Graphic Firing Table

 Couple of quick thoughts today.

1. Israel vs South Africa in the International Court of Justice

A quick reminder that the ICJ, along with a lot of the other "international law" and "law of war" institutions are effectively creations of the last truly horrific global episode of mass death, the Second World War.

That's why, for example, things like the bombings of London during the Blitz, Dresden, the fire-raids over Japan in 1944 and '45 are now officially the "war crimes" that Curtis LeMay admitted he'd have been hung for had Japan won the Pacifc War.

The supposed key is "proportionality". Even in war, if someone attacks you without provocation ('making aggressive war", also a war crime that George Bush could easily have been prosecuted for going into Iraq in 2003...) you're fully justified in hitting them hard.

But not TOO hard. You can't firebomb their cities and kill millions of their people to get the political and military leaders who war-crimed you when they attacked. You've gotta try and kill those people without butchering job-lots of their countrypeople who had nothing to do with the original crime.

What I think is "wrong" with the ICJ case that South Africa is bringing is that it accuses the Israelis of "genocide".

I don't think for a moment that if the Netanyahu government could genocide the Arabic former residents and descendants of those residents of the Ottoman province of Palestine they wouldn't because they're just nice guys.

They're vicious ethno-supremacists, who have utterly embraced the idea that only they are truly human and the Palestinians are some sort of two-legged humanoid vermin. Don't be surprised; had you asked a typical frontier American anytime between 1750 and 1900 of their opinion of the various native groups they were pushing out of their vicinity you'd have gotten a damn near identical answer.

The Gaza "campaign" is just the hot phase of the war that Israel has been fighting against the Pals since the mid-1940s. Including the long march to apartheid since 1967 - something that a South African would be expected to be brutally familiar with.

The equally vicious bastards who engineered the attack on 10/7 know that better than anyone, and that was their plan all along; to rip the smile off the pretty Israeli girl soldier and bare the teeth behind it. They intended to bait the Israelis into what they're doing. Netanyau's people responded like the junkyard dogs they are, and here we are.

The problem I see is this.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is clearly a war crime. It's not proportionate to kill tens of thousands of innocent women and kiddies who happen to be in the vicinity of war criminals. It's not within the bounds of whatever the fuck "international law" is to be doing ethnic cleansing. We - the U.S., that is - bombed the fuck out of the Serbs for that, remember?

But I don't think it rises to the level of "genocide".

So I think the ICJ will rule in favor of Israel.

Which, as Juan Cole points out here, is troublesome just because "(i)f the justices fail in their duty to uphold International Humanitarian Law in this instance, the failure could be fatal to what is left of the legitimacy of international institutions, throwing us back into the jungle."

I note that, per the BBC today, Israel's "response" to the charge is that they are acting in "self-defense".

I'll keep that in mind the next time my neighbor takes a swing at me. Because when the cops show up at the smoking ashes of his house I can point to the ruins, the corpses of his family, and explain how I was acting in self-defense. 

I'll be curious to see how that'll fly.

2) The airstrikes in Yemen

Bret Devereaux has an excellent breakdown of why a) this is entirely expected and - as opposed to the Israeli clusterfuck we've just discussed - is entirely within the bound of international law, and b) likely to lead to a difficult and troubling escalation.

The real problem is the methods.

Airstrikes are a big, blunt hammer. As John Paul Vann said about how they were useless in Vietnam, the best weapon in counterinsurgency is a knife. You try and "pacify" an insurgency from fifteen hundred feet AGL all you're likely to do is piss off the surviving civilians whose homes, businesses, churches and schools you flattened.

But the alternative is doing a Shores of Tripoli sort of punitive expedition, which in the IED-and-cheap-automatic-weapon-casualty-averse world of Western powers is a nonstarter. There's no way for an Anglo-American landing party to do an O'Bannion in Yemen without a hellishly high risk of losses. 

And if so the Anglo-American public, who in general has no fucking idea where Yemen even is, much less the issues of freedom of navigation, the Saudi-Yemeni War, what's going on in Israel and Gaza, and the geopolitical balance between the Saudi-Gulf States and Iran, would rouse from the latest episode of "90 Day Fiance" in wroth and pillory their various governments for...well, something.

Decereaux sums things up neatly, if ominously:

"So on the one hand, the Houthis are unlikely to back down over just a few airstrikes – they’ve shown tremendous resiliency in the past against air campaigns. On the other hand, Houthis have endangered the vital national interests of many countries which are substantially stronger than they are. Historically speaking, piracy and indiscriminate trade disruption were not long-term successful strategies and states have been willing, when necessary, to employ extreme levels of violence to make those activities stop. I don’t think that has changed. Unfortunately, many of the people of Yemen – who have little say in what the Houthis do – are likely to suffer as the Houthis find out why is has been, historically speaking, a terrible idea to indiscriminately try to close down the seas."

