the USA, Israel, and national interest

no, feel free to go about manhattan with your head up your arse.

the Israeli army (and I say this from personal experience) can be a big, rough bulldozer

unfortunate choice of words

it would be difficult to go around anywhere with a head up an arse

goldberg owes us his definition of pornography, because his must be pretty fucked up.

When you barely have a military and a completely non-functional infrastructure and society, human shields are kind of all you have left. It's galling to think that Hamas is being taken to task for the last resort of the totally defenseless.

It's galling to think that Hamas is being taken to task for the last resort of the totally defenseless.

This is a pretty compelling argument not to declare that you're going to end the prior cease-fire. The quixotic position, militarily, of Hamas is being shown to be as irresponsible and fuzzy-headed.

When you barely have a military and a completely non-functional infrastructure and society, human shields last resorts are kind of all you have left.

― Tracer Hand

^^ Would be a little easier to swallow. But only a little. Last resorts come in more flavors than "human shield".

When you barely have a military and a completely non-functional infrastructure and society, human shields are kind of all you have left. It's galling to think that Hamas is being taken to task for the last resort of the totally defenseless.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, January 7, 2009 3:25 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

look i think this assault is disgusting and depressing in the extreme but this statement is just nuts. is a qassam rocket cheaper than someone else's kids?

I mean the Israeli-Palestinian conflict aside, this, as usual is also about Israeli doemstic politics and internecine Palestinian strife (aka Palestinian politics). Did Hamas win the last elections because they're 'push the Zionists to the sea' platform carried them or were people tired of the corruption and arrogance of Fatah? Whichever, they took over Gaza by force and they seem to be seeking some kind of legitimacy and esteem in the manner of Hizbollah, without the weaponry, foreign support or materiel that the latter had. Did they really think they could appeal to their hardcore base by lobbing missles, however fecklessly, into Israel and never see a response? Israel impio is trying to assure southern Israelis that they are being defended and also trying to show Gazans that support for Hamas isn't paying much in the way of dividends.

that said, in jeffrey goldberg's example, arranging bodies for western media seems like a secondary kind of evil to me than creating dead bodies in the first place

xp to myself

It's galling to think that Hamas is being taken to task for the last resort of the totally defenseless.

It's galling to think someone's trying to come up with a moral argument for human shields.

I am generally opposed to moral highhorsemanship and okay w the Tracer Hand, but yeah.

It's galling to think someone's trying to come up with a moral argument for human shields.

cf moral argument for bombing children

as usual I am totally disgusted by both sides in this never-ending, mind-numbingly pointless conflict

i hope youre talking about nabisco vs. enrique

sadly, no

How the hell are these two things equivalent?

1) Hamas rocket transportation blows up accidently and kills a whole bunch of Palestinians - someone takes a video and claims that it is an Israeli airstrike.

2) Israel claims that Hamas regularly takes human shields, and it's unclear whether their evidence is sufficient.

The first is an example of Hamas literally KILLING PALESTINIANS. You know, that thing that everyone has a problem with Israel doing. And then exploiting that manslaughter for PR purposes. It's totally mindboggling.

I see how they're comparable in terms of misleading video footage being used to make arguments that the video footage doesn't make. But the fact that someone posted a video claiming this was the devastation in Gaza from Israeli air attacks, found out it was a fake, and then people said it didn't matter (!!!) blows my mind. Seriously, wtf?

Did anyone read this article? It's really fucked up. Also, I really liked the 'stop hitting yourself' analogy used upthread.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123136613816062175.html
Israelis Watch the Fighting in Gaza From a Hilly Vantage Point
They Come With Binoculars and Lawn Chairs; Nurse Znaty: 'I'm Sorry, but I'm Happy'
...
Jocelyn Znaty, a stout 60-year-old nurse for Magen David Adom, the Israeli counterpart of the Red Cross, can hardly contain her glee at the site of exploding mortars below in Gaza.

"Look at that," she shouts, clapping her hands as four artillery rounds pound the territory in quick succession. "Bravo! Bravo!"
...
When a plume of smoke -- the result of an Israeli attack -- rose from what appears to be empty farmland Monday, Mr. Danino shook his head. "No, no, no," he said. "We should be hitting the greenhouses."

makes me want to vomit

how is that article fucked up? did you not realize these two populations actually want to kill each other?

I guess more importantly the thing that article makes clear to me is that even if 90 percent of both the hebrew and arab populations in any part of israel/palestine agreed that coexistence was a-okay and fine and something they wanted, the outliers will ruin it for you every time. And I'm sure, every time, that when the outliers start blowing stuff up and killing each other, more and more of the middle get that If You Can't Beat Em Join Em feeling, which most of the quotes in that article seem to illustrate.

