Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

Shakey, do you ever slap yourself around, or keep it to verbal innuendo?

morbz, have u seen this flick?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalags_(film)

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119244/2014-gaza-conflict-part-hamas-long-effective-war-israel

Their success isn’t measured by death toll but by psychological impact.

That New Republic article wants us to sympathize with the Israeli-based author based on the psychological toll the threats of rockets have and for his belief that even a Palestinian state will keep shooting rockets, but this (self-hating?) Jew is not won over by his argument as he never offers any real sympathy in the piece to people different than himself. Its the same predictable arguments that we have rehashed here re the Hamas military and Israel.

False alarm, not dire enough. Western taxpayer dollars saved and us human rights softies don't have to worry either I guess:

The U.S. military was prepared last weekend to aid besieged Turkmen residents in Amirli, a Shiite ethnic minority. But the latest military assessments are that the situation there isn't dire enough to necessitate direct American intervention. wall street journal

from two posts ago: "he never offers any real sympathy in the piece to people different than himself"

I've been trying to understand Mordy's posts about Torah war ethics, along with his (yes, measured) support of Israel's latest Gaza incursion. I thought Mordy held that assaults of Gazan non-combatants were justified (yes, in a measured way) because they were implicitly complicit in Hamas' actions, including their violence against Israel, simply by virtue of being Gazan under the Hamas regime. & I was thinking of that when thinking about the phrase I quoted above. according to the Torah war ethics you're appealing to, Mordy, what weight should "real sympathy...to people different than [ourselves]" play in our moral deliberations concerning the justice of violence against enemy non-combatants?

no Mordy, I don't remember ever knowing about it.

The images of Israeli dislocation are hardly as heartbreaking as the images from Gaza. But the psychological consequences of the repeated if temporary uprooting of large segments of the Israeli population—and the implications for Israel’s long-term viability—are profound.

The New Republic article writer did say this, and ocassionally paid lipservice to other aspects of Israel's response, but his largely single-minded focus on the psychological toll on Israelis will only draw suppport from those who are already in agreement with him.

I don't have an easy answer to that question, Euler. While I do use the Torah as a [loose] basis with which to understand morality in general (and war morality in particular), it's not the final word for me. I think the Torah advocates a kind of war that sees an oppositional military as the representation of its civilian population. War against that army is war against that people. Even within this there are graduations, though. The Torah says that war against Amalek is total, and it doesn't just advocate but commands complete genocide against that people. (Nb every legitimate Torah scholar believes that this commandment no longer applies, and many believe the original command was more of a homiletic about symbolic nationalism.) Against the seven nations that lived in Canaan during the occupation (the ORIGINAL occupation; "When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations--the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you--") the Torah says you must "destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show no mercy." (Deut 7:2) There's an explicit commandment not to intermarry with those people (and I don't remember the exact details but I know there's a lot of discussion about who and who isn't allowed to convert to Judaism from those tribes - and how many generations later). Then there are discretionary wars, which I quoted a little bit about above.

But in 2014 as someone who considers himself a broadly liberal humanist, I accept with the rest of the modern Western world the distinction between targeting civilians and targeting legitimate military targets. I don't believe an army should try to commit genocide against a civilian population, even one that fully supports the leadership against which you find yourself as war. As such, I think Hiroshima and the bombing of Dresden were moral errors (though mediated somewhat by the circumstances of that war). I think this is all even more complex with the Palestinian people of Gaza (who I'll limit this too, although I think West Bank and Lebanese Palestinian also complicate these questions). First of all, because it is unclear to what extent Hamas represents the civilian population of Gaza (there haven't been elections since 2006 so they don't represent them in any kind of authentic democratic fashion - and even in 2006 a lot of people were making the claim that the population was signing onto Hamas' social programs but not necessarily their political ideology). There are polls that suggest war against Israel enjoys a tremendous amount of public support, but also polls that said the majority of the Gaza population wanted a ceasefire at the very beginning of this most recent conflict. Even more complicated is that Hamas intentionally blurs the lines between civilians and militants - not just because they don't wear uniforms and fire rockets from civilian areas, but also because their very institution blurs the lines. Their police force, normally what one might consider a civilian institution, participates in war hostilities. They have leadership for the military and some separate civilian leadership, but there is lots of crossover there too.

I'm putting this on a separate line because I think it's important:

Despite all these considerations, I do not hold that "assaults of Gazan non-combants were justified... because they were implicitly complicit in Hamas' actions." I don't hold them responsible for voting for Hamas and I don't hold them responsible for any kind of support (tangible or otherwise) they give to Hamas now. I think the IDF should make every effort to distinguish between military targets and civilian targets. However, I do believe that because of the complications I mention above it isn't always easy to distinguish between those two.

