingly, because that's the nature of colonialism.

The very nature of Israel and its situation in the Middle East makes for monstrous choices.

But here's the thing; as a citizen of the U.S. I don't HAVE to make a choice. I can blithely wish a curse on both the houses in this colonial mess. I can wish that everyone involved in the business had made better choices. I can wish that Truman had offered Utah to the Zionists. I can wish that David Balfour had choked on a kipper at the age of 16. I can wish a lot of things, and none of them will made a half-damn's worth of difference."

In the ensuing decade nothing has changed. 

In the decade to come nothing will change, either. 

Last night my Bride asked me "They can't possibly win, right? What does Hamas expect? And why now? "

Here's my guess.

1) I think that the Arab residents of the former Ottoman province of Palestine see that their Muslim co-religionists are wearying of the endless expenditure of blood and treasure on the Palestinian bloody shirt. The Saudis are cozying up to Israel. The Syrians and Egyptians have their own problems to worry about. The old grievances are losing their appeal, so...

2) I think that Hamas see this as a sort of grand scale suicide/martyrdom - dying on their feet rather than living on their knees - AND the chance to hand the Israeli government their Own Personal Atrocity; a Warsaw Ghetto that will help make more anti-Israeli warriors.

My friend says that the whole Occupation is a horror for the way it exposes and destroys one of the most comforting tropes of many American Jews; that there is something uniquely thoughtful about Judaism that makes it resistant or even immune to the sorts of Inquisition/Crusade/Pogrom sort of evils. As he points out, what the apartheid state of 2023 Israel makes clear is that the difference was just that prior to 1967 organized Judaism simply lacked the opportunity.

And I think this is a chance for Hamas to goad Netanyahu's Israel into a Final Palestinian Solution that will stain it the way the original stained the Nazis. Before Treblinka there were fascists. But after Treblinka and Auschwitz and the sonderkommandos? No. Nazism became a uniquely awful evil. The taint of genocide could never be removed.

And Hamas wants to paste that label on Israel. Along with the satisfaction of killing as many Israelis was they can.

Is that insane and pointless bloodshed?

Ohfuckyes.

Is that just another day in the nightmare that is the eastern Levant?

Ohfuckyes, too.

As I saw when I looked out over this field of blood 17 years - and eleven years - ago, I see no "good" outcome here. The horrific conclusion was written...back in 1917 when Arthur Balfour promised away a piece of the Ottoman Empire he had no right to speak for...or in 1948, when Harry Truman jumped in and wrote a check that my country has been paying on for more than half a century.

And I still don't.

"Ruin and merciless hatred..."

Friday Jukebox: Life Ain't Fair Edition

"Welcome home, my child
Your home is a checkpoint now
Your home is a border town
Welcome to the brawl
Life ain't fair, my child
Put your hands in the air, my child
Slowly now, single file, now
Up against the wall."

I hope you and yours are safe and well and hopeful.

For sometimes hope is all we have.

One Last Reluctant Post on the Recent Clusterfuck in Gaza.

The discussion on the whole question of who did and is doing what to whom in the portion of the Middle East where Jews and Arabs butt heads has gotten rather huffy, which is frankly what I expect whenever this issue comes up. As I've said here, and there, repeatedly, there IS no solution outside genocide of one faction or the other OR a massive concatenation of impossible actions on the part of a dozen different parties in the dispute.

For example, here's my friend Lisa, a brilliant and lovely person whose opinion I respect in every sense, commenting on this post;

"The very tiny nation that is Israel could not be defended without the Golan Heights."

Which just makes me tired and sad. Here we are, sixty years after watching two insane World Wars that were ginned up to a great extent because of Germany and France repeating this about Alsace-Lorraine, and look at where it got them.

The sad thing about the argument that we've been having here and at MilPub is how it just convinces me how insoluble this problem is.

Lisa - for all her wisdom and humanity - refuses to see the Arab residents of the former Palestine as anything but "the problem", and meanwhile here are bb and Ael - for all their intelligence and decency - saying exactly the same thing in reverse about the Israelis.

Here Lisa is equating "liberal sympathy" with the Pals with anti-Semitism, while here are the guys - who I have to assume from mere politeness if nothing else are not arguing from a base of "Jews suck" - arguing for sympathy for the Pals because of the actions of the Israeli Right.

I don't think either one of them is "wrong"...and yet, in terms of solving this clusterfuck, they're BOTH appallingly and terribly "wrong".

