Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

I got the impression that any figures for casualties in syria are highly speculative (& often conservative) 1

the IDF is reporting far fewer total rockets entering israeli airspace than the gaza NGO safety office is reported launched - which suggests that a lot of these rockets are falling short and landing in gaza. altho hamas has not caused any casualties on the israeli side, it's very likely they're killing palestinian civilians who get hit by poorly designed rockets.

to change subjects a bit, and interesting conservative take on syria+iraq

http://www.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/2014/07/11/mullah-dreams-not-counting-sheep/

basically "let's try to dump the whole thing on iran"

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.604898

LIVE UPDATES: Egypt proposes Gaza cease-fire for Tuesday morning, sources say
Egypt sources offer cease-fire deal starting 9 A.M. on Tuesday; top IDF officer says Hamas ready for cease-fire

saw this in that annoying right-wing columnist Jen Rubin's w. post column:

Cokie Roberts hit the nail on the head when she noted that the Gaza conflict is part of a bigger problem, namely “a real absence . . . of American leadership in the region.” She explained that “ you’ve got these rockets going into Gaza from Syria and Iran,” in part because “we haven’t made a strong enough presence in that region to have people be afraid of this country. And so I think there’s a sense that, you know, they can get with anything they want to get away with.”

I am skeptical that the US could really stop Hamas from getting Syrian and Iranian missiles, and this just sounds like more blame Obama cliches.

hamas rejects ceasefire

Ezzedin al-Qassam rejected it, the political branch hasn't responded yet.

israeli security cabinet accepted the cease fire

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/15/gaza-ceasefire-israel-hamas-bombing

Israel's deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, suggested that Israel may now escalate military action to include a ground invasion as well as aerial and sea bombardment. "If Hamas does not accept a ceasefire by 9pm tonight, my estimation is that the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] will have to enter," he tweeted.

However there were signs of division within Hamas. Conflicting messages were delivered by the Hamas leadership within Gaza, and its international leadership. The organisation's military wing also took a more defiant stand than the political leadership.

...
Hamas has set out its key demands for ending rocket fire, which include the lifting of Israel's eight-year blockade on the Gaza Strip, the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the release of more than 50 Palestinian prisoners Israel recently rearrested after freeing them in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.

Mordy, Israel believes that ending the blockade will just allow Hamas to get even more weapons, right? While Hamas and others say ending the blockade will help the economy, bring in more food, etc.

deputy hamas foreign minister (i think that's who he was) claimed hamas leadership heard of the cease fire through the media, not by being contacted by anybody

that was on npr this morning anyway

Israeli filmmakers at the Jerusalem Film Festival:

“Cameras here, in Israel, film and tell about the suffering and pain of Israeli citizens subject to missile attacks….A dialogue must be established, an acknowledgment of the suffering of the other. Today, we want to direct those cameras to the suffering of Gaza residents, men, women and children killed during the last few days. Those filming the suffering of Israelis should be courageous and honest enough to film the killing and destruction in Gaza as well, and tell that story as well.”

“The ‘life goes on’ conception, by which surrounding events cannot and will not affect our everyday dealings, is morally impossible. In these terrible days, we as artists and creators expect from ourselves, the festival’s administration, the spectators and the media to use this event to issue a clear, loud cry for change.

“We call the Israeli government to cease fire; we urge it not to send our troops to be killed again, in another pointless, cruel military campaign; we call it to engage in meaningful dialogue with the Palestinian people and its leaders, to achieve a viable peace for both sides.”

http://www.screendaily.com/news/israeli-filmmakers-call-for-cease-fire/5075171.article

two from hussein ibish:

http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/palestinians-die-in-the-most-cynical-of-all-military-games
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/555893-has-netanyahu-closed-the-door-on-peace

Hamas has set out its key demands for ending rocket fire, which include the lifting of Israel's eight-year blockade on the Gaza Strip, the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the release of more than 50 Palestinian prisoners Israel recently rearrested after freeing them in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.

it's interesting that one of the demands is that egypt open rafah - hamas obv would never dare fire rockets into egypt tho.

rmde at Hamas

i admit my reading on this has been intermittent, but i did not know this (or see it stated outside of twitter drive-bys):

http://forward.com/articles/201764/how-politics-and-lies-triggered-an-unintended-war/?p=all#ixzz374CPB51T

The frustration had numerous causes. Once the boys’ disappearance was known, troops began a massive, 18-day search-and-rescue operation, entering thousands of homes, arresting and interrogating hundreds of individuals, racing against the clock. Only on July 1, after the boys’ bodies were found, did the truth come out: The government had known almost from the beginning that the boys were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas’ West Bank operations.