I think this is especially true with Hamas, but really every modern army has to deal with this problem. In contemporary asymmetric warfare it is difficult to tell combatants apart from civilians. This is not just true of popular resistance movements (which tellingly accept implicit consent from the population they supposedly represent), but also first world armies - I notice Russia has been using lots of this kind of obfuscation in their campaign in Ukraine.

I'm not sure if this really answers your question at all. Regarding "real sympathy" I would suggest that as individual humans we have a tremendous capacity with understanding the Other - even with our enemies. Sympathy seems to be an affect that exists within the individual - when we talk about political bodies we generally talk about justice, or mercy. Sympathy or empathy are methods of personal, subjective association. I don't think on that count the Torah's laws of war are super applicable. I think the Torah accepts that war is destructive to the cause of sympathy - that to some extent sympathy undermines war itself. But I also think on other occasions the Torah talks about how we should think about our enemies - there's a famous Talmudic passage where Reb Meir (iirc) is chastised by his wife Bruriah because he prayed for a sinner to die - she tells him that he should pray for the sinner to repent. Similarly by the splitting of the Red Sea God chastises the angels for celebrating the drowning of the Egyptian army in the sea because after all, aren't they also His creations? So the Torah definitely believes in a level of sympathy, but whether it should temper an army, I don't know. Probably because I'm split between my faith in Judaism and my faith in liberalism I fall somewhere between the two - I maintain the sympathy for myself and ask that the army make an effort to distinguish between civilians and combatants - but I don't foreclose war as an option entirely and I understand that war itself troubles these humanistic notions.

(I have a complicated relationship to other highly problematic things in the Torah as well - basically though I'm not much of a textual literalist and additionally I believe that revelation can be a Historical process so it doesn't bother me so much that the Torah advocates for things that I believe to be morally wrong. Times change, texts are complex, and I don't feel wedded to any particular interpretation. Still, the document itself, flawed as it might be, still holds a position of prominence in my life.)

If ever we needed a giant whale to swallow someone or Red Sea swallowing an army to show us the way ...

Thanks, Mordy, for your thoughtful response! I've been thinking a lot about how perspectives on Gaza differ from a Jewish perspective than from what you're calling a "liberal" perspective---and from a Christian perspective, in particular a Catholic perspective (since that's my practice). and your appeal to the Torah helped me understand this a little better. & it seems to me that the impact of these differences in perspective aren't talked about in any commentaries that I've read (I haven't looked well though). war seems to put these differences in focus much more than other aspects of the conflict (e.g. the settlements) though the blockade may also have generated some relevant reflections.

"We don't have a strategy yet"--Obama's frank comment re ISIS at press conference (referring in part to the problematic status of them being in Syria, Congress being away, etc.)

http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/28/world/meast/isis-iraq-syria/index.html

Obama said he's asked America's top defense officials to prepare "a range of options" about what the United States could do to go after ISIS in Syria, which he described as "a safe haven" for the Sunni extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State.

Plus, someone tell Dick Cheney that the Washington Post is reporting that ISIS waterboarded Foley and others (just as they were waterboarded)

tbf, people have been "waterboarding" other people for time immemorial. Someone does it in Godard's Le Petit Soldat from 1964 and iirc claims that it was standard interrogation practice in Algeria.

But it isn't allowed under the Geneva Conventions and the US used to follow those (at times) pre-Bush/Cheney.

Yes, I wasn't defending the US use of torture but lots of the press coverage about Foley makes it sound like waterboarding was something novel learned from the Americans.

Re: Cameron and ISIS,

Faisal Islam @faisalislam · 33m

asked if a year on from Syria vote he backed might've meant accidentally supporting whats now a severe threat..

"Don't want to overanalyse it"

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/08/there-are-no-lessons-history

From ILE Facebook thread

#RubbleBucketChallenge. #IceBucketChallenge
In Gaza we don't have water and when we have water, we can't make it ice since the electricity is off most of the time. So my cousin Hafiz, My nephew Khalid and I used remains of a destroyed house to participate in this challenge. I am not nominating anyone for this challenge but I am asking you all to show solidarity with Palestinians and to participate in this challenge.
Thank you in advance
— in Gaza, Palestine.

Video is of two adult guys and a kid in Gaza. They pour buckets of dirt/finer particles on the kid and on one guy and the third guy dumps a bucket of rubble on his head, which looks like it would hurt. (video was posted directly to Facebook, not YT, so I'm not posting it here)

― Je55e, Wednesday, August 27, 2014 11:21 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

o_O

pretty booming post from Mordy up there. Just wanted to acknowledge it.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.613319

Largest appropriation of occupied land in 30 years, apparently.