The simple reality is that Israel is and always will be a Middle Eastern colonial solution to a European social problem.

Israel may very well be "warred upon" - certainly the Arab residents of the Levant chose to fight rather than accept its existence - but what the fuck else could the Zionist founders expect? They were Normans in England, colonists in New England, Portuguese in Brazil. They tried and succeeded in doing what hadn't been done since the late 19th Century; founding a colony. And this was just as the rest of the world had turned it's face decidedly AGAINST colonialism.

Now I'm more than willing to own my own country's atrocities and vileness in genociding the pre-1492 residents of the place I live. If a native American "terrorist" organization started rocketing North Portland and blowing up Tri-MET buses I'd shake my head in grim sympathy - before arming up to exterminate them like vermin. In that fight I'd completely understand WHY my enemies were fighting, and at the same time understand that there was no middle ground there; we both wanted exactly the same thing, and for them to win I and mine would HAVE to lose. And I'd choose for their women and kids to die rather than mine.

But at the same time, I'd also understand that that would make me a monster. I wouldn't make excuses for myself. I would be doing wrong, and willingly, because that's the nature of colonialism.

The very nature of Israel and its situation in the Middle East makes for monstrous choices. Lisa has made hers, Ael and basil have made theirs. And so it goes.

But here's the thing; as a citizen of the U.S. I don't HAVE to make a choice. I can blithely wish a curse on both the houses in this colonial mess. I can wish that everyone involved in the business had made better choices. I can wish that Truman had offered Utah to the Zionists. I can wish that David Balfour had choked on a kipper at the age of 16. I can wish a lot of things, and none of them will made a half-damn's worth of difference.

But one thing I cannot do is change the utterly-fucked condition of the eastern Levant, and the only thing I mourn is that it sets my friends at each other's throats.

But there is no peace

The usual suspects are exercised as usual, and even the gang over at MilPub is getting into the discussion about the latest round of bitchslapping between Israel and Gaza.

I just can't work up the effort to care. It's just another day at the office, and it won't be the last. More dead Arabs and Jews. Yawn. What's on ESPN?

Working out a way for Israel to exist peaceably in the Levant simply requires too many variables to work out right.

It requires Israel to muzzle its right-wing whackaloons and ultrareligious Greater Israel dominionists, retreat to its 1967 borders and pay a whopping reparation for the ethnic cleansing required to found itself in 1948.

It requires the Arab residents of the former Palestine and the present West Bank and Gaza to abandon their deliciously cherished hatreds and angers of things that happened sixty-some years ago, to forget the place their great-great-grandparents lived in that is now a shopping mall in Tel Aviv, find steady jobs in Jordan or Egypt and move on.

It requires the nations of Jordan and Eqypt, Lebanon, and Syria to absorb these Arabs as full citizens, to find them work and a future, to take in the rump of the old Palestine and provide a secure border for the Jewish State.

It requires the "leaders" of all these nations as well as the Arab nonstate combatant groups to stop using their old enemies for the acquisition of new powers.

It requires the foreign great powers to quit selling these "leaders" arms and backing their use of them. And to provide a whopping infusion of cash and trade to stabilize the economies of the impoverished Arab states and give them a future to provide their young men outside a martyr's death.

More to the point, it requires people, all sorts of people, Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Americans, Turks, Russians, and Iranians, to decide to let the dead bury their dead and find a way to live with a Jewish state on the Levant.

And to succeed in making a lasting peace ALL of this would need to happen. One person, one leader, one group, one nation reneging on the deal, and it's game on, back to the old cycle of fighting and death and pointless hatred.

Truman's State Department people, the old Middle East hands, told him back in 1948 that this wasn't possible and that it wouldn't happen, and that if he moved the U.S. to recognition of Israel that he would poison that well forever.

He did, and it has.

There is no way out of this death-spiral short of genocide of one side or the other, and I have no favorite group of people that must suffer or die to solve the problem. The wrath of the angry and the ignorant shall consume the innocent, and there is not a goddamn fucking thing I can do about that.

11 Therefore I am full of the fury of the Lord; I am weary with holding in: I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together: for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.

12 And their houses shall be turned unto others, with their fields and wives together: for I will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of the land, saith the Lord.

13 For from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.

14 They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

15 Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore they shall fall among them that fall: at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down, saith the Lord.

The Return of Politics, or...

"The Stupidity of a Sentimental Foreign Policy".