The initial evidence was the recording of victim Gilad Shaer’s desperate cellphone call to Moked 100, Israel’s 911. When the tape reached the security services the next morning — neglected for hours by Moked 100 staff — the teen was heard whispering “They’ve kidnapped me” (“hatfu oti”) followed by shouts of “Heads down,” then gunfire, two groans, more shots, then singing in Arabic. That evening searchers found the kidnappers’ abandoned, torched Hyundai, with eight bullet holes and the boys’ DNA. There was no doubt.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately placed a gag order on the deaths. Journalists who heard rumors were told the Shin Bet wanted the gag order to aid the search. For public consumption, the official word was that Israel was “acting on the assumption that they’re alive.” It was, simply put, a lie.

Wouldn't you act on the assumption that they're alive, even with that?

You're not Machiavellian enough!

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5897853/gaza-israel-hamas

Israel is fighting only for appearances, says Ibish: it already struck a major blow against Hamas when, under the pretext of searching for kidnapped boys it already knew were dead, it arrested hundreds of leading Hamas operatives in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Ibish thinks Hamas knows it can't beat Israel or extract major concessions, and is fighting to try to pressure Egypt into giving it a freer border and more money.

Israel bombs four Palestinian kids to death: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/16/witness-gaza-shelling-first-hand-account

precision

tbf those kids might have had access to rocks. israel couldn't afford to take that chance.

that'll teach 'em to vote for Hamas amirite

senseless

TEL AVIV — After nine days of aerial assaults on Gaza that have killed more than 200 people, Israel announced late Wednesday that it would suspend the attacks for five hours on Thursday as a humanitarian gesture at the request of the United Nations. But a senior Israeli military official said that the likelihood of a ground invasion to eliminate militants’ rockets launched from Gaza was “very high.”

to bibi's credit he is probably the most reserved israeli PM in my memory about deploying ground forces

in 2009 olmert sent in ground troops on the second day (and had more casualties in the first day from the aerial bombing than bibi has had this entire duration of the conflict)

What's your response to the killing of the four children Mordy? They were playing hide and seek on the beach. Not a suspect area by any means, not a Hamas place. Is that still part of the "appropriate response"?

oh look Israel made a gesture towards the UN how cute

i'm not an official spokesperson for the IDF, LBI. you don't need to question my opinion on every civilian casualty in gaza.

as a general quote for any question you might ever have on a related note: "i feel sad about the death of all innocent civilians in every conflict throughout the world"

I didn't approach you as "an official spokesperson for IDF". I also am not questioning your opinion "on every civilian casualty". Nice you have a pull quote at hand though, expressing you "feel sad about innocent civilians in every conflict throughout the world". Classy.

The death of these four kids is not "sad". It is sickening. They aren't collateral damage in a "conflict", they were deliberately murdered. Israel's army is fortunate enough to have the means to be able to aim properly. They abused this 'privilege' yet again. But you simply can't bring yourself to acknowledge that this is a criminal atrocity.

You want Hamas to stop sending rockets to Israel. I want that too. But in return Israel needs to stop it's apartheid and occupation policy. There is no other way.

they are collateral damage in a conflict.

GAZA CITY — It is not unusual for militants to launch rockets from sites near my hotel. Israeli missiles and shells have also landed pretty close to al-Deira, an old red stucco inn with a large terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Just a few hundred yards down the beach is the fishing harbor.

like when you say "deliberately murdered" do you actually believe that the IDF targeted these kids for some reason? why? obv every civilian casualty damages israel's international reputation and damages the IDF's ability to operate in gaza. what would they have to gain from deliberately targeting children? sadistic glee? is that really what you believe?

personally, I reject the entire concept of collateral damage. it's entire formulation is intended as a moral sleight-of-hand to absolve the actions of a military. but war means innocents get murdered. that's what it is, that's what it has always meant, that has always been a part of it. if you participate in a war, that is what you are signing up for.

xp

the pics are v clear about 4 kids playing around on a sea wall; if journos could them clearly it i don't know what the unit who shot them was looking at.

that one kid was shaped like a rocket

in the social mediasphere, the amount of vicious antisemitism these operations bring out is pretty shocking

the amount of eliminationist racism coming from israel supporters doubly so, frankly. all you have to see is a mention of events like the beach shelling to see a stream of what follows: the kettle logic that it didn't really happen like that, that the kids deserved it, that hamas made it all happen, that they'd grow up to be jihadis anyway, and on and on

win/win

social media re I/P is odious and unavoidable.

like when you say "deliberately murdered" do you actually believe that the IDF targeted these kids for some reason? why? obv every civilian casualty damages israel's international reputation and damages the IDF's ability to operate in gaza. what would they have to gain from deliberately targeting children? sadistic glee? is that really what you believe?