One of the biggest failures of Israel has been to allow those "outliers" to gain increasing power and legitimacy over time. In Gaza, the outliers actually threaten you with violence for dissenting. In Israel, on the other hand, I'm never clear whether they're indulged for short-term political gains without any further motives or if there's a larger strategy at work.

uhh Rabin?

outliers support each other. we've seen how effective fear-mongering politics have been over here, just imagine it in that environment.

media writing about nurse znaty shit doesn't really help/reveal anything. you really think finding Palestinians celebrating horrible things would be that hard to find?

outliers support each other. we've seen how effective fear-mongering politics have been over here, just imagine it in that environment.

totally. I don't know if letting wingnuts hijack national policy is so much of a "failure" as it just seems like part of the democratic business cycle, if that makes sense.

and in a kind of lol but mostly sad non-coincidence, the books I've been reading about the rise of wingnuts in the GOP culminating in the last eight years trace a lot of their starting points back to 1973.

uhh Rabin?

Rabin should have provided grounds to target extremists, not to indulge them.

Yeah, of course they want to kill each other, often in ugly ways, but one side has billions in U.S. military support and a relatively large, well-trained army, and the other is a big refugee camp that's being humiliated and starved. Just by the crude measurement of a body count of how the "war" is going, it's up to around 700-3. For me, the power dynamic between the two sides is central to understanding what's happening (well, that, and race and religion and a dozen other things).

What's fucked up and sad about the article is how nonchalant the Israelis depicted are towards real suffering while living in relative comfort and wealth.

(xps)

that's not just israelis. you may find that in fact the entire developed world is nonchalant towards real suffering while living in relative comfort and wealth.

vermonter, are you trying to say that if we evened the odds and gave both sides a few billion each, and let hamas take some genius classes on artillery, that would make it better? I don't think the power dynamic has shit to do with anything EXCEPT in the macro game theory picture where mutually assured destruction creates the opportunity for a real ceasefire agreement that lasts for an entire generation or two.

(and no I don't really like those odds either)

(xp)
That's true.

I guess what's different about Israel for me is that it's younger and we can watch in real time the violence of creating a nation on someone else's land...kind of like being in the U.S. 400 years ago. Also we can't picnic on a hill and clap while our boys drop bombs overhead either, so there's a difference in proximity too.

You don't have to go time traveling, verm. You can look at lotsa places in the world today where relatively wealthy folks are killing relatively poor folks. And vice-versa. Just like in Israel/Gaza.

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053800.html

Seriously, fuck these guys.

DEEP THOUGHTS BY CONTENDO

Shlomi Regional Council head, Gabi Na'aman, told Channel 1 that local residents have been told to open their bomb shelters and that school has been canceled. The Home Front Command said, however, that no orders have yet been given to cancel school.

Which guys Mordy, the Shlomi Regional Council or the Home Front Command? I'm going with seriously fuck the HFC because yo schools out forever motherfuckers

Sorry, don't have much of a sense of humor about it. I have two brothers and a sister-in-law living in Israel right now.

I'm just really pissed. I want to know how Israel is responsible for Hezbollah breaking THAT cease-fire as well.

israel made the decision to exist, therefore they are responsible for shit that is done to them

israel shouldn't have worn that short skirt to the party. she was fucking asking for it.

ha - at least we agree about revolutionary road

It seems like a lot of the people that wsj article is talking about aren't really ideological extremists but just people who happen to live in Sderot.

btw vermonter in re birth of a nation, there's another UK partition project growing up before our eyes a little further east, and again the same thing is happening - attempts at secular democracy being hijacked by religious extremists. we're 230 years in and this happens to us, so I think it's safe to say it'll be a while. OTOH history goes faster every day.

Apparently making the British viceroys feel unwelcome is a one-way ticket to sturm and drang of the bloodiest variety

I know I was being simplistic in that last post, but damn, I really hate the argument that this particular situation calls for a special kind of one-sided moral outrage over the "very clear evil that those people over there are doing over there!" I mean, it is clear that great evil is being done, on both sides, but it's also clear that the situation exists as it does due to a big tangle of achingly complex sub-situations, and that any attempt to mash it down into a simple bad guy vs. good guy scenario is FUCKED - is seriously part of the problem. And that's why I was getting all moony-inna-joony with the deep thoughts back there.

^^ which is more of the same, I suppose...

israel made the decision to exist, therefore they are responsible for shit that is done to them

― TOMBOT, Thursday, January 8, 2009 1:52 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

israel shouldn't have worn that short skirt to the party. she was fucking asking for it.

― Mordy, Thursday, January 8, 2009 1:54 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

Well let's not be completely obtuse. 1) Israel's decision to "exist" did involve displacing a ton of people and they've been a bit slow to confront the consequences of that. 2) Israel has made normal life in Gaza pretty much impossible since the Hamas election in 2006, which is almost since the withdrawal.

haha yeah it is unfortunate that deontological ethics doesn't work at the level of nation-states

xpost to contendo

or, you know, any time you're making decisions that actually affect other people