So the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs are at it again, doing what they do best; battering the snot out of each other. Mind you, it's not exactly the Battle of the Bulge, or Soviets against Nazis at Kursk. This is more like a couple of big-ass Castro Street drag queens squaring off.

Lots of slapping and hair-pulling and screeching. A couple of busted press-on nails. Scratches and even a bite or three.

But both combatants will walk - or strut - or swish - away. In fact, both sides are getting exactly what they want out of this. Hamas gets cred for being the baddest Koran-wallopers in the southeastern Levant, cocking a snook at the Big Evil Jewish Entity and knee-walking away. Israel's government, suffering from a bad case of Little Man's Disease, gets to hang some Arab skins on the kibbutz barn and look all badass, too.

Of course, a couple of hundred women, kids, cripples, old people, house pets and the odd combatant have been rendered into bloody rags, but, hell, you can't make a religious state omlette without breaking some infidel eggs, right? And besides, if they didn't want to be killed, why were they born there?No, as far as this old soldier is concerned, getting worked up about Jews and Arabs fighting over the craptacular Palestinian desert is like staying up nights worrying about whether your kid is masturbating. So what? There's clean sheets in the cupboard, they pretty much do it because they enjoy it, and it's gonna happen whether you stress about it or not.

What DOES bug me is the degree to which my country is all bollixed up by our connections to this moronic catfight. First, the required disclaimer: I find Hamas as loathesome as any of these "built with bloody hands" former guerilla-group governments. They rank right up there with Sinn Fein, with the Tamil Tigers, as a bunch of people I wouldn't invite to my daughter's quinceanera party. But, then again, my country doesn't fund or otherwise support them.Israel is a different plate of matzo altogether. The U.S. foreign policy is fucked up like a football bat where Israel is concerned, and I can't help but get exasperated enough at times like these to point it out.Specifically:

1. Israel is a geopolitically and strategically useless "ally" for the U.S. to get all sweaty about*. Maybe not as useless as Andorra or the Grenadines, but more useless than Panama or South Africa. All the U.S. needs out of the southeastern Mediterranean is:
a. Passage through Suez choke-point. That's an Egypt deal - Israel can't do anything but bugger it up, and
b. A relative lack of conflict, or some semblance of stability in the region. Between Israel and their Arab neighbors we haven't had that for sixty years.
Israel is a nice little Western-like democracy in a place where democracy and Westernism are rare. That in itself makes Israel pleasant, like a fluffy pussycat. But when you add in all the fights, the prickly disposition and the tendency to urinate all over to mark it's territory...this kitty bites. How about a nice goldfish instead?2. As detailed above, the U.S. doesn't "need" Israel for anything. Their appeal and the reason we consider them an "ally" is purely sentimental. We "like" them because they're American-looking, they're modern and Western. We think they look like "us" (instead of the Arabs, who look like "them"). Well. Sentiment is a bad master for policy, or most of anything else outside of love and marriage, for that matter.3. Our reflexive support of Israel, on the other hand, invariably costs us with the Arab states and stateless organizations in the Middle East. Costs us militarily, costs us polically, costs us economically. There is no real reason that the U.S. needs to be an active enemy of the Arab states. We need petroleum, which is fungible and will be sold to the highest bidder - us, if that's the case. And we need passage through several geostrategic choke points dominated by Islamic nations: the Strait of Tiran, and the Sunda Strait, and the Red Sea.That's all.

Beyond that, we should be able to let the Arab nations go their own way. If they want alliance we can ally with them, if it's in our interests. If they harm or otherwise attack us, as the Afghans did (or let happen) in 2001, or the Libyans did in 1805, then we can fight them. But there is no real fundamental reason we need to be in a state of permanent low-level war with them.

And that's it. We have no reason to subsidize, arm or otherwise bankroll the Israelis. And by doing so it makes them our cat in this idiotic catfight.