― Mordy, Thursday, July 17, 2014 12:03 AM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

After having learned about the ins and outs today, that is what I believe. That beach wasn't a known Hamas hotspot. No rockets have been fired to Israel from that place (because it is just a beach, there is nothing there). Israel had the spot in clear vision. They didn't strike once but repeatedly. Targeting that spot of the beach, on those kids. There really is no other way to interpret it as it being deliberate. I don't know why, I refuse to believe it is because "sadistic glee". But this is what happened,

Social media on this: to be avoided at all cost.

yeah, it's really hard for me to interpret what looks like the "deliberate" killing of four kids according to journos, using superior american-backed drone technology as "civilian casualties" (or to look at this as a "conflict", which imo is a word loaded with the assumption of even-somewhat-equal warfare -- israel shelling a tiny strip of land for essentially throwing oversized rocks at them is not close). that's either murder -- unlikely, i agree -- or just straight up manslaughter based on human/technological error that decided four kids playing on a beach were hamas operatives.

and as someone with a lot of exposure to the Free Palestine side of reactive social media as well as a jew oversensitive to antisemitism, i can't say i've spotted a single example of anything that smells like antisemitism. nothing that has criticized israel or its citizens on the basis of judaism rather than as a nation. maybe you've been around some different people.

10000 sq miles vs 140 sq miles

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/07/16/371556/israel-must-kill-all-palestinian-mothers/

israeli MP calling for genocide

Israeli explanation in NY Times article

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/world/middleeast/gaza-strip-beach-explosion-kills-children.html?_r=0

Alon Ben-David, a well-sourced Israeli military affairs analyst, said on Israeli television that the first beach blast targeted a structure that Israel believed was used by Hamas. He said the second blast might have been aimed at the running children, perhaps mistaken for militants. He added that given the military’s technologically advanced surveillance equipment, “it is a little hard for me to understand this, because the images show that the figures are children.”

I wonder how this split between the non-Israeli Jewish diaspora, which is increasingly anti-Israel, and Israeli Jews, who are increasingly militant/racist/insane will play out in the generations to come. I was reading some Malzberg essay (from the 90s) recently where he expressed how profoundly insulting and ahistorical it is for Israel to claim centrality in Jewish identity, when for so long - for centuries - it was the Jewish diaspora that was the center and lifeblood of Jewish culture. Now all of a sudden because you live there you are the most Jewish and other Jews should feel obligated to stand in solidarity with you? Younger Jews, particularly in America, are totally alienated from Israel; this seems like a major schism, with no real precedent afaik. Certainly reflects how I feel.

xp

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/07/16/371556/israel-must-kill-all-palestinian-mothers/

israeli MP calling for genocide
--j.

They should put all the palestinians in concentration camps amirite

@ggreenwald
"Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife" = NYT-ese for: Israel bombs 4 boys playing on a beach

Jeff A. Taylor @TheFree_Lance
"At Dealey Plaza, JFK Finds Self At Center of Foreign Policy Debate" #NYTHistory

They should put all the palestinians in concentration camps amirite

― panettone for the painfully alone (mayor jingleberries), Thursday, July 17, 2014 3:58 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

mm perhaps they could avoid the stigma of camps by simply surrounding a demarcated region with military checkpoints

/!\ alert /!\ ^^^^^^^^^ this is not me drawing an equivalency it is a grim joke /!\ alert /!\

this has been your knock on the floor post

can we please not do this bullshit on this thread?

But my argument is not with the Palestinians or even with Hamas. People in the thick of it pursue their own agenda as best they can. But what’s our agenda? What do we, in the cosy safety of tolerant old England, think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Do those who blithely make these comparisons know anything whereof they speak?

In the early 1940s some 100,000 Jews and Romanis died of engineered starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto, another quarter of a million were transported to the death camps, and when the Ghetto rose up it was liquidated, the last 50,000 residents being either shot on the spot or sent to be murdered more hygienically in Treblinka. Don’t mistake me: every Palestinian killed in Gaza is a Palestinian too many, but there is not the remotest similarity, either in intention or in deed – even in the most grossly mis-reported deed – between Gaza and Warsaw.

Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those – it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. Its aim is a sort of retrospective retribution, cancelling out all debts of guilt and sorrow. It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday.

Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial, infinitely more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney sizes. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians. Thus, here and there throughout the world this year, Holocaust day was temporarily annulled or boycotted on account of Gaza, dead Jews being found guilty of the sins of live ones.

-howard jacobson in 2009: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/howard-jacobson/howard-jacobson-letrsquos-see-the-criticism-of-israel-for-what-it-really-is-1624827.html