Yes, and that reminds me---from a few days back,
“The Death of Liberal Zionism,” by the author of The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/opinion/sunday/israels-move-to-the-right-challenges-diaspora-jews.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/world/africa/us-undertakes-military-operation-against-shabab-in-somalia.html?

That was interesting and seemingly out of the blue. Saw a W. Post piece today on US setting up a new drone launching site in Agadez, Niger.

I thought the US only had Agadez and Djibouti as permanent drone basing. Was wrong.

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/218/330/mritems/Images/2013/1/30/201313011580164734_20.jpg

Sotloff ostensibly beheaded today.

Oy

omg biden

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/politics/joe-biden-isis-gates-of-hell/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

idk enough about UK newspapers to evaluate if this is for real or just some insane tabloid nonsense:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/terror-threat-911-anniversary-after-4155703

Most of the reporting is taken from the Washington Free Beacon, which doesn't seem particularly reliable as a source. Dawn Of Libya have taken Tripoli Airport and the empty US embassy but I'm not aware of whether they have ever claimed to pose a direct threat to the west.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/world/africa/somalia-shabab.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

The American airstrikes on Monday against the Shabab, the Qaeda-linked militant network in Somalia, succeeded in killing the group’s leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, the Pentagon announced Friday.

for fans of clash of swords:

http://www.youtube.com/v/-wmdEFvsY0E&fs=1&hl=en

you know, maybe i should have posted that as a link. it's pretty graphic FYI.

so what do we think about this Sinai offer? is it legit? should abbas take it?

If the only consideration were a rational assessment of the future, this would be a pretty good offer to accept, imo. But as any jew should understand, attachments to the past and to specific lands, town sites, cemeteries, mosques are extremely strong and psychologically more powerful than any attachment to an unseen, unknown future. This will almost certainly fail, just as any offer to relocate the jewish state to Uruguay would fail.

http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/205222/art-spiegelman-breaks-his-silence-on-israel/#ixzz3CjDusNJx

u kno, the jews in 1948 accepted a much smaller area than they had initially wanted under the assumption that it's better to take what you can get now and not hold out for an uncertain future. might be smart for abbas to do the same. owning the sinai certainly couldn't hurt.

Needless to say, the situation for jews in 1948 was very, very different. Accepting this offer would require renunciations on a scale much larger than accepting "a much smaller area than they had initially wanted". Even then, it would be an enormous breakthrough if the deal went forward and, speaking as someone far removed from the sacrifices required, it would be a relief to see the current stalemate broken.

this just sounds like Israeli PR jockeying to make the Palestinians look unreasonable imo

^ With justification. The proper diplomatic approach would be to make the offer during private talks and only reveal it publically at the discretion of Abbas. Publicizing it in this context is transparently a PR move, not a diplomatic move.

Abbas obviously won't take it now, even if he wanted to

huh

twitter shuts down al nusra accounts

al nusra tweets call to assassinate twitter employees

https://www.vocativ.com/world/syria-world/isis-threatens-twitter-employees/?page=all

seems super unlikely to me. if al nusra can pull off a twitter exec assassination i'll really have to reevaluate my opinion of their operational capabilities

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/syrias-assad-thinks-he-is-winning-he-could-be-wrong/2014/09/08/09c5044e-a6ca-45d0-91a8-c9eacd4c92f8_story.html?hpid=z1

However, Alawites have also paid a heavy price in blood for their loyalty and now see no end in sight to the war that Assad insisted he was winning. At least 110,000 members of the security forces and the local militias created to support them have been killed since the rebellion began, a disproportionate number of them Alawite, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The minority sect, loosely affiliated to the Shiite branch of Islam and concentrated in the mountains along Syria’s northwestern coast, comprise 10-12 percent of the country’s pre-war population of 24 million. If the casualty figures are true, it is the equivalent of America losing 9 million of its men.

that's insane

Tom Harkin, liberal dinosaur, otm

"We overreacted to 9/11. Most of the people that did 9/11 were Saudis. Why the hell didn't we invade Saudi Arabia? There wasn't one Iraqi involved in 9/11," Harkin said. "We just keep jumping from one mistake to another. I have a feeling we're going to do the same thing with [the Islamic State]."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/10/congress-war-isis_n_5798780.html?1410380344

this is perhaps overly cynical of me but I kind of dgaf about ISIS...? I mean yes obviously they are a horrible organization doing horrible things and that's bad but let's be real they aren't threatening anything beyond two failed states that have totally invited/facilitated this crisis and y'know get back to me when they attack a credible state with an actual army that's an ally of ours because we all know that if they make a move towards Turkey or Iran or Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Israel they will be summarily obliterated pretty fucking quickly.