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GAZA_APRIL
February 18, 2025
Some items I posted (mostly in discussions
at the eschatonblog) throughout April and Reading through these now
May of 2024: is interesting, they differ
in tone and occasionally
content from things I would
say now-- these were
remarks made back in the
moment, back when I still
held out hope that we might
turn this around before
Gaza was destroyed...
I find I am having trouble preserving my
sardonic ironic distance on this one.
You want to talk about redlines, "genocide"
is supposed to be one of them.
The not-as-bad-as-those-other-guys party is
engaging in one of the worst crimes against
civilization possible.
Forget about anything like preserving the moral
stature of the United States or the Democratic
Party or anything like that.
Trump bad, but genocide bad.
Genocide or Trump == false dilmemma.
You can't engage in genocide and just
walk away from it going "oh well,
sucks to be them, but we need the
votes"-- this one is going to follow
us, for a very long time.
The competing model is that the bad guys have been in
control the entire time, though they occasionally let
in some "leaders" who wave the Brand D flag.
Stop me if you've heard this one, but I think the
underlying common denominator is Oil.
I remark somewhere every few days that
Israel's foreign policy did not suddenly
go sour because Netanyahu is in power, and
the idea that replacing Netanyahu will
suddenly fix everything is shall we say,
unlikely.
I thought this interview with Hala Rharrit--
the US diplomat that resigned over Gaza
around the beginning of May-- was pretty HALA_RHARRIT
interesting:
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/5/3/state_dept
If you were actually interested
in this issue, you'd think this
is one of the voices you'd like
to hear from.
If you do a search on that URL over
at reddit, you will note there are
no hits in the big discussion groups Jeffrey Fisher: "All very
like /r/politics or /r/world. If it reminiscent of the West Bank,
was posted there it was buried which is sliced and diced into
somehow to reduce it's visibility. bits separated by Israeli
barriers of various types."
We like to talk about problems with
The Media here: this would seem to be a A lot of Israel is like
glaring problem with the New Media, that. Bethlehem is a walled
there's this popular site that offers prision next door to Jeruselum.
itself as "the front page of the
internet", but certain things are not
"fit" for that front page.
The political wisdom that the Jewish Vote matters
but the Arab-American vote doesn't eludes me. I
would rather try to convince American Jews that
Israel has gone too far, than to try to convince
Arab-Americans that a little genocide is no big
deal.
(And this seems to be a tough one for a lot of
people here to get, but there are moral crimes
that aren't really justifiable by "but we need
the votes".)
Calling the position "pro-Palestinian" seems
okay to us, which is why it's convenient for them
to use the label, but there's a dog-whistle there
you'll get if you think about it. For many people
"Palestinian = terrorist", and a pro-Palestinian is
an obvious nutjob you don't need to think about.
It's important to call
them pro-Palestine
protestors, and not
anti-genocide protestors.
NYT headline: "Biden Says the
U.S. Will Not Supply Israel
With Weapons to Attack Rafah"
Because we already have?
This is different:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/07/us-concerns-over-israels-gaza-policy-led-to-weapons-holdup-00156528
"The Biden administration is holding up
shipments of two types of Boeing-made
precision bombs to send a political
message to Israel, according to a
U.S. official and six other people with
knowledge of the deliberations."
Too little, too late of course, but at
this point I wasn't expecting anything
https://thehill.com/opinion/4661959-rafah-is-bidens-red-line-moment-dont-botch-it/
"The Biden administration recently paused a shipment of weapons
to Israel over concerns that the country was considering a
full-scale attack on Rafah, where over a million people are
sheltering. And he threatened to suspend arms shipments if
Israel went through such an attack."
"Those are positive developments. But according to
U.S. officials, in the days following the pause, the Biden
administration has continued to send offensive and defensive
weapons to Israel. And today, Israel is ratcheting up its
attacks against Rafah."
"The president must enforce his own policy and suspend weapons
deliveries to Israel. Failure to do so would only embolden
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu to ignore U.S. warnings and
move forward against Rafah with disastrous consequences for the
people of Gaza and the region."
So Biden is treading carefully, and it's all
eleventy-dimensional and all, but once again:
if Gaza were a nice-white European suburb
this would all play very differently, which
is where we come back to racism ("or anything
like that").
"Rafah didn't happen right away" It's been
abundantly obvious for quite some time that
this is a genocide in progress. If you've
missed them, I can give you links to reports
from the UN and Amnesty International.
Hala Rharrit, a state department diplomat who
resigned over the handling of Gaza recently, HALA_RHARRIT
is of the opinion that this is all about
keeping the money flowing to military
contractors.
Romeny: "An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire,
and yet the world is screaming about Israel. It’s
like, why are they not screaming about Hamas?"
My answer would be that
(a) Hamas killed a relatively small number of
people, arguably in retaliation to Gaza being
placed under blockade for a decade
(b) The United States supports the Israeli
military with money and weapons, which makes
us responsible for what they do
(c) Hamas' actions in no way rise to the level
of "genocide", but Israel's do.
Note: all three points here are independent of each
other. Point (a) could be an unfair
representation of events and the other points
would still apply.
If anyone wanted to object to the term "genocide" I can
supply links to the UN and Amnesty International.
There's no reason that should be controversial.
I think a lot of people regard genocide as wrong,
but are unconsciously inclined to minimize it's
significance when it's happening to brown skinned
people in foreign lands, and find themselves
making up scenarios about "political realities" to
avoid having to do anything about it.
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