*(And I don't even want to go into the whole issue of Israel's "right" to exist, who "owns" the land between the Jordan and the Med, and why Israel is even there to begin with. I'm reading something called "A Peace To End All Peace" and the take-away lesson is the appalling combination of ignorance, hubris, racism, greed, bad faith, and stupiditythat it took between the Brits, French, Ottomans, Jews and Arabs to arrive at a Jewish state in the Levant in 1948. Israel, IMO, has exactly the same "right" that the Palestinian Arabs have: the right to whatever they can claw out with their hands and brains. We and the Brits were idiots to encourage the early Zionists to continue to filibuster Palestine. If we wanted to give the Jews a state we already had one bunker for religious nuts in Utah, so, what, Nevada was too good for them? And the Brits had no business giving Palestine to anyone; it wasn't theirs to begin with. But once on the ground, the Jews fought and fought well.A little too well. Now they're stuck with a bunch of territory they can't digest and won't spit out. If we and they were honest the alternatives would be simple. They can genocide the Arabs and take the land, daring all comers to compare them with the great monsters of the past - become the Mongols of the 21st Century. Or they can retreat to the 1967 Green Line borders, fort up and wait for the Arabs to get bored. Or fight each other. Or find a Saladin who will unite them and drive the Jews into the sea. Or reach a modus vivendi with them.

Whatever. That's their - and SHOULD be their - problem. In my studied opinion, the U.S. should have no more intimate association with Israel than we have with any other geopolitically useless state, than we do with Paraguay or Tonga or Sikkim.)

And yet, here we are, again, watching the two screaming nancies battle it out to be Queen Bitch of the Arid Dunghill of the Levant. And cringe at the bloodyhanded insanity. And turn our heads and pretend we didn't see, or that once again we end up looking like the hulking brother of the little bully with all that implies for our standing in the wider world opinion. And wonder, again, what bad cess we will receive as a result of it.

Update 1/3: Here's Glenn Greenwald pointing out the freakish effect this stuff has on American politics:

"Ultimately, what is most notable about the "debate" in the U.S. over Israel-Gaza is that virtually all of it occurs from the perspective of Israeli interests but almost none of it is conducted from the perspective of American interests. American opinion-making elites march forward to opine on the historical rights and wrongs of the endless Israeli-Palestinian territorial conflict with such fervor and fixation that it's often easy to forget that the U.S. is not actually a direct party to this dispute." (emphasis mine)

This is bad - bad for Israel, bad for the Arab states, and especially bad for the U.S. It is very probable that there is no solution for Israel's troubles with its neighbors other than the Roman, Norman or Mongol one - to exterminate the brutes. But this is NOT a requirement for the U.S., and to be a party to it will make us a byword and a hissing in the non-Jewish parts of southwest Asia for generations. We should really be thinking about this, and the way the U.S. government works we are not.

And that's not a good thing.

Update 1/5: Here's a good example of the "debate" regarding the U.S./Israel relationship over at National Journal. It's worth looking at all five essayists' responses. Note that, of the five, the one who has actual experience dealing with Israel, COL Patrick Lang (of the blog Sic Semper Tyrannis), is the most scathing. No, he says, Israel is an essentially worthless, sentimental choice by the U.S. And the most hypertrophic Israel partisan? The usual Heritage foundation hack (in this case, Jim Carafano). Of the remaining three, Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown pens an utterly useless capriole of nonsense about how Israel is so cool and democratic and its intelligence service is SO awesome (this, mind you, right below Lang's essay - and Lang worked in military intel - where Lang says that Israeli intel ain't all that) and gosh, the Israelis are SO like us. Dov Zakheim shows why the Bush Defense Department was such a fucking disaster by making his point that U.S. support for Israel shows our "commitment", and besides, Iran! Booga! Booga! Scary! And Mike Scheuer tells the Israelis to go piss up a rope.

Honestly. It'd make you cry if it didn't make you weep...

Update 1/7: In the comments section Lisa asked about John Bolton's "Three State Solution". I made some offhand comments about how this canard gets thrown up by the usual wingnuts every time the Jews and Arabs start bashing each other and some of the reasons it doesn't work. Well, here's Marc Lynch doing a MUCH better job of explaining why John Bolton is, fundamentally, a tool. Oh, and while we're on the subject: here's Lynch reporting a disturbing meeting with Israel's U.S. Ambassador where Meridor comes as close to actually admitting that Israel has no clue what the long-term plan for Gaza is as he can without actually saying so. Ezra Klein chimes in with an assessment that either a) Meridor is talking fact and the Israelis HAVE no actual strategy, or b) Meridor is talking smack because their strategy is so nasty (killing Arabs until the Arabs give up in horror) or so skeevy (killing Arabs to boost Kadima at the ballot box, or to make Israelis feel better about themselves after the Lebanon debacle in 2006) that, in the words of Jack Nicholson, "we can't handle the truth!"

Either way, this is starting to look ever more lame.