the USA, Israel, and national interest

I'm glad we got that settled. I wanted to straighten this out in the HuffPo comments, but it's such a hassle to post there.

wau, Likudniks reprazentin'

glad we were able to incorporate ahmadinejad into this discussion

that was Morbius, not ahmedinejad

there are two sorts of people in this debate: those who spell ahmadinejad correctly, and those who don't

Things will surely be different when we have a former IDF adventurer as White House chief of staff.

there are two sorts of people in this debate: those who spell ahmadinejad correctly, and those who don't

lol

احمدی‌نژاد

^^ ahmadinejad "spelled correctly"

solution: move israel to baja

jews benefit, arabs benefit, mexico benefits

those who transliterate ahmadinejad correctly, those who don't, and wanton clever-clogs

احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد احمدی‌نژاد

Some charged that Emanuel was an Israeli citizen or a dual U.S.-Israeli national (he is neither, he was born in Chicago in 1959); or, they alleged that he served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), losing his finger confronting a Syrian tank during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (he did not serve in the IDF, and lost his finger in a freak accident while working as a teenager in an Arby's restaurant). A few accused Emanuel of skipping U.S. military service to join the IDF in 1991 (also not true -- in the midst of the 1991 Gulf War, while U.S. forces were manning Patriot missile batteries in Israel and the Arab Gulf, Emanuel volunteered for a few weeks, as a civilian, doing maintenance on Israeli vehicles).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/rahm-emanuel-and-arab-per_b_143976.html

Gustafus
Party: NA
Reply #9
Date: Nov. 6, 2008 - 12:47 PM EST
The first thing Obama did betray his anti war base. Game set match - Israel. Rahm Emanuel has an Israeli passport. Rahm Emanuel served in the IDF in 1991. Rahm Emanuel means more war on Islam. Rahm Emanuel means OBama lied to his base... he drank the kosher kool aid to win the election.... all done behind the scenes of course... complete with psyops operations against the anti war supporters... with stories planted that Jews in Israel were 'fearful'... that Obama was a closet Muslim.... ooh.... Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer... and all of Tel Aviv are toasting their historic defeat of the American electoral process.....Obama - lawn jockey for Israel. I'm disgusted. And everybody on this site should feel betrayed and angry. THIS is what Jew hatred is all about - now, before, always... we are the suckers and the dopes... and they pull all the strings... and make and break the kings. I'm rootin for Iran. Save us IRan... save us.

morbs?

Emanuel volunteered for a few weeks, as a civilian, doing maintenance on Israeli vehicles

split those hairs, baby

yeah, you wouldn't ever want to know too much about anything

interesting, from the latest issue:

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20090101faessay88105/walter-russell-mead/change-they-can-believe-in.html

btw

baby

lol

two good posts on talkingpointsmemo, by josh marshall and, from just before the current bombardment, bernard avishai. avishai's is especially to the point:

Hamas is growing in power--in the West Bank, too--directly as a result of this grotesquery. It is absurd to think of Gaza as a separate matter. Nor will the Hamas leadership be intimidated by shows of force. Actually, they thrive on it--precisely because eruptions of violence allow them to be seen as the steadfast opposition to the inertial expansion of Israeli occupation. An Israeli attack on Gaza, which must be bloody, will be play right into Hamas's hands.

... The simple fact is, this problem is too big for Israel. We will need the world's involvement; anyone who tells you something different is either covering for the settlers, or afraid for electoral reasons to appear squishy about Israeli autonomy, or arrogant, or ignorant, or thick, or all of these at once. This post is not the place to describe what involvement means, though the contours of a two-state deal have been obvious for many years. The point is, what Hebron represents cannot be solved by this deal in a few decisive months, like the evacuation of the Sinai was. New changes to the landscape will take years. Or the landscape will look like Bosnia.

avishai's whole blog is worth paying attention to.

and tom segev, in haaretz:

But the assault on Gaza does not first and foremost demand moral condemnation - it demands a few historical reminders. Both the justification given for it and the chosen targets are a replay of the same basic assumptions that have proven wrong time after time. Yet Israel still pulls them out of its hat again and again, in one war after another.

Israel is striking at the Palestinians to "teach them a lesson." That is a basic assumption that has accompanied the Zionist enterprise since its inception: We are the representatives of progress and enlightenment, sophisticated rationality and morality, while the Arabs are a primitive, violent rabble, ignorant children who must be educated and taught wisdom - via, of course, the carrot-and-stick method, just as the drover does with his donkey.