Talk about eating soup with a knife.

Fred Kaplan has a piece up at Slate discussing the one real tell in this whole Israel-Hamas donnybrook; the West Bank settler murders.

It's not a bad piece, per se, but, well...

"Israeli officials must (arrest and try the murderous settlers) to dissociate the Israeli government from these killings, to make clear that it does not equate Palestinians with Hamas and that it is committed to protecting innocent Palestinians in the West Bank.

If officials do not do this, then they are asking for the world to conclude that they do endorse (or at least don’t much mind) the settlers’ killings, that they draw no distinction between Palestinians and terrorists.

There is a great moral distinction between Israel and Hamas. Israel at least warns civilians before dropping bombs; Hamas does nothing to protect its own subjects from those bombs and even deploys them as human shields. Israel’s targets are not Palestinian people per se, even when their airstrikes (disproportionately and unforgivably) kill quite a few; Hamas leaders say that the aim of the Oct. 7 raid was to kill as many Jews as possible and that their ultimate aim is to wipe the state of Israel off the map.

However, if the Israeli government does not denounce, arrest, and prosecute the settlers who have killed Palestinians in the West Bank, then its officials should feign no surprise when more Palestinians are radicalized; when still larger numbers of people elsewhere—who already criticize Israel’s airstrikes in Gaza as a “disproportionate” response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack—come to view Israel (or at least this Israeli government) as a criminal enterprise; when, in short, they, justly or not, draw moral equivalences between Israel and Hamas."

...Kaplan misses the point - that the current Israeli government clearly DOES "equate all Palestinians with Hamas".

So, as thoughtful as the whole piece is, he might as well be discussing commercial applications of phlogiston chemistry. 

As I said earlier; the only point of the current plan of the Israeli war in Gaza is for there to be no survivors, or as close as possible. 

The Israelis intend to do this the Roman Way; "make a desert and call it peace".

Now. I think that's a  stupid plan, as I've made clear. It won't work.

But I also think that it's clear that that IS the plan. 10/7 has, apparently, knocked off whatever pretense or lip-service the Netanyahu government gave to the whole "Palestinians are humans with human rights" thing.

So any other expectation?

Go ahead, make a plan based on that. I'm retired. I got time. I'll wait here.

Like I said before; revenge. I get it.

But like the saying goes; before you go hunting for vengeance, dig two graves.

If I were Israeli, or Palestinian, I'd probably be okay with that as a plan.

As someone who is neither? 

Fuck, no. That's still a stupid plan.

But the Israeli government has told us all by their deeds what they believe.

We should believe them, and base our foreign policy on that, rather than some naive belief in a world that exists only in our heads.

Like I said; I'll wait.

There's not really much I can add to the rolling clusterfuck which is the Hamas-Israeli War or whatever we're going to call it. I said pretty much all there is to be said back in October and nothing has changed.

Except this:

There can be only two reasons for the conduct of the current Israeli war assuming we take the Israeli government at its' word that the objective is to "destroy Hamas".

It intends to utterly exterminate the Palestinian population of Gaza.

Because, given the brutality that such a mechanized industrial offensive must inherently entail, the survivors of that offensive will be so violently infuriated that they will spend the rest of their lives taking bloody revenge.

Therefore the offensive can only succeed if there ARE no survivors.

Or it is meant to placate the Israeli public's and government's thirst for revenge for the Hamas butchery of 10/7, and will cease when enough dead Arabs are piled in heaps to glut that bloodlust...to then resume the apartheid misery for Israel's Arab chattels.

In either case...then what?

Return to the original borders? That'll let the bloody reservoir of Gaza refill with merciless hatred.

Resume the Occupation? There's a reason that Israel withdrew from Gaza in the first place.

Exterminate the brutes? Can even Israel manage that Roman level of savagery in the 21st Century?

So on the first hand "success" must mean genocide. 

But to even imagine that will be possible in a post-Roman world is so ambitious as to be almost insane. The Nazis had years and absolute power and couldn't genocide every Jew in Europe, and this would mean genociding every Arab in Gaza who aren't helpless behind wire but will fight, or hide, or flee to return when the heat is off, as it must eventually be, to get revenge.

If that's the objective? It's a stupid objective.

On the other hand there's no real "success" at all. Just a bunch of dead people, ruin, and merciless hatred and everyone right back in the apartheid-prison shit, only angrier and meaner.

That's even stupider.

This whole fucking thing is idiotic, whatever the idea is; Israel's "plan" looking more like the limbic spasm of a nation that has run out of not-stupid ideas.

I don't know if there ever was a not-stupid idea, frankly. 

The idea of creating an invasive religious ethno-state in the Ottoman province of Palestine was pretty fucking stupid to begin with; this sort of eternal-war-or-genocide was kinda baked in from the jump.