...As a corollary, Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over.

...here is another historical truth worth recalling in this context: Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the Land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians.

Most dangerous of all is the cliche that there is no one to talk to. That has never been true. There are even ways to talk with Hamas, and Israel has something to offer the organization. Ending the siege of Gaza and allowing freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank could rehabilitate life in the Strip.

(Tipsy, thanks for keeping up the better side of this "disheartening argument" -- I appreciate it, because I don't like doing it either, and there are some statements on this thread that boggle my mind too much to respond to reasonably and calmly.)

Mordy, some of your analogies in particular -- like the one about this being a conflict between "two people," or the comparison with Mexico and Texas -- seem to spell out in themselves what you're willfully avoiding about the situation: things like the difference between a functional democracy and a stateless collection of people with various pockets of very short-term leadership (or the difference between Mexico and the U.S. occupying Chihuahua.) These things aren't even the subtle complexities of the situation, they're the basics of it, and it seems bizarre to me to bring such strong opinions to the table without acknowledging them. (Also it's weird to hear you defending Israel by asking for Palestinian self-determination, but that's another story.)

Well, looks like Israel is doing exactly what I said they should. you can keep your book lernins

"What you said they should" was genocide, if I remember correctly

So is a stateless collection of people with various pockets of short-term leadership off the hook for any responsibility for their actions?

There is no "their" there

OMG i was just about to make that joke

I think I'd take calls for the punishment of Palestinians more seriously if their state hadn't already been almost completely destroyed and the actual culpable rocketeers rounded up and put on trial, rather than the collective punishment meted out by IDF helicopters and tanks but you know.

xpost -

That's not an attempt to be glib or land a zinger, by the way, so I'll do the boring explanation:

It's just that you say "their actions" as if there's an identifiable collective there, and then you talk about it as if the "their" in question is the same thing as "Palestinians." It's not, obviously. The reason you're being reminded that it's a stateless collection of people with etc. etc. is that this severely complicates the idea of anything called "their actions." There's no single actor; there's a tumultuous collection of factions working toward different purposes and beholden to one another in different ways and with various levels of legitimacy and authority that are rarely honestly and freely derived from the people (and when they are it's not necessarily for the reasons that would make things morally simple for us).

Nobody's said anything about people not being responsible for their actions, mind you. This is more a reminder that you have to think a bit about how broadly that "their" stretches and how that works when you're making broad moral claims.

Right, just like peace activists in Israel probably don't deserve blame for these attacks, even though they are a part of the Israeli state.

But the people who voted Hamas in? The people in Hamas? Both those sub-groups seem to deserve some responsibility for their actions...and both groups have the ability to influence their own future, so they ain't powerless.

I think I'd take calls for the punishment of Palestinians more seriously if their state hadn't already been almost completely destroyed and the actual culpable rocketeers rounded up and put on trial...

the rockets were still coming down, to be basic. the violence will be counter-productive but it's not being done on a whim.

all of what nabisco says -- "There's no single actor; there's a tumultuous collection of factions working toward different purposes and beholden to one another in different ways and with various levels of legitimacy and authority that are rarely honestly and freely derived from the people " -- would also apply if palestine were a "properly functioning" state, surely?

it applies -- ta-da -- to israel as well.

or are we saying that civilian members of democracies are legitimate targets as a result of "their" governments' actions?

Yes, that's exactly what iatee is saying isn't it?

Or course it applies to Israel as well: that's why we all agree that rocket attacks are not good things! That's why we agree that they're terroristic, and not justifiable reactions to the actions of Israel as a state! And one reason some of us worry about Israel's offensives is that Israel does not have a very good track record of extending that same courtesy toward Palestinian civilians.

Iatee, I'm not sure anyone is arguing that Hamas is powerless, or does not have responsibility for its institutional actions. Much of what Tipsy has argued in this thread is that this sort of response toward the actions of Hamas is counterproductive -- that it strengthens Hamas, that it's not part of a coherent long-term strategy toward peace and security for anyone. The response he's mostly gotten has been "yeah well that's what happens when you fire rockets," which isn't much of a response, and doesn't address his point. We're not just talking about the lack of coherent authority in Palestine for moral reasons, we're also talking about it for practical reasons, because it influences what you can do or should plan to do in terms of a long-term strategy for not having this problem anymore.

Nabisco, I think you're misunderstanding my argument. I'm not defending Israel, per se. I'm simply suggesting that we do both sides of the conflict a disservice by pretending that one is incapable of stopping violence and the other is. Not only have stateless peoples been able to secure rights for themselves in the past, but, as Brohan points out, both parties are full of individuals. Shalom Achshav is an Israeli political party. There is no "their" there in the knesset either. I'd like to see Hamas man up and take responsibility for their people and their actions. Israel should not be babying the Palestinians. It's degrading and unuseful. They should take care of their people, and their state, and let the Palestinian leadership figure out best how to take care of their people. If at some point it becomes evident to Israel that taking care of the Palestinians is most useful to the Israeli population, then maybe they'll do that. But to ask them to ask selflessly because the Palestinians are little children is pretty racist, IMO.

And if you're asking what Israel has to gain pragmatically from retaliated against rockets, I mentioned a possibility earlier: If you want to run a government, sometimes you need to take action when assholes keep attacking your constituents. You can't run a state if your coalition keeps falling apart.

(retaliating*)

Israel isn't retaliating or dishing out punishment to civilians because of fault - it's taking action to get the rockets to stop because it faces a threat from them. There's no justification for targeting civilians, whoever they may have voted for (and let's not forget that Hamas runs Gaza totally because they seized power in a coup, not because they won certain powers in the last round of elections). But, when Israel faces a threat, it is entitled to use force to stop it, and whether civilians get killed during that use of force is largely irrelevant. Which is why the phrase 'collateral damage', while horrible, is accurate - targeting civilians is just not part of war any more

NB the other side of this coin, and why it would work in a traditional war, is that military installations should not be based in civilian areas. Hamas ignore this rule, presumably because of the propaganda value of high casualties (also seen in their current refusal of Egyptian medical assistance)

So is a stateless collection of people with various pockets of short-term leadership off the hook for any responsibility for their actions?

― iatee

There is no "their" there

― nabisco

This is the problem with a lot of the dialogue re: Israel & Palestinians/Hamas/whatever. Both of these encapsulations are too simplistic to be meaningful. Of course a "stateless collection of people" is not the same as a nation, but then again, it's not as though we're talking about a bunch of mutual strangers who just happen to occupy the same region. So while it's clearly unfair to wage war against all Palestinains in response to the actions of a violent few in their midst, the reality is more complex than that. The violent few are not so few, and they often seem indistinguishable from a provisional government.

Moreover, most war is waged, to some extent or another, against "innocent" civilian populations. Physically speaking, we do not fight governments, but rather the citizens and structures that enable those governments to function militarily. This includes those who render direct assistance to their government, willingly or not, and also those who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We do not pretend that this is morally correct, but rather understand it as an unfortunate neccessity that accompanies war, the greatest "unfortunate neccessity" of all.

I'm not trying to justify Israeli brutality, but simply to suggest that things aren't as simple as they might seem, and morally correct solutions are difficult to arrive at in situations such as this.

Not to mention that personally, I'm not sure that a two-state solution that includes the West Bank is in Israel's best interests. I don't know how they'll handle the strategic fact that the Golan can be cut off from the Gaza with two side-by-side tanks if they aren't policing the West Bank. And I don't know how Jerusalem can be protected geographically if there is a two-state solution. Plus, Syria wants parts of the Golan to be given back to them, which, if you know anything about the water situation in Israel, could obviously lead to huge problems. So if you're Israel, and you need to protect your citizens, and the people you are negotiating with aren't ceasing violence - why would you feel confident about them ceasing violence after you've ceded autonomy in the West Bank, or whatever it is that you're hoping Israel does?

Which isn't to say there isn't a solution. But I think it's understandable that Israel responds to rocket launchers with retaliation and not with, "Hey dudz, here is some Peace, man!"

Iatee, I'm not sure anyone is arguing that Hamas is powerless, or does not have responsibility for its institutional actions. Much of what Tipsy has argued in this thread is that this sort of response toward the actions of Hamas is counterproductive -- that it strengthens Hamas, that it's not part of a coherent long-term strategy toward peace and security for anyone. The response he's mostly gotten has been "yeah well that's what happens when you fire rockets," which isn't much of a response, and doesn't address his point. We're not just talking about the lack of coherent authority in Palestine for moral reasons, we're also talking about it for practical reasons, because it influences what you can do or should plan to do in terms of a long-term strategy for not having this problem anymore.