But this? It won't "work" because it can't "work". There's no way short of genocide to make it work, and there's no way to make the genocide work unless the Arab victims obediently just agree to die.

This just kills a lot of people and turns stupid up to eleven.

And I have no idea what anyone will do, or can do, to change that.

Nope. 

Sometimes you're just fucked.

 

A friend of mine and I were drinking and the conversation turned to the disaster that is the former Ottoman province of Palestine. We both agreed that it was all just hell and fucking disaster and that neither of us could see a way out.

I mourned that I as an Army-mad kid had idolized the Tzahal, the Israeli Defence Forces. I'd repainted my little plastic model Sherman and M3 halftracks in IDF colors to wargame the Six Day War with the Israelis as the heroes, and that it hurt to see my old heroes fighting women and kids and guys who just wanted the land they, too, grew up in.

My friend replied that he had been raised to see Israel as heroic as well, as a vision of strength for a kid growing up Jewish. But even more, that he - as a child and an adult - had been confident that Judaism was different from the other religions. That the long history of persecution, that the long tradition of thoughtful rabbinical exegesis surrounding the Torah, would defend his faith from the sorts of sectarian horrors that had so often visited so many other religions. That Jews would be better.

"It turns out..." he mourned, "...that we aren't. We just lacked the opportunity."

My ancestors were used by their English masters to help them run their apartheid state of Ireland. That's what "Scots-Irish" means; Scottish imported to Ireland to be reliable Protestant muscle for the English project to keep the Irish down. I'm the spawn of the "settlers" of 17th and 18th Century Ireland, no different from some ultraorthodox swinging dick gunning for Arabs in the West Bank.

My gaffers didn't lack the opportunity, either.

I was lucky; some time along the road my clan escaped that ugly cycle, came here to the US where the earlier wave of "settlers" had done the ethnic cleansing of the original natives for them, so no need to bloody their own hands.

Is that what we are? Is that all we are? Just one wave of conquerors after another? One more round of oppression and murder and rape and ruin and merciless hatred?

I honestly don't think I want to know the answer.

I do know this; no matter how much killing Hamas has done this past week it will not kill the problems of the people of Palestine.

And no matter how much killing my old heroes of Tzahal will do in the coming weeks it will not change the problems of Israel with the people of Palestine.

And yet the killing will go on and on.

I can do no better than Wright did, ending his long discussion with a quote from Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz:

“Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America—burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

 I thought it was worth reposting this. I wrote it initially as a comment over at Nancy Nall's joint.

"What frustrates me most about this Gaza mess is the obvious fact that it IS an Israel problem, or at least it was. If the new country was going to be a “Jewish state” (and my memory of the first sabras was that there were many pretty secular Israelis in the early days, but the goal was still “Jewish”) then anyone who was not-Jewish was gonna be by definition not-100%-Israeli. So the danger of what the Occupation made a fact – Israel as an anti-Arab apartheid state – was always kinda baked in.

If the Arab states had been less shirty about the issue, if Israel had been less threatened, if the Great Powers had been more concerned…well, they weren’t. So here we are.

And here we’re gonna be. All the killing, all the hate, all the vengeance…there’s no undoing any of that. There’s no getting around it. Too many people now see hating on the “others” as giving their own lives meaning…and Israel is caught inside their own history. They fear giving up the Territories (I had a friend tell me flat-out “Israel cannot survive without the Golan” and that’s a widespread belief about the West Bank, too – they’re strategic depth) but to keep at least the West Bank means continuing apartheid at best, and flat-out ethnic cleansing at worst.

And for the Arab subjects? How galling it must be to look at how the world reacted to South Africa, how Mandela is revered and the armed wing of the ANC is overlooked no matter how many white farmer families they murdered (“one Afrikaaner, one bullet”), compared to how their own Bantustans are viewed.

Nope. It’s just grimdark no matter where you look…"

That's the saddest part.

There might have been another path...if people were different than they are. Kind, gentle, thoughtful...to those others not their own.

But we're not, most of us. We're the same fang-baring monkeys we've always been.

So, no. The moment you set yourself up as a "......" nation; white, black, Christian, Mormon, sun-worshiping...is the moment you make the other the Other, a danger and a threat, the Outsider.

So it was written.

So it is being done. Selah.

Update 10/13: Jim Wright has a thoughtful rumination on the same subject.

 

As an addendum to my post below, a reminder: this, I think, is Hamas' goal.

My Bride is right; the latest military action is hopeless militarily. It cannot possibly "win" in the conventional sense. Any more than the airliners of September 2001 could "win" anything.

It can do what those airliners did, and what this photo does; firmly affix the image of a brute with a rifle destroying a helpless innocent family. Making that brute a hissing and a byword for horror.

Over at Nancy Nall's joint I said that, and was called out for cheap-shotting Israeli soldiers.

I replied:

"When you swing a butcher’s cleaver, you should not be surprised when people call you a butcher.

When Israel made the political choice to treat their Arab subjects like the apartheid regime treated its black citizens, it chose the mantle of apartheid.

When Israel goes into Gaza it will have to use the exact same methods the Germans used in Warsaw in 1943 and the Soviets in Berlin in 1945. It makes them neither Nazis nor Communists, but it will make them monsters in the way the SS in Warsaw and the Red Army in Berlin were monsters.

That’s not a cheap shot. That’s war, which, as Bill Sherman reminded us, is all Hell. And urban war, as I remind you, is a specially awful Hell that earns the maker the kind of bloodyhanded mantle that stains for generations.

That, I think, is Hamas’ entire intention. They want to generate a photo as iconic as the infamous one of the German soldiers herding the little kid with his hands up down the Warsaw street. They want the Arab world to associate that with Israel.

Feel free to call it what you like. But if Israel goes ahead with what I’m sure they will, that’s what they risk; becoming not just apartheid Afrikaaners but joining history’s great butchers."

And, thinking on this further, I see no reason to alter so much as a syllable of that reply.

 ...in Israel today.

That's from 2012, by the way. Same shit. Different day.

I don't see a point in writing a deeper dive into this Gaza-Israel disaster than I already have multiple times.

Here, back in 2006 (and the other three parts of that series are worth a look, because I was a fun read back in those days. Glib and snarky, but funny...)

And here and here, the last time a bunch of people died in and around Gaza in 2012.

Here's my conclusion from 2012:

"Now I'm more than willing to own my own country's atrocities and vileness in genociding the pre-1492 residents of the place I live. If a native American "terrorist" organization started rocketing North Portland and blowing up Tri-MET buses I'd shake my head in grim sympathy - before arming up to exterminate them like vermin. In that fight I'd completely understand WHY my enemies were fighting, and at the same time understand that there was no middle ground there; we both wanted exactly the same thing, and for them to win I and mine would HAVE to lose. And I'd choose for their women and kids to die rather than mine.

But at the same time, I'd also understand that that would make me a monster. I wouldn't make excuses for myself. I would be doing wrong, and willingly, because that's the nature of colonialism.

The very nature of Israel and its situation in the Middle East makes for monstrous choices.

But here's the thing; as a citizen of the U.S. I don't HAVE to make a choice. I can blithely wish a curse on both the houses in this colonial mess. I can wish that everyone involved in the business had made better choices. I can wish that Truman had offered Utah to the Zionists. I can wish that David Balfour had choked on a kipper at the age of 16. I can wish a lot of things, and none of them will made a half-damn's worth of difference."

In the ensuing decade nothing has changed. 

In the decade to come nothing will change, either. 

Last night my Bride asked me "They can't possibly win, right? What does Hamas expect? And why now? "

Here's my guess.

1) I think that the Arab residents of the former Ottoman province of Palestine see that their Muslim co-religionists are wearying of the endless expenditure of blood and treasure on the Palestinian bloody shirt. The Saudis are cozying up to Israel. The Syrians and Egyptians have their own problems to worry about. The old grievances are losing their appeal, so...

2) I think that Hamas see this as a sort of grand scale suicide/martyrdom - dying on their feet rather than living on their knees - AND the chance to hand the Israeli government their Own Personal Atrocity; a Warsaw Ghetto that will help make more anti-Israeli warriors.

My friend says that the whole Occupation is a horror for the way it exposes and destroys one of the most comforting tropes of many American Jews; that there is something uniquely thoughtful about Judaism that makes it resistant or even immune to the sorts of Inquisition/Crusade/Pogrom sort of evils. As he points out, what the apartheid state of 2023 Israel makes clear is that the difference was just that prior to 1967 organized Judaism simply lacked the opportunity.

And I think this is a chance for Hamas to goad Netanyahu's Israel into a Final Palestinian Solution that will stain it the way the original stained the Nazis. Before Treblinka there were fascists. But after Treblinka and Auschwitz and the sonderkommandos? No. Nazism became a uniquely awful evil. The taint of genocide could never be removed.

And Hamas wants to paste that label on Israel. Along with the satisfaction of killing as many Israelis was they can.

Is that insane and pointless bloodshed?

Ohfuckyes.

Is that just another day in the nightmare that is the eastern Levant?

Ohfuckyes, too.

As I saw when I looked out over this field of blood 17 years - and eleven years - ago, I see no "good" outcome here. The horrific conclusion was written...back in 1917 when Arthur Balfour promised away a piece of the Ottoman Empire he had no right to speak for...or in 1948, when Harry Truman jumped in and wrote a check that my country has been paying on for more than half a century.

And I still don't.

"Ruin and merciless hatred..."