I agree with all of this, I think the majority of the things the Israeli government does are counterproductive and very bad for its long term-interests. Where I differ is that I don't expect the Israeli people to be acting any more rationally when they're in this sort of psychological position than the Palestinians do (or the Americans did...) just because they have a more organized political structure and bigger guns.

the issue is not -- or at least shouldn't be -- the relative responsibility or accountability of the palestinian or israeli populations. that's a moral rabbit hole. the only thing that matters is whether actions make an ultimate resolution more or less achievable. if this attack seemed like or could be justified as part of a coherent move toward that resolution, that would be one thing. that is, if the military devastation of hamas was likely to actually remove obstacles to eventual peace, it would be easier to justify from a practical stanpoint. but there's no indication of that, at all. as tom segev says in that column, this is just the same thing over and over, and it doesn't lead anywhere good.

also let's not exaggerate the threat of the rocket attacks. the threat is real, for the people who live in those areas, but it is hardly existential. the real existential threat is the inability to come to terms -- however painful -- on a two-state agreement. anything that makes that agreement harder to reach is a much graver threat to israel than any number of poorly aimed and randomly fired peasant rockets.

(a "practical stanpoint" = the point of view of yr average stan)

I'm not going to try and quantify the existential threat, but I think that Israel ignoring rockets drop on Sderot for over a year because it's one of the poorest cities in the country is a pretty huge existential threat.

Mordy I think it is really disingenuous to try and compare the "no their" of a democratic state to the "no their" of Palestine -- yes, obviously neither is a hive mind, both are just collections of people with different agendas, but one of these has a working, central, legitimate authority and the other struggles to have anything even vaguely resembling one. I suspect you know that's disingenuous, too.

Contenderizer I think that's a reasonably fair way of putting a lot of that, but keep in mind that I'm saying "there's no 'their' there" in response to a whole lot of earlier posts that seem to act as if the situation is symmetrical. It's just ... really, really, really not symmetrical.

P.S. Mordy I'd note here, just in passing, that a lot of Hamas's popularity in Palestine stems from the perception that it did a much better job "taking care of people" -- in terms of things like hospitals and schools -- than Fatah did. This isn't a defense of Hamas, or anything, just a note that development and peace are not necessarily polar opposites for such groups, which is definitely a problem in figuring out how to respond to them. Israel's strategy has seemed, for a while, to be to make them polar opposites, by strangling and destroying any positive progress that doesn't come along with peace; a lot of signs suggest this creates a vicious circle that helps no one.

...military installations should not be based in civilian areas. Hamas ignore this rule, presumably because of the propaganda value of high casualties.

-- IK

Yeah, sure, "presumably".

Or presumably they do this because they are not granted the right to have a military in the first place, and thus must hide it. Or presumably because they are massively, MASSIVELY overwhelmed militarily and have no ability to win in a direct, "fair fight". Or presumably because they don't really own the land they occupy, or much of anything at all, and therefore lack the luxury of such conventional manners.

Insisting that military rules developed by and for rich, powerful, first-world nations must apply to all-but-powerless, third-world non-nations in their conflicts with the former = the height of hypocrisy.

I'm not being disingenuous, I'm just suggesting that your comparison is meaningless. If your argument is that Palestinian authority can't be held responsible for rogue terror - I don't disagree. But when the elected leadership is claiming responsibility for those attacks, what do you gain from saying there's no "their" there? Weren't most of the retaliatory installations hit those of Hamas leadership?

also let's not exaggerate the threat of the rocket attacks. the threat is real, for the people who live in those areas, but it is hardly existential. the real existential threat is the inability to come to terms -- however painful -- on a two-state agreement. anything that makes that agreement harder to reach is a much graver threat to israel than any number of poorly aimed and randomly fired peasant rockets.

Rocket attacks / suicide bombings are psychological threats - and they were meant to be. Obv way fewer Israelis die, but they still succeed in freaking everyone the fuck out. In that sense, they're exactly as successful as the IDF attacks.

the only thing that matters is whether actions make an ultimate resolution more or less achievable. if this attack seemed like or could be justified as part of a coherent move toward that resolution, that would be one thing. that is, if the military devastation of hamas was likely to actually remove obstacles to eventual peace, it would be easier to justify from a practical stanpoint.

-- tipsy

Sometimes our responses to situations -- even the best available responses to situations -- have less to do with acheiving an "ultimate resolution" than with solving an immediate, short-term problem. Here, I think the Israeli response isn't an attempt to resolve the conflict as a whole, but simply to stop the rockets from falling, if only for a while. On that level it seems entirely reasonable, if not entirely